Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAAS)
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More than a Feeling: Why the Lewis and Clark Expedition Did not Experience \u27the Sublime\u27 at the Great Divide when Crossing the American Continent
Full text linkWhen in the early summer of 1805 Meriwether Lewis for the first time sights the great mountains of the American West, he merely reports "an august spectacle." The word "august" was not then an aesthetic category, nor did it usually describe visual contact with landscape. Categories used for these purposes were the picturesque and the sublime. Whereas there are numerous examples of the picturesque in the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the sublime draws a blank. In my contribution, I will be offering several reasons for the absence of description in the sublime mode: (1) Like their contemporaries, Lewis and Clark held nature up to the yardstick of utility, calculating the agricultural potential of the land or the navigability of a river. (2) The Lewis and Clark expedition was a military expedition, sent out by President Jefferson not to stand in awe at sublime grandeur but to document a useful landscape. (3) Seeing mountains as sublime was essentially a matter of an individual imagination. The Corps of Discovery was a group, whose success depended on cooperation. Hence, the individual imagination must take a back seat. (4) The actual experience of hardship and adversity during the crossing of the Rockies would have obviated any description in the "grand style." (5) Finally, the Corps of Discovery was not even prepared to encounter the great mountains of the West, expecting instead gentle rolling hills that would enable an easy portage to the Columbia River and, if anything, call for picturesque description
The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry. Edited by Timothy Yu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), xix, 246pp.
Full text linkNassim Balestrini reviews Timothy Yu\u27s Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
American Studies as Im/Mobility Studies: Introduction
Full text linkThe introduction to the JAAAS special issue American Studies as Im/Mobility Studies maps the field of mobility studies in the context of American studies, framing the various contributions to the issue. By summarizing dominant mobility narratives in US culture (e.g. in the mythology of the Western frontier), Ganser, Lippert, Oberzaucher, and Schörgenhuber demonstrate how deeply ingrained the idea of freedom of mobility is in the American cultural imaginary. In the vein of critical mobility research across the humanities, the introduction critiques these dominant scripts of American mobility in light of recent movements like MeToo or Black Lives Matter, which implicitly highlight that the mythology of the “freedom of mobility” has been deeply gendered and racialized. Along with former President Trump’s securitization attempts at the US-Mexican border, these developments demonstrate, so the authors, how the immobilization of various groups of people runs equally deep US history but also complicates the equation of mobility with progress. In the second part, the article introduces the individual contributions to the special issue and demonstrates how they add to ongoing discussions around US im/mobilities
The \u27Games\u27 People Play: The Dangers of Holocaust Simulations and Thought Experiments in Nathan Englander\u27s and Ellen Umansky\u27s Short Stories
No full textAccording to a 2018 survey conducted by The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, "over one-fifth of Millennials (22%) haven\u27t heard or are not sure if they have heard of the Holocaust." Since the publication of that study, calls for Holocaust-mandated education have been intensifying. Some academics and teachers have advocated the use of simulations to create empathy for Holocaust victims and survivors. However, sensitive subjects such as the Holocaust must be taught with great care, keeping sound, age-appropriate pedagogical goals in mind. Otherwise, it may do more harm than good. This article discusses two early twenty-first-century Holocaust-themed short stories which serve as stern warnings about the potential dangers and lasting effects of irresponsible Holocaust pedagogy. In Ellen Umansky\u27s "How to Make it to the Promised Land" (2003) and Nathan Englander\u27s "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" (2013), characters engage in "what if" scenarios by playing seemingly harmless Holocaust "games" that take a dark turn and conclude with unsettling revelations. While the stories are works of fiction, the analog "games" described in both narratives are loose adaptations of actual games hat Umansky and Englander played as teens
Becoming-Data, Becoming-Mountain: Affordances, Assemblages, and the Transversal Interface
Full text linkThis article explores our ecological relation to both information and information technologies as we "mediate mountains." Starting with a Gibsonian approach to affordances, and considering how an agent-specific account of action limits human access to "the digital," I suggest that the interface between human and device marks a double-coupling of two agents—one digital the other embodied—each of which draws out the other to alter potential action. The essay explores the affordances of agents and the environments in which they act, and how action seemingly occurs across the boundaries marked by the human-device interface. Drawing on actor network theory, assemblage theory, and Don Ihde\u27s "inter-relational ontology," I examine how, within an ecology of humans and mobile devices, "agency" and "action" operate within a Deleuzean transversal, cutting across body-machine boundaries. As an application of this analysis, I examine the relationship between embodied and digital agents "in the wild" of the mountains, through AR and GPS-enabled smartphone apps, and how each agent, acting upon its own environment, gives rise to transversal events that alter the affordances offered to agents across a seemingly uncrossable divide.
\u27The Beast from the East\u27: Mental Dis/Ability and the Fears of Post-Socialist Mobility in North American Popular Culture
No full textThis article analyzes characters in North American popular culture who migrated from the post-socialist world to the United States and other western countries. It focuses on the Anglo-Ukrainian clone Helena in the television show Orphan Black (Space/BBC America, 2013-2017), the Russian girl Esther in the horror movie Orphan (2009), and the psychopathic Russian assassin Villanelle in the television show Killing Eve (BBC America, 2018-2022). All these fictional characters are orphans. Moreover, they all share the same pathology: a mental disorder or disability that predestines them to become ruthless killers. I argue that the fictional killers embody North American fears surrounding the mobility of the Cold War Other in the aftermath of the fall of the so-called Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the Soviet Union
Black Im/Mobilization, Critical Race Horror, and the New Jim Crow in Jordan Peele\u27s Get Out
Full text linkIn the United States, people of color are not allowed to move around freely in spatial or social terms. Confronted with the everyday horrors of racial segregation, discrimination, and the legacies of slavery, African Americans continue to be excluded from opportunities of upward mobility and experience cultural displacement based on the immobilizing practices of what Michelle Alexander calls "the New Jim Crow." On-screen representations of Black individuals in the horror genre mirror this racial(ized) ideology. Many earlier horror films, texts Isabel Cristina Pinedo classifies as "race horror," mark them as ferocious monsters who must be villainized, imprisoned, or murdered and thus subscribe to a logic of race as the root of American fears. Jordan Peele\u27s directorial debut Get Out (2017) provides a counter-argument, depicting racism as the primary horror in American (popular) culture by investing in the decolonizing strategies of critical race theory to uncover the very real horrors of the prison industrial complex, commodification of the Black body, and racial profiling. In this article, I read Get Out as an example of what I term "critical race horror," texts whose narrative, generic, and cinematographic strategies subvert essentialist strategies of racial silencing and thus invest in necessary measures toward (Black) mobility justice
Going West, Slow and Fast: Speed and Surveying in Thomas Pynchon\u27s Mason & Dixon
Full text linkThis article examines the speed and mobility of surveying of pre-revolutionary America in Thomas Pynchon\u27s Mason & Dixon (1997). Pynchon contrasts the extremely slow and directed physical drawing of the Mason-Dixon line with the infinitely fast and undirected speed of magic and dream. This confrontation of mobilities extends into a more general discussion of Enlightenment science and romantic reverie and their clash in Pynchon\u27s novel. I contend that this investigation of mobility furthermore helps to extend the conceptualization of the well-established opposition of rationality and irrationality in current Pynchon scholarship and beyond.
Uplift: Visual Culture at the Banff School of Fine Arts. By PearlAnn Reichwein and Karen Wall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 352pp.
Full text linkThis is a review of PearlAnn Reichwein and Karen Wall\u27s Uplift (2020
Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2020), 248pp.
Full text linkMarijana Miki´c reviews Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek\u27s edited volume Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (The Ohio State University Press, 2020)