Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS - E-Journal)
Not a member yet
250 research outputs found
Sort by
Retrieving the Lost Self: The Greening of America, Easy Rider and the Politics of Countercultural Whiteness
Get PDFThe transition from the 1960s to the 1970s saw the birth of two significant countercultural products: Charles Reich’s bestseller The Greening of America “(1970) and Dennis Hopper’s surprising box office success Easy Rider “(1969). “This article argues that Reich’s analysis of a “loss of self” in US society constructed white identity as being in crisis, thus setting the stage for affective solutions to this crisis by emergent cultural forms. The article understands both of these cultural artefacts as complicit in the emergence of a countercultural reconfiguration of white subjectivity, examining its racial politics and its translation into an aesthetic regime that came to be known as the cinema of the New Hollywood
Call for Papers: White Supremacy in the United States
Get PDFCall for Papers: Issue 20.2 on White Supremacy in the United State
(German) Academia and White Supremacy
Get PDFThis collaboration extends the discussions of white supremacy to the space of German academia by offering personal reminiscences and reflections on experiences as a Black and as a white scholar in this system
Creative Openings and World-Making: Postcritique, Reparative Readings, and Anzaldúa’s Borderlands
Get PDFThis article examines postcritical and reparative readings of female same-sex narratives and proposes a diversification of reading practices. The approach toward f/f-narratives presented here shifts attention to queer literary visions by questioning the narrative of the “impossible woman” (Valerie Rohy) as well as the hegemony and omnipresence of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Paul Ricoeur) in literary and cultural studies. It aims at queering hierarchies of knowledge as well as practices of readings. Eventually, a postcritical reading of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera“ (1987) interrogates the text’s potential for creative openings and queer world-making by drawing on entanglements of past, present, and future
Identity, Affect, Alliance: Thinking Whiteness Transnationally
Get PDFI interrogate affective investments in whiteness, both in antiracist movements and in their white-supremacist counterparts. Questioning the definition of whiteness as either race or ethnicity, I point out the affective aspects of both whiteness and racialization at large. Turning to queer of Color critique, I underline the affective dimensions of racial belonging that have to be deconstructed to effectively combat white supremacy.
Singing for a White ‘City upon a Hill’: White Power Music and the Myth of Regeneration Through Violence
Get PDFThis article examines how the discursive construction of white power identities draws on US American hegemonic narratives and foundational myths. In particular, I analyze the myths at play in the music produced and promoted between the 1990s and 2010s by some members of the American white power movement. Basing my argument on Richard Slotkin’s conceptualization of the myth of regeneration through violence, I observe in white supremacist lyrics the recurring construction of the white power activist as a captive (or oppressed victim) who is turned into a hunter (or ‘racial warrior’), and regenerated after a ‘racial war.’ This analysis of white power lyrics provides insight into not only how the white power discourse legitimizes violence but also how it celebrates it
Metalepsis and/as Queer Desire: Queer Narratology and the \u27Unnatural\u27
Get PDFAfter tracing the connection between metalepsis, originally defined as a transgression of narrative levels, and the term ‘unnatural’ in various strands of narratology, this article argues that unnatural narratology, a postclassical approach specifically dedicated to non- or antimimetic narrative phenomena like metalepsis, follows what Eve Sedgwick calls paranoid inquiry. The perspective of queer narratology subsequently weighs in on discussions of ‘naturalness’ and ‘unnaturalness’ in a reparative effort: Metalepsis, as theorized in this paper, is expressive of the queer failure at being ‘natural’ and thus possesses a potential to articulate desires that are usually made invisible, inconceivable, or unintelligible by the normative framework and exclusionary rhetoric of narratology. Case studies of the video game What Remains of Edith Finch“ (2017) and the film musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch“ (2001) complement my theoretical deliberations and show that metalepsis can be more than ‘unnatural’ by affirming desires grounded in positive affects related to togetherness, belonging, and unity
White Violence and Spectral Blackness in Don DeLillo’s Zero K
Get PDFDon DeLillo’s work is often framed as a visionary and ethical reflection on contemporary crises. Such reception redoubles an idea of white American farsightedness and morality that is already embedded in many of DeLillo’s stories—most recently in his 2016 novel Zero K“. The following article challenges celebratory rhetoric surrounding this narrative both in terms of how texts work to position DeLillo in the line of American writers who address and thus metaphorically dismantle social evils, and how these texts enable visions of American heroism and transcendence despite and due to narrative exclusions, politics of exclusion, and repeated legitimization of white supremacy. I signal towards long-disregarded anti-blackness in DeLillo’s oeuvre, and consider some of its pronunciations in Zero K.“ I thus analyze some of the techniques and technologies through which DeLillo’s novel prolongs narratives of white supremacy
Heroes in Body Bags: Renegotiating Heroism in Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning
Get PDFThis paper discusses how Maggie Hoskie, the Indigenous “hero”of Rebecca Roanhorse’s The Sixth World “series,renegotiates what it means to be a hero in the “post-Native Apocalypse”(Dillon 10). Trail of Lightning“,as a work that exploresIndigenous futurismsand ecofeminisms, demandsa renegotiation of Western hero ideals, highlighting how Maggie’s most heroic qualities arise from her challenge of stereotypical Western heroism in the wake of ecological disaster
