BAAS 2023 Panel Review: 8H-GreenBAAS Panel ‘”Our House is Still on Fire”: New Research in Environmental American Studies’
BAAS 2023 Panel Review: 8H- GreenBAAS Panel ‘“Our House is Still on Fire”: New Research in Environmental American Studies’ Since debuting at 2021’s BAAS Annual Conference, GreenBAAS’s panels have become something of an annual fixture, acquiring a reputation for interdisciplinarity, provocativeness, and contemporary relevance. These features were again apparent as GreenBAAS re-convened on the final day of the BAAS 2023 Annual Conference for a panel chaired by Christine Okoth (Lecturer, KCL) and entitled, after a quotation from Greta Thunberg, ‘Our House is Still on Fire.’ Building on ‘Teaching Environmental American Studies in a Time of Crisis’ (BAAS 2021, published in The Journal of American Studies) and ‘Code Red: Embedding the Climate Crisis in the American Studies Curriculum’ (BAAS 2022, published in Transatlantica), 2023’s discussion offered a wide-ranging discussion with two overwhelming themes: the diversity of environmental thought and the imbrications of climate crisis with global imperialism and settler colonialism. Ananya […]
BAAS 2023 Panel Review: 5E-Negotiating American Spaces
BAAS Panel Review: 5E- Negotiating American Spaces From the musings of the Transcendentalists to Turner’s frontier thesis, Chicano Aztlán, and the intercommunal visions of the Black Panthers, space has long been critical to American Studies. On April 13th, an all-star interdisciplinary team of PhD students from the University of Manchester found a space at the BAAS 2023 Annual Conference to negotiate this keyword. Across four presentations, their striking and wide-ranging papers investigated “how space operates within our research fields across various literature and media and how different groups have negotiated space across society.” The chairperson Samson Thozer opened proceedings with a lyrical examination of the poet Robert Hayden’s (1913-1980) writings regarding his childhood and adolescent home, the Detroit cultural hub and magnet for Black migrants during the Great Migration, Paradise Valley. Paradise Valley was a consistent source of inspiration for Hayden. The first Black Poet Laureate, Hayden once remarked that […]
Book Review: The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives by Adolph Reed Jr.
During a long career spanning political science, activism, and journalism, Adolph Reed Jr has cultivated an enigmatic reputation among left public intellectuals, continually checking the inertial tendencies and oversights of contemporary left theorising to critique race reductionism and what Reed calls the left’s increasingly ‘quietistic’ cultural politics. Locked in ever-fiercer, internecine, and insular skirmishes adrift from site-specific questions of political economy, Reed suggests that this ‘flight from concreteness’ underplays the role of class, favouring representation over redistribution and thus undercutting opportunities for cross-racial mobilisation. [1]
Review: ANZASA 2021 (Online)
As the Australia and New Zealand American Studies Association met for its biannual conference on November 24-25th, the conference’s key themes of ‘American Crisis’ and ‘American Renewal’ were kept in an incredibly fine balance. Hosted by the Macquarie School of Social Sciences, ANZASA 2021 was the Association’s first pandemic-era conference and was predictably haunted by the spectre of Trumpism. The overall emphasis was understanding America’s history as one of perpetual crisis, registered not only in political instability or economic decline, but also, perhaps most corrosively, in interpretive struggles over the nation’s future trajectory. Professor Michael Thompson (Australian Catholic University) opened the programme with his keynote, ‘Environmental Crisis and Renewal in the Global New Deal Era: A Biography of the “Eleventh Commandment”’. This ambitiously wide-ranging lecture explored the Global New Deal through a combination of environmental, religious, and transnational history. Professor Thompson prefaced his lecture by stating ‘it sounds ambitious, and […]