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This paper examines Nation women's engagement and resistance in the Muhammad Speaks (MS) newspaper. MS was created as the official publication of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam (NOI) in 1960. The paper employed women as journalists and invited contributions from women who had registered with the group. Women's contributions to the paper's production and content reveal their readings of NOI mandates but they equally illuminate a gentle resistance to aspects of the organization. Elijah Muhammad's NOI implemented gender roles for men and women within the organization that were often inflexible. Women embraced the organization's gender roles and found ways to navigate the patriarchal dimensions of the movement. This paper argues that a careful analysis of women's writings for the MS newspaper reveals facets of their activism that have been overlooked in existing scholarly studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For most of its existence, the Second Amendment was largely ignored by Constitutional scholars. Recently, a veritable cottage industry has developed in which two distinct camps have surfaced: so-called "Standard Modelers," who argue that individuals have a right to bear arms for self-defense, the defense of the state, and, in the most extreme examples, to overthrow the government should it become tyrannical, and those who view the Second Amendment as a collective right vested in the state militias for the purposes of law enforcement, to protect against foreign aggression, to quell domestic insurrection, and as a check against federal overreach. Despite the enormous gulf between them, both sides agree that the right to bear arms provides a counterbalance against the federal government. This paper uses insights from game theory to shed new light on the adoption of the Second Amendment. The states suffered a commitment problem. They wished to cooperate with each other by founding a new republic, but feared the consequences of doing so: losing their freedom to a powerful government. The Second Amendment militated against the need for a large federal army, acted to counterbalance federal forces, and created the offensive means with which to confront a tyrannical government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the attitudes of feminist activists, intellectuals and filmmakers to US intervention in Central America during the 1980s. It traces the development of mutual intellectual and political sustenance between feminism and anti-interventionism, arguing that as feminist thinking bred new ways of approaching US involvement in Central America, so anti-interventionist struggles bred new ways of thinking about women's activism. In making this point, the paper complicates narratives of the “age of Reagan” that overlook the persistence of left-wing politics during the 1980s. Instead, it argues that a specific form of international feminism enabled a community of activists to contribute to a vibrant culture of dissent that criticized conservative approaches to women's rights and, at the same time, vigorously contested the interventionist foreign policy of the Reagan administration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores HBO television show The Wire's portrayal of inequality and injustice in terms of the neoliberal state and capitalism, while focussing on the Baltimore Police Department and the marginalized people in the show. In arguing that the neoliberal state and neoliberalism promote the systemic problems reflected in The Wire, this paper will examine the representation of the marginalized in the show in relation to Zygmunt Bauman's idea of wasted lives. In doing so, it will explore how bureaucracies in the show fail to salvage the wasted lives that Bauman defines as the collateral casualties of capitalistic globalization. After examining the show's bleak portrayal of American urban life in terms of the police department, this paper will discuss some morally complicated characters, such as Major Colvin and Detectives McNulty and Freamon, who attempt to surmount the systemic problems of the department. In examining their controversial police work, including transgressions of law, this paper aims to clarify the political implications of these police officers in terms of Jacques Rancière's ideas of politics and equality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the demise of the Crompton Company, which filed for bankruptcy in October 1984, causing 2,450 workers in five states to lose their jobs. Crompton was founded in 1807 in Providence, Rhode Island and when it went out of business it was the oldest textile firm in the country, having been in continuous operation for 178 years. Despite its history, scholars have overlooked Crompton, partly because most work on deindustrialization has concentrated on heavy manufacturing industries, especially steel and automobiles. I argue that Crompton's demise throws much light on the broader decline of the American textile and apparel industry, which has lost over two million jobs since the mid-1970s, and shows that textiles deserve a more central place in the literature. Using company papers, this study shows that imports played the central role in causing Crompton's decline, although there were also other problems, including the strong dollar, declining exports, and a reluctance to diversify, which contributed to it. The paper also explores broader trends, including the earlier flight of the industry from New England to the South and the industry's unsuccessful campaign to pass import-restriction legislation, a fight in which Crompton's managers were very involved. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses some key scholarship on ethnicity, including work by Glazer, Moynihan, Sollors, and Hollinger, as a backdrop for re-examining specific plays by Arthur Miller, especially The Crucible and After the Fall. While looking closely at distinctive expressions of ethnicity related to Miller's Jewish-American status, the paper argues that the playwright should not be thought of as a "pluralist" or "cosmopolitanist" but rather as a "universalist." Miller deserves distinctive credit for his ability to invoke situations where rhetoric transcends the particularities of ethnicity and sheds light not just on American, or Jewish, or Jewish-American history, but also, for example, on the current situation in the Middle East. The playwright also demonstrates how rigid identification with one side of a conflict can blind us to the omnipresence of evil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013) might seem an unlikely candidate for intervening in Hollywood's civil rights genre, given both its nationalistic ending and its recuperation of iconic styles and images. This paper argues, however, that the film's pastiche interrogates past cinematic tropes for race and space; in this sense, it proves counterhistorical, a term indicating not a lack of accuracy but a commitment to illuminating the role of visual media in shaping contemporary understandings of history and to encouraging fresh perspectives on the past. Examining the many forms of constraint produced by iconic images of black and gendered personhood, the film also takes on the spatial icon with which many of these figures are associated – the southern plantation. Both exposing and challenging the ways in which spectacular accounts of southern racism occlude the geographic and political reach of African American movements against oppression, the film inconsistently insists on the importance of thinking across conventional demarcations of space and time. At these moments, it suggests possibilities for how even commercial cinema might contribute to new conceptions of black political history and possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American fraternities have long engaged in hazing, subjecting their prospective members to curious and painful ordeals. Many fraternities also appear to incorporate planned failure within their inductions: near-impossible tasks where failure is punished with hazing. This paper provides evidence for the widespread use of planned failure in fraternities, describing its application in a modern hazing fraternity and presenting evidence of planned failure in other fraternities using interviews and decades of scholarly and non-scholarly accounts of hazing. Discussion is focussed on possible explanations for the existence and persistence of this ostensibly core feature of fraternity inductions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the end of the 1960s, the United States military was rocked by race-related violence and riots. Growing fears of black “militancy” eventually compelled the military's largely white leadership to implement policies aimed at ameliorating racial disparities. One of the most significant changes was the establishment of the Defense Race Relations Institute (DRRI) and the requirement that all troops partake in race relations education. Largely overlooked in histories of military race relations and rarely viewed in terms of its place in the larger landscape of US race relations, DRRI was founded to train the military's race relations educators. Its original curriculum and methodology, during the years 1971–74, represented a radical response to the problems of racism in the military, and central to its framework was a critique of whiteness as a nexus of racialized power. This paper attempts to present a complex understanding of the motivations involved in the founding of the DRRI as it historicizes the military's quest to contain race “militancy” through the establishment of DRRI. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite much talk of a culture war, scholars continue to argue over whether the American public is divided on cultural and social issues. Some of the most prominent work in this area, such as Fiorina's Culture War?, has rejected the idea. However, this work has in turn been criticized for focussing only on the distribution of attitudes within the American public and ignoring the possibility that the culture war may also be driven by the increasing strength with which sections of the population hold their opinions. This paper tests the strength, or saliency, hypothesis using individual-level over-time data and nonlinear regression. It finds (1) that there was a steady and significant increase in concern about traditional moral issues between the early 1980s and 2000, but (2) that the over-time increase was driven by an upward and equal shift in the importance attached to traditional moral issues by Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, evangelicals and non-evangelicals, and frequent and infrequent worshippers alike. While the first finding offers support for the saliency hypothesis and the culture war thesis, the second challenges the idea that Americans are engaged in a war over culture. Both findings enhance but also complicate our theoretical understanding of the culture war, and have important real-world consequences for American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper seeks to accomplish three things. First, it contextualizes Ralph Waldo Emerson's political thought by demonstrating that, despite his rhetoric to the contrary and the dominant interpretation within Emersonian scholarship, his political ideas had an intellectual genealogy rooted both in his local New England context and in the broader American culture. Second, it argues that principles and tensions from the Federalist Party lingered long after the demise of the organized group, especially in response to the perceived excesses and extremes of Jacksonian America, and can even be found within a thinker as egalitarian and democratic as Emerson. And finally, the article explores how the ironies of these two previous points flesh out the paradoxical and dynamic nature of America's democratic tradition. By engaging the ironies and paradoxes within Emerson's political thought in microcosm, I argue, one gets a better view of the larger issues at stake within the broader culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the American theater of the 1930s and 1940s, the designation “queer star” was an oxymoron – except when applied to Clifton Webb. The Indiana-born singer and dancer was (according to colleagues) homosexual and (according to critics and audiences) queer. He was also, after 1932, a star on Broadway and the road as well as a reliably queer presence in the gossip columns and arts pages of the daily paper. Unlike any other show business personality of his rank, he used his star text to raise the visibility of queerness in early twentieth-century entertainment culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the representation of American everyday life and the language of the legal system in the work of Charles Reznikoff. It draws comparisons between Reznikoff's accounts of the lives of immigrants to America in his work, and Jacques Derrida's experience of colonial relationships as described in his book Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin. Charles Reznikoff was the son of Russian Jews who moved to America to escape the pogroms of the late nineteenth century. His parents spoke Yiddish and Russian, his grandparents spoke Hebrew, and Reznikoff's first language was English. This familial linguistic complexity was further added to by his associations with experimental modernist poetry and poetics through the “Objectivists,” an environment that provided him with the poetic forms in which to explore relationships between language, experience and its representation. I cite two other linguistic contexts: that of the law, acquired through his legal training, and that of commerce and sales, acquired through working as a hat salesman for his parents' business. Reznikoff therefore had no naturalized relationship between language and either family or national identity, or between language and place. I use Derrida's notion of “a first language that is not my own” to explore the implications for Reznikoff's poetry, and particularly the relationship between the specific accounts of experience in Testimony and the more general notions of nation and justice. While I conclude that a concern of the poems is always language, and what language means in different contexts, the poems also seek to connect with the material consequences of injustice for the fleshly bodies of the victims. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

African Americans and Korean Americans have addressed Black–Korean encounters and responded to each other predominantly in their favorite genres: in films and rap music for African Americans and in novels and poems for Korean Americans. A case in point is the intertextuality between Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker. A comparative study of the two demonstrates that they are seminal texts of African American–Korean American dialogue and discourse for mutual understanding and harmonious relationships between the two races in the USA. This paper reads the African American film and the Korean American fiction as dialogic responses to the well-publicized strife between Korean American merchants and their African American customers in the late 1980s and early 1990s and as windows into a larger question of African American–Korean American relations and racialization in US culture. This study ultimately argues that the dialogue between Spike Lee's film and Chang-rae Lee's novel moves towards a possibility of cross-racial identification and interethnic coalition building. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The influx of Vietnamese refugees, "boat people," and immigrants into the United States after April 1975 has led to the establishment of a significant Vietnamese-American community. There is a body of literature written for children and young adults that creates and delineates this new community within the topography of a welcoming and immigrant-friendly USA. This paper will examine the meanings and implications of the appellation "Vietnamese-American" as defined within a body of nonfiction children's literature. It will highlight how these texts negotiate questions related to refugee status, immigration, identity and belonging, contributing in many instances to a bland re-creation of a formerly oppressed but now coherent and increasingly prosperous and Americanized people. The children's literature plays an important role in defining the relatively new community to itself and to mainstream America. In its dissemination of truisms about Confucian heritages and stereotypes of "model minorities" the literature reveals as much about American ideological desires as it does about "the new Americans." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between American studies and affective production? In what specific ways does our scholarship participate in the creation, circulation, and appreciation of affective practices ? These questions provide a foundation for understanding the sometimes obscure connections between academic scholarship and mass culture. I argue that the history of American studies involves a specific and influential imbrication with affective production that has shaped notions of identity and affect since the nineteenth century. Usually this history is understood in terms of how the field used to advocate conservative notions of nativist national identity ; this paper brings the history of this advocacy into new focus by histricizing the relationship between scholarship and affective production in the often-overlooked field of humor studies. The first section traces the invention of an academic tradition that articulated humor practice to national character, and identifies this articulation itself as the affective labor of that scholarship. The second section addresses alternative histories that might be written once we recognize this articulation of affective practice to identity as itself a form of affective labor. In three case studies, I briefly explore the relations between humor, mass culture, and politics in the works of the late nineteenth-century humorists David Ker, Marietta Holley, and Bill Nye, whose humor was produced in the same period that saw the durable articulation of humor practice to national identity emerge. These cases gesture, polemically, to the important work American studies can still do with humor, especially as we realize the key role of affective production in our disciplinary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the history of the National Women's Committee on Civil Rights (NWCCR). Called into being at the behest of President Kennedy, the NWCCR was an attempt to enlist the support of the organized women of America in the advancement of civil rights. The NWCCR had two main goals : first, to offer support for the passage of Kennedy's civil rights legislation, and second, to encourage their branch membership to work in support of integration. However, whilst the majority of the NWCCR's affiliated organizations had passed resolutions in favour of integration both throughout the United States and within their own organization, in practice they were reluctant to threaten the internal stability of their associations by insisting on either integrated membership or active support of civil rights in the local community. This article will argue that whilst the NWCCR were successful in organizing lobbying for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they were unwilling to throw their weight behind efforts to encourage activism in local communities. Whilst key members of the NWCCR saw an important role for women in the implementation of civil rights at the community level, they were forced to conclude that the organizational structure and ethical inertia of the NWCCR did not make it a suitable medium for furthering racial justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following World War II, Ebony's creator and editor, John H. Johnson, sought to create a popular black magazine in the vein of Life and Look that would reflect the accomplishments and joys, ''the happier side,'' of African American life. Throughout the first four years of its publication, Lena Horne appeared on the magazine's cover three times - the only woman to do so during this period. In this paper, I argue that the fledgling Ebony magazine drew on Lena Horne's wartime status as a beautiful black icon and represented her as a symbol of its ideological project, broadly, and as the Ebony image of postwar black womanhood, specifically. The magazine's representation of Lena Horne acts as a useful trope for understanding how Ebony imaged postwar black femininity in terms of motherhood, work, and civil rights activism; additionally, Ebony's representation of Horne and Ebony readers' letters to the editor reveal central issues of respectability, pinup photography, colorism, hair care, and interracial relationships as they were debated within the magazine's pages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on a paper written by Owen Dudley, published in the December 1984 issue of "Journal of American Studies," which reviewed a book on the family of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy. In the book written by Gary Wills, the analysis of John Kennedy's "political Catholicism" is by far the best account of the subject the author has come across. It is a matter of public record that Kennedy was the first President to feel the full force of the civil rights movement. Colouring the whole article, in fact, is an attitude which gives it such unity as it has; which has brought Dudley his insights into Kennedy's Catholic political background; but which in the end makes most of his observations curiously unreal.