Search

As a critical counter-reading of Michel de Certeau's classic text, The Practice of Everyday Life, this essay argues that today, in the age of neo-liberal biopolitics, it is death that is quotidian. While "life" itself now figures as the paratactical and memetic ruse of our dominant order, the essay problematizes conventional forms of tactical resistance, claiming that resistance is often complicitous and has been co-opted in advance. It is death that must henceforth inform our struggles to make (a) life in the ruins. Examples of racialized deaths suggest a rhetorical agency, and a rallying cry, for political protest and resistance beyond the tactics of a progressive embourgeoisement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the mediatized death of Jamel Dunn in Florida in 2017, this paper situates the event of death within familiar cycles of moral condemnation, on the left, and the context of recursive circuits of mediatized and racialized violence, on the right. As we watch ourselves watching the boys watching (and filming) his death, the paper hopes to complicate our understanding of digital hate speech, moral subjectivity, and culpability. Between the curse of death and its recursive afterlife, it advances a tentative claim about ethical complicity across our digital media ecologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US reality television show The Bachelorette is one of the most successful productions in its genre. It only recently featured its first African American lead, a long-expected departure from the show's dominantly white cast. By analysing how the show discusses race, this article sheds light on how reality television sensationalizes racism. Racism in reality television is not, as the production wants to make viewers believe, the result of individual cases of prejudice, but a problem of those responsible in the control room and, arguably, of those tuning in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In "Risking Nationalism: NAFTA and the Limits of the New American Studies" (1997), Bryce Traister draws on Amy Kaplan to caution against favouring models of pluralism in American studies that leave "national borders intact without interrogating their formation" (Kaplan 15). Conversely, many Canadianists remain deeply sceptical about both borderlands studies and hemispheric studies. Rather than dismissing American depictions of Canada outright as clichéd and stereotyped, it would behove scholars to consider why there is a long-standing American tradition of writers employing Canada, literally and figuratively (frequently by moving characters across the forty-ninth parallel), to deeply explore American concerns and why this fictional migration matters-both for Canadians and Americans. This article inverts the fearful presumptions cultivated by Canadians about America by using Richard Ford's Canada as a test case for such an analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading five late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century lynching poems chronologically, this article argues that pre-1920 lynching poetry focuses on the white audience, and after 1920, it focuses on the black body. (A curious concomitance, the 1920s was the first decade in which the number of African Americans executed exceeded the number lynched.) In Paul Laurence Dunbar's “The Haunted Oak,” Leslie Pinckney Hill's “So Quietly,” and Claude McKay's “The Lynching,” the victim is silent, and instead critique of the lynch mob is privileged. Using Hortense Spillers's distinction between body and flesh, this article argues that these poems objectify black bodies to represent violent white racism. None unleash the terrors of miscegenation on the Southern psyche or discuss the sexual humiliation of the lynched to preserve virginal whiteness. After the historical shift from lynching to execution, Jean Toomer's “Portrait in Georgia” and Langston Hughes's “Three Songs about Lynching” create corporeal tension between sound and silence. Instead of wordless black bodies, the bodies of these poems either speak or choose silence, becoming flesh. Symbiotic race relations lead to problematic definitions of self when the power and relative position of whiteness determines the autonomy of the lynched corpse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Review of American Studies is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Segregated schools are a widely documented component of American history. Conversely, in Canada, provincially legislated segregation of Black Canadians has not been fully acknowledged. This historical amnesia raises numerous questions about the construction of Black experiences in both states. This interview examines Sylvia Hamilton's documentary The Little Black School House (2007), which explores the past as a means to contribute to the ongoing vitality of Black communities. Our discussion places this film within the historical context of legislated segregation in Canada and the United States, drawing attention to histories that have been largely absent within the dominant Canadian historical narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]