Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAAS)
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Genre, Space, and Social Critique in Chloé Zhao\u27s Nomadland (2020)
No full textThis article examines the extent to which Nomadland is a convincing representation of poverty in the United States and to assess the film\u27s political stance concerning race, gender, and age. By analyzing Nomadland\u27s narrative and filmic techniques, this article points out three major characteristics of the film that are relevant for its portrayal of characters defined chiefly by their poverty and age. Firstly, Nomadland employs genres subtly to undercut their inherent ideological effects. Secondly, in its portrayal of space, it represents the characters as placemakers, showcasing their agency in the face of structural problems. Thirdly, it adopts a particular neorealist production style that lays a powerful claim to authenticity.
While the film falls short of addressing the root causes of poverty and bypasses the question of race altogether, Nomadland serves as an exemplary model of socially conscious filmmaking in other regards. It transcends mere entertainment and counters a more mainstream strategy of personalizing structural problems through a nuanced portrayal of elderly working nomads while also displaying attention to gender and age
Violent Landscapes: James Benning\u27s Landscape Suicide (1986)
No full textWhile serial killings, murders, and other violent deaths are traumatic incidents for the communities in which they occur, they also attract a great deal of media attention and form the basis for numerous cinematic adaptations in US-American cinema and beyond. Many of these movies employ a sensationalist approach and focus on the social environments of the killings: the perpetrator\u27s upbringing, triggering experiences, or a generally troubled personality. There are only a limited number of cinematic treatments of violent killings that focus on the natural environment or the landscapes where these incidents occurred.
This article is concerned with filmmakers using (cinematic) landscapes as a mode of cultural expression for violence and trauma. It seeks to show that James Benning\u27s Landscape Suicide (1986) calls for a different understanding of landscape that goes beyond a mere setting for narrative, as it gives landscape active agency in its mediation of two seemingly unconnected murder cases. The film compares and juxtaposes the murder of Kirsten Costas by Bernadette Protti in a suburb of San Francisco in 1984 with the killings of Ed Gein in Plainfield, Wisconsin, in the 1950s. In doing so, the film presents viewers with two distinct functions of landscape in mediating violence and trauma: as a spatialization of time and as socio-political surroundings. Analyzing these aspects of the film helps us to better understand the link between landscape, violence, and trauma in cinematic treatments of violent incidents and also sheds light on the broader connection between landscape and trauma culture
"Magic Dirt": Transcending Great Divides in Scott McClanahan\u27s Crapalachia
Full text linkScott McClanahan, rising star of the US Indie Lit world and "Poet Laureate of Real America" (Moran), writes miasmic chronicles of life in a West Virginian holler. In Crapalachia: A Biography of Place (2013), as in many of the tales he releases in Dickensian pace, McClanahan ties the fate of a place to the fate of its people and connects environmental destruction to the ruins of life. Where mountains are stripped away, happiness is not at home. McClanahan tells family stories of deforestation and disability, mining disasters and mental illness, structural poverty and opportunities denied. His stories are about the slow and fast deaths of forgotten people in forgotten places and he tells them with a ballistic sensibility that opens up new spaces to negotiate difference. Crapalachia is a threnody for a wounded region that complicates imagined hierarchies of center and periphery and blends the worlds of fact and fiction as well as tragedy and comedy. The semi-autobiography mines so deeply for privation that, at its close, it lays bare some of the most hopeful principles of American transcendentalism. In between personal hardships, local misery, national movements, and universal human experience, McClanahan has us see "Crapalachia as the center of the world" (35). This paper explores how the aesthetic, narrative, and stylistic strategies of Crapalachia help navigate the local, national, and global routes of fictions of disregard
The "Colonial Anthropocene" Imaginary: Re-Imagining Climate Change in Waubgeshig Rice\u27s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018)
Full text linkClimate imaginaries – collectively held visions of future climate change – take shape in a variety of media and genres, from computer models to poetry. While some climate imaginaries have proven particularly enduring and have managed to attain a hegemonic status in climate change discourse – for example, the "techno-market" imaginary and the "climate apocalypse" imaginary – others remain marginalized. Drawing on Waubgeshig Rice\u27s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018), this article theorizes the "colonial Anthropocene" imaginary as an alternative imaginary and examines its co-production at the intersection of academic discourses, activism, and literature. The "colonial Anthropocene" imaginary generally and Moon of the Crusted Snow specifically negotiate ideological tensions that have emerged in the discourse on the Anthropocene and forge a connection between the seemingly exceptional event of anthropogenic climate change and a historical sequence of colonial violence and forced displacement of Indigenous peoples. As one of this imaginary\u27s manifestations in the literary domain, Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) embeds climate change into a longer story that begins with settler colonialism on the North American continent by drawing on an equally old genre: the Indian captivity narrative. Significantly, the "colonial Anthropocene" imaginary is a reaction to the impulse toward claims to universality resurfacing in the discourse on the Anthropocene, particularly in the notion of "the human.
"Out there in that cabin in the middle of nowhere in Montana": Narrating the Geographical and Mental Deviance of the Unabomber
Full text linkIn 1996, the mathematician-turned-terrorist Theodore J. Kaczynski, nicknamed the Unabomber, was arrested in his self-built cabin in the woods of Montana after having terrorized the nation for over 20 years. He had modeled his cabin after Henry David Thoreau\u27s idealized Walden cabin. This article argues that the Unabomber\u27s cabin in Montana, often considered a so-called flyover state, serves as the pivotal point for his geographical marginalization in the media coverage of the case. Its location in what is discursively constructed as a \u27wilderness\u27 makes it impossible to perceive his cabin through the perspective of the pastoral ideal – this imagined middle ground between nature and culture. The over-determination of this material form in its location apparently off the grid furthermore enables the othering and medicalization of Theodore J. Kaczynski. This article demonstrates that the media coverage of the Unabomber case displays these three tendencies which come together in the nexus cabinsanity, i.e., the conflation of pseudo-geographical, cultural, and medical discourses. Projecting cabinsanity, in turn, enables the dismissal of the Unabomber\u27s critique of technologized society as delineated in his manifesto
With Great Product Comes Great Responsibility: Marketing Gender and Eco-Responsibility
Full text linkUS-American mass media was revolutionized when, at the turn of the twentieth century, mass printing of illustrations enabled the visual advertisement of lifestyles – the American Dream was now sellable at a faster rate than ever before. Today\u27s mass media has refashioned itself by adapting to a rapid technological evolution, yet remains a space which enables monetization of identity. Women\u27s purchasing power has resulted in a culture of advertisement developed to specifically target women. Whether it is overpriced and elaborate female hygiene products or universal items re-branded specifically for women, capitalism continues to thrive off of a gendered narrative of consumption. In recent years, it has merged with the rise of eco-friendly consumption. Many companies that engage in greenwashing strategies manufacture women\u27s hygiene and skin care products. Additionally, due to a persistent sexual division of labor, household products turned green disproportionally target the female consumer. While there is a tendency for women to be more environmentally aware (Brough et al.; Capecchi; Zelezny), the urgency of this response is the result of a structure which has historically excluded women from positions of executive decision-making and production, while also perpetuating the exploitation of their gender-based identity. I argue that, as a consequence of this perpetuation, a narrative was established which ties responsibility of eco-awareness and ethical consumption to gender, manifesting in an "eco-gender gap" (Capecchi)
Murray Rothbard\u27s Populist Blueprint: Paleo-Libertarianism and the Ascent of the Political Right
Full text linkIn his 1992 pamphlet "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement," libertarian economist and intellectual Murray Rothbard drafted a strategy that foreshadowed the rise of populist politics that was to come some years later. Central to his populist vision was the idea of a "paleo-coalition" consisting of "paleo-libertarians" and "paleo-conservatives" that he saw coming closer to power by addressing the masses directly. This, Rothbard proclaimed, would be possible if a presidential candidate were able to short-circuit the traditional media and appeal to disgruntled parts of the population, namely the "rednecks" and Middle America. With Donald Trump\u27s victory in the presidential election in 2016, Rothbard\u27s ideas seem to have become reality. This article draws on the concept of flyover to describe this special populist framework by analyzing libertarians\u27 appeals and politicizable connections to an imagined "real people" and by historically tracing populism in US conservatism. Based on a discussion of the social functions of pamphlets as contentious formats that are interwoven into social conflict, a close reading of Rothbard\u27s 1992 pamphlet shows the decisive political edge that populists were able to gain by employing the strategies for the "paleo movement."
From the Capitol to the Heartland: Analyzing Congressional Rhetoric and the "Flyover Country" Narrative
Full text linkThis study examines the evolution and strategic use of the term "flyover country" in US congressional rhetoric from 1995 to 2024. Initially a benign geographic descriptor, "flyover country" has transformed into a potent symbol of cultural and political identity, particularly among Republican members of Congress. Through a comprehensive analysis of congressional speeches, committee hearings, and constituent correspondence, this research identifies an increase in the use of flyover rhetoric, especially during the Trump era. The study reveals that "flyover" is employed to evoke a sense of victimhood and marginalization among rural constituents, highlighting perceived economic and cultural disenfranchisement by coastal elites. The findings underscore the adaptability of political language and its role in shaping and reflecting socio-political divides in the United States. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the dynamics of congressional rhetoric and the cultural and political undercurrents that influence US-American identity and discourse
"There\u27s still a world": Salvaging Hope in Garbagetown
No full textIn Catherynne M. Valente\u27s The Past Is Red, the world as we know it has already drowned. However, even after the apocalypse, traces of extractive capitalism – responsible for the destruction of the planet in the first place – are still lingering on as the novella is set in Garbagetown, a floating habitat of waste that emerged from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This article takes this rubbish as its starting point and examines what Elizabeth DeLoughrey calls our "anticipated history of ruins" through the lenses of utopian theory and salvage-Marxism. By conceptualizing waste as one of the most visible markers of the Capitalocene (Moore), I argue that it is not only a planet\u27s resources that are considered disposable in a capitalist economy but also some of its inhabitants. The analysis focuses on the novella\u27s main character Tetley, who, in contrast to her fellow citizens, attempts to locate beauty in the ruins and has hope – not for salvation but for the broken world. By reading Tetley as a salvagepunk character, this article nods towards a different utopian horizon in The Past Is Red, one that is not defined by solastalgia (Albrecht) for the past or the hope for a future Eden but as a praxis of becoming post-apocalyptic, by learning to "stay with the trouble" (Haraway) of a world built out of trash
Heaven\u27s Harsh Tableland: A New History of the Llano Estacado. By Paul H. Carlson. Texas A&M UP, 2023, 386 pp.
Full text linkMartin Gabriel reviews Paul H. Carlson\u27s Heaven\u27s Harsh Tableland: A New History of the Llano Estacado (Texas A&M UP, 2023)