Books in the New Americanists series

A biography of Henry Roe Cloud (c. 1884-1950), a Winnebago educator, scholar, and minister who was one of the most renowned Native Americans of his time.

Explores the relationship between gender, race, and nation by tracing developing ideals of citizenship in the United States from the Revolutionary War through the 1850s. This book shows how this ideal has simultaneously privileged and oppressed white men. It is suitable for those studying early national culture, and race and gender issues.

Offers a vision of Henry James as a social critic whose later works can be read as rich with homo-erotic suggestiveness. Drawing from work in queer and feminist theory, this book argues that the most fruitful approach to James is one that ignores the elitist portrait of the formalist master.

Focusing on the commonalties revealed in their shared language and colonial history, the author examines the work of six writers who, while artistically distinct and geographically scattered, share complex sensibilities regarding their own relationship to France and the French language.

Offers a major reassessment of the work of Herman Melville, a definitive history of the post-Enlightenment discourse on cannibalism, and a provocative contribution to postcolonial theory. This title focuses on the representations of cannibalism in three of Melville's key texts-Typee, Moby-Dick, and "Benito Cereno."

Explores how photographs have been and are used to construct versions of history and examines how photographic representations of otherness often tell stories about the self. This book exhibits the work of American women; tells their absorbing stories; and discusses representations of North American Indians, African Americans,and the migrant poor.

Unlike studies of 19th-century culture that perpetuate a dichotomy of a public, male world set against a private, female world, this book shows the sometimes contradictory cultural planes on which struggles for authority unfolded in antebellum America. It also revises the terms of debate on 19th-century literature, history, and gender studies.

A study of the pragmatism of Emerson, James, and Peirce and its relevance for the neopragmatism of thinkers like Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and Cornel West. In offering neopragmatism, a theory of the mind taken from Emerson, James, and Peirce, this book suggests that the neopragmatists' arguments can be sharpened across a variety of disciplines.

In its demonstration of how the US has been shaped by its dual status as an imperial and a postcolonial power, this study on the discourse of natural rights and national identity in the pre-Civil War United States may interest students and scholars of American studies, African American studies, gender studies, and American history and literature.

Although in recent years scholars have explored the cultural construction of masculinity, the ways in which masculinity intersects with other categories of identity, particularly those of race and ethnicity, have largely been ignored. This title includes essays that address this concern and focus on the social construction of masculinity.

Suitable for a range of readers, including students and scholars in the fields of American literature, film, and gay studies, this book challenges widely held assumptions about postwar gay male culture and politics.

"One rarely sees a body of documentation as richly varied in important themes. This is a cross-disciplinary treasure, especially since so many of Child's concerns foreshadowed issues now central to our time."--Sterling Stuckey, University of California, Riverside

Offering a study of American cultural production from the colonial era onwards, this book takes up the loose ends of popular American narratives to craft a theory of narrative closure.

When Jack London died in 1916, he was one of the most famous writers of his time. This book analyses the nature of his appeal by examining how the struggling young writer sought to promote himself in his early work as a sympathetic, romantic man of letters whose charismatic masculinity could carry more significance than his words themselves.

Suitable for students and scholars working in the areas of race, gender, and identity theory, as well as US history and literature, this book offers a perspective for studying the construction and meaning of personal and cultural identities.

Challenges cliches about race and gender while looking at current debates about multiculturalism and difference while simultaneously exposing the ways in which white racial supremacy has been reconfigured since the institutional demise of segregation

Reveals how late nineteenth-century Latino migrant writers developed a prescient critique of US imperialism: a critique that prefigures many of the concerns - about empire, race, and postcolonial subjectivity - animating American studies.

Focuses on US citizens' democratic impulse: their ability to imagine and to work with others to create democratic publics while taking divergent views into account. This book contends that citizens of the early US were encouraged to locate this social impulse not in associations with others but in the turbulent interiors of their own bodies.

Documents the contributions of Native Americans to the notion of American nationhood and to concepts of American identity at a crucial, defining time in US history. This book examines the rhetoric and writings of nineteenth-century Native Americans, including William Apess, Black Hawk, George Copway, John Rollin Ridge, and Sarah Winnemucca.

Studies the stirring literature of "Red Power," an era of Native American organizing that began in 1969 and expanded into the 1970s. This title shows instead that the movement engaged historical memory and oral tradition to produce more enabling knowledge of American Indian lives and possibilities.

National narratives create imaginary relations within imagined communities called national peoples. But in the American narrative, alongside the nexus of belonging established for the national community, the national narrative has represented other peoples (women, blacks, "foreigners", the homeless) from whom the property of nationness has been removed altogether and upon whose differences from them the national people depended for the construction of their norms. Dismantling this opposition has become the task of post-national (Post-Americanist) narratives, bent on changing the assumptions that found the "national identity." This volume, originally published as a special issue of bounrary 2, focuses on the process of assembling and dismantling the American national narrative(s), sketching its inception and demolition. The contributors examine various cultural, political, and historical sources--colonial literature, mass movements, epidemics of disease, mass spectacle, transnational corporations, super-weapons, popular magazines, literary texts--out of which this narrative was constructed, and propose different understandings of nationality and identity following in its wake. Contributors. Jonathan Arac, Lauren Berlant, Robert J. Corber, Elizabeth Freeman, Kathryn V. Lingberg, Jack Matthews, Alan Nadel, Patrick O''Donnell, Daniel O''Hara, Donald E. Pease, Ross Posnock, John Carlos Rowe, Rob Wilson

Explores the relation between nineteenth-century American interest in ancient Egypt in architecture, literature, and science, and the ways Egypt was deployed by advocates for slavery and by African American writers.

Poet, novelist, journalist, and ethnographer, Americo Paredes (1915-1995) was a pioneering figure in Mexican-American border studies and a founder of Chicano studies. This book establishes Paredes' pre-eminent place in writing the contested cultural history of the American southwestern borderlands.

Most would agree that American culture in the 1980s differed dramatically from that of the 1960s. Yet the 1970s is still thought of as a cultural wasteland. This text debunks this notion by examining a wide range of political and cultural phenomena.

Throughout the era of the Cold War a consensus reigned as to what constituted the great works of American literature. Yet as scholars have increasingly shown, and as this volume unmistakably demonstrates, that consensus was built upon the repression of the voices and historical contexts of subordinated social groups as well as literary works themselves, works both outside and within the traditional canon. This book is an effort to recover those lost voices. Engaging New Historicist, neo-Marxist, poststructuralist, and other literary practices, this volume marks important shifts in the organizing principles and self-understanding of the field of American Studies. Originally published as a special issue of boundary 2, the essays gathered here discuss writers as diverse as Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, Emerson, Melville, W. D. Howells, Henry James, W. E. B. DuBois, and Mark Twain, plus the historical figure John Brown. Two major sections devoted to the theory of romance and to cultural-historical analyses emphasize the political perspective of "New Americanist" literary and cultural study.Contributors. William E. Cain, Wai-chee Dimock, Howard Horwitz, Gregory S. Jay, Steven Mailloux, John McWilliams, Susan Mizruchi, Donald E. Pease, Ivy Schweitzer, Priscilla Wald, Michael Warner, Robert Weimann

Argues that from the late eighteeneth century through the early twentieth, American literary and political texts used the figure of the child to represent U.S. national belonging.

Alan Nadel provides a unique analysis of the rise of American postmodernism by viewing it as a breakdown in Cold War cultural narratives of containment. These narratives, which embodied an American postwar foreign policy charged with checking the spread of Communism, also operated, Nadel argues, within a wide spectrum of cultural life in the United States to contain atomic secrets, sexual license, gender roles, nuclear energy, and artistic expression. Because these narratives were deployed in films, books, and magazines at a time when American culture was for the first time able to dominate global entertainment and capitalize on global production, containment became one of the most widely disseminated and highly privileged national narratives in history.Examining a broad sweep of American culture, from the work of George Kennan to Playboy Magazine, from the movies of Doris Day and Walt Disney to those of Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock, from James Bond to Holden Caulfield, Nadel discloses the remarkable pervasiveness of the containment narrative. Drawing subtly on insights provided by contemporary theorists, including Baudrillard, Foucault, Jameson, Sedgwick, Certeau, and Hayden White, he situates the rhetoric of the Cold War within a gendered narrative powered by the unspoken potency of the atom. He then traces the breakdown of this discourse of containment through such events as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and ties its collapse to the onset of American postmodernism, typified by works such as Catch–22 and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. An important work of cultural criticism, Containment Culture links atomic power with postmodernism and postwar politics, and shows how a multifarious national policy can become part of a nation’s cultural agenda and a source of meaning for its citizenry.

Traces the emergence of the global context within which American critical identity is formed. This book argues that globalization has had a markedly negative impact on American cultural criticism, circumscribing both its material and imaginative potential, reducing much of it to absurdity. It also presents several interrelated analyses.

Explores interactions between novels and advertising in the construction of subjectivity in the early part of the twentieth century.