Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAAS)
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\u27The World Called Him a Thug\u27: Police Brutality and the Perception of the Black Body in Angie Thomas\u27s The Hate U Give
No full textWidespread police violence, often targeted at black people, has increasingly entered public debates in recent years. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, various African American young adult novelists have addressed the topic of police brutality and offer counternarratives to the stories about black victims disseminated in the media. This article illustrates how prevalent debates of Black Lives Matter are reflected in contemporary young adult fiction. To this end, the first part elucidates substantial issues that have led to the precarious position of African Americans today and to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing on theoretical concepts such as Judith Butler’s notion of "precarious lives" and Frantz Fanon’s description of the black experience in a white-dominated world, I will analyze Angie Thomas\u27s novel The Hate U Give in view of ongoing debates about racial inequality. As I will show, the novel features striking similarities to real-world incidents of police brutality while simultaneously drawing attention to the manifold ways in which society disregards black lives and continues to subject African Americans to racial injustice
American Studies, Sound Studies, and Cultural Memory: Woody Van Dyke\u27s San Francisco as Sonic Contact Zone
Full text linkEach year on April 18, the city of San Francisco commemorates the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire with a series of elaborate and tightly scripted ceremonies. As one of the key events, the ceremony at Lotta\u27s Fountain features, among others, commemorative speeches, the hanging of a memorial wreath, and the ceremonial wailing of fire sirens, followed by a minute of silence for the victims. The acoustic tension building up between the sirens\u27 piercing warning sounds and the ensuing collective gesture of mournful quietude is subsequently resolved by the communal sing-along of the upbeat theme song "San Francisco" from the eponymous Academy Award-winning 1936 musical film. This performance seems to stand in stark contrast to the other events at the ceremony, which are painstakingly staged to appear historically accurate. Nonetheless, the anachronistic inclusion of the triumphant "San Francisco," written three decades after the earthquake and released in the context of a purely fictional narrative, fits the purpose of memorializing the 1906 earthquake, since it sonically embodies the "new" city\u27s founding myth. San Francisco, especially its theme song, this article argues, memorializes the 1906 disaster as a social equalizer and a patriotic affirmation of American resilience by portraying the pre-earthquake city as a loud, decadent, and disorderly soundscape that only the earthquake could unite, refine, and ultimately Americanize
Soundscapes, Sonic Cultures, and American Studies: Introduction to the Special Issue
Full text linkWhat happens when we imagine the sonic worlds of literary texts, when we focus on voice in film, or when we study the sound of social protest? How can we integrate sound studies into our academic practices? How does sound relate to space and place? How can American studies scholars understand the link between sonic and social relations? Music, voices, noise, and silence are constitutive elements of phenomena that we as American studies scholars regularly investigate. However, in contrast to the well-established prominence of visual culture studies, sound features less prominently in our field\u27s research—an oversight (pardon the pun!) this issue of JAAAS seeks to remedy
Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West. By H. W. Brands (New York: Basic Books, 2019), xvi+524pp.
Full text linkThis is a review of Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West by H. W. Brands
Life Writing and American Studies
Full text linkThis forum seeks to outline a variety of research prospects at the intersection of American studies and life-writing studies. The common thread that interrelates the individual contributions is spun and twisted out of various filaments of life writing theory which productively dialogue with current trajectories in American studies. The contributors to this special forum highlight what they consider particularly significant developments of the interdisciplinary field of life-writing studies. Taken together, they raise issues about representations of the self in film, literature, and popular culture from the vantage points of transnational American studies, feminist studies, intermediality studies, oceanic studies, affect theory, critical race theory, and queer theory. The result is a rich, multi-layered conversation about the future of American studies within the interdisciplinary and decidedly transnational context of life-writing studies
Editor\u27s Editorial
No full textThis is the editor\u27s editorial. In lieu of an abstract, here is the editorial\u27s first paragraph: In the first issue of Textual Practice, the late Shakespeare scholar Terence Hawkes claimed, "It is never a good time to start a new journal." "The Humanities in particular feel marginalized and underfunded," he continued. "[T]hey sense themselves to be hopelessly at odds with a culture which has long abandoned any recognition of the value of their role."1 More than thirty years later, some of these words still ring very true
The Austrian Contribution to American Life Revisited
No full textThis review essay reviews From a Multiethnic Empire to a Nation of Nations: Austro-Hungarian Migrants in the US, 1870–1940, authored by Annemarie Steidl, Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier, and James W. Oberly (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2017) and Quiet Invaders Revisited: Biographies of Twentieth Century Immigrants to the United States, edited by Günter Bischof (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2017)
Poetry as a Strategy for Teaching English: Using Nikki Giovanni\u27s Poetry in the English as a Second-/Foreign-Language Classroom
Full text linkThis article explores ways to introduce and integrate poetry in English classes in the context of second-language education. My aim is to spark interest in contemporary poetry while addressing general perceptions by both teachers and students that poetry is difficult to engage in. I thus argue for an approach that centers on "easier" poems and involves aspects of contemporary popular culture to introduce poetry, help students appreciate it, and eventually engage in creative writing of their own. Furthermore, I suggest ways in which poetry can be integrated in English courses at large, via the inclusion of strings of poems, within their broader cultural contexts, and by linking them to different, more popular cultural forms of expression, such as songs, films, and cartoons. I exemplify this approach by focusing on two poems by African American poet Nikki Giovanni. "Knoxville, Tennessee" and "Nikki-Rosa" are autobiographical poems which offer first-person accounts of the poet\u27s African American cultural background. However, my intertextual approach interconnects these poems with other poems and cultural texts from different parts of the English-speaking world. Ultimately, I suggest that poetry, due to its brevity and open-endedness, can enhance the study of the English language and Anglophone cultures in a variety of ways beyond the close study of verse in terms of aesthetics
"Huck Finn at King Arthur\u27s Court": F. O. Matthiessen, the Salzburg Seminar, and American Studies
Full text linkF. O. Matthiessen was a key player in an event which took place at Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg in the summer of 1947 and which launched the legendary Salzburg Seminar and may be considered the birth of American studies in Europe. Matthiessen\u27s reflections on this remarkable session, From the Heart of Europe, remains outstanding in its conjuring of a humanist vision amidst ruins. This travelogue, his last major—if largely forgotten—work published shortly before his suicide, has been variously reassessed as an elegiac document of his tragic failure, as a politically deluded scholar, and as a groundbreaking foray into sketching out a radically alternate transnational understanding of American studies avant la lettre. These highly diverging perspectives on Matthiessen\u27s final book, in particular, and on the professional and personal troubles during his last years, more generally, account for the lasting myth-making fascination with Matthiessen, which has left its mark not only on academic discourses ranging from socialist criticism to queer theory but may also be found in the novels of May Sarton (Faithful Are the Wounds) and Mark Merlis (American Studies). Hence, this article reflects on Matthiessen\u27s impact on the 1947 seminar and traces the legacy of this controversial founding father of American studies
Intermedial and Transnational Hip Hop Life Writing
Full text linkIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of this forum contribution:
The growing popularity of celebrity life writing and of memoirs which focus on the respective memoirist\u27s specific social, professional, ethnic, or other context also spawned a large number of autobiographical publications by persons in the music industry. The field of musical autobiography is a recent development for which a niche in life-writing scholarship has only been carved out in the past decade. The growing number of autobiographical book publications as well as autobiographical self-representations in non-analog, non-printed, not primarily verbal formats raises the questions as to whether specific genres of hip-hop life writing have been evolving and as to the perspectives from which scholars should discuss them