bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“They did worse than nothing”: Rape and Spectatorship in The Accused
Authors: Horeck Tanya
Published: June 2011

Towards the beginning of March 1983, reports of a gang rape that took place in a barroom in New Bedford, Massachusetts, entered the national media. The follow­ing New York Times report provides an early account of the crime that came to be known as the “Big Dan’s gang rape”: A 21-year-old woman, recent to the neighbourhood, stopped at Big Dan’s tav­ern for some cigarettes and a drink about 9 P.M. Sunday, March 6. She emerged sometime after midnight, bruised, half naked and screaming for help. Her clothes had been torn from her, she told the police officers who were called by a motorist who had stopped to help her. She said she had been hoisted to the bar’s pool table, tormented and raped beyond count by a group of men who held her there for more than two hours while the rest of the men in the bar stood watch­ing, sometimes taunting her, and cheering. When the police fetched her clothing and took her back inside, two of the men she identified as her assaulters were still there. Big Dan’s, which is one large room, had apparently been open for business the whole time. No one had called the police. One unidentified witness was quoted as saying in The New Bedford Standard-Times, “Why should I care?”(Clendinen A16)
“Closed Place, Open Word”: Locating the Post-Manichean in Recent Black Thought
Authors: Abdel-Shehid Gamal
Published: June 2011

Recently, in social and political theory, we have become familiar with using “posts” to describe our world. As someone in favour of these developments, I see this paper as my attempt to add another post to the mix: the post-Manichean. While there are a number of reasons why this is important, I will outline some of them. First, in response to Wahneema Lubiano’s (1998) question, “What’s PoMo got to do with it?”, I recognize the need to locate black thought within the various traditions of postmodernity, post-structuralism, and so on. More specifically, I share Lubiano’s insistence that something is to be gained when “the idea of met­anarratives is up for grabs” (206). Moreover, I share her claim that “the collage modality of postmodernism is one way to refuse the dangers and pleasures of coherence by instead demanding constant restructuring” (211). The second rea­son for the excavation of the post-Manichean is that I share Lubiano’s desire for “elbow room” for black life in contemporary social theory. The elbow room I need is a way of responding to the Eurocentrism and, dare I add, pathetic nature of the Marxism vs. post-structuralism binary, which continually buries and carnivalizes some of the most important black thinkers of the past fifty years, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and C.L.R. James. Such a binary makes it impossible to read thinkers who have been sympa­thetic or made contributions to both traditions, as well as those who carved out their own aesthetic and political spaces. It is clear that new positions are neces­sary.
Take Me Back to the Ball Game: Nostalgia and Hegemonic Masculinity in Field of Dreams
Authors: Nilsson Joakim
Published: June 2011

The financial and critical success of the film Field of Dreams attests to the wide­ranging appeal of its main character and the nostalgic ideals he embodies. One critic exclaims that “Field of Dreams soars beyond dreams” and describes the film as “a fantasy about belief, hope, fathers and sons, passion for life. A masterwork of wonderment,” while another describes it as “a magical movie. It’s so perfect, it’s like a miracle—a completely original and visionary movie.”1 Wes D. Gehring argues that Field of Dreams is a “populist” film in the tradition of Frank Capra, for like populism the film celebrates “adherence to traditional values and customs (mirroring the phenomenon’s [populism’s] strong sense of nostalgia)” and a “general optimism concerning both man’s potential for good and the importance of the individual” (36). And Caroline M. Cooper, citing an interview of Bill Clin­ton by Tom Brook, explains that Field of Dreams is, after High Noon (1952), the favorite film of President Clinton. He loves it, apparently, because of its message that “if you build it, they will come”; he finds it a “fabulous fairy tale” which “makes people feel that anything can happen.”
Introduction
Authors: Almont Richard , Chariand David , Harris Jennifer
Published: June 2011

In June 1999, at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences held at Bishop’s University in Quebec, we attended the first-ever conference devoted exclusively to African American Rhetoric.1 As members of a relatively small Canadian contingent, we were aware not only of our numerical under-representa­tion but of the irony that the first conference of this kind was being held in Can­ada. This was not the first time that Canada has served as a place for the meeting and discussion of African American culture and concerns. Indeed, as Rinaldo Walcott has demonstrated, in 1905 the Niagara Movement, forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), con­vened on the Canadian side of the Niagara River, apparently because it was una­ble to find suitable facilities in the US. Significantly, Black Canadians and their organizations were not invited to participate. This exclusion is particularly note­worthy given that so many of Canada’s Black organizations were in fact founded by African Americans who had relocated north of the forty-ninth parallel, as well as by their descendants (Walcott 18). In both Fort Erie in 1905 and Quebec in 1999, the crossing of a border inaugurated a debate. The conference at Bishop’s hap­pened appropriately at a time when there is an increased interest in the possibili­ties and challenges of rethinking borders and their meanings. These interests are linked to the current political and economic climate, which is characterized by increased transnational migration, heightened cultural interaction, and the emer­gence of an electronic culture that subverts existing borders. The result of these phenomena is the emergence of new and challenging ways of conceiving of iden­tity (no longer simply national, cultural, racial, sexual) and the emergence of new approaches to academic disciplines and paradigms of knowledge. The aim of this special issue of the Canadian Review of American Studies is to explore the unique perspective that African American and Black Canadian border crossing can bring to these topics.
Unfolded Hands: Class Suicide and the Insurgent Intellectual Praxis of Mary Ann Shadd
Authors: Olbey Christian
Published: June 2011

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Barbara Christian. On an afternoon in April 2000, one of the more remarkable convocation ceremo­nies of this year, or any year for that matter, took place at Antioch University’s graduation proceedings. The ceremony was noteworthy both for its choice of commencement speaker, Mumia Abu-Jamal (the former Black Panther Minister of Information currently sitting on death row in a US prison), and for the latter’s call to commit “class suicide” as the explicit theme of his address. Abu-Jamal states that this topic is in response to the graduating class’s “proposed query about an individual’s impact on the world” (Abu-Jamal and Kissinger 3). He names several figures (Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, Ella Baker, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Angela Y. Davis) who should appear on any “logical” list of people we admire for having impacted our world. Abu-Jamal then locates the common and decisive characteristic of these figures neither in race nor in their shared commit­ment to leftist politics.
The Tale of Ida Jane and George: Murder, Miscegenation, and Bastardy in 1893 Raleigh, Ontario
Authors: Walker Barrington
Published: June 2011

Introduction In late-nineteenth-century Raleigh, Ontario, the attention of a whole town was riveted to the spectacle of an entire black family on trial. Seven members of the Freeman fam­ily, Cecilia, Jeremiah, Lemuel, William Henry, George, Elizabeth, and Alexander, stood in the court docket for the murder of a white constable while a packed court­room savoured the salacious details of the trial. The tale of the Freeman family case engendered much commentary, played out on many different levels, and had all the elements of high drama: murder, bastardy, and miscegenation.1
Honest Abe and Uncle Tom
Authors: Irvin Painter Nell
Published: June 2011

I. Honest Abe and Uncle TomOver the course of many decades, historians have seen it as their duty to discover the fundamental causes of the Civil War: economic, political, and social. Their pursuit has turned up the political economies of slavery and freedom that ulti­mately would have pulled the American Union apart, peacefully or by force of arms (see Boritt; Collins; Freehling; Levine; McPherson; Niven; Perman; Reid). On the metaphorical level, by contrast, Honest Abe and Uncle Tom—incommensu­rate, but evocative figures—embody the causes of the Civil War. Monuments to Lincoln circulate on a daily basis, as units of money as common as pennies and five-dollar bills. After flourishing for three-quarters of a century, Uncle Tom’s popularity lapsed in the late twentieth century, as African Americans gained cul­tural clout and reinterpreted Tom’s meaning. With Black Power, the figure of Uncle Tom came to stand for treason to the (Negro) race rather than for faithful black Christian virtues, at least for the most part.
Queen Bee, King Bee: The Color Purple and the Blues
Authors: Wasserman Jerry
Published: June 2011

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple chronicles the life of an African American woman from rural Georgia during the first forty years of the twentieth century, a blues life of indignity and severe emotional poverty that is salvaged and ultimately redeemed, in part through the agency of the blues itself. On the opening page, warned by her stepfather never to tell anyone but God that he has raped her, Walker’s protagonist, Celie, erases herself. “I am,” she writes, striking out the word “am” and correcting herself, “I have always been a good girl” (3). She pre­sents herself as “an absence, an erased presence” (Gates 243). Later her husband further (un)defines her: “You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam, he say, you nothing at all” (Color Purple 176). From this condition of absence, of ostensible nothingness, Celie learns to make herself present and real. She achieves subjectivity and agency under the tutelage of Shug Avery, blues singer.
Spectacle Matters: Titanic, The Sweet Hereafter, and the Academy and Genie Awards
Authors: Roberts Gillian
Published: June 2011

In spite of the fact that, as Atom Egoyan has noted, “both The Sweet Hereafter and Titanic have big crashes with ice and water that take place halfway through the film” (qtd. in Lacey, “Tale” A2), these two films would seem to share little between them. They were made in the context of vastly different industries, according to different aesthetic concerns, with large discrepancies in their budg­ets and box-office grosses. However, the Academy Award nominations, announced in February 1998, inserted Titanic and The Sweet Hereafter into the same category, as both Atom Egoyan and James Cameron were nominated for Best Director. This grouping of the films sets the stage for a deeper comparison beyond Egoyan’s casual observation. These two films, which feature large vehi­cles crashing into or through ice, depict these accidents through opposite relations to spectacle. As an extension of the accident, death itself becomes spectacle in Titanic; The Sweet Hereafter, in contrast, invokes death without representing it. The narrative structures of the films also differ: Titanic shifts unproblematically between present-day narration and Rose’s memories of the ship; The Sweet Hereaf­ter confuses temporal relations without using the clear flashback structure of Titanic. In addition to the internal workings of the texts themselves, the films have acquired other meanings and significance through awards and recognition bestowed upon them.
The Price of Publishing Modernism: Ezra Pound and the Exile in America
Authors: Monk Craig
Published: June 2011

When Ezra Pound began his association with the little magazine Poetry in 1912, he wrote to tell its editor, Harriet Monroe, that her plan for a publication “seems not only sound, but the only possible method. There is no other magazine in America which is not an insult to the serious artist and to the dignity of his art” (Paige 43–44). Published in Chicago, Poetry was a death knell for the genteel literary preten­sions of high-circulation magazines in the United States. But while Pound sug­gested to Monroe that it was not “any of the artist’s business whether or not he circulates,” he confessed that he too had been “nevertheless tempted, on the verge of starting a quarterly” (43–44). By this time, of course, the poet was well estab­lished in Europe, and over the subsequent decade he would rely heavily upon magazines like Blast, the Dial, the Egoist, the English Review, the Little Review, and the New Age to print his work. But it would be fifteen years before Pound edited his own magazine: four numbers of the Exile appeared between the spring of 1927 and the autumn of 1928 while the poet lived in Rapallo, Italy.
“A Hewer of Wood and Drover of Water”: Expectations of Protestant Missionary Women on the Western Frontiers of Canada and the United States, 1830–1900
Authors: Higham C.L.
Published: June 2011

Between 1820 and 1900, women represented approximately thirty per cent of the missionaries sent to western Canada, the majority married to other missionaries. During the same period, women comprised sixty per cent of the Protestant mis­sionaries sent to Indian missions in the western United States.1 Over half of the women in US mission work were single and unrelated to other members of the mission.2 To the male-dominated Protestant missionary societies, women repre­sented the embodiment of Christian womanhood: pious protectors of home, hearth, and the private sphere. But missionary women viewed their role differ­ently. Better educated than the average woman in Canada or the United States, and often more educated than their male counterparts, females joined the mis­sionary movement because missionary societies portrayed their work as a liberat­ing and more public extension of Christian womanhood (Wills 253–55).3Therefore, missionary women hoped to use their education to advance Christian­ity and to extend the role of the Christian woman. Once they arrived on the fron­tier, though, they found that mission work offered simply the same traditional roles of wife, helpmate, mother, and nurse but in a different locale. By examining Protestant missionary societies’ expectations for women and missionary women’s own expectations of mission work, this paper studies how missionary women struggled with these expectations when they conflicted with actual experience on the frontier. It compares female and male missionaries’ descriptions of native women to examine the conflicts in missionary women’s lives.
Women Who Run from the Wolves: Feminist Critique as Post-Feminism
Authors: Kinahan Anne-Marie
Published: June 2011

For some time now I have been intrigued by the discourses on post-feminism con­sistently articulated within popular media. In an attempt to interrogate and under­stand the rise of this post-feminist movement, this article discusses three of the most popular treatments of the topic: René Denfeld’s The New Victorians (1995), Katie Roiphe’s The Morning After (1993), and Christina Hoff Sommers’s Who Stole Feminism? (1994). Specifically concerned with how these works define feminism, how they articulate the “crisis” of the movement, and what solutions they propose, I am interested in uncovering what is at stake in these debates. The similarities between these books (all published in the early 1990s, all discussing campus femi­nism, all written by feminist-identified, university-educated women) allow for an assessment of how these young, white, well-educated women position themselves against a movement once thought to be theirs alone. While each author claims to offer insight into the current crisis facing feminism, it is my contention that, collec­tively, these works signal a fear of the perceived radicalism of feminism on univer­sity campuses, a radicalism which these authors attribute to the increasing influence of queer theory, “radical” lesbians, and feminists of colour. These fears over the potential radicalization of young women belie a concern over the loss of literary and canonical traditions, as well as an attendant concern over the legacy of the university as a cultural, intellectual, and social institution.
Ageing Masculinity in NYPD Blue: A Spectacle of Incontinence, Impotence, and Mortality
Authors: Yeates Helen
Published: June 2011

Incontinence and Impotence For the masculine ego the body can be used to draw a defensive line between inside and outside. So long as there is very little fat, tensed muscle and tight sinew can give a hard, clear outline to the body. Flesh and bone can pass itself off as a kind of armour. A hard body will ensure that there are no leakages, across the edges between inner and outer worlds. Nature, it seems, has betrayed the perimeter of the male body. It has opened up there a number of gaps and orifices, though mercifully fewer than the female body. What holes remain must be firmly shut…. Tensed, the whole frontier can be kept on red alert.—Anthony Easthope (qtd. in Buchbinder 133–34) In the popular US police drama NYPD Blue, the invulnerable “citadel” of the male body is being stormed both from the inside and from the outside. The masculinity “red alert” is certainly on, the armour is being peeled off, leakages occur, and penises are dysfunctional on prime-time television. As vulnerability, uncertainty, and mortality are foregrounded, one of the key male bodies on display is revealed as profoundly human, rather than idealized. Indeed, it could be argued that NYPD Blue contains a fascinating exploration of the crisis of humanity metamor­phosed into a mortality crisis of a plump middle-aged male detective with pros­tate problems, incontinence, and impotence. While the “masculine” is still being framed problematically as the “universal” here, the shifts and differences repre­sented within this particular manifestation of hegemonic masculinities warrant close mapping from a feminist perspective.
From Disciplinary Gaze to Biological Gaze: Genetic Crime Thrillers and Biogovernance
Authors: Gerlach Neil
Published: June 2011

Imagine an America where violent crime rates have quadrupled over the past century, inexorably rising to a level that would be incomprehensible to previous generations. Imagine that the nature of violent crime seems to have changed, tak­ing a turn toward casual sociopathy where the representative crime has become calculated serial murder rather than a one-off crime of passion. Imagine the resulting level of public fear, rampant to the point where civic-mindedness is replaced by a fortress mentality, walled communities, pervasive video surveil­lance, and electronic monitoring as the public sphere is virtually abandoned as too risky. In this imaginary America, the fearful public turns angrily upon its gov­ernments, demanding more decisive action and inquiring as to why traditional practices of crime control are not controlling crime.
“Frank Lloyd Oop”: Microserfs, Modern Migration, and the Architecture of the Nineties
Authors: Thompson Graham
Published: June 2011

I If the early development of the computing industry in America was marked by a preoccupation with hardware, as companies like UNIVAC, DEC, and IBM filled the nation’s corporate and government offices with mainframes, then a similar pre­occupation has so far marked the response of cultural criticism to contemporary technology. For Michael Menser and Stanley Aronowitz, American technoculture is founded on the way that hardware permeates all sections of society: “The Amish have their wagons and farm equipment, the hippies their Volkswagen buses. The rap DJ has his or her turntable … the cyberpunk has a computer complete with modem” (10). Even in a recent article about the interaction between people and computers, Kevin J. Porter treats the computer, without exception, as a piece of machinery (43-83). Software – the medium through which human-computer inter­action takes place – is nowhere to be found in either of these accounts.
Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost: Yet Another Big Book
Authors: Leeds Barry H.
Published: June 2011

In 1959, Norman Mailer aired an ambition in Advertisements for Myself which he must have known and intended that the literary world would never let him for­get: to “try to hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our American letters” (477). Since then, Mailer has written many books, several of them massive in size and scope, which his detractors have rejected as failed attempts to fulfill this promise. Writing in the New York Times Book Review on The Executioner’s Song, Joan Didion described this critical phenomenon best when she forcefully insisted: It is one of those testimonies to the tenacity of self-regard in the literary life that large numbers of people remain persuaded that Norman Mailer is no better than their reading of him. They condescend to him, they dismiss his most origi­nal work in favour of the more literal and predictable rhythms of The Armies of the Night; they regard The Naked and the Dead as a promise later broken and every book since as a quick turn for his creditors, a stalling action, a spangled substitute, tarted up to deceive, for the “big book” he cannot write. In fact, he has written this “big book” at least three times now. He wrote it the first time in 1955 with The Deer Park and he wrote it a second time in 1965 with An American Dream and he wrote it a third time in 1967 with Why Are We in Vietnam? and now, with The Executioner’s Song, he has probably written it a fourth. (Didion)
Camelot’s Killers: Gordon Dickson’s Rhetorical Cleansing of America
Authors: Blackmore Tim
Published: June 2011

Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King – Else, wherefore born… Tennyson, Idylls of the King Writing Around the TableThe idea of Camelot was a lance stuck in the side of American culture – the erup­tion that followed spilled some of the best and the brightest blood in Southeast Asia and Africa. In the science fiction community, Gordon Dickson’s well-liked Childe Cycle1 published between 1960 and 1994, made a fictional Camelot that paralleled Kennedy’s New Frontier. In this paper, I argue that the series functions to make war bloodless and palatable, to mirror the rhetorical postures of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and its political aftermath. A line can be drawn from Kennedy’s rhetoric to the creation of the Peace Corps, the space race, and the deepening involvement in Vietnam. This paper understands Kennedy’s rhetoric to be a step in the direction of American foreign policy that began in Vietnam and extended to other global conflicts. However, Dickson’s writing reflects the early heroic part of the mission: the part we most typically associate with Kennedy’s New Frontier.
Justice and Citizenship in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon
Authors: Medoro Dana
Published: June 2011

They called me “the angriest Negro in America.” I wouldn’t deny that charge. I spoke exactly as I felt. I believe in anger. […] I’m not for wanton violence, I’m for justice. –Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm XDeconstruction keeps open the “beyond” of currently unimaginable transformative possi­bilities precisely in the name of Justice. –Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the LimitPublished in 1977, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon remains haunted by the debates and struggles of the previous two decades. Her characters seem to repre­sent or embody different positions from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, conjuring in both oblique and explicit ways the words of its prominent spokesmen: W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Booker T. Washington, and Malcolm X. While the novel is often read as an account of the trauma wrought by racial injustice, it is, at the same time, an attempt to express an idea of justice loyal to this experience.1 This paper focuses on the figures of Guitar and Pilate, con­tending that each articulates and develops a concept of justice in Song of Solomon, and that each informs – or exerts pressure on – the other’s configuration of justice. Although the text does not ultimately sustain Guitar’s eye-for-an-eye directive, as the scholarship on the novel concurs, neither does it entirely dismiss or discredit it. Guitar has his say in two separate, lengthy dialogues; he also speaks on behalf of consequence in the enaction of justice: “’The earth is soggy with black people’s blood,’” he says about his involvement in the deadly Seven Days. “’And before us Indian blood. [ … ] I had to do something’” (Song 154). Pilate, I will argue, ges­tures toward a promise of justice, an ever-arriving ideal outside or beyond the necessity of force or retribution. In Morrison’s words: “She is something we wish existed on a wider scale” (Conversations 140). If Pilate stands for an ethical ideal, with an attendant ontological reconfiguration, Guitar stands for the real­ity of its absence in African American lives, announcing the force of law that often accompanies an ethical portal in an unjust world.
“No Undue Prejudice:” Samuel Colt and the Politics of Uniformity
Authors: Massender James
Published: June 2011

To have civilization, it is necessary that a people should be numerous and closely placed; that they should be fixed in their habitations, and safe from violent external and internal disturbance; that a considerable number of them should be exempt from the necessity of drudging for immediate subsistence. Feeling themselves at ease about the first necessities of their nature, including self-preservation, and daily subjected to that intellectual excite­ment which society produces, men begin to manifest what is called civilization; but never in rude and shelterless circumstances, or when widely scattered. – Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of CreationThe philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul”[…] the speech of Mr. Hobbs could not fail to impress upon their minds the fact that it was more difficult to engineer men than to engineer matter. – from a discussion of John Anderson’s paper “On the Application of Machinery in the War Department,” Journal of the Society of Arts, 28 January, 1857 ***One of the most pressing difficulties with which I must contend in the process of shaping the following argument about what I am calling the “Machinery of Indi­vidualism” – and its deployment of an imperative that bears upon the practices of both history and science – is that of a tendency toward idealization. That is, it is easy to generalize, to portray in heroic terms, those “renegade” factions or unruly groupings that have resisted metabolization by a dominant order. Indeed, this very structure is replicated in the authorized version of early American history, in which the first colonists set out for the New World in order to escape the tyrannies of the Old.
“The Blood Will Flow Back to You:” The Reactionary Proletarian Fiction of Marita Bonner
Authors: Musser Judith A.
Published: June 2011

The first fifty years of twentieth century American literature is marked by various literary movements such as the European adaptation of modernism, the rise of the Proletarian novel influenced by Marxist ideology, literature of the “lost gener­ation,” the Harlem Renaissance, and the rise of feminist writing. The connection between proletarian literature and Harlem Renaissance is useful, for many of the leading leftist and Marxist intellectuals sought to promote or encourage the development of black literature. This is a period marked and made important his­torically by critical attention to the fiction of black male writers such as Richard Wright, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, and Claude McKay who depict the strug­gles of black male subjects to survive hostile ghettos, joblessness and underem­ployment, and racial hostility and segregation in the migrant community originally from southern cities. More recent critical attention has focused on Afri­can American women writers who contributed to at least three of these move­ments – most notably the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, proletarian literature, and black feminist ideology. Feminist scholar Paula Rabinowitz has re-evaluated the 1930s as a decade of women’s revolutionary fiction. According to Rabinowitz, women’s revolutionary fiction of the 1930s narrates class as a fundamentally gendered construct and gender as a fundamentally classed one and so enables the beginnings of a theory of gendered class subjectivity. (8)
American Perspectives on La fièvre aux États-Unis, 1860–1930 : A Historiographical analysis of Recent Writings on the Franco-Americans in New England
Authors: Richard Sacha
Published: June 2011

Se pourrait-il que le faux renouveau des années 1970 n’ait été que le présage d’un vrai renouveau, lequel sera vécu dans les décennies à venir? – Armand Chartier, Les Franco-Américains de la Nouvelle-Angleterre, 1991.The great French Canadian migrations of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the subsequent survival of Franco-American descendants have long fasci­nated scholars. Carroll Wright’s study of the French immigration across the bor­der, The Canadian French in New England, circulated in the New England region as early as 1882. . The Franco-American community of New England has since been the object of numerous studies. French Canadian scholars in particular have devoted much attention to the study of la Franco-Américanie, undoubtedly because the “grande hémorragie” was a traumatic episode in their history.1 Immigration figures tell the story of a massive exodus from French Canada: recent estimates show that over 600, 000 French Canadians, out of a population of 1.5 million, left their homeland in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Their Franco-American descendants number over three million in the New England states (Chartier 383).
“Where Do I Belong?”: Willa Cather’s Apocalyptic Landscapes
Authors: Thacker Robert
Published: June 2011

Writing in Wolf Willow (1962), Wallace Stegner offers a description of the prairie landscape that serves as a point of departure. Having returned as an adult to southwestern Saskatchewan near the Cypress Hills, where he spent his early boy­hood years on a frontier homestead, Stegner is both remembering and describing that land when he writes: The drama of the landscape is in the sky, pouring with light and always mov­ing. The earth is passive. And yet the beauty I am struck by, both as present fact and revived memory, a fusion: this sky would not be so spectacular without this earth to change and glow and darken under it. And whatever the sky may do, however the earth is shaken or darkened, the Euclidian perfection abides. The very scale, the hugeness of simple forms, emphasizes stability. It is not the hills and mountains which we should call eternal. Nature abhors an elevation as much as it abhors a vacuum; a hill is no sooner elevated than the forces of ero­sion begin tearing it down. These prairies are quiescent, close to static; looked at for any length of time, they begin to impose their awful perfection on the observer’s mind. Eternity is a peneplain. (7)
Cultural Anti-Modernism and “The Modern Memorial-Park”: Hubert Eaton and the Creation of Forest Lawn
Authors: McNamara Kevin
Published: June 2011

The Business of DeathBorn into a line of Baptist clergymen who pursued academic careers, Hubert Eaton (1881–1966) was raised in Liberty, Missouri, where his father was Chair of Natural Sciences at William Jewell College; his paternal grandfather, Rev. George Washington Eaton, had been president of Madison (now Colgate) University in Hamilton, New York, and his great uncle, Rev. Joseph Eaton, presided at Tennes­see’s Union University. Hubert forsook the family calling, however, and chose mining over the ministry. It was in the wake of a failed Nevada venture that he found himself in a cemetery just north of downtown Los Angeles in present-day Glendale. According to Forest Lawn legend, the rapprochement of Hubert’s dream of success with his inherited sense of vocation commenced on New Year’s Day, 1917, when he surveyed the graveyard’s growth of chaparral and devil grass, yet saw instead “a great park, devoid of misshapen monuments and other customary signs of earthly death, but filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns, splashing fountains, singing birds, beautiful statuary, cheerful flowers, noble memorial architecture with interiors full of light and color.” Eaton vowed then to remake the cemetery as a memorial park “where artists study and sketch; where teachers bring happy children to see the things they read of in books,” objects like great art (in reproductions) and famous churches (in reconstructions). Only such a displacement of death within the continuity of culture and the eternity of art, an undertaking to be secured by “an immense Endowment Care Fund, the principal of which can never be expended—only the income therefrom,” would adequately represent Eaton’s fundamental belief “in a happy Eternal Life” and, “most of all, in a Christ that smiles and loves you and me” (St. Johns 118–19).1
The Isolationist Sentiment in North Dakota during the Truman-Eisenhower Years
Authors: Lemelin Bernard
Published: June 2011

In the rare studies dealing with American post–World War II isolationism, the state of North Dakota, bordering on the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Sas­katchewan, always holds a special place, as it has acquired the reputation of hav­ing been ”the nation’s most isolationist state during the postwar decade” (Carpenter 22; see also Lubell 146). To a large extent, this reputation can be ascribed to the attitude of some of its prominent Republican members on Capitol Hill. Hence, Senator William Langer, who sat between 1941 and 1959, voted against the United Nations Charter and denigrated the Marshall Plan, while his colleague Milton Young, in the upper house from 1945 to 1981, was one of only thirteen senators who opposed the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949 (Schoenebaum 298, 623). The situation was no different in the House of Representatives: William Lemke, who sat between 1933 and 1950 and was portrayed as an “old isolationist” (Lillehaugen 19), described the internationalists in 1947 as “the betrayers of our Nation” (United States Cong. Rec. 24 July 1947, A4089) and Usher Burdick, in the lower house between 1949 and 1959, resisted programs which risked subjecting US domestic concerns to foreign influence (Carpenter 23). Burdick, incidentally depicted during these years as “the only [f]ederal legislator who [spoke] fluent Sioux” (United States Cong. Rec. 20 May 1953, A2795), particularly attracted atten­tion for his vehement criticism of the United Nations Organization and his advo­cacy of an American withdrawal from this international body.
Critique in an Age of Rigor Mortis?: Negative Dialectics, Symmetrical Logic, and Terrorism after September 11, 2001
Authors: Howard David Brian
Published: June 2011

For there has been no change in society's basic condition …. No rebellion of mere consciousness will lead beyond that. In the minds of the subjects, too, a bourgeois society will choose total destruction, its objective potential, rather than rise to reflections that would threaten its basic stratum. – Theodor Adorno, Negative DialecticsThere is an image by Klee called Angelus Novus. On it an angel is depicted who looks as if he is about to distance himself from something that he is staring at. His eyes are wide-open, his mouth is agape, and his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. He has turned his face towards the past. Where, in front of us, a chain of events appear, he sees one single catastrophe. This unrelentingly piles rubble on rubble and flings it at his feet. He would really like to stay, awaken the dead, and repair the smashed pieces. But a storm is blowing over from paradise, and it is tangled in his wings and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm forces him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of rubble in front of him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
National Appropriations and Cultural Evolution: The Spatial and Temporal US of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Native America
Authors: Ben-zvi Yael
Published: June 2011

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) is remembered today primarily as a marginal nineteenth-century ethnologist, whose contribution to anthropology was limited to the inception of kinship studies. Other than that, Morgan is remembered—often ironically—as a “friend of the Indian,” a title he had wished to earn by intermingling his inter­est in Native American cultures with philanthropic intentions, and as a somewhat delusional amateur, whose evolutionist thought was strongly criticized by Franz Boas (1858–1942). The first US scholar to direct dissertations in anthropology and a major force in the field’s professionalization, Boas promoted the idea of cultural relativism by refuting previous theories—including Morgan’s—that emphasized a unified evolutionary scale on which all cultures could be ordered. While Boas has been constituted as the father of American anthro­pology, Morgan eventually became an obscure figure, locked in an old box of refuted theories and bad science. Still, some Morgan scholars claim that he should be regarded as a pioneer of American anthropology.1 My analysis in this paper is not aimed at redeeming Morgan’s theo­ries or status. I am interested in his efforts to create a coherent sense of national existence rooted in colonized space, as I believe that these processes have broad implications for understanding the tensions between colonialism and nationalism in US culture. I argue that Mor­gan appropriated Native American cultures and subordinated them to an evolutionary framework, in order to naturalize US culture and root it in the colonized space of what has been called “America.”
Is Emily Dickinson a Metaphysical Poet?
Authors: Emsley Sarah
Published: June 2011

Emily Dickinson has been called “a major metaphysical poet of the nineteenth century” (Thota 161) and even, “if any nineteenth-cen­tury writer can be called this, the American metaphysical” (Keller 203). In recent years, criticism of Dickinson has tended to focus more on investigating aspects of her immediate historical context than on exploring her use of the conventions of metaphysical poetry, but the question of whether or not she can usefully be considered a meta­physical poet is worth raising once more.1 Does she think about ideas in ways that are distinctly metaphysical? Does she explore techniques that are specifically metaphysical? She frequently engages with both metaphysical ideas and metaphysical techniques, and she is often, if not always, a metaphysical poet. Reading her poems in light of the characteristics of metaphysical poetry shows how her work is connected with the larger tradition of this complex approach to questions about the nature of existence. Metaphysical poetry is not limited to the seventeenth century, any more than the ontological and cosmological questions it addresses are limited. Sev­eral critics have identified Dickinson’s poetry as metaphysical, and by investigating what definitions they have used, it will be possible to examine in what sense she can be called a metaphysical poet.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Tears: Art vs. Pop in American Culture1
Authors: Beaty Bart
Published: June 2011

He had one curious encounter at camp. He dropped by the chief of staff’s quarters one night and found a young soldier sitting on a bunk, crying like a baby. “He said he was an artist,” Novick remembered, “and he had to do menial work, like cleaning up the officers’ quarters. “It turned out to be Roy Lichtenstein. The work he showed me was rather poor and academic.” Feeling sorry for the kid, Novick got on the horn and got him a better job. “Later on, one of the first things he started copying was my work. He didn’t come into his own, doing things that were worth­while, until he started doing things that were less academic than that. He was just making large copies of the cartoons I had drawn and painting them.”
Identities in Crisis: Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s New Orleans Fiction
Authors: Stouck Jordan
Published: June 2011

In recent years, critics have celebrated Caribbean theories of creoli­zation for their creative and protean approaches to identity. E.K. Brathwaite’s version of creolization and Wilson Harris’s “creative syncretism” (his term for cross-cultural exchanges) have been hailed as powerful critical tools in dismantling destructive binaries and harmful racial hierarchies within Caribbean literature.1 Similarly, Chris Bongie deploys Edouard Glissant’s understanding of creoliza­tion as a process of cross-cultural exchange to describe the limita­tions and possibilities of postcolonial theory. Bongie’s book, Islands and Exiles, is intended, he states, “quite simply to help further Glis­sant’s argument that ‘ours is a creolizing world’” (10). Indeed, H. Adlai Murdoch affirms the potential of Glissant’s theory in articulat­ing a relational identity vitally important to the Caribbean region (157–61). Even Peter Childs and Patrick Williams’s recent Introduc­tion to Post-Colonial Theory celebrates Caribbean creolization’s repre­sentation of a “positive, dynamic, processual becoming” (48). In all of these theories, creolization is situated in Caribbean history and racial identities but is, most fundamentally, as Bongie points out, a dynamic practice that can be extended to describe many situations of cross-cultural exchange.
Afro(Americo)centricity in Black (American) Nova Scotia
Authors: McNeil Daniel
Published: June 2011

A few families rose to prominence [in Baptist churches in Nova Scotia], created an aristocracy of the faith, and often held the church to more than ordinarily frozen and conservative theological and social positions. Winks 346 Winks’s reading of African-Canadian history exhibits, purely, a small-l liberal, American bias. I would need an entire book to amend—one by one—his false precepts ... African-Canadian ‘progress’ must be read against Canadian cultural norms, not American ones. Clarke,Odysseys Home 63^4n9 Preamble In formulating a vision of The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy makes sorties against anti-essentialists who ignore the appeal of a ‘‘power­ful, populist affirmation of black culture,’’ ‘‘racial conservationists who veer between a volkish, proto-fascist sensibility and the misty­eyed sentimentality of those who would shroud themselves in the supposed moral superiority that goes with victim status’’ (100, 101). Canadian scholars have found Gilroy’s work instructive. In Odysseys Home, George Elliott Clarke insists upon the ‘‘necessary attractiveness of cultural nationalism for any minority that feels itself downtrodden and disrespected’’ while warning of the ‘‘hazards of nationalism—its tendency to decay into fallacious myths, misty romanticisms, and blood-rite fascism’’ (183, 184). Yet Clarke does not only condemn the ‘‘liberal lies’’ of Robin Winks—the ‘‘American’’ (30, 124n9, 189) or ‘‘US’’ (155) author of The Blacks in Canada—and ‘‘those wanna-be black nationalists who suspect mixed-race or light-skinned blacks of being congenital .
TwinTales: Narrative Profusion and Genealogy in Fall on Your Knees
Authors: Gordon Neta
Published: June 2011

Ann-Marie MacDonald concludes her interview with Eva Tihanyi with a description of how the process of writing Fall on Your Knees began: I started with a room in a house and the name of a character and a face. I lived for a long time with those very small components until I was allowed to leave one room of the house and see that there was an attic. ... It was a long time before I was allowed to leave the house and find out where we were. (‘‘Jane Eyre’’ 23)
Intersections of Gender and Ethnic Performativity in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees
Authors: Frost Corey
Published: June 2011

Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees is a thematically complex novel, but in theoretical terms, it is perhaps most interesting for the way it metaphorizes one political struggle in terms of another, specifically through the intersection of its postcolonial and gender-transgressive ( or ‘‘post-gender’’) themes. This essay examines and attempts to explain some of those strategies of resistance.
Falling for Jazz: Desire, Dissonance, and Racial Collaboration
Authors: Georgis Dina
Published: June 2011

In Ann-Marie McDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, the tensions of migration and hybridity are configured through the perversity of desire and narratives of trauma. The story is set in a mining town in Cape Breton Island and represents a complexly diverse Canada, replete with scandal, hatred, and slippery racial dynamics. When this affect is unbound, it returns not only to the lost time of past racial traumas but also to the lost time of sexual traumas. Trauma’s repetitions are, however, always a distortion because memory is, as Cathy Caruth puts it, ‘‘a filtering of the original event through the fiction of traumatic repression’’ (15). The original event of trauma can, therefore, only be performed, never repre­sented. Said differently, although the terrors of history, such as slavery, are unspeakable, they are not, as Paul Gilroy suggests, inexpressible (73).1
What Memory Wants: BrokenTongue, Stranger Fugue in Fall on Your Knees
Authors: Salah Trish
Published: June 2011

Composition ... leads to a staggering conception of history, a history that is open, unstable ... Time no longer flows in a linear fashion; sometimes it crystalizes in stable codes in which everyone’s composi­tion is compatible, sometimes in a multifaceted time in which rhythms, styles, and codes diverge, interdependencies become more burdensome, and rules dissolve. —Attali 147
Eighty Years and More: Looking Back at the Nineteenth Amendment
Authors: Chapma Mary , Mills Angela
Published: June 2011

Abstract: ‘‘Eighty Years and More – Looking Back at the Nineteenth Amendment’’ is the introduction to a special issue on American Woman Suffrage timed to coincide with the eighty-fifth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The anniversary invites us to raise questions about memory and memorialization, about which stories about suffrage endure (such as Susan B. Anthony’s primacy in the campaign) and which figures and activities have been excluded from myth-making chronicles like the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage. As an overview of the collection, the introduction outlines both the impetuses for and the implications of dismantling traditional narratives of suffrage and refiguring the campaign as a multilayered, multifaceted phenomenon, functioning on many fronts and involving many figures whose efforts have been hidden from history. The special issue as a whole works to challenge old orthodoxies about the suffrage campaign by re-evaluating the contributions of figures like New York author–activist Lillie Devereux Blake and Wyoming justice of the peace Esther Morris and by reconsider­ing the rhetorical work performed by the creative tactics that characterized the campaign, including oratory, literature, and stereotyping. Reviews of three recent works of scholarship on American suffrage remind us of the persistent interest in interrogating the historiography of suffrage and of the continued need for research that furthers the goals of re-evaluation.