Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAAS)
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Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West. By R. R. Reno (Washington, DC: Gateway Editions, 2019), xviii + 182 pp.
Full text linkPhilipp Reisner reviews Russell Ronald Reno\u27s book Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West (2019
The Bicycle in the Service of Reform: Frances Willard\u27s Social Entrepreneurship, Her \u27Do Everything\u27 Policy, and the Temperance Temple Campaign
No full textThis essay situates Frances Willard\u27s temperance reform campaigns as entrepreneurial in nature, and claims Willard as a key nineteenth-century American social innovator. Much has been written on Willard\u27s temperance policies and her leadership in the Woman\u27s Christian Temperance Movement as well as her founding of the World Woman\u27s Christian Temperance Organization. The writings Willard produced on women\u27s access to and engagement with the bicycle as a reform technology has not been explored. In offering a narrative of the strategies and experiences Willard used to employ the bicycle as a tool or ally for temperance reform and woman\u27s rights, this essay argues for the inclusion of women\u27s voices in the public sphere and in publication around social and economic mobility. The bicycle offered Willard and her WCTU organization a key metonymic image--the wheel--around which to analyze the relationship of temperance to everyday lives. Willard\u27s "Do Everything" campaign can be seen as the nineteenth-century equivalent of vast social entrepreneurship
\u27Brown Babies\u27 in Post-WWII Denmark: A Case Study of the Vulnerabilities of Adopted Children Born of War
No full textChildren born to occupying soldiers and members of a local population during or after conflicts are in many ways an extraordinarily vulnerable population. These so-called children born of war (CBOW) commonly inherit the stigma of transgression and foreignness from their respective parents and face discrimination in post-conflict societies. Their specific vulnerabilities, though, emerge from multiple overlapping factors: the needs and social status of their family members, their relation to the trans/national communities of their parents as well as to ethno-national norms of belonging. This paper theorizes the multiple factors that shaped the vulnerabilities of biracial adoptees in post-WWII Denmark as Black and German children of fraternizing mothers. I look at a case from the Danish "child import," the illegal adoptions of children born to African American soldiers and German women in late 1950s Denmark, in relation to the testimony of an adopted child born to a German soldier in Denmark during WWII. The similarities and differences between the two testimonies show that the "imported" biracial children did not just face specific racial vulnerabilities at this intersection between US American and Danish adoption histories but also a relational vulnerability tied to their CBOW status, which manifested through the slow violence of family secrecy practices
Performing Vulnerability and Resistance in Spoken Word Poetry
Full text linkThis article explores the duality of Kosal Khiev\u27s poetry performances as performing vulnerability and resistance within global cultural contexts. While his live performances vocalize several forms of systemic racism that he experienced as a refugee, in the US foster care system and with the US prison-industrial complex, his live-streamed performances reach beyond national borders that have jeopardized his very existence. Over the past few years, his livestreams and social media posts have most succinctly served as creative channels through which Kosal Khiev addresses his vulnerability. His poetry included in this article not only acknowledges and comments on his vulnerability as interconnected with US politics but also writes himself back into the national discourse from the perspective of an exiled poet
From Crisis to Cata/Strophe: Prepositional Poetics as Decolonizing Praxis
Full text linkThis article shows how Aracelis Girmay\u27s The Black Maria (2016) and Raquel Salas Rivera\u27s while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (2019) turn the ongoing catastrophe of coloniality into a visual grammar of/for loss. Aracelis Girmay\u27s The Black Maria offers a prepositional poetics to visualize the catastrophe of Mediterranean migrant crossings within the spacetime of an oceanic coloniality that joins Mediterranean to Atlantic and Caribbean. Raquel Salas Rivera\u27s poetic response to Hurricane María invokes prepositional relationships to reveal and contest the United States\u27 existing hierarchies of colonial-imperial power. Through form, their poetry visualizes how witness, survival, and mourning become decolonizing tactics of resistance. In the two texts, I identify a prepositional poetics that, by signaling movements through space and time, locates the specific catastrophes of displacement and climate change disaster in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean as part of a continuum of coloniality that stretches from the sixteenth century to the present
\u27Vulnerable as a small pink mouse\u27: Vulnerability, Affect, and Trauma in Hanya Yanagihara\u27s A Little Life
No full textThis essay focuses on the productive interactions between vulnerability and trauma theory. Vulnerability indexes trauma\u27s infinitude and recursion as something constantly generative of new emotional, social, and legal injuries. In the novel A Little Life (2015), Hanya Yanagihara employs narrative fragmentation, multi-perspectivity, and temporal disarray to evoke trauma\u27s patterns of injury and abjection. Vulnerability\u27s double valence creates affective intensities for readers and establishes a sense of intimacy with the protagonist as he is traumatized. Vulnerability in the novel is linked to closeness, thus, in a dual sense. On the one hand, the protagonist closes off from the world. On the other hand, he persists impossibly in fostering intimate relationships. In A Little Life, it is this precarious closeness precisely through which vulnerability becomes a form of resistance that foregrounds agency
One Nation Under Many Cowboy Hats: Western Hats and American Studies—A Cultural-Historical Conspectus
Full text linkCommencing with the polemic that "everybody has always worn cowboy hats," this article (re)conceptualizes western hats as significant, signifying, wearable, and thus nomadic manifestations of Americanness. Their material complexity lends itself to thinking through the cultural fabric of Americanness, which, depending on the vantage point, oscillates between dominant and arguably homogeneous permutations of predominately white Americanness, and the checkered, multicultural "felt" that is the American experience at large, and that of the American West in particular
African American Literature, Racial Vulnerability, and the Anthropocene: Reading W .E. B. Du Bois\u27s The Quest of the Silver Fleece in the Twenty-First Century
Full text linkThis article discusses W. E. B. Du Bois\u27s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), in the context of the broader debate on the role of race in the Anthropocene and in relation to Judith Butler\u27s theory on corporeal vulnerability. Specifically, this article spotlights three particular ways in which rereading African American literature may enhance a more race-conscious Anthropocene discourse. Initially, this article demonstrates how Du Bois\u27s text gives opportunity to trace African American vulnerabilities through various scales from the local to the planetary. A genealogy of African American racial vulnerability, I argue, can be vital for better understanding and acting against continuing forms of racism in the Anthropocene. This article continues by turning to Du Bois\u27s representation of vulnerabilities as part of power relations, showing how African American epistemologies of resistance negotiate racial vulnerability. Lastly, this article examines how the novel plays with generic conventions to engage racial vulnerabilities, evincing an African American aesthetics of resistance and suggesting alternative forms of storytelling
The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy. By Jonathan Singerton (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022), 352pp.
Full text linkMartin Gabriel reviews Jonathan Singerton\u27s monograph The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy (2022)
George Washington, the Godfather of American Entrepreneurism
Full text linkAmong all U.S. presidents, George Washington still ranks as the wealthiest. By the time of his death, he owned more than 52,000 acres, which secured his position among the top-ranked land-holding gentry of his day. In Washington\u27s America, secured property was one of the most potent and consequential ideals, much as it also was a dominant cultural investment, with property figuring as "a matter of progress," in the words of a British social philosopher. In eighteenth-century America, individual property was related to working one\u27s own land, which became the basis of civic virtue, conveying status and authority. At Mount Vernon, Washington was a farmer, not a planter, and a scientific farmer at that. Farming was not the easiest route to riches, though, and Mount Vernon\u27s glorified façade of wealth and grandeur only covered up an operation that was, at best, only marginally profitable. Over the years, therefore, Washington became an intrepid figure in financial investment and risky enterprise, not the least of which was the development of the new national capital, whose location on the Potomac had been decided upon in June 1790. With his involvement in the capital venture, Washington fashioned for himself a new mode of economic selfhood and familial belonging that was keyed to the emerging market economy. He became what Joseph A. Schumpeter in 1911 described as a "risk-taker," America\u27s "first commercial man" (President Calvin Coolidge in 1932), and, finally, the "godfather of American entrepreneurism" (historian Richard Norton Smith in 1993)