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What has it meant to be an Americanist? What did it mean to be an Americanist through fascism, war, and occupation? Nightmare Envy and Other Stories is a study of Americanist writing and institutions in the 20th century. Four chapters trace four routes through the mid-twentieth century. The first chapter is the hidden history of American Studies in the United States, Europe and Japan. The second is the strange career of "national character" in anthropology. The third is a contest between military occupation and cultural diplomacy in Europe. The fourth is the emergence and fate of the "American Renaissance," as the scholar and literary critic F.O. Matthiessen carried a canon of radical litera...
Telling America's Story to the World argues that state and state-affiliated cultural diplomacy contributed to the making of postwar US literature. Highlighting the role of liberal internationalism in US cultural outreach, Harilaos Stecopoulos contends that the state mainly sent authors like Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, and Maxine Hong Kingston overseas not just to demonstrate the achievements of US civilization but also to broadcast an American commitment to international cross-cultural connection. Those writers-cum-ambassadors may not have helped the state achieve its propaganda goals-indeed, this rarely proved the case-but they did find their assignments ...
Mastering Emotions examines the interactions between slaveholders and enslaved people, and between White people and free Black people, to expose how emotions such as love, terror, happiness, and trust functioned as social and economic capital for slaveholders and enslaved people alike.
Between the world of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Christianity there appears to be the widest difference. Coates’s brief comments on Christianity in his highly acclaimed Between the World and Me make clear that religious faith is alien to his own experience. Still, Christian audiences from congregations to theological schools engaged the text for its analysis of the state of race relations in the United States. In September 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates tweeted, "Best thing about #BetweenTheWorldAndMe is watching Christians engage the work. Serious learning experience for me." This volume takes that tweet as an invitation to theologians, ethicists, and religious studies scholars to engage the book, and as a challenge to do so in a way that is a learning experience for Coates, the authors, and readers.
Redeeming Objects traces the afterlives of things. Out of the rubble of World War II and the Holocaust, the Federal Republic of Germany emerged, and with it a foundational myth of the "economic miracle." In this narrative, a new mass consumer society based on the production, export, and consumption of goods would redeem West Germany from its Nazi past and drive its rebirth as a truly modern nation. Turning this narrative on its head, Natalie Scholz shows that West Germany's consumerist ideology took shape through the reinvention of commodities previously tied to Nazism into symbols of Germany's modernity, economic supremacy, and international prestige. Postwar advertising, film, and print culture sought to divest mass-produced goods--such as the Volkswagen and modern interiors--of their fascist legacies. But Scholz demonstrates that postwar representations were saturated with unacknowledged references to the Nazi past. Drawing on a vast array of popular and highbrow publications and films, Redeeming Objects adds a new perspective to debates about postwar reconstruction, memory, and consumerism.
Six decades after the end of the occupation of mainland Japan, this volume approaches the theme of the occupation’s legacies. Rather than just being a matter of administrative practices and international relations, the consequences of the US occupation of Japan transcended both the seven years of its formal duration and the bilateral relations between the two countries. Rich with fresh analyses on a range of topics, including transnational and comparative views on the occupation, the influence of Japan on the United States as well as the reverse, international perspectives on this “odd couple”, and the memory of the occupation in both countries, this book provides a greater understanding of the transtemporal, transnational and transcultural legacies of one of the crucial events of the 20th century.
The Cold War was an era of surprising connections between American and Czech literary cultures. Major writers met behind the Iron Curtain, while others smuggled, translated, and adapted works from the other side. Brian K. Goodman explores the artistic and political consequences, arguing that the movement of literature inspired new forms of dissent.
His world view colored by growing up in 1980s Ethiopia, where death governed time and temperament, the author offers a fresh interpretation of melancholy and mourning during the early years of the AIDS epidemic.
"'The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky' offers not only a panoramic view of a country poised between devastation and an uncertain future but a gripping self-portrait of a man poised between unresolved youthful bewilderment and a mature clarity of conviction." • Wall Street Journal In 1945 Melvin J. Lasky, serving in one of the first American divisions that entered Germany after the country’s surrender, began documenting the everyday life of a defeated nation. Travelling widely across both Germany and post-war Europe, Lasky’s diary provides a captivating eye-witness account colored by ongoing socio-political debates and his personal background studying Trotskyism. The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky reproduces the diary’s vivid language as Lasky describes the ideological tensions between the East and West, as well as including critical essays on subjects ranging from Lasky’s life as a transatlantic intellectual, the role of war historians, and the diary as a literary genre.