American Studies

Broadway and Main:Crossroads, Ghost Roads, and Paths to an American Studies Future Philip J. Deloria (bio) I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees.I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees.Asked the Lord above, "Have mercy now. Save poor Bob if you please." -Robert Johnson, "Crossroad Blues" As the parent of a high school student, I often find myself contemplating the Scholastic Aptitude Test (the SAT), which means jumbling together my intellectual understanding of the test's built-in knowledge inequalities with my fascination with the aesthetic beauty of its analogy questions. I want to begin with one of these analogies: Robert Johnson is to crossroads as crossroads is to (blank). I'm going with answer C: American studies. Crossroads offers a useful trope for thinking about intersections, danger, commerce, intercourse with others, and the possibility of the new-and the figure that seems to represent these meanings best is Robert Johnson. One almost cannot hear his name without making the link to a long-lived story: It was sometime in 1929 or 1930 that Robert Johnson began showing up with a guitar at Saturday night parties in Robinsonville, Mississippi. When Son House and his partner Willie Brown went on break, Johnson would take over, supposedly "driving people nuts" with his poor playing. But then, fleeing a brutal stepfather and the hard work of the fields, Johnson ran away from home for six months. He marked his return to Robinsonville by showing up at another party, blowing the crowd away. "He was so good!" remembered Son House. "When he finished all our mouths were standing open."1 Out of such stories-generally recounted by white music critics long after Johnson's death-emerged a particular vision of "the crossroads." How had Robert Johnson gotten so good, so fast? He had made a pact with the devil, selling his midnight soul in return for musical genius. And he'd cut the deal down at the crossroads, that place of mystery, danger, and possibility conveniently [End Page 1] marked for later listeners by the tune "Cross Road Blues," recorded in 1936.2 American studies has long offered a world of possibility for those interested in escaping the strictures of the disciplines and in stretching their boundaries, in looking for insight from other interpretive traditions and social realities, in making the new. American studies might be defined by this pithy phrase: "it's not what we choose to include, but what we refuse to exclude."3 That is a powerful statement about the antipathy to boundary setting that produced American studies as we know it: capacious, expansive, and engaged. And "crossroads"-in the form of the ASA Web site, university press series, and conference themes-has often seemed the perfect figure to sum up our practice.4 As Robert Johnson is to crossroads, so crossroads is to American studies: the smaller term in each relation allows one to weave some tangibility around capaciousness. Each gestures to the real connections that are made at meetings such as the one we celebrate tonight. And, in fact, there is a need to capture such tangibility. For as one of my favorite administrators recently sniped, "If American studies is so much everything, then how can it be anything?" It's a fair question. Tonight, I want to remind us that there is in fact an anything to American studies and it is something to be contemplated at greater length. In making that contemplation, I want to walk through two issues in our field. The first of these is the question of disciplinarity and of the transformations of that thing called the "interdisciplinary." The second involves the long interchange between American studies and ethnic studies. These are hardly distinct questions, and they both have something to say to the practices of American studies. This year's conference theme, "Back Down to the Crossroads: Integrative American Studies in Theory and Practice," was meant to serve as a kind of "anti-theme," a chance to open up the meeting to a wide range of work and to challenge American studies scholars to see four recent thematic interests-in race and ethnicity studies, in...

Reviewed by: Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies Rafael Pérez-Torres José David Saldívar. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. xvi + 251 pp. José Saldívar’s Border Matters is at once thoughtful, incisive, and self-reflective. As such, it is one of the most expansive and inclusive books recently published in the field of ethnic studies. It indicates some of the directions that American and cultural studies may take in the next millennium. Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is that it aggressively politicizes and historicizes its discussion. It thus engages with the vexed [End Page 1013] desires of a Chicano critical consciousness that demands both grounded, historical, and practical, political planning and visionary, mythical, and moving cultural inspiration. Saldívar’s analysis traces how the discursive spaces and the physical places of the U.S.-Mexico border inflect the reality of U.S. cultural production. Taking up an argument articulated by Gayatri Spivak and others, Saldívar proposes that border discourses are emerging as the dominant discursive forms in American studies. His study thus stands at a crossroads where cultural studies is becoming increasingly a form of border studies. One manifestation of this transformation is evident in the concrete political context in which Saldívar situates his discussion. He does not let us forget that his work is driven by the fact of U.S. militarism and the low-intensity war being fought daily on the U.S.-Mexican border. While noting the centrality of borders to the development of so many academic discussions, Saldívar underscores the distance between discourse and the sociopolitical struggle of borders and border-crossers. He thus forces his reader to face the central question his work raises: “Has cultural studies [. . .] become institutionalized in U.S. academies at the cost of its political edge?” Saldívar’s text represents an attempt to answer this question with a resounding “no!” He does this by directing his attention to the critical project he last took up in The Dialectics of Our Americas: reorienting American Studies along a North/South rather than East/West axis. This reconfiguration allows him to focus “on the yet unwritten literary and cultural history of Chicano/a and Latin American social cultural ‘theorists’ and postmodernist intellectuals.” He thus reads the anti-imperialist work of Américo Paredes as a preliminary step in examining how contemporary Chicano poets, writers, and artists configure identity and space in the borderlands. Saldívar provides, in his typically well-informed and lucid style, a synthesis and overview of contemporary cultural theory in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He finds through studying the work of such writers as Renato Rosaldo, Vicki Ruiz, George Sánchez, and Néstor García Canclini that they are new intercultural theorists sensitive to both local processes and global forces. Their discussions are unified around the attempt not to rely on simple dichotomies such as the local and global, [End Page 1014] the resistant and revolutionary. In considering the work of Américo Paredes as an earlier, modernist formulation of border theory, Saldívar argues that his texts offer an Adornian negative dialectic. Paredes’s poetry, in particular, establishes the contours of a Chicana/o subjectivity that can be traced through contemporary poetic texts. Paredes thus offers “a representative précis of postcontemporary Chicano/a poetic practices, based on social theory and ethnocultural methodology.” Saldívar closes out this section of his discussion, and the first half of the book, with a study of border space as produced by novelist Arturo Islas and painter Carmen Lomas Garza. He concludes that these artists radically reframe and reconceptualize the provincial and cosmopolitan, the regional and worldly, in a move that resonates with the work of contemporary cultural theorists. As suggestive as this conclusion is, one cannot help but be a little puzzled by some of Saldívar’s terminology. That is to say, while he sees Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the 1930s as subjects of “typical colonial discourse,” just what the term “colonial” signifies within the contours of his discussion remains unspoken. By the same token, he notes that “it seems clear to me...

Reviewed by: Canada, the United States, and Cuba: An Evolving Relationship Cristina Warren Sahadeo Basdeo and Heather N. Nicol, eds. Canada, the United States, and Cuba: An Evolving Relationship. Miami: North-South Center Press, University of Miami, 2002. 179 pp. This book is a collection of seven essays written by mostly Canadian authors. It seeks to provide insights into the nature and direction of change in the "triangular" relationship among Cuba, Canada, and the United States since the end of the cold war. This book promises far more than it delivers, however. Many of the essays contained in this volume are narrative and descriptive rather than analytical. Furthermore, most of the papers do not offer any new information. [End Page 170] Overall, this volume does not provide the analytic tools to better understand the dynamics of the Cuba-Canada-U.S. relationship. The first section of this book on Cuba in the wider world contains an essay written by Hal Klepak on Cuba's security agenda. Although it provides a helpful summary of the evolution of Cuban defense policy and military affairs throughout Cuba's revolutionary period, Cuba's Special Period is only briefly covered. Emphasizing the diminished capacity of Cuba's armed forces to deal with traditional security challenges, such as the threat from the United States and internal security against subversion, the author points out that new challenges will arise as Cuba's armed forces are confronted with an explosive social scene fueled by ongoing economic problems. The paper would have been well served by an exploration of this highly relevant concern. In the second section, on Canada-Cuba relations, Sahadeo Basdeo and Ian Hesketh trace developments related to Canada's policy of constructive engagement. Rather than assess the future of the policy based on an analysis of the key driving factors that contribute to the evolving relationship, this narrative of relations is used to make a case for continued engagement, emphasizing its appeal as an alternative to U.S. policy. Fortunately, in one of the more insightful essays in this volume Peter McKenna, John Kirk, and Christine Climenhage take up the task of projecting the future of Canada's policy. They conclude that despite bilateral tensions since Prime Minister Chrétien's visit to Cuba in 1998, many of the driving forces of Canada-Cuba relations remain in place (although the authors inflate the Canadian business community's presence and enthusiasm in present-day Cuba). The result may well see Canada committed to constructive engagement but somewhat ineffective in stimulating movement along the human rights front. The third section, on U.S.-Cuba relations, begins with an essay by Stephen Randall that provides a useful, although unoriginal, chronological overview of the bilateral relationship between Cuba and the United States over the past twenty years, with a focus on the post–cold war period. In a paper that stands out in terms of policy relevance and explanatory value, Daniel Fisk (of the U.S.-based Heritage Foundation) analyzes the evolving forces underpinning U.S. policy toward Cuba in order to explain policy developments since the enactment of the Helms-Burton legislation. Oddly, this section of the book includes a paper by Karl Koth that discusses Cuba's current development path and speculates about future development options for the island. Relying heavily on unsystematic interviews and anecdotal evidence—for example, "the Cuban economy appears to have grown considerably" (123)—and personal commentary to develop his arguments, this paper is far more suited for publication on a newspaper's editorial page than for inclusion in a scholarly volume. The final section of this book is comprised of a jargon-laden essay by [End Page 171] Heather Nicol that attempts to make some concluding observations through her analysis of political discourse. Relying on some original research, she identifies the existence of new political discourses toward Cuba in Canada and the United States since 1996, with Canadians moving to the right on Cuba issues, while U.S. perspectives are becoming somewhat more liberal. This reality, according to the author, allows new possibilities for international relations to emerge. Unfortunately, Nicol is not able to shed light on these possibilities. [End Page 172] Cristina...

An Appalachian Heritage InterviewSally Rubin Emily Masters (bio) and Sally Rubin hillbilly, the new documentary film directed by Sally Rubin and Ashley York, is an examination of images and stereotypes about Appalachia and its people. The film works to combat stereotypes of Appalachia as a homogenous region, using the 2016 presidential election as a window for examining how the region is portrayed in the national media. In the film, Rubin and York work to contextualize [End Page 51] and humanize Appalachians, showing images that contrast with the often abused depictions of whiteness and poverty that have pervaded the national consciousness about the region. Rubin and York hope to challenge such prevailing, narrow views of Appalachia and the people who live here, prodding those with a limited understanding of the region and its history to pause and think before making jabs about class and otherness. The film debuted on the film festival circuit over the summer, winning the Documentary Award from the LA Film Festival and the Special Award for Documentary Filmmaking from the Traverse City Film Festival, and being mentioned as a "significant Oscar contender" in the Best Documentary Feature category. But in an honor that perhaps even surpassed these accolades, hillbilly received the endorsement of Appalachian icon Dolly Parton. "I'm happy to see somebody trying to cover us as we really are and not what some people think we are," she said. "It's wonderful, the attention (the movie) paid to so many areas that are so important to all of us. I'm proud to have been mentioned in the film a time or two." hillbilly is now showing in select cities nationwide. Following a recent screening of the film at Berea College in September 2018, co-director Sally Rubin spoke to Appalachian Heritage about some of the trials and successes she and York had in making the film, developing an on-screen balance during the polarization of the 2016 presidential election, and providing a diverse perspective of an often simplified and stereotyped region. [End Page 52] Click for larger view View full resolution Sally Rubin [End Page 53] EMILY MASTERS: What was the most challenging part of the documentary process when you were making hillbilly? SALLY RUBIN: We had a couple of major challenges with the production of hillbilly. I think in some ways the breadth of the ideas in the film is certainly a strength; the film ranges wide in its coverage of psychological and sociological humanities themes that are complex and highly compelling, such as notions of regionalism, othering, code switching, co-option, stereotyping, and more. Simultaneously, the film deals with the 2016 presidential election and [includes] scenes with co-director Ashley York and her family. But this broad, sweeping look at the history of various cultural elements of the Appalachian region, including the region's reliance on coal, as well as the survey of media representations of the region over the last century-and-a-half, combined with all of the content described above, sometimes felt like more than we could really chew while producing the movie. We tried to do so much with this film. I hope we succeeded—I think we did—but it made production overwhelming and difficult at times, and long. It took four-a-half years to make this movie. And there were times when even I, as the film's co-director, had a hard time describing what this film was about. Another major challenge with the production of hillbilly was working all of the threads described above into one cohesive movie. The film evolved substantially over time, as American society, politics, and culture evolved, and we had to work hard to keep up. When we began researching this film back in the fall of 2013 we were primarily aiming to make a film about the history and evolution of the "hillbilly" stereotype over the past century and a half. But as we got into making that movie, it became clear that if we were going to tell a story about what Appalachia isn't, we also had to include [End Page 54] what Appalachia is. At that point we began to work in the alternate...

Reviewed by: Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary Óscar Fernández (bio) Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary. By Paul Giles. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. xiii + 337 pp. $22.95. In Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary, Paul Giles defines virtualization as the contingencies of perception in electronic and digital media where the interface between original and replica has been "eliminated" (11). Most telling in Giles's definition is how "virtualization" is associated with culture and capital and how this link is helpful [End Page 336] in analyzing the classic phase of American studies. In reading Las Vegas as the city of virtuality and of abundance, Giles argues how American fictions of abundance connect with philosophical idealism and how American capitalism and transcendentalism function by "'virtualizing' natural phenomena into their shadow or replica" (12). Giles's overall project is to "virtualize" America and analyze the processes that have helped construct mythologies of nationalism and of American exceptionalism. In reading together works by Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Henry James, Robert Frost, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon and poets such as Thom Gunn and Sylvia Plath, Giles juxtaposes American cultural narratives with those of Europe and examines the national mythologies framing these narratives. By "virtualizing" America, Giles demonstrates how "indigenous representations of the 'natural'" function as tautologies without "reference to anything outside their own charmed circle" (2). Besides analyzing mythologies of nation formation, an important focus of Virtual Americas is to establish an alternative genealogy for American studies, one that is informed by transnational and transcultural forces and by the seemingly homogeneous construction of American studies of the 1950s and 1960s. Giles's chapter, "Narrative Reversals and Power Exchanges: Frederick Douglass and British Culture," successfully argues how the three autobiographies of Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845; My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855; Life and Times, 1882, revised 1883) and the work of William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist movement demystify Britain's perception of being an antislavery power. Comparing the plight of the oppressed in both the United States and in Britain shows the "explicit violence" in both American and British societies and the transatlantic plight of the oppressed (46). Giles analyzes the parallel histories of labor in both continents, as exemplified by Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855) and its rhetoric of a divided England, and concludes that Douglass's biographies unsettled the myth of England's labor and social unity by mirroring the North/South conflict in postbellum United States. Especially interesting is chapter 3, "'Bewildering Intertanglement': Melville's Engagement with British Tradition." This chapter provides a welcomed re-reading of Melville's canonical texts and traces alternative genealogies for reading Melville's work, especially in terms of what Giles considers to be Melville's project of comparing "American slavery of race with British slavery of class" (58). Moreover, Giles demonstrates how his parodic writing helps explain the general discomfort of British critics reading Melville after the Second World War. In addition to highlighting the way in which the [End Page 337] composition of Moby Dick (1851) was intrinsically connected with British literature (Melville, for example, based his style for Moby Dick on Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a book he borrowed from Evert Duyckinck's library in July 1850), Giles shows how Melville's interaction with British culture and literary models was parodic and intertextual instead of oppositional. Pierre (1852), for example, shows how the genealogy of aristocratic England is no less arbitrary than that of demagogical America. Especially useful for scholars is Giles's reading of "masking" in works such as The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). In Melville's last novel, "masking" not only instrumentalizes deception for a confidence-man working the river economy of the Mississippi, but in Giles's reading "masking" also dismantles global rather than regional forms of class and of capital. Throughout Virtual Americas, Giles shows the importance of making the canonical seem foreign and estranged. In the case of Melville, American literature works to aestheticize British literature by showing how its literary conventions are an "elaborate masquerade . . . made different by the advent of American culture, which opens up an alternative...

Reviewed by: Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture Jennifer Andrews Shari M. Huhndorf. Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2009. vii + 202 pp. US $39.95. Shari M. Huhndorf’s new monograph, provocatively titled Mapping the Americas, offers a much needed alternative to the recent dominance of nationalist criticism in Native American studies, a focus which has resulted in the “underrepresentation of women writers” (4). While Huhndorf’s book can be read as working to address this inequity, she also questions the relative absence of Native studies within the emerging field of postnationalist or transnationalist American studies, which may acknowledge the long history of American exceptionalism but avoids delving into the stark reality of American imperialism both domestically and internationally. And Native Americans, of course, most vividly represent that disturbing legacy and its contemporary manifestations, as disputes over land claims, access to and control over natural resources, and cultural, political, linguistic, and economic sovereignty continue to be fought throughout the Americas. As Huhndorf explains in her introduction, she uses a two-pronged focus in order to create a sustained dialogue between Native American and American studies, where such conversations might otherwise have been [End Page 205] seen as incommensurable, because to place Native American studies under the umbrella of American studies would be perceived as an imperializing move. To do so, Huhndorf turns to various sites of cultural struggle and resistance, as manifested in Native-authored literature and visual arts produced by and about Native Americans, including museum exhibition documents, picture postcards, sculpture, and film. Not surprisingly, Huhndorf begins her study with an examination of how the Indigenous populations of Alaska were colonized as part of America’s efforts at imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her first book, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Cornell up, 2001), devotes considerable space to exploring how Americans have historically reclaimed Native Americans “as part of their own past” (15), particularly through displays at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 and the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Likewise, in Mapping the Americas, Huhndorf draws on a wide array of documents, including drawings done by Yup’ik and Inupiaq students (to promote government efforts to assimilate the Eskimo population) and pavilions designed to showcase colonized cultures at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, held in Seattle in 1909, to understand how the Eskimos were visually infantilized and literally dispossessed by the process of colonization. Her readings of two postcards from the 1909 exposition, one portraying two Eskimo women in Western bourgeois apparel titled “Educated Eskimos” and the other, an image of two toddlers—one in a loin cloth and the other in a long fur coat—called “Igorotte Baby from the Phillipines [sic] and Eskimo Baby from Alaska,” are the most fascinating of the chapter and make a convincing case for the perversity of American exceptionalism within an explicitly transnational framework by attending to multiple sites of American imperialism through a single image. But Huhndorf goes a step further by looking at gendered figurations of these colonized others, namely the Igorotte boy and Eskimo girl, noting that the latter is presented as “more racially advanced and altogether unthreatening” (61), which makes her potentially easier to assimilate. While this attentiveness to gender is most welcome, the chapters that follow are more uneven in their efforts to pursue what is a complex coupling of often competing agendas. Huhndorf’s second chapter (on Igloolik Isuma Productions) posits an interesting explanation for why Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) has garnered international praise and box-office profits while Inuit director Zacharias Kunuk’s second film, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, has not had similar commercial success; she suggests that the more explicitly anti-colonial message of the second film has made [End Page 206] it less appealing to non-Inuit audiences. Having taught Atanarjuat, the chapter reinforced my own frustrations with non-Native student reactions to the film, and specifically their tendency to treat it as an ethnographic exercise, as well as their discomfort with the film’s concluding moments which self-reflexively take on the film’s ostensibly timeless qualities by...

Reviewed by: Catholics in America: Religious Identity and Cultural Assimilation from John Carroll to Flannery O’Connor by Russell Shaw Richard Gribble CSC Catholics in America: Religious Identity and Cultural Assimilation from John Carroll to Flannery O’Connor. By Russell Shaw. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2016. 141pp. $15.95. Catholics in America: Religious Identity and Cultural Assimilation from John Carroll to Flannery O’Connor, the work of the widely published journalist and author, Russell Shaw, provides fifteen vignettes of various champions of American Catholic history. Prefaced by an introduction and concluding with an afterword, Shaw has written a helpful monograph that gives some flavor to the variability of American Catholic life. The introduction of this book sets the tone and provides its rationale. Acknowledging that immigration and assimilation built the [End Page 92] American church, he suggests that assimilating into contemporary U.S. culture might be problematic due to the increasingly more inhospitable environment in America toward Catholic beliefs and values. He suggests that the people chosen for discussion in this volume represent several significant themes in American Catholic life: assimilation and how it was promoted by Catholic leaders, anti-Catholicism and the church’s response, the immigrant experience, hyper-patriotism as a means for assimilation, the ambiguities of American culture, the feasibility of evangelization and resolving tension between church and state. Through the stories, he seeks to ask if American Catholics should conform to or fight against contemporary American culture. The aforementioned themes are illustrated by Shaw through his short vignettes. John Carroll, the first Catholic bishop in the United States, used his progressive theology to encourage Catholics to become American in every way. In response to anti-Catholicism, Elizabeth Ann Seton started the Catholic school system and Father Michael McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus. Shaw uses Archbishop John Hughes to illustrate strident advocacy for Irish immigrants while Frances Xavier Cabrini, through her quiet establishment of hospitals and personal outreach became a champion for Italians. Cardinal Francis Spellman is used to illustrate an unabashed patriotism as a means to assimilate twentieth century immigrants. Dorothy Day, working with the poor, and Bishop Fulton Sheen as a media superstar illustrate various aspects of American culture. Isaac Hecker and Orestes Brownson, both converts to Catholicism, demonstrate how Catholics could transform American society. John F. Kennedy and John Courtney Murray are examples of Catholics who made a contribution in placing Catholicism within the democratic system of America. Shaw’s vignettes do represent the specific theories he seeks to illustrate, but they also illustrate the author’s contention that assimilation into twenty-first century American culture may be problematic. He portrays those described in his book as the right people for the right time; they serve their function well for the time period in [End Page 93] which they lived. Concluding with the afterward, the reader walks away asking the pertinent question if conforming to contemporary culture is helpful or hurtful to American Catholics. While leaning toward the latter view, Shaw draws no conclusion. Several of the vignettes, however, contain material that, in this reviewer’s mind, is not germane to the thesis, and therefore, detracts from the book’s value. For example, when discussing Elizabeth Ann Seton, Shaw describes the decline in contemporary Catholic education. The details that he gives concerning Henry Robinson’s novel, The Cardinal, described in a few of the vignettes, is not necessary. Catholics in America provides a helpful introduction to American Catholic history by framing several significant theories around the lives and contributions of fifteen prominent men and women, ranging from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Very readable and a book that would be of interest to all who desire to know more about American Catholicism, including its use as an introductory text for high school or college courses, the monograph accurately and fairly presents an important thesis in American Catholic life today. Russell Shaw has made a positive contribution to the literature of American Catholic life. [End Page 94] Richard Gribble CSC Stonehill College Copyright © 2017 American Catholic Historical Society

Braids Craig Beaven (bio) Braids I believed in seeing a painting in person, after years of reproductions. Was I “passionate” or just naïve? In Braids nothing happens. In Wyeth’s Braids there is only each piece of hair, known intimately by God and the painter, strand and strand brought in to hold its own turning. High school art history and it beats across the screen, mote-mottled, projection-sized—years later I drove three days to stand here. This is where he stood, arm’s length from the canvas. This is Maine at the end of April; tomorrow it snows, and we watch an old man march into the ocean, submerge himself, walk out and shake it off. Why, standing at Braids, can I think not of this painting, but of approaching Press 40, the day after graduating high school, and what conspires to make the plant foreman start me at Press 40, of 44 presses? What does Wyeth [End Page 88] have to do with graveyard shift making dashboards except for fathers and concentration? The guy at 39 has sleeves of scar tissue, a purple luminescence poorly stitched on. Number 40 is the largest machine in the state. I know because my father built it. It slows my work to realize: have I seen this before, in dream? Drafting table, white lines on blue paper, the ghost of it emerging with each revision. He brought me here as a kid to explain how it worked, describe the tonnage, the many men it took. My father who was, at that moment, asleep, who I would pass in the kitchen this morning, on my way to bed, on his way here, to see how I did and if they need anything— replacement parts or adjustments. So I came to the far edge of a continent, so I walked through the field from Christina’s World— Why save any of this from the fire? Dear Origin Myth, are you in art history class or night shift hours sanding the rough edges of dashboards? I was there as a way of apologizing, but no one heard it amid the din, no one noticed such a gesture in the filing away of excess plastic. In Braids she stands alone in a cold, dark room, looking away. Someone is calling [End Page 89] but it doesn’t break her spell. They’ve been calling forever but they don’t know her name. The house is empty and quiet. This is the story of your life. [End Page 90] Craig Beaven Craig Beaven’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Third Coast, Carolina Quarterly, Cutbank, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals. His work was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Copyright © 2013 University of Nebraska Press

This essay discusses the recent efforts to redefine the discursive strategies and critical objectives of American Studies in the context of Lawrence Grossberg's very critical re-assessment of the triumphal success of British Studies in the U. S. during the 1990s. The New Americanists have reclaimed the historical and political dimensions of American (Culture) Studies, opened the perspective to postnational narratives, and placed their work in the wider context of American imperialism and a globalizing world. The essay points out, however, that the various attempts at internationalizing American Studies tend to be built on a unidirectional perspective that is in danger of constructing and re-appropriating the articulations of intracultural as well as of interor cross-cultural differences. As an alternative, it suggest a more radical version of dialogical cultural critique in/of American Studies that draws on the dialectics of border discourses in American multicultural critique and projects a new dialogics of International American Culture Studies, of the encounter of American and foreign scholars in a bior multidirectional joint venture, as well as briefly indicating some crucial case studies. American Studies and British Studies In the late 1960s, American Studies was in a deep crisis. It was declared intellectually bankrupt, politically reactionary, a handmaiden of American imperialism during the Cold War era, and a failure in its effort to offer an interdisciplinary understanding of American culture as a whole, past and present. ТЪе various redefinitions that were given during the 1970s and early 1980s usually replaced key terms or critical approaches that had characterized the field by their opposites without seriously reconceptualizing the formative principles and objectives of American Studies in a rapidly changing cultural and theoretical context. American Studies as an integrative study of American culture fell apart and was replaced by a sequence of politically engendered and committed interdisciplinary programs such as Black Studies, Women's Studies, Urban Studies, Popular Culture Studies, Native-American Studies, Chicano/a Studies, Asian-American Studies, Queer Studies, etc. that, however, often seemed to have to face methodological and institutional problems similar to those of the American Studies programs they rejected. Anyway, American Studies did not seem to work any longer anywhere near the frontiers of contemporary scholarship. Thus, it did not come as a surprise that when British Studies was widely discovered during the second half of the 1980s, and the famous Cultural Studies Now and in the Future conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990 provided the defining moment for a triumphal success of Studies in the United States during the 1990s, it was received as another wave of traveling theory from Europe. Studies from the Birmingham Centre seemed to offer new anThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 05:07:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Reviewed by: Motorsports and American Culture: From Demolition Derbies to NASCAR ed. by Mark D. Howell and John D. Miller Daniel J. Simone Motorsports and American Culture: From Demolition Derbies to NASCAR. Edited by Mark D. Howell and John D. Miller. ( Lanham, Md., and other cities: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. Pp. xxi, 219. $94.00, ISBN 978-1-4422-3096-5.) Mark D. Howell broke ground with From Moonshine to Madison Avenue: A Cultural History of the NASCAR Winston Cup Series (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1997), a full-length scholarly study of stock car racing. Since then, academics [End Page 225] have produced a handful of auto racing books, and Motorsports and American Culture: From Demolition Derbies to NASCAR is one of the best. The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) remains America's most popular auto racing sanctioning body, yet stock car racing makes up but a portion of the American auto racing narrative. Editors Mark D. Howell and John D. Miller rightfully include other types of motorsports in this interdisciplinary collection of twelve essays and define motorsports in the broadest of contexts. For instance, the intentional destruction of vehicles for sport and entertainment can be considered a motorsport. Two articles reflect this notion—showcasing the diversity of this collection. In "Speed and Destruction at the Fair," Emily Godbey details the staged destruction of cars and buses at agricultural fairs during the early 1900s, and Susan Falls looks at deliberate crashing as a form of motorsport in "Creative Destruction: The Demolition Derby." In "Automobile Racing and the American Hot Rod," David N. Lucsko traces the evolution of hot-rodding throughout the twentieth century. Mostly unregulated, hot rods were quite common on public roads through the 1950s. Their status changed with automobile emissions laws passed during the 1960s and 1970s. Enthusiasts were forced to decide where they wished to show off and test their creations, and Lucsko indicates that "the need to keep one's on-road project legal has since served as a fairly effective legal barrier between the track and the street" (p. 35). John Edwin Mason describes the sights and sounds of a small Virginia drag strip in "'Anything But a Novelty': Women, Girls, and Friday Night Drag Racing." According to Mason, "no motorsport (and few sports of any kind) has been more open to women and members of racial and ethnic minorities than drag racing" (p. 125). He is correct; drag racing has produced a roster of national champions that includes Shirley Muldowney and Angelle Sampey. Lisa Napoli provides an excellent essay on Barney Oldfield, America's first speed king. While Oldfield had countless on-track achievements, Napoli stresses the extreme significance of his actions off the track: "It's likely he was the very first sports star to put his public persona to use as a pitchman" (p. 177). Oldfield also "became an ardent promoter of automobile safety later in life" and, Napoli observes, "helped with the development of the seat belt" (pp. 178, 179). NASCAR's popularity has long since moved beyond the American Southeast, and two essays in the collection investigate NASCAR's expansion to wider audiences. In "The NASCAR Paradox," James Wright explains how corporate sponsorship and television coverage helped NASCAR nationalize and gradually shed its southern identity. NASCAR is also attracting more foreign competitors and fans. Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder addresses NASCAR's globalization in "'Running with the Big Dogs': The Rhetoric of Fan Identity in a Postmodern NASCAR." He traces the sport's growing international audience and focuses on how American fans and the media reacted to Toyota entering NASCAR competitions and the emergence of Colombian driver Juan Montoya, a former Indianapolis 500 champion and a Formula One driver who embarked on a full-time NASCAR career from 2007 to 2013. [End Page 226] A pair of articles touch on early stock car racing. Martha Kreszock, Suzanne Wise, and Margaret Freeman examine Louise Smith, who raced in numerous NASCAR-sanctioned events in the late 1940s and early 1950s and often earned respectable finishes. In this excellently researched article, they look at Smith's entire career—both on and off the racetrack—and show how "Smith brought her own brand of...

Bruce YonemotoMade in Occupied Japan Rika Hiro (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Bruce Yonemoto (1949–) Made in Occupied Japan (Sakasama Makasa), 1998. Ceramic mug and metal base 7 ½ x 8 ⅜ x 4 ¾ in. (19.05 x 21.27 x 12.07 cm.). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of Barbara Wise. © Bruce Yonemoto, Image courtesy of the artist. [End Page 162] Conceptual and multimedia artist Bruce Yonemoto's (b. 1949) display of a group of mugs, cup-and-saucer sets, and porcelain figurines provokes a sense of bewilderment. Each object is colorful, charming, nostalgic, and even kitschy. However, the artist curiously places them upside down to highlight their trademarks and country of origin, "Made in Occupied Japan," which forms the title of the series that he initiated in 1998. "Made in Japan" has become a talisman of good quality, refined craftwork, and tasteful design. Yet it once meant the opposite—inexpensive and sometimes defective goods in the immediate postwar period.1 In the 1930s and 40s, Japanese fine but low-cost ceramics were seen as a threat to American pottery manufacturers.2 "Made in Occupied Japan," in contrast, suggests a narrow range of production dates and circulation limited to Europe and especially North America. Under General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP), the Occupation of Japan lasted from September 1945 until the conclusion of the Treaty of Peace in April 1952. However, it was only in the single year of 1947 that the mark of "Made in Occupied Japan" or "Occupied Japan" was required for virtually all export items, including toys, textiles, cameras, and porcelain.3 Although the mark became non-compulsory in 1949, Japanese manufacturers continued the practice of adding this imprint until the end of the Occupation Period.4 This historical imprinting intersects with the biography of Yonemoto himself, whose identity was, to some extent, trapped between Occupied Japan and liberating America. The sansei artist was born to ex-interned Japanese American parents in 1949. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was exposed to the rise of Asian American and Third World studies, and decided to further pursue art and his cultural roots in Japan.5 Since then, Yonemoto has been questioning the authenticity of histories and memories as well as complicated gender, cultural, racial, and/or ethnic representations through his works. His multimedia installations frequently involve [End Page 163] complex structures to allow such a nuanced reading of memories and the politics of representations. For example, a 1995 video installation, Parana, utilizes a coffee porcelain set made in Paraná, Brazil, with hand-painted oval images featuring Oscar Niemeyer's modernist architecture in Brasilia. Yonemoto superimposes found film footage of Paraná's Japanese Brazilian community gathering over one of Niemeyer's designs. Compared to Parana and Yonemoto's other installations, Made in Occupied Japan seems fairly simple and straightforward. This 1998 example of a "Made in Occupied Japan" work consists of a single Toby mug in the shape of MacArthur's head and is stamped "MERIT OCCUPIED JAPAN." MacArthur wears his iconic Philippine Field Marshal cap, but unlike other comical Toby mugs, his face looks serious and reveals signs of his aging, such as saggy cheeks and under-eye bags. A toughness and energy issue forth from his cherry-colored lips and wide-open eyes. In the domestic space of America at the time of the mug's creation, it would have functioned as a memento of America's strength, its victory over Japan, and MacArthur as the executor of postwar democracy during the rise of communism. By changing the mug's orientation, however, and placing it upside down, Yonemoto playfully challenges the above, referencing Duchamp's readymades. The mug in Yonemoto's presentation instead becomes a keepsake of the hypocrisy of American democracy, which incarcerated nearly 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, about two-thirds of whom were American citizens and included Yonemoto's family. [End Page 164] Rika Hiro Rika Hiro is a Visiting Assistant Professor, Occidental College, California. Her doctoral dissertation looked at the aftereffects of the atomic bombs in arts and exhibition culture in postwar Japan. She co-founded the non...

Self-Determination, Categorization, and the Unsettling of Indigenous Visual Studies Jeremy Carnes (bio) UNSETTLING NATIVE ART HISTORIES ON THE NORTHWEST COAST. Edited by Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse and Aldona Jonaitis. University of Washington Press. 2022. VISUALITIES 2: More Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art. Edited by Denise K. Cummings. Michigan State University Press. 2019. KNOWING NATIVE ARTS. By Nancy Marie Mithlo. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2020. SHIFTING GROUNDS: Landscape in Contemporary Native American Art. By Kate Morris. University of Washington Press. 2019. PICTURING WORLDS: Visuality and Visual Sovereignty in Contemporary Anishnaabe Literature. By David Stirrup. Michigan State University Press. 2020. [End Page 25] Interest in and studies of Indigenous visualities and visual cultures are not new. From anthropological texts claiming a particular understanding of Indigenous visual cultures and representations, to photography projects documenting the “vanishing race” (the most famous being that of Edward Curtis), to contemporary representations of Indigenous people in film, there has been a continued interest in the visualities of indigeneity. Only relatively recently, however, have scholars begun to consider visuality from the perspective of Indigenous communities themselves—their experiences, ontologies, cosmologies, etc. Of course, the bulk of this work is being led by Indigenous scholars whose knowledge and lived experience is helping to open scholarly understandings of Indigenous visual cultures away from these colonial formulations toward a self-determined engagement with visuality evident in particular Indigenous and communal contexts. It is within this context that scholars are beginning to ask questions about how we approach Indigenous visual cultures, how we study Indigenous visualities, and how Indigenous visual artists are included or excluded from certain spaces like museums and galleries. How do Indigenous artists get work on display when sources of funding and curation privilege a particular approach to visual artwork that may not be immediately compatible with Indigenous approaches? How do we understand Indigenous visual cultures without the overdetermination of colonialism that so often defines parameters for understanding? How can we begin to complicate historical understandings of visuality in a way that breaks down binaries, categorizations, and distinctions, which help to support colonial institutions and approaches? Nearly all these questions, along with many others, are taken up in Nancy Mithlo’s (Chiricahua Apache) Knowing Native Arts. Through art, Mithlo considers larger questions about institutional and governmental structures that continue to ignore and oppress Indigenous communities. As Mithlo writes of her book, [End Page 26] “Knowing Native Arts identifies and debates the central frames of Native arts scholarship, including the institution of the museum and the academy, forms of Indigenous aesthetic analysis, the receptive scope of Native arts in new global and digital realms, and models of exhibition practices in light of current American Indian curatorial mandates” (4). Mithlo’s “musings,” as she calls this collection of essays, are indispensable in considering the contemporary art world that many Native artists are navigating. The breadth of topics and considerations Mithlo takes up in a relatively short book is nothing less than incredible. Her opening essay builds on the scholarship of Nancy J. Parezo, considering the complexities of Native Arts and art scholarship today through the areas of research and publication, funding, self-determination, and globalization. She argues for more individuals from disenfranchised communities in leadership roles in museums, a clearer understanding and consideration of historical arguments in art history scholarship, and an increase in Native arts research at national and international Native Studies organizational conferences like the Native American Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) annual conference. While Mithlo’s arguments continually return to and reconsider the current state of Native arts practice and scholarship, she offers some nuanced considerations of art itself as it operates in particular social, political, and communal contexts. Throughout the book, Mithlo remains demonstrably interested in what I see as three central strands in Native visual cultural studies today: self-determination, the fallible categorizations of orality/visuality/writing, and the colonized histories of art into which scholars often try to “fit” Native artwork. Throughout this review essay, I will trace these concepts throughout five new books from various disciplines in the academy to consider the current state of Indigenous visual studies. Before moving on, it is important to note the academic positionality of both...

Our Thoughts and Prayers Cacayo (bio) To the 20+ children a day who are victims of gun violence in the United States of América. Now I lay me A Boy asks his older sister to buy him a gun. She says no. The Boy buys rifle slings, a military carrier vest, and optics . . . down to sleep The Boy posts about buying a gun and being a school shooter . . . I pray the Lord The Boy buys online 60 capacity magazines and posts a 10-day countdown . . . my soul to keep, The Boy becomes a Man: he buys two high-capacity rifles and over 2000 rounds of ammo . . . watch and guard me The Man texts that he will kill his grandmother and shoot up the Elementary School . . . through the night, The Gunman posts: I just shot my grandma in her head. Ima go shoot up a elementary school rn. [End Page 160] and wake me with The Gunman arrives at the School, shoots at two bystanders . . . Teachers call 911. the morning light. Police see the Gunman enter the School . . . (It's 11:33 a.m.) Almighty God, The Gunman fires over 200 rounds. radiant with light, Police enter the school as the Gunman continues to shoot . . . cast your goodness Gunman fires 16 more rounds in a classroom. to shine upon me. Police announce that Gunman is contained . . . .Gunman fires 11 more rounds. Most wonderful Lord, More Police enter the School . . . creator of all things, Police post that students and staff are safe in the School . . . hold your truth Gunman fires another round. More Police arrive . . . to shield me. Parents beg to enter the School. [End Page 161] Angel de mi guarda Police discuss what to do . . . oh mi dulce compañía A Student calls from a classroom. Twice. She whispers: multiple students are dead. no me desampares Police look for a master key . . . ni de noche ni de día Students call 911 again. They whisper: Children and a teacher are dead. hasta que me entregues More Police arrive . . . en los brazos Students call 911 again. They whisper: 8 or 9 students are alive. de Jesús Police Chief tries master key on another door . . . y de María Onlookers beg for action. Parents try to break the windows. Con tus alas me persigno Another Student inside calls 911. A Classmate whispers to him: hang up. The Gunman fires 4 rounds. y me abrazo de la Cruz Medics set up triage . . . Police search for a master key . . . [End Page 162] y en mi corazón me llevo A Student from a classroom calls again. She is told to wait . . . quietly . . . (It is 12:36 p.m.) al dulcísimo Jesús. [End Page 163] Cacayo St. Mary's College of Maryland Cacayo CACAYO (JOSÉ R. BALLESTEROS) is a Professor of International Languages and Cultures at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Beyond multiple publications in anthologies and journals, he authored the poetry collection Love Dust (Izote Press, 2014); and co-authored the Spanish letters textbook Voces de España (Cengage, 2014). Cacayo is the editor of Bolivian and Ecuadorian poetry for the Library of Congress' Handbook of Latin American Studies and is the founder and editor of the bilingual literary Press Zozobra Publishing. Copyright © 2022 South Central Review

This Place Called Home:Curating from an Insider's Perspective Miles R. Miller (bio) As a young boy, accompanied by my family, I joined the Washat religion at an area longhouse. I was nurtured with a traditional education; the elders taught me the Yakama legends and time-honored lessons, and encouraged me to understand everything around me. These early influences continue to inspire me as a beadwork artist. I learned patience, observation, design, and composition, skills that carried over to my collection management work. I learned to care for collections by thoroughly evaluating, completing, and updating accession and catalog records, thus facilitating the process of preservation and attending to exhibition concerns with care. The combined influences of my traditional Yakama upbringing, museology, and contemporary Native American art history studies motivate me as a curator to utilize exhibits as a new pedagogical method of pursuing Native American history, culture, and arts. This essay will introduce the reader to This Place Called Home, an exhibit I curated in 2008 as part of my master's thesis project at the University of Washington's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.1 In this essay, I will reflect on my experiences as a Native curator from the Yakama Nation—specifically how, in my opinion, traditional cultural beliefs enhance current museological practices and the relative power of decision making in collaborative projects between museums and tribal communities. Related to this shared management process, I will address two additional issues: (1) the relationship between pan-tribal [End Page 21] advisory committees and tribally specific values, and (2) possible tensions between culture and religion in museological practices. Click for larger view View full resolution Guest curator Miles R. Miller (Yakama) with a 1988 capote (cat. no. 1988-119/1) made by Maynard Lavadour White Owl (Nez Perce/Cayuse), on display in the 2008 Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture exhibit This Place Called Home. Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Photograph by Doug McTavish. In the course of the object-selection process for This Place Called Home (TPCH), an Umatilla cultural adviser brought his concern over ten historical objects that might possibly fall under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) to the attention of [End Page 22] the Plateau exhibit curators. These archaeological objects come from a particular accession in which the archaeologist and collector often acted without the guidance and advice of local Native American consultants. The intended use of these objects—a sinker/maul, sculpture/ effigy, pestle, ground stone tools, and stone mortars—is often misunderstood. My course of action to resolve the issue was to research accession records in search of evidence supporting this claim of a burial connection. Finding no evidence, and acting as a curator familiar with traditional Yakama teachings, I chose to override the recommendation of the Umatilla cultural adviser. This internal decision making is indicative of new understandings of what we mean by indigenous museum curating and the implications of consultation. This Place Called Home In March 2007 I accepted the invitation by Dr. James Nason, curator emeritus at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, to cocurate a complementary, object-based exhibit to augment Peoples of the Plateau: The Indian Photographs of Lee Moorhouse, 1898-1915, a traveling photographic exhibition from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.2 Both TPCH and the Moorhouse exhibit were designed to focus on the arts and culture of middle Columbia Plateau tribes—Yakama, Umatilla, and Nez Perce—and as such, would be the first major exhibits about Plateau culture in the past twenty years at the Burke Museum. The Moorhouse exhibit included fifty-one important historical images of known people, village sites, clothing, and other objects of material culture—all reproductions of Lee Moorhouse's glass plate negatives taken at the turn of the century. The Burke Museum was interested in enhancing the exhibit to highlight and present to western Washington audiences Plateau objects from the Native American permanent collection. TPCH explored the indigenous aesthetic of the Columbia River Plateau region. Carefully selected objects looked at relevant historical and prehistorical objects characteristic of Plateau culture from the Burke Museum, and demonstrated...

Reviewed by: They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic by Kenneth Cohen James C. Nicholson (bio) They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic. By Kenneth Cohen. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Pp. xi, 320. $55.00 cloth; $26.99 ebook) Like much of American culture, sports have often become overtly politicized terrain in recent years. But as Curator of Early American Culture at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, Kenneth Cohen, shows, the American sporting realm was a site of cultural, social, and political tension long before the National Football League, or even the national anthem, existed. Interspersing the experiences of individual sportsmen into his examination of early American sporting venues (broadly defined to include taverns, billiard rooms, theatres, and racetracks), Cohen argues that these sites provided opportunities "for contesting and limiting elites' social authority while ultimately supporting their economic and political power" (p. 244). Building on and complicating the work of a generation of historians of early American sports culture, Cohen utilizes an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, including newspapers, letters, and other archival material, in support of his facially paradoxical assertion that sporting culture "simultaneously promoted egalitarianism and hierarchy on the Anglo-American mainland between 1750 and 1860" in sporting venues where "white men's shared right to access and engage made elites seem more like other white men, and thus made differences in wealth and power seem less unnatural and more reflective of superior ability and character" (pp. 3, 10). In the decades before the American Revolution, wealthy colonists invested in sporting venues in part to "forge a more distinctive, exclusive, unified, and powerful colonial elite" (p. 23). These venues [End Page 591] gave prominent colonists an opportunity to strengthen business relationships, flaunt their status, and consolidate political power. However, as tensions with Great Britain heightened in the 1770s, American colonies began banning horse racing, cock fighting, and plays in an attempt to foster cultural solidarity and to "scale back a politicized sporting culture that, by 1774, had gotten away from the gentlemen in Congress and jeopardized their leadership of the patriot movement" (p. 87). In the aftermath of revolution, many Americans bristled against any whiff of aristocracy, including genteel sporting culture. However, investors in new sporting venues promoted their capacity to benefit all of society even as they pursued a broader goal of "the construction of economic and political systems that espoused competitive opportunism while rooting power among the few men with the assets and connections to control capital flows" (p. 127). In the Antebellum era, the sporting realm engendered what Cohen calls an early form of mass culture, and survived reformers' efforts to eradicate it. As wealth became more concentrated in the United States, white men across the class spectrum used sport to assert their masculine status and to challenge stereotypes associated with their social class. The antebellum sports culture that embraced an "implied democratic opportunity and meritocracy" ultimately helped to legitimize the notion that the accumulation and preservation of wealth in America was inherently moral (p. 234). Tracking continuity and change within American sporting culture over the course of nearly a century, They Will Have Their Game covers an impressive amount of ground and will be essential reading for scholars of early American society and culture and of American sports history more broadly. [End Page 592] James C. Nicholson james c. nicholson is the author of four books on American sports history, including The Notorious John Morrissey (2016). He taught history at the University of Kentucky. Copyright © 2020 Kentucky Historical Society