SOAR: Society of Americanists Review
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The Underground Railroad (2016) as Anti-White-Supremacist Fantasy
Get PDFThe possibilities the fantastical genre offers for commenting on the reverberations of the United States’ colonial heritage have been exploited extensively in contemporary narrative works. One example is Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), in which he employs Toni Morrison’s concept of the Africanist presence in the realm of the fantastic to show how the stereotypical image of a “Black other” still haunts the White American imagination. Situating Whitehead’s bestseller within the field of Critical Whiteness Studies, this article examines how the fantastical encounter with the “Black other” comments on the image’s persistence in American society and on its function to maintain White supremacy
Review Ambivalent Childhoods: Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child (Breslow)
No full textThe American Taste of Globalization: The Case of McDonald’s in Italy
Get PDFThis article analyzes the history of McDonald’s restaurants in Italy, in order to investigate the American constituents of globalization and address the question of how globalization reflects and spreads American values.1 The analysis of the chain’s expansion in the peninsula unveils how the American character of globalization resides, not as much in the exportation of McDonald’s Big Mac and French fries, as in the global diffusion of specific American systems of production and consumption, as well as of those standardized operating procedures and business practices that are at the core of the so-called “McDonald’s system.
Amerikastudien/American Studies Special Issue "Common Grounds? American Democracy After Trump" (Essi, Paul, and Vormann, eds.)
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Italian American Stuff: A Survey of Material Culture, Migration, and Ethnicity
Get PDFIn this article we offer a critical survey of some approaches to material culture studies within an Italian mobility context, with a focus on Italian American history and culture. We situate our work in relation to greater academic and activist concerns that emphasize the transnational and political while highlighting ideologies that shape how particular kinds of vernacular aesthetic practices are valued or, more likely, devalued, among both hegemonic U.S. culture and the dominant perspectives within Italian American communities. We thus illustrate the ongoing relevance of studying material culture from an Italian American angle, including emerging digital models for doing so
Front Matter and Editors\u27 Note: Resistance, Delayed
No full textFront Matter and Editors\u27 Note: Resistance, Delaye
Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter (McIlwain)
No full textReview of Charlton D. McIlwain. 2020. Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 0190863846.
 
The Trump Resistance\u27s Repertoire of Contention and its Conception and Practice of Civil Disobedience and Nonviolent Direct Action (2016-2018): An Institutionalization of Protest?
No full textThe Resistance, formed in opposition to Donald Trump, has seen progressive forces galvanize since November 2016. Groups have allied in marches and rallies all over the country (The Women\u27s March, #MarchForOurLives), and thrown themselves into electoral politics (Indivisible). Yet one of the most striking features of the Trump Resistance is that there have been few acts of civil disobedience since the last Presidential election.
Using the tools of social movement studies and political sociology as well as ethnographic data, this paper investigates why breaking the law is not currently a more popular form of nonviolent direct action, and why activists seem to favor coordinated, permitted marches at a time when civil disobedience seems to have become if not legitimate, at least increasingly accepted as a democratic practice
