Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAAS)
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Suffragists and Russian Suffering : Vulnerability in Early Progressive US Movements
Full text linkThis article analyzes American pro-Russian revolutionary newspaper and magazine articles, biographies, political speeches, poems, etc. between roughly 1880 and 1917. It asks what strategies American social progressives, including suffragists and feminists, developed to create empathy for the Russian revolutionaries, and the Russian people more generally, at a time when the American authorities, as well as the public, was rather anxious about foreign and domestic radicalism. The article identifies suffering Russian women at the center of narratives that intended to create sympathy for the Russian Revolution. Particularly vulnerable female bodies were used as veneers to draw the American audience and the world into supporting the revolution. The article approaches the topic of vulnerability through the work of literary scholar Thomas Laqueur, and specifically his analyses of suffering as a literary trope, to explore the narratives\u27 particular structures and the kinds of Russian vulnerabilities that the writers presented. It analyzes the affective attachments to the bodies at the center of these narratives, and the subsequent imaginaries they inspire, thereby crucially influencing American cultural and political imaginaries as such through the application of Laqueur\u27s ideas. Additionally, the analysis will focus on the question why suffragists and feminists were so particularly invested in the creation and dissemination of these humanitarian narratives, suggesting that the support of Russian revolutionary women was as much in solidarity with the Russians as it was a means to further their own causes and ideas, including women\u27s emancipation
Creative Extinction: Serial Cycles of De-Extinction and Re-Extinction in Resurrection Business
Full text linkThis article explores the videogame Jurassic World Evolution (Frontier Developments, 2018). As a business simulation, Jurassic World Evolution makes playable—and asks players to perform—a serialized cycle of de-extinction and re-extinction: dinosaurs are resurrected only to be wiped out again when a successor that is "better, louder, with more teeth" (to quote Jurassic World\u27s operations manager Claire Dearing) becomes available. The revenue players generate is thus founded on a cycle of extinction, de-extinction, and re-extinction. In so doing, the videogame suggests that de-extinction does not promise a future primarily defined by the overcoming of extinction and the becoming-real of the dream of reestablishing natural abundance through techno-scientific means, but rather a future characterized by an exponential growth in serialized extinctions, made possible by techno-science. That the videogame puts players in charge of both finances and developing their dinosaur "assets" draws players\u27 attention to molecular biology as a new place of production. Hence, resurrection science and its biocapitalist entanglements not only exploit past extinctions but rather suggest that this biocapitalist venture is based on speculation—reaping seemingly unlimited future profits from a potentially never-ending cycle of extinctions, de-extinctions, and re-extinctions
On Being Topped: Vulnerability and Pleasure in Ocean Vuong\u27s On Earth We\u27re Briefly Gorgeous
No full textThis article explores the sexual and racial politics of anal vulnerability in Ocean Vuong\u27s 2019 novel On Earth We\u27re Briefly Gorgeous. The article shows how the book negotiates the relationship between vulnerability as an embodied relation—configured as forms of bodily receptiveness, permeability, and dependency that necessarily constitute the formal basis of any intersubjective encounter—and vulnerability as a social relation, configured as frameworks of legitimation that differentiate populations in terms of how they encounter, and are affected by, risk, attachment, desire, violence, and physical and mental health. By reading a series of teenage sexual encounters between the Asian American narrator-protagonist Little Dog and Trevor, his white first lover, the article shows that the novel uses anal sensation and metaphoricity to negotiate the vulnerabilities that come with sexual shame and stigma, racial trauma, internalized homophobia, as well as with racialized sexual stereotypes, all the while suggesting ways in which these vulnerabilities may be turned into sources of pleasure, care, reparation, and healing
American Studies as Vulnerability Studies: Introduction
Full text linkThis special issue explores the ambivalent nature of vulnerability as a "politically produced" condition of suffering which contains the potential for resistance and consequential social change for minoritized individuals and communities. Judith Butler\u27s now-classic rendering of vulnerability as "unequally distributed through and by a differential operation of power" helps us better grasp interrelated forms of oppression, yet we argue that narratives of vulnerability also foreground the relational and interconnected conditions of vulnerable lives, while at the same time engendering worldmaking projects centered around agency and resistance
\u27When you look at a calf, what do you see?\u27: Land(ed) Business, Manifest Entrepreneurialism, and Competing Capitalisms in the Contemporary West of Yellowstone
No full textFor a popular, mass media text, Paramount\u27s hit television show Yellowstone (2018–) packs quite a punch. It renders visible in a mass-mediated, synecdochial format the latent and ongoing effects that settler colonialism and its entanglements with the necrotic logic of capitalism have on lifeworlds in the contemporary West. By making a traditionally privileged place—a multigenerational cattle ranch—the principal target of intrusive, increasingly powerful agents of big non-agricultural capital, who are portrayed as a threat to the local and regional polity and the social fabric of the rural West, Yellowstone says something tangible and pertinent about the fastest growing region in the United States, and the massive changes in land use and land development that have registered in the past two and a half decades.
This article pursues a goal that is twofold. Firstly, it will map the Trans-Mississippi West as an entrepreneurial habitat where the agents of settler colonialism initiated patterns that continue to undergird land ownership, land development, and land use policies in the contemporary West. Secondly, I will read and explicate how Yellowstone remediates New/Post-West scholarship—the work of social historians and cultural geographers in particular—with a seemingly didactic zeal. Ultimately, this yields a rather sober(ing) view of entrepreneurism in that its frequently quoted Schumpeterian definition—creative destruction—amounts to an ideological position that can only ever produce formations of violence, be they physical, psychological, epistemic, symbolic, and/or ecological
\u27It sounds like erasure\u27: Mobility, Vulnerability, and Queer Coolitude Poetics in Rajiv Mohabir\u27s The Taxidermist\u27s Cut
No full textVarious im/mobilities linked to colonialism have shaped the Caribbean, fundamentally structuring the unevenness of vulnerability. This paper reads vulnerabilities as relationally produced through the entanglement of human and more-than-human im/mobilities. Rajiv Mohabir\u27s poetry collection The Taxidermist\u27s Cut (2016) addresses the vulnerability of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora and extends it to a shared more-than-human vulnerability. This is done by employing the practice of taxidermy as a figurative device to expose violences and vulnerabilities of oppressive and colonial regimes and its legacies today. These multiple vulnerabilities are related to both imperial im/mobilizations of peoples during the period of indentureship, as well as of animals, on which taxidermy is performed, immobilizing their desired shape for eternity. The book then queers understandings of singular national affiliation and binary classifications that serve to immobilize humans and non-humans alike, and instead moves out of these fixation by opening up the vulnerabilities of the self to other possibilities. 
The American Entrepreneurial Spirit: A Primer
Full text linkThis introduction to the special issue on the American entrepreneurial spirit sketches its significance to American culture. The entrepreneur is an important cultural archetype that reflects the zeitgeist. Accordingly, fears, anxieties, desires, and wishes may be projected onto the entrepreneur; the figure of the entrepreneur—and interpretations of the entrepreneur as a hero or villain—is thus a cultural barometer that provides insight into the American psyche
Jennifer Peedom\u27s Mountain as a City Symphony
No full textThis article explores Jennifer Peedom’s film Mountain (2017) through the lens of the city symphony in view of structural, aesthetic, and thematic parallels between mountain and city symphony films. Analyzing Mountain in the generic context of the city symphony film draws attention to the deep structural links between urban centers and mountains, and their shared technological and urban infrastructures. This appraoch also harnesses the potential of film studies to revise dominant perceptions of mountains and can help viewers understand mountains as places of density and as dense networks that are developed by technological infrastructure and informed by dense technological, social, and cultural networks. By drawing on media ecology, actor-network theory, and media archeology, I will show that, similar to city symphonies, Mountain explores collective networks beyond the human realm to shed light on mountains as cultural spaces, geological manifestations, and eco-social realities. In so doing, Mountain tries to help humans to come to terms with the deep temporalities of alpine spaces and their technological mediations
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. By Daniel Immerwahr (New York: Picador, 2020), 516pp.
Full text linkMartin Gabriel reviews Daniel Immerwahr\u27s How to Hide an Empire (Picador, 2020)
Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity. By Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 220pp.
Full text linkEmily Edwards reviews Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes\u27s book Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (2019