Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS - E-Journal)
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"I Believe in Nothing If Not in Action": African American Humanism and (Embodied) Agency
Get PDFThis article explores African American humanism and reflects on its relationship with Enlightenment humanism, anti-, and posthumanism. It regards African American humanism as an alternative to these philosophies based on an analysis of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man“ and explores how the novel conceptualizes agency. It does so in focusing on three elements: (1) the rejection of authorities, (2) (dis)embodiment, and (3) relationality and concrete action. 
“Modern Medicine Had to Start Somewhere:” Performing Health and White Privilege in The Knick
Get PDFThis essay examines the interrelations of health and white privilege in the U.S.-American historical and medical drama The Knick “(2014-). Employing a broad definition of health and drawing from performance studies, this article argues that the everyday life within the series depicts a racist society, while the television series itself with its rhetoric of modernity and visual strategies makes white privilege visible in the context of health. The television series and everyday life within the show are examined in regard to their performative dimensions, i.e. both levels of performance do not merely represent, but take an active part in defining health and its surrounding discourses. 
Making a Fun Home: The Performance of Queer Families in Contemporary Musical Theater
Get PDFThis essay examines the performance of the queer family as presented in the Broadway musicals Falsettos“ (1992) by William Finn and James Lapine and Fun Home“ (2015) by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron. While both musicals feature idealized non-traditional models of the family with queer individuals as crucial agents of their formation, Fun Home “questions rather than affirms the actualization of this ideal through the critical engagement on stage with issues of performance and performativity. In so doing, the article traces a bigger trajectory of historical moments in queer thinking from the 1980s until the present moment that verges back and forth between optimism and pessimism as well as relational and non-relational understandings of sexual identities
Hawthorne and Antebellum Theories on Hereditary Insanity
Get PDFTwentieth-century concepts of degenerative hereditary insanity and Social Darwinism can be viewed as preconfigured by the less fatalistic stance of antebellum medical and social thought. Taking the latter into account, the following article will analyze Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels The Scarlet Letter“ and The House of the Seven Gables “in order to explore nineteenth-century theories on heredity and acquired character. These literary works do not simply represent antebellum concepts of madness, but actively contribute to or critique contemporary notions on insanity and therefore shape the early psychiatric landscape in their own right. 
“But cutting off the Scalps of the Ten Wretches”: Reading Hannah Dustan’s Captivity Narrative through the Body
Get PDFThis paper examines Cotton Mather’s account of Hannah Dustan’s captivity and its representation of white and Native American bodies in the context of an early colonial, Puritan framework. The analysis of the account shows how bodies are used to translate and question concepts of Otherness in early New England. The performance of bodies in the narrative serves as a representational device to utilize agents of ambivalence and deviation from a conventional captivity formula
Bargaining for Prestige in the Hide/Seek Exhibition: The Ambiguous Relationship between Economic and Non-Economic Capital and Its Effects
No full textIn 2010, the National Portrait Gallery removed David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly“ (1987) from their Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture“ exhibition. By gauging the reactions to the removal, this article discusses transactions that illustrate the tenuous relationship between economic and non-economic capital within the art world; a field that constantly disavows the existence of capitalist modes of operation. Based on an unwavering belief in the validity and legitimacy of its own practices, the artistic field tirelessly reproduces its value and continues to determine the value and meaning of art. My analysis of the system, which draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of the field, disavowal, and different forms of capital, aims at showing that anxiety is a driving force within the artistic field that motivates the practices of the field’s agents and thus becomes an influential structuring impetus for the system as a whole. 
Making the Unspeakable Seen? Trauma and Disability in David Small’s Stitches
Get PDFOver the last two decades, the ‘graphic novel’ has increasingly become of interest to literary scholars of trauma, who praise the form for its innovative approach to storytelling. This article critically examines Marianne Hirsch and Edward Brunner’s thesis that multimodal trauma narratives succeed in making the unspeakable visible and audible to the reader. By analyzing David Small’s graphic memoir Stitches“, I shed light on the potential as well as on the limitations that the comics medium faces in its representation of trauma. In so doing, this paper aims to demonstrate the ambivalent effects that the negotiation of disability has on graphic trauma narratives
Analyzing the Network of Traumas in Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin
Get PDF“Since classic Caruthian trauma theory cannot account for novels juxtaposing several historical traumas, this paper explores network theory as a new analytical approach to trauma narratives. A reading of Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin“ demonstrates how traumas become linked in a network and explores the effects of this trauma network on characters, readers, and main themes of the novel
Constructing ‘Arab Terrorism’—The Slow Emergence of Terrorism Discourse in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s
Get PDFThis article traces the beginnings of the discourse on “Arab terrorism“ in the U.S. after World War II. I argue that the discourse emerged slowly in the early 1970s, growing out of political concerns in the aftermath of the 1972 “Munich Massacre“ as well as previous work by scholars on political violence. Prominent cultural products like Leon Uris’ Exodus“ and Thomas Harris’ Black Sunday“ contributed to the vilification of Arab populations in the Middle East and merged with these political and academic discourses to construct Arab aggression in terms of terrorism