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Reseña del libro: Barrientos Márquez, María del Mar y Lozano Salado, Lola (eds.). Revolución y Diplomacia: el Trienio Liberal y América. Santiago de Chile, Ariadna, 2023, 166 pp. ISBN: 978-95-66095-92-7.

Con la llegada a América, decenas de animales fueron traídos a Europa como alimento, pero sobre todo como mascotas exóticas. Su presencia en jardines y cámaras de maravillas pronto despertó la curiosidad de científicos y artistas, que incluyeron estas nuevas especies en sus libros y cuadros. En el caso de los artistas, su representación estuvo fuertemente condicionada por la presencia previa o no de especies de la misma familia. Para mostrar las diferencias según el caso y la red de significados y usos otorgados en el arte a las distintas especies americanas, tomaremos los loros como ejemplo de una familia conocida desde la Antigüedad por los europeos y los armadillos como muestra de una familia desconocida en el Viejo Continente.

This paper examines an important medieval manuscript now preserved in America at the Maria José Lafragua Library in Puebla, Mexico. Dating from the second half of the fourteenth century, this codex, which contains a breviary, can be considered the oldest medieval manuscript of European origin preserved in a Mexican public institution to date. Although the manuscript has been considered to be of French production on stylistic and ornamental grounds, further analysis of the liturgical content and the notes added to the calendar have shed light on where it was actually created and subsequently used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the preamble to the Declaration of Independence “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” are described as being unalienable rights of people and moreover, they constitute the core of the American national ethos: ‘the American Dream’. Nevertheless, full access to the plenty of potentialities inherent in this rhetoric seems to have been denied to specific categories of people, thus resulting in an endorsement of exclusivity and discrimination, when actually it should have supported inclusivity and equal opportunities to every American citizen. Especially the notion of “liberty” has historically been influenced by many socially constructed categories in the US, notably race, religious belief, gender, and sexual orientation. Therefore, the connected conceits of ‘life’ and ‘the pursuit of happiness’ couldn’t help but be reshaped by those categorizations. This despicable state of things had such a profound impact on the life and works of many authors – especially on those who closely faced an unjust set of domination and discrimination due to their ethnicity and sexuality that they publicly condemned how suffocating and hypocritical American society still was in the twentieth century. Among them stands the influential African American writer James Baldwin, a figure in which one can really feel the struggle of being labelled as both African American and homosexual by the hypochondriac white society of the US. In his second novel entitled Giovanni’s Room (1956), Baldwin deeply explored the theme of the ‘quest for self-identity’ in connection with the theme of sexual orientation. Thus, the aim of this paper is to investigate how – and why – Baldwin makes use of Africanist, or Africanlike, characters (e.g., the Italian immigrant Giovanni) to explore topics that otherwise would have been taboo, which means homosexuality and even bisexuality in the American society of the 1950s. In particular, the analysis will rely on the seminal work of literary criticism Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), by Toni Morrison, who greatly examined the peculiar use of black characters in American literature for the first time.

Cody Marrs, Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics of All Things. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. 148, ISBN: 9780192871725. Reviewedby Pilar Martínez Benedí

In Casey Plett’s novel Little Fish (2018), the protagonist Wendy faces multiple lifechanging events at the same time: After her grandmother passes away, she finds out that her Mennonite grandfather might have been a trans woman and grapples with the way her family has narrativized him and remembers him. In the midst of this journey, her friend Sophie dies by suicide and Wendy is left to piece together Sophie’s past, navigate a present of mourning, and imagine a future without her. Building on theories of queer and trans temporalities, Kit Heyam’s recent work on trans histories, Susan Stryker’s Foucauldian reading of trans as a subjugated archive, and Margaret Middleton’s concept of ‘gaydar as epistemology,’ this paper explores how cisnormative narrations of transness and transitioning hold trans subjectivities in a constant temporal bind and, in turn, how Little Fish interrogates this bind through a (re-)narration of transgender pasts, presents, and futures. The temporal bind within cisnormative temporalities and narrations of transness is rooted in medicalization and pathologization and configures trans identity as a temporary phase on a linear transitioning path from a traumatic childhood in the past to the ‘curing’ of a ‘wrong body’ in the future. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that Little Fish is able to challenge the cisnormative narrative by desubjugating trans archives and utilizing specific, embodied knowledge of transness to come to an interpretation of the past that negates presupposed heterosexuality and cisnormativity, and instead opens the possibility for the complexity of queer and trans existence.

In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage. Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the early 1800s, changed her name to “Public Universal Friend,” refused to use pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led her own congregation in upstate New York. In the mid-nineteenth century, internationally famous Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman led an openly lesbian life, including a well-publicized “female marriage.” And in the late 1920s, Augustus Granville Dill was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter. These are just a few moments of queer stories that fill what we call U.S or American history. But what does it mean to queer American history? How might queering it move us to ask new and different questions about it, regardless of whether we write about intimacy, eros, sexuality or love? If early scholarship chronicled the exploits of queer-identified people over time for an audience already open to the history of sexuality, the contemporary methodological struggle is aiming to suggest ways in which queering history might aid us in thinking more critically about how conventions, ideals, norms and, above all, practices gain traction and resonance in our history writing. To queer history rather than just writing histories of queerly situated or queer-identified people is to draw on a wide array of conceptual tools—often from other disciplines—to lay bare common assumptions about the world in which our subjects lived. It means stepping away from the family album approach and adding new layers of complexity to a shared historical past. This essay, in the spirit of decades’ worth of scholarship that sees queer as much as a methodological intervention as an epithet, sketches out: the way queer history has been defined by academia and the issues and limits that emerged from research and scholarship; what it means to queer our common understanding of American history; where queer history gets its fuel, the archive, what it means to reconstruct and preserve the memory of discriminated and written off communities and individuals.

This article examines the concepts of historical accuracy and truthfulness of the setting in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) through an analysis of his representation and depiction of Padua, in particular of its University and Botanical Gardens (Orto Botanico). Though Hawthorne had not yet visited Italy at the time of publication, his description of Padua in the tale is vivid and full of apt references that embody the city. Overall, little critical attention has been devoted to the Padua setting of the short story. However, a study of Hawthorne’s rich and accurate references in the text reveals a somewhat obscure desire to convey his particularly deep knowledge of Italian literature, art, and history. Finally, a comparison between the Padua of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” with subsequent depictions of Italy in Hawthorne’s production, especially the Rome of The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1860), will highlight similarities and differences in the treatment of history and setting in his later works.

Justice Anthony Kennedy has ascertained a strand of jurisprudence articulated around the concept of “equal dignity”, enshrined in the equal protection clause and the promise of “liberty” guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. However, in their dissents, originalist justices have framed marriage equality as a way to shift the burden of discrimination onto religious conservatives who claim their right not to recognize LGBTQ+ citizens by invoking religious freedom (First Amendment) and direct democracy. Although it is early to determine whether the court will be poised to overturn key precedents, I would like to argue that the recent flux of religious domination has enabled Donald Trump to restore the moral uplift of the federal judiciary, which could potentially undermine Kennedy’s legacy. Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has equipped himself with all the tools to hold the leverage he needs to launch a moral crusade against women’s reproductive rights or transgender Americans by denying them equal protection against “sex” discrimination and gender-affirming care under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. By referring to Lawrence (2003), in dissent, I aim to explore the interpretive foundations of Justice Scalia’s opinion, which has paved the way for a possible path to accommodate Americans’ “sincerely held religious beliefs”. Similarly, in Masterpiece Cakeshop (2018), Kennedy’s failed attempt to draw a fine line between sexual orientation discrimination and religious freedom on narrow grounds has empowered conservative Christians to claim the right to ignore the symbolic value of same-sex marriages.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how older queer identities are represented in the contemporary American sitcom Grace and Frankie (2015 – 2022). By watching this TV show through the work on the depiction of sexuality in American family sitcoms provided by Tison Pugh in his book The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom (2018), this paper argues that different, unsung queer realities are starting to get more recognition in the U.S. television system. Grace and Frankie’s political statement of “being queer and in my 70s” and Pugh’s theoretical framework on the representation of queerness in U.S. television, are the tools this paper uses to analyze how a contemporary American comedy show deals with the intersection of age and sexuality.

Lorem Ipsum è un testo segnaposto utilizzato nel settore della tipografia e della stampa. Lorem Ipsum è considerato il testo segnaposto standard sin dal sedicesimo secolo, quando un anonimo tipografo prese una cassetta di caratteri e li assemblò per preparare un testo campione. È sopravvissuto non solo a più di cinque secoli, ma anche al passaggio alla videoimpaginazione, pervenendoci sostanzialmente inalterato. Fu reso popolare, negli anni ’60, con la diffusione dei fogli di caratteri trasferibili “Letraset”, che contenevano passaggi del Lorem Ipsum, e più recentemente da software di impaginazione come Aldus PageMaker, che includeva versioni del Lorem Ipsum.

The phenomenon of youth gangs -- which manifested itself significantly in America after the crisis of the 1930s -- has also spread to Europe and Italy in the following decades, arousing considerable attention among sociologists. The aim of this article is to briefly outline the social causes at the origin of this phenomenon and to investigate the account itself of youth gang, identifying the necessary and sufficient characteristics that the activities put in place by a group of boys must have in order to qualify as a gang. To this end, I analyse and compare the studies and positions of various sociologists -- not coeval -- such as Frederic M. Trasher, Albert K. Cohen and Franco Prina. The analysis induces to hypothesize for this complex phenomenon a multifactorial genesis that require a punctual case-by-case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to show how right-wing political evangelicalism in the United States shifted from the “high ideal” of realizing the Christian nation in America to the project of separate identity communities, immune from the evils of modernity. A turning point for the rise of an evangelical right is identified in the 1970s Supreme Court decision in Coit v. Green (1971), establishing that a private school practicing racial discrimination could not be eligible for tax exemption. Some evangelical leaders, accordingly, defended segregationist academies in the name of religious freedom. In the following years they found in the crusade against abortion a more suitable issue to unite all Christians. Demographic changes, however, made the idea that Christian America, albeit including Catholics, could constitute the country’s “moral majority” increasingly problematic. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, new visions of identity emerged. The final part of the essay focuses, in this perspective, on “neo-monastic” projects of building isolated Christian communities, and reads them as signs of a crisis in the Christian nation narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Nuestro trabajo se detiene en el análisis de una serie de contribuciones en las que identificamos la labor filológica de Bartolomé Mitre (1821-1906): un político, militar, periodista e historiador argentino que combinó la función pública –llegó incluso a ser Presidente de la Nación– con los quehaceres intelectuales. Su enfoque profundizó la adopción de un punto de vista ideologizado y condenatorio respecto de las cualidades del hombre americano: apuntaba las insondables diferencias entre las “semi-civilizaciones” antecolombianas y las sociedades europeas, sostenía que la historia americana se circunscribía al territorio en el que se hallaba y denunciaba la impropiedad de las reconstrucciones filológicas que traían aparejados falaces derroteros migratorios. Si bien acuñó una noción absolutamente interesante como la de “ideología idiomática” (1894), al estudiar las lenguas americanas procuraba poner de manifiesto una idea sin ningún tipo de asidero científico en la actualidad: la precariedad de pensamiento del hombre originario de América, su “barbarie congénita” y sus penurias en materia de desarrollo cívico y moral.

Peter Viereck (1916-2006) is the acknowledged forerunner of the United States conservative movement that growed after WWII. Indeed, from 1940 onward, he made the case for a New Conservatism, charged with the implementation of classical and Christian ‘absolute moral laws’ and with the safeguard of the American tradition, based on civil liberties and humanitarian values. He considered conservatism to be at the centre of the political spectrum, between totalitarian ideologies as much as between statism and individualist atomism. This led Viereck to clash with the 1950s and 1960s right-wingers, who expelled him from the conservative camp. Also through the use of unpublished sources, this essay aims to reconstruct those noteworthy events in the history of the American political thought.

Countries have been organized as nations for over two centuries. This research starts from the concept of nation and its symbols that represent it, reflecting especially on national anthems. Our goal is to deconstruct the belligerent nationalism contained in the lyrics of the anthems of Europe and America, with the aim of promoting interculturality and the integration of peoples based on the universal values that unite us. We will construct a narrative of belligerent nationalism whose process goes from subjugation to independence, with violence against the invader being the predominant element.

En los primeros meses del año 2020, la Organización Mundial de la Salud le otorgó oficialmente categoría de pandemia global al Coronavirus, o COVID-19, un virus prácticamente desconocido para el común de las personas hasta apenas unos meses antes. Expandida a una vertiginosa velocidad hasta alcanzar cada rincón del planeta, la pandemia produjo profundos efectos en diferentes latitudes y en distintos aspectos de las interacciones humanas, incluyendo las relaciones cívico-militares. El hemisferio americano no estuvo ajeno a esa transformación, y su esfera política registró importantes impactos. En ese marco, el presente trabajo analiza la evolución de los roles militares en América y contempla las implicancias posibles para el futuro regional, en relación con los temas del control cívico-militar, la gobernanza democrática y el fortalecimiento institucional.

CAÑAS DE PABLOS, Alberto, Los generales políticos en Europa y América. Centauros carismáticos bajo la luz de Napoleón, 1810-1870. Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 2022, 463 pp.

This paper discusses the tropes of addiction and the grotesque body as William S. Burroughs’ paradigms for social control and subversion, further illustrating how they refer to the social, political, and economic context of the United States in the post-war decades. To do this, it highlights dynamics and images in Burroughs’ works which concern invasion, predation, and control. The author’s conceptions of the ‘junk pyramid,’ the ‘naked lunch,’ and the ‘soft machine’ illuminate his theories on oppression and parasitism. The author bases his discussions on models of production and consumption which characterize post-war capitalism and all power systems and hierarchies. Opioids, or ‘junk,’ emerge as both mechanisms of social control and positive metaphors of free exchanges between the (grotesque) body, or the national body, and the Other, or the ‘non-American’ as they open the body to external infiltration. As a mechanism of disruption, junk represents the threat of subversion and transformation. Burroughs’ narrative of resistance comes to include a struggle against the control of the human consciousness as well, as his ‘American non-dream’ theorizes a conspiracy of the media and language as control mechanisms. The concrete counter-cultural solutions proposed by Burroughs include spontaneity and experimentation in consciousness with such techniques as cut-ups, fold-ins, and collaborations. His proposition is to liberate consciousness and to eschew the predatory nature of social structures and hierarchies.

Pending whose knowledge you seek and which rationality you chose, the history of uranium mining in Canada entails both pessimistic and optimistic perspectives. The miners believed in a rationality of prosperity at the expense of the existing First Nation lifestyles and beliefs. It’s a history of settler colonialism in which the process of conquer generated counter claims of defeat. The ongoing clash between claims and counter-claims, prophecies and counter-prophecies, traditional and scientific knowledge, mark the history of Canadian mining along with the larger history of nuclear industries and weaponry. And these stories are rarely resolved.

The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955) is the result of the collaboration between the photographer Roy DeCarava and writer Langston Hughes. Both authors were Harlemites, DeCarava was born in Harlem and Langston Hughes made Harlem his home after moving from Missouri to New York City. This essay intends to explore the ways in which The Sweet Flypaper of Life depicts a representation of the neighbourhood of Harlem at a time when the Civil Rights Movement was just beginning. It will look at the power that DeCarava’s photographs and Hughes’ text have on creating a specific visuality of African American life, based on the Harlem community, rendering itself to be seen as a family album. The essay will firstly focus on contextualizing the creation and publication of The Sweet Flypaper of Life and afterwards offer a reading of the book using the family album metaphor as a form of agency in the acknowledgment of the African American community, focusing its representation in the aestheticization of beauty, thus distancing itself from the social and racial issues that were usually exposed.

Ari Arister’s Hereditary (2018) and Natalie Erika James’s Relic (2020) are contemporary films which present significant intertextualities revolving around triads of female characters and draw particular attention to the figure of the older woman. This article aims to provide an analysis of aging femininities in these two films taking into consideration Robert Graves’s mythical archetype of the Triple Goddess, which refers to three distinct mythical figures—the Maiden, the Woman, and the Crone—that join in one single entity. Since the archetype of the Triple Goddess is paradigmatic of different mythical triads, from the Charites to the Gorgons, it will be taken as an allegory in order to interpret images of aging in these two films, as their female characters are portrayed as members of a triad as well as they also represent the same woman at different life stages along her aging process.

Tra la fine del Cinquecento e la prima metà del Seicento si diffonde una produzione epica dedicata alla narrazione della scoperta e della conquista dell’America. Gli usi e i costumi delle popolazioni native nonché la natura rigogliosa quanto seducente di quei luoghi, incontaminati dalla civiltà, vengono resi noti ai lettori europei attraverso una serie di poemi oceanici, corrispondendo così al desiderio di conoscenza e di esotismo che caratterizza il XVII secolo. Per queste ragioni, l’epica americana, pur collaborando al consolidamento di stereotipi legati alle etnie, rappresenta bene lo spirito secentesco, animato da un ampio e ardimentoso progetto di rivoluzione in ogni campo del sapere.

This work intends to study the letters of Amerigo Vespucci inserting them into the life and the various family and political relationships that the Florentine has. In the third family letter, the discovery of a fourth continent is an established fact, without any particular precedent being invoked against Columbus; the same consciousness permeates the Mundus novus, while in the Letter to Piero Soderini Vespucci's supremacy would be limited to the fact that he landed in present-day Venezuela a year before Columbus, who for his part continued to believe until the end (or at least pretending to believe) that he had reached an appendage of Asia: a belief shared by the first family charter and which only disappeared with the Portuguese voyage of 1501-02. However, it was not the Mundus novus, but the Letter to Piero Soderini that provided the scientific update of Saint-Dié's Cosmographiae Introductio, in which the name of America was baptized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I would like to explore the creation and development of the powerful imaginaire that associates the presence of Dante and the Comedy to the furthest bounds of the world's South. Dante himself imagined the Antipodes as an immense ocean in which only one piece of land emerges, the island occupied by the very high Mount Purgatory, with Earthly Paradise at the top. The only character in the poem who sights this island before Dante's arrival is Ulysses, who is shipwrecked there. The first historical person who sails towards the Antipodes is Amerigo Vespucci. The man who explores and maps out the Straight of Magellan is Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa who, quoting Dante, has Ulysses found "New Spain", i.e. Latin America. It is in Patagonia that Bruce Chatwin will again find Dante's Ulysses in the twentieth century. Poets, from Coleridge to Kazantzakis, and above all to the Australian John Kinsella and New Zealand's Jan Kemp, go much further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En este artículo el objetivo principal es el de identificar aquellos principios que aproximan o alejan, dentro de la ética de las profesiones, algunos códigos deontológicos de traductores e intérpretes, disponibles en sus respectivos sitios web, de dos asociaciones hispanoamericanas (Colombia y México) y dos europeas (España e Italia). Para ello tendremos en cuenta el análisis de la profesión reflexionando sobre la ética en la traducción (Sánchez Trigo, 2020). De hecho, la ética profesional sirve para que los traductores se familiaricen, asuman y debatan sus implicaciones en sus relativas profesiones porque, con frecuencia, traductores e intérpretes se suelen enfrentar a problemas que van más allá de lo lingüístico.

This essay analyzes Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) from the perspective of “ugly feelings” (Ngai 2005) such as disavowed mourning (Butler, 2004, xiv) or loneliness in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Following Butler’s contention of the hindered possibility for community in the recognition of US national vulnerability (2004), I will argue that Rankine’s work underscores the disparities in public recognition of grief and private care for Othered subjects’ pain. In particular, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely displays a series of physical and mental collective ailments in US citizens, such as medicalized depression, as Rankine attempts to bear witness to the institutionalized injustice and erasure of the violence exerted upon America’s precarious bodies, enacting a form of recognition, only if temporary, through the fragmented use of the narrative/lyric ‘I’.

The title character of E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971) is a graduate student in political history at Columbia University in the late sixties; he is also the son of fictional versions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were tried together for treason in1951 and executed in 1953. The time present of the novel is 1967, when Daniel’s long effort to relieve himself of the burden of memory is morphing into an obsession with figuring out guilt and thus distributing blame, for his own victimization as much as that of his parents. This essay argues that Daniel’s “trouble breathing” is a function of the utter and unvanquishable co-determination of the public and the private, household and nation-state, the socialist dream of equity and the ethical obligations of Judaism; that the interpretive strategies of Marx and Freud deliver superb insight into the over-wrought, over-determined family dramas of McCarthy-era Anti-Semitism and Abbie Hoffman’s Radical New Left; but that epistemological insight, even if it is as effectively domestic as it is socio-political, doesn’t mean release from ontological suffocation, especially not for Daniel. Cultural critique, however informed in its modern secularity by Judaic origins, doesn’t address all the matter in his heart. And it is Daniel’s ultimate embrace of the fiercest dimension of Chosenness, his ancestral ethos of suffering, including his grandmother’s bequeathing of the martyr’s pursuit of justification, that paradoxically drains his anguish, his anger, and his viciousness—with the help, in the book’s final spiraling turn between public and private, ethnos and ethos, of we readers who bear witness to the history written in Daniel’s Book.

This essay turns to the writing of William James in “A Word of Pure Experience” as a methodological framework for reading The Souls of Black Folk. While most readings of Souls emphasize the unfolding of black consciousness, or the mind, this essay brings the body into critical focus, specifically in tracing the ways in which Du Bois appeals to the plasticity of bodies—their ability to affect and to be affected—as a creative textual means of redressing racial strife and crisis. To this end, I argue that Souls both diagnoses what I am calling a “gothic” ontology of racial division (after James) and appeals to moments of vital affect which overspill and thus critically challenge the boundaries of such racial disjuncture endemic to modernity and race relations at the dawn of the twentieth century. My reading thus resituates Souls in a literary-philosophical genealogy running from James to Du Bois, yet one that emphasizes their convergence via James’s “radical empiricism” rather than his more familiar pragmatism. Keywords: James; Du Bois; Ontology; Affect; Racism; Radical empiricism.

The United States military has long been considered a proving ground for masculinity and encourages servicemembers to adopt a warrior mindset of bravery and toughness at the expense of vulnerability. Such a mindset often proves troublesome for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as it dissuades them from seeking care in the form of therapy. This article argues that contemporary recommendations to attune therapy to embrace military masculinity in an attempt to make it more appealing to veterans are misguided. Ernest Hemingway’s 1925 short story “Soldier’s Home” dramatizes how an appeal to normative forms of masculinity as an entry point to post-combat healing risks a rejection of care entirely if this type of masculinity is ever questioned. The substitution of a care-receiving process by a masculinity-affirming process that he cannot accept leaves protagonist Harold Krebs with no choice but to refuse it and flee his hometown after returning from service in World War I. To demonstrate alternative possibilities, the article then examines George Saunders’s “Home” (2013) and Toni Morrison’s Home (2012) as texts that explore how interrogations of military masculinity itself can contribute to the healing process. In both texts, the protagonists realize that manhood means more than protection and violence, which engenders an acceptance of care. While neither text offers a complete resolution by its end, they both gesture towards the necessity of changing perceptions of manhood fostered by the military. To conclude, the article references Walt Whitman’s Memoranda During the War as one historical precedent that demonstrates how certain types of vulnerability are acceptable and necessary, even during wartime.

The expression of fragility has always been a difficult and complex matter for African Americans, for the discourse of mainstream media is set up to sustain their fragility while at the same time misrecognizing it. Even though the black public sphere split off from the dominant public sphere after the Civil War to enable distinctive forms of expression, the “practiced habits” of which Coates speaks continued in the structures of the dominant discourse. My essay will analyze the structure of America’s indifference to fragility in three parts. In the first section, I will introduce a normative problematic that can track how the hegemonic public sphere uses the rhetoric of formal equality to subordinate and silence African Americans speech while it also opens a space for black speech to be heard rather than dismissed. I then will trace the silencing structures back to the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954, for this “progressive” decision provided a template for what can be said and cannot be said. The next second section examines how Ralph Ellison thematizes and revises the encounter between the black and dominant public spheres. In the last section of the essay, I analyze the ways that Ta-Nehisi Coates exposes the contemporary forms of these discursive structures.

In her writing, Norma E. Cantú problematizes the dimensions of the autobiographical genre by way of placing it at the border between two nations. Border life-writing is constructed as collective, creative, and above all wounded by the colonial and Western experience. Far from exhibiting rage or mere nostalgia, Cantú claims for memory and historical inscription as the means to empower otherwise forgotten and colonized bodies and subjectivities. In so doing, she sets out new modalities of self-representation that aim at re-membering the racialized and gendered bodies at one and other side of the border. Through a display of border crossings and historical recollections, Cantú ultimately exhorts readers to delve into the border wound as though it were a threshold into a particular subjectivity. In analyzing three of her works, Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (2015), Cabañuelas, A Novel (2019), and Meditación Fronteriza: Poems of Love, Life, and Labor (2019), this essay seeks to establish bounds between Cantú’s autobiographical writing and feminist theories of mestizaje (Anzaldúa, 2012), performative self-representation and autobiographics (Gilmore, 1994), nomadism and mobile diversity (Braidotti, 2011), and third spaces (Bhabha, 1994), that will problematize and push the autobiographical genre to its very limits.

Over the course of time, people have been told many lies concerning the Red Planet. Maybe the most renowned one dates back to the late 1880s, when, owing to an error in translation, scientists were led to believe in the existence of canals on its surface – canals instead of channels – which meant that Mars must be inhabited. More recently, in 1976, a lively discussion arose about the “face on Mars”, something that was spotted by the Viking 2 spacecraft in the region of Cydonia and was later dismissed as a mesa whose unusual shadows had cheated the eye. But the biggest lie of all was told in 1938, when a young actor (Orson Welles) decided to play a Halloween trick with the help of the then-rising medium – the radio. It was not really a lie in the strictest sense of the term. It was not a hoax or a fake, either – it was, in narratological terms, what is commonly called the suspension of disbelief pushed to its extreme. In this essay I am going to reconsider this event mainly in the light of two main conditions concerning lying, namely untruthfulness and the intention to deceive. Our specific case is further complicated by a third factor, that is the fact that somebody lies to someone who is believed to be listening in but who is not being addressed. I will also highlight the aftermath of this mass deception which, despite being followed by a number of disclaimers, actually overturned the utopian portrait of Martians, initiating a long literary and filmic theory of alien invasions.

Ressenya de: Javier Moreno Luzón, Centenariomanía: Conmemoraciones hispánicas y nacionalismo español, Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2021, 328 pàgines

The purpose of the essay is to identify and define the essential aspects represented by the exposure to and encounter with the American Other in Francesco Guccini’s literary and songwriting production. In particular, the analysis will focus on the relationship that the author has established during his decades-long artistic production with the American Other, represented by his long-lasting connection with the American culture. The article will analyze Guccini’s songs and works taken from his vast and variegated repertoire, from which his relationship with the Other and with the American Alterity is better highlighted, Hence, a clear understanding of how this link has substantially contributed to the formation of his personality and identity as a songwriter / poet emerges. Especially, the study will be conducted through an analytical reading which involves a textual analysis that focuses on the lexical choices that convey the image that the author has of the American Other.

La Celestina as a best-seller suggests interesting problems regarding its market distribution in America. This book and Escuela de la Celestina de Salas Barbadillo were recorded thirty six times in the lists of books sent to several Spanish American cities in the ships of the Carrera de Indias. These data make possible to get an overview of the «life» of this book from the late 16th century till mid-seven-teenth century in the Americas.

The Fifties have been consolidated in the American ethos as one of the best times in American history, the iconography of which was vigorously evoked during Reagan’s presidency in an attempt to erase the civil rights victories of the Sixties. The paper focuses on the different interpretations of Fifties and Eighties imagery in popular culture and their role in shaping the definition of Americanness, highlighting the contrast between the idealized portrait of American society and the underlying tensions beneath the surface. Taking the Eighties as the focal point of the argument, the analysis goes from the Fifties to the modern day to deal with the influence of the Fifties myth on a new ‘revival’ in the Trump years.

The National Basketball Association is first and foremost a company which tries to generate revenue. As such, the NBA is embedded into a system of mass media and thereby influenced by cultural, social, and political events. Simultaneously, the NBA can also (partly) cause such events. Lastly, the NBA (and professional basketball at large) has always featured a racial component. Thereby, the NBA features three key American concepts and/or conflicts (corporate interest, meritocracy, race) and, through critical as well as historically-oriented analysis, allows to grasp the interplay of these concepts, at least in a temporally and spatially defined context. This article discusses three individual cases in which the NBA had to react as a race-related image crisis doomed or, in other words: a representative of corporate America had to react to fractures appearing on its otherwise coherent and shiny outside caused by (implicitly or explicitly) racialized aspects. As such, the NBA can be read as a larger extension of American culture and life. In order to understand these three cases as well as the corporate responses in their specific context, the paper will start by providing an overview of professional basketball’s history with special consideration of racial aspects. This is followed by the illustration and critical discussion of the three cases and results in a short summary. The overarching focus of the paper is the question of what keeps the NBA – as a company plagued by racial fractures – together at heart. It is assumed that the NBA, as a proto-American sports league, is held together by the same unifying moments which keep America (at least partially) intact and running.

“Madame Butterfly” is integral to U.S. folklore. The initial short story, written by an American novelist, has been adapted numerous times across a variety of media, including literature, theatre, and film. The tragic narrative of an Asian woman (originally, but not always, Japanese) who dies over the unrequited love of an American officer continues to provoke. It exemplifies the orientalist attitudes of early 20th century, and its enduring presence in U.S. popular culture signifies the persistence of such attitudes. This project engages several early Hollywood adaptations of the Butterfly tradition: Madame Butterfly (1915), Toll of the Sea (1922), and Madame Butterfly (1932). Through a cross analysis of the orientalist discourse in these films, contextualized by historical U.S.-Asia Pacific relations, I examine how the Butterfly narrative evolves, and how it helped define American identity. The intention of this project is not simply to examine U.S. projection of the “Orient,” but how this projection reflects the American self. To accomplish this task, I put forth several arguments. First, I examine the ways in which these three films reflect and construct an American perception of the “Orient.” Second, I complicate the popular press’ discourse of “authenticity” surrounding these films, specifically with regard to their evolving technology. Ultimately, I posit that a sympathetic narrative coupled with a belief in its authenticity, justified imperialist tendencies, reinforced the “benevolent” in benevolent assimilation, and reinscribed American moral dominion and authority. The United States constructed its cultural identity on the back of its imagined enemy Orient.

This article explores how white women in the U.S. have centered their right to citizenship on the maintenance of white supremacy. While current scholarship primarily focuses on white male supremacy and women’s historical campaigning for citizenship, little is dedicated to establishing a connection between women’s white supremacy and their organizing efforts across the generations. Through a close examination and analysis of existing literature, I argue that different groups of women in varying spaces and times assisted to create a “whites only” citizenship by emphasizing their whiteness and femininity. Since the inception of the republic, white women have repeatedly claimed their right to agency and privilege by ideologically distancing themselves from the construct of the uncivilized, masculine, and promiscuous Black woman. They assert themselves as the “civilizing” fair sex who is educated, chaste, pure, and domestic. From the fair sex advocates of the founding era to the tradwives of today’s digital world, seemingly disparate groups of women united to advocate for a “whites only” citizenship. They used every avenue possible: violence against Black women and other people of color; wrote letters and ads; held protests and rallies; participated in grassroots organizing; built far-reaching political networks; published articles; and created social media accounts. These women teach us that white supremacy is sustained by our white women friends, relatives, colleagues, and neighbors. If we start to recognize their strategic weaponization of whiteness and femininity, we can better thwart the advancement of a “whites only” citizenship.

Southern US literature and African American literature often speak about racialized and dismembered bodies swallowed by the earth and never retrieved; Nature, in these instances, is hostile and “white”, as even trees become problematic symbols of lynching practices. This essay, however, attempts to retrieve and re-signify the concepts of soil and plants by analyzing the relationship between Black bodies and Nature from an Ecoliterary and Ecotheological point of view. This examination especially focuses on West African beliefs and their role in the African American re-appropriation of natural, earthly spaces and instances of the afterlife. Ethnic resistance and spiritual-medical knowledge have been crucial to African American cultural liberation, and the essay highlights this by analyzing the traces of African spiritualism and syncretism in the works of a number of African American authors, namely Toni Morrison and Jesmyn Ward. The result of this re-appropriation is, as I argue, a vivifying, hopeful and ultimately political series of images and literary tropes that overturn mournful and chthonic narratives, resuming positive and life-bearing relationships between Black bodies and Nature.

This essay reflects upon the political and cultural significance of hair for Black women. The acclaimed novel Americanah (2013) by the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and ABC's TV Series How to Get Away With Murder (2014-2020), cleverly address this issue as they both display their protagonists' struggles in accepting their natural hair. To be assimilated into the US society, Ifemelu and Annalise Keating feel forced to strighten their hair or wear wigs. I will also discuss how the myth of the melting pot has contributed, since the 18th century, to shape and influence ethnic identities in the US by positing the necessary features of Americanness. Instead, these twenty-first century narratives provocatively challenge the definition of American by giving an inside perspective on this unusual form of emancipation.

On June 26, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Proclamation 9645, also known as the “Travel Ban” or “Muslim Ban.” This resolution suspended the insurance of immigrant and non-immigrant visas to applicants from Libya, Iran, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen (which are Muslim-majority countries), plus North Korea and Venezuela. Because of Donald Trump’s decision, many American had their rights diminished: spouses were separated; children could not reunite with their parents; students felt hopeless about getting a job in the U.S.; and many felt trapped, unable to leave America for fear of not being able to reenter the country despite their legal status. The Supreme Court validated the executive branch’s ability to limit people’s freedom and many of their (internationally recognized) rights in the name of national security. People from the ‘banned’ countries were blocked from seeking asylum independently from their living conditions (Gladstone & Sugiyama, 2018: web). This event had the involuntary effect of revitalizing the memory of an old court case, the well-known Korematsu v. United States, and the haunting ghost of the Japanese internment camps. In both cases (Trump’s Proclamation 9645 and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066), claims to national security were used to justify and mask ethnic, racial (and religious) animus. The lack of respect for individuals’ access to justice, in spite of their citizenship, the racist undertones present in both misinformed propaganda rhetorics, and the malicious detention of individuals are clear parallelisms connecting these two events (Wietelman, 2019). These correspondences were also (shamelessly) noticed by a pro-Trump Great American PAC spokesperson, who cited Japanese internment camps as ‘precedents’ for Muslim registry (Hartman, 2016: web). Likewise, the opposition often cited Korematsu as a notably bad decision and antecedent. For example, Justice Sotomayor manifested his dissent by comparing the ‘Travel Ban’ decision to Korematsu v. United States. Indeed, in both cases, one might question the constitutionality of means to separate neatly the “bad actors” from the larger group. In the Executive Order 9066, all persons of Japanese ancestry living in the western United States were part of the larger group, whereas the “bad actors” were citizens deemed to be disloyal. In Trump’s Proclamation 9645, the citizens of only eight countries composed the larger group, and the “bad actors” were those considered potential terrorists within that population. In both situations, the Court “abandoned judicial review over alleged infringement of constitutional rights asserted by American citizens arising from screening procedures” (Dean, 2018:176). This led many American to infer that Trump v. Hawaii was a reiteration of the Korematsu case. Given this context, it no surprise to see the reenactment of Japanese internment camps in contemporary graphic novel. Thus, these works can be seen as “memory projects” (Leavy, 2007) as they activate particular repositories of collective memory in order to bring certain aspects of the recent past into the public eye. These projects might be seen as attempts to resist dominant records of the event, allowing individual voices and (hi)stories to arise, as well as a means to disseminate new ideas about activism and citizenship. The choice of the medium is not neutral as it might be seen as an homage to one of the earliest vivid testimony of the Japanese incarceration, Miné Okubo’s (1946) Citizen 13660. Yet, it is important to remark that in the 1940s the medium comics was also involved in the dissemination of anti-Japanese and Anti-Asian sentiments. Finally, whereas previous revocations of the event in comic form aimed to make the public aware of present injustices (Okubo, 1946), denounce America’s long history of Asians’ exclusion policy (Yang et al. 2009) and counter the invisibility of Asians’ sufferings (Toyoshima, 2003), the more recent comics do not just aim to address these old questions, but to bring these debates within a “global civil sphere” (Alexander, 2012).