Matthew Scully’s Democratic Anarchy is a fascinating and provocative exploration of American literature in relation to democratic politics. It joins a wave of recent scholarship examining that subject (American Literary History’s 2023 special issue on “Democracy and the Novel in the US,” edited by Rachel Smith and Gordon Hutner, is one example among many) and undoubtedly motivated by current widespread concerns about threats to democracy in the US and globally. What sets Scully’s book apart ...

Fig. 1: Harmonia RosalesCourtesy of Harmonia RosalesBorn in Chicago in 1984 to a Cuban father and a Jamaican mother, Harmonia Rosales is now based in Los Angeles and works at the crossroads of Afro-Cuban mythology, Christian iconography, and European art history, reimagining classical compositions to center Black women and diasporic narratives.Largely self-taught, Rosales has mastered Renaissance and Baroque techniques, grounding a visionary practice that blends technical precision with myth...

Le monde occidental des années 1960 fut le lieu d’une profonde redéfinition des manières de penser l’histoire. Alors que Fernand Braudel cristallisait une nouvelle épistémologie en sciences humaines et sociales avec le concept de « longue durée » (1958), la perspective d’une histoire structurelle, abordée à l’échelle du temps long et des grands espaces géographiques, s’est également manifestée dans le contexte de l’art américain. Robert Morris appartient à cette génération d’artistes, qui au cours des années 1960-1970 à New York, explorait de nouveaux terrains de création, tout en opérant un rapprochement inédit avec le domaine de la recherche. Il se saisit en particulier de la théorie morphologique et transhistorique formulée par George Kubler dans The Shape of Time (1962), à la croisée de l’histoire de l’art et de l’anthropologie. En parallèle, le passé précolombien qui fascinait particulièrement ces artistes, constituait l’objet privilégié de leurs investigations sur l'histoire de « longue durée » spécifiquement américaine. C’est ainsi que Robert Morris publia « Sur les traces de Nazca » en 1975, à la suite de son voyage sur ce site archéologique au sud du Pérou, offrant à travers cet essai une étude comparée des géoglyphes et des formes culturelles précolombiennes de la région, en les confrontant aux derniers développements de l’art environnemental contemporain aux États-Unis. Nous proposons d’examiner les spécificités de cette modalité de recherche créative, qui présente des similitudes conceptuelles notables avec les théories de Kubler et de Braudel. Il s’agit également d’analyser la manière dont l’artiste-historien, à travers le discours visuel et textuel de son essai, inscrivait sa propre pratique en regard des formes culturelles étudiées, issues tant d’un héritage précolombien qu’occidental.

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et au Canada

aux tats-Unis et au Canada

Cline Planchou: Can you tell us about the history of CAIRNS, the place and the center?Craig Howe: Well, it started a long time ago, when I was young.I love living here.This place is home.It's where I grew up and I always wanted to live here.We were ranchers, so I grew up outside in the land, working with the land and with animals.Coming back and doing this was always in my mind.But I waited to do it.I also love designing and architecture, but you can't really be a rancher and an architect.You have to go to school.Then I got into that loop and did all these other things that took me away from here.Being away was not permanent, I was always coming home, but I was trying to think: "How can I live out here and use my head?"Grandpa used to say "use your head and not your back."So that's what I tried.And then when I was at the Newberry Library, I could see the power of documents.People came there to Chicago from all over the world because of the American Indian collection and other collections as well.Then at the Smithsonian, people also came from all over the world. 3So, I thought, why don't we have that at home, a place that people would come to?It seems like there are two things that are not transportable, that is the land and the people.And if we focus on land and the people that live here, they don't necessarily want to travel, they don't want to leave.A lot of people are also unknown to outsiders.They have a lot of knowledge and are unknown beyond the local area.These were the ideas that were in my mind: we can do something with land and with people, and I could also live out here.Also, when the Internet came by the mid-1990s, I could see we could do a lot of research from anywhere.We didn't have to be in Chicago or in Philadelphia or in Washington DC, we could do research from anywhere with an Internet connection.And so again, I started thinking of a way to create a research center.When I came back, I was first shy about speaking up, but I could see the discrimination and the problems in our state and I thought, "well, I have the credentials, I can weigh in here, and we'll do it through research."And that's where this idea started of a non-profit research center that would be independent from me but that has some stature, like the Newberry Library, the Smithsonian, in the sense that they are institutions.CAIRNS came out of that thinking.And when it comes to American Indians and issues important to them here in our state, the idea is to say: here's the research, and here are the facts, here are the issues that many of us don't know about.We have been trying to stick to that mission ever since.I have been the only full-time employee since 2018, though there were different assistants before then.With one assistant, we developed these really tribal-specific or local-specific endeavors like the Lakota Film Festival, these Lakota Lands and Identity traveling seminars, and these exhibits, the very first one called Lakota Emergence.Sandrine Baudry: We also wanted to hear a little bit about the place itself. C.H.:Wingsprings? 4 This was part of our ranch.When I moved back and wanted to build a place to live, I also wanted it to serve as the workplace for this company.I had to pick a place, so I walked all our land, it goes quite a bit to the West from here.I like the landscape better over there, it's deep canyons and pines and it's more remote.But this part of the ranch, which is as far East as our ranch goes, is also only a mile and a half from where I grew up.I could see the benefits of working, living and building here as far as access is concerned.

Hollywood films could not be shown in studio-owned or affiliated theaters if the movies did not obtain a Production Code seal. Such films would be barred from showing in studio-owned theaters and affiliated chains. Exploitation cinema relied on the sensational and the spectacular, often resorting to depictions of sex stories, childbirth, illicit affairs, venereal diseases, or the consumption of drugs—which the Production Code Administration (PCA) disapproved of and justified why such films could not get Code seals. Exploitation producers usually disregarded the Code entirely, and sought to show their movies in rural or independent houses instead. Child Bride (1941) and Dust to Dust (1938) were among the most controversial exploitation films in the 1940s, because of their subject material, but also because of producer Kroger Babb’s clever marketing techniques. Child Bride was intended to serve as a pamphlet against child marriage in the Ozarks, and Dust to Dust focused on teenage pregnancies. Both were the subject of battles involving Catholic and Protestant groups, local censorship boards, women’s clubs, parent teacher associations, and medical associations. This paper examines the reception of these two films through the prism of censorship battles, and how the producers of the movies devised clever strategies to circumvent the fact that they could not get Code seals—acting as traveling salesmen, touring U.S. cities, renaming the movies, and showing the films in the independent circuit. The exhibition and reception histories of Child Bride and Dust to Dust interrogate the effectiveness of the film censorship systems (the PCA and the local boards), which seemed quite powerless to stop those films from showing in urban and rural theaters.

et au Canada

The exhibition California Work offered a sweeping and masterful overview of the California-based projects conducted by American artists Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (1932-2022) over a period of over forty years (fig. 1). In preparation for the exhibition, curator Tatiana Sizonenko and La Jolla Historical Society organized a workshop in La Jolla in March 2022, entitled Listening to the Web of Life, which I was fortunate to attend and where I met Newton Harrison, who ac...