JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies
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description: The Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAAS) is a peer-reviewed diamond open-access journal which seeks to provide an interdisciplinary space for debate on all aspects of American studies. It functions as a forum for Americanists in Austria and the global academic community. Published twice a year, the journal welcomes submissions on a wide range of topics (e.g. American film, American literature, US politics, US-European relations, US-Austrian relations, American television, American music, American visual culture, and American history) and approaches (e.g. cultural studies, political science, sociology, critical race theory, gender studies, media studies, transnational American studies, geography, and the environmental humanities). JAAAS is listed in the the MLA Directory of Periodicals, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and in ErihPlus (European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences).
publisher: Austrian Association for American Studies & University of Innsbruck
language: en
publication name: JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies
issn: 2616-9533
copyright: JAAAS is committed to real open access. Accordingly, all of JAAAS's articles and reviews are free to access immediately from the date of publication. There are no author charges prior to publication (APCs), and no charges for readers to download articles and reviews. Hence, JAAAS is free to all at any time and as long as it remains in operation. To make this possible, JAAAS depends on the technical and financial support of the University of Innsbruck, the financial support of the Austrian Association for American Studies, the goodwill of its editorial team and advisory board, and the continuing support of its network of peer reviewers. A Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license applies to all content published in JAAAS. While anyone may copy material published in JAAAS for any purpose if proper credit is given, all materials are published under an open-access license, with authors retaining full and permanent ownership of their work. JAAAS has a perpetual, non-exclusive right to publish the work and to include it in other aggregations and indexes to achieve broader impact and visibility. Authors are responsible for, and required to ascertain that they are in possession of, image rights for any and all photographs, illustrations, and figures included in their work or to obtain publication or reproduction rights from the rights holders. By submitting their work for publication in JAAAS, authors agree to the terms stipulated above. Authors are free and encouraged to store their work elsewhere, for instance in institutional repositories or websites to increase circulation (see The Effects of Open Access). Authors are also able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal. JAAAS does not charge any reprint fees and it is not necessary to contact JAAAS for reprint permission, as authors retain their …
items: Introduction: American Studies in the Classroom – Arts, Culture, and Critical Pedagogy
items: Pictures at an Environmental Exhibition: Reflections on the Art of Photography Curation
items: Paneling to Avoid 'Deer in the Headlights' Moments in Class: Critical Race Theory Counterdialogues in a Seminar on Percival Everett's Novel James (2024)
items: Narrative in Crisis: Reflections from the Limits of Storytelling. Edited by Martin Dege and Irene Strasser. Oxford UP, 2024, 182 pp.
items: Investigative Aesthetics in the American Studies Classroom: Approaching 9/11 through Alejandro González Iñárritu's 11'09''1: September 11
items: Can Literature Come to the Rescue When History Is Under Siege? How One Novel Can Be a Trojan Horse to Engage Questions Some Politicians Don't Want Us to Ask
items: Indigenous Poets as Cartographers of Crisis and Memory: Joy Harjo's Poet Laureate Signature Project Living Nations, Living Words
items: Introduction: Versions, Narratives, and American Studies
items: Narrative in the Anthropocene. By Erin James. Ohio State UP, 2022, 207 pp.
items: Puerto Rico: A National History. By Jorell Meléndez-Badillo. Princeton UP, 2024, 312 pp.
items: Becoming bell hooks: A Story about the Self-Empowerment of a Black Girl Who Became a Feminist. By Aneta Ostaszewska. U of Warsaw P, 2023, 161 pp.
items: Profiles and Plotlines: Data Surveillance in Twenty-First Century Literature. By Katherine D. Johnston. U of Iowa P, 2023, 207 pp.
items: Transplantation and Alternative Worlds: Speculation in Doctors' Life Writing
items: Narratives of Resilience in Times of Climate Crisis: Angry Optimism and Utopian Minimalism in Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 and Jenny Offill's Weather
items: Splintered Archives -- Versions and Versioning through Erasure Arts and Poetry
items: Re-envisioning America's Frontier: A Speculative Journey through John Wesley Powell's Expedition to the American West and Jaclyn Backhaus's Men on Boats
items: "Last Frontier. North to the Future." – Oil-Age Alaska and the Environmental Critique in Mei Mei Evans's Oil and Water
items: Cabin Fever, or: Back to the Future? The (Anti-)Pastoral in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Walden (1854)
items: (Re)Imagining Flyover: An Introduction
items: From the Capitol to the Heartland: Analyzing Congressional Rhetoric and the "Flyover Country" Narrative
items: Introduction
items: Heaven's Harsh Tableland: A New History of the Llano Estacado. By Paul H. Carlson. Texas A&M UP, 2023, 386 pp.
items: Digital America
items: In Search for Alternatives
items: Murray Rothbard's Populist Blueprint: Paleo-Libertarianism and the Ascent of the Political Right
items: "Out there in that cabin in the middle of nowhere in Montana": Narrating the Geographical and Mental Deviance of the Unabomber
items: Note from the New Editor
items: Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays. Edited by Sheri-Marie Harrison, Arin Keeble, and Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo. Edinburgh UP, 2023, 368 pp.
items: Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric. By Virginia Jackson. Princeton UP, 2023, 304 pp.
items: Violent Landscapes

Introduction: American Studies in the Classroom – Arts, Culture, and Critical Pedagogy
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description: This introduction situates the special issue's central premise that artistic and aesthetic practices offer powerful pedagogical tools for critical inquiry in American studies. Framed by the field's interdisciplinary traditions and its ongoing epistemic transformations, the introduction reflects on how classroom practices can foster analytical, emotional, and ethical engagement with cultural materials. It also highlights the political stakes of teaching US history and culture in a moment marked by curricular debates, book bans, and renewed challenges to critical scholarship. The articles collected here present innovative approaches that expand the interpretive possibilities of American studies pedagogy across classrooms, analog and digital media, as well as public spaces.
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creator: Ingrid Gessner
creator: Angelika Ilg
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Ingrid Gessner, Angelika Ilg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2026-05-06
publication date: 2026-05-06
starting page: 1
ending page: 9
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v7i1.261

Pictures at an Environmental Exhibition: Reflections on the Art of Photography Curation
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description: During the 2023–24 academic year, we worked together at the Harry Ransom Center, a major humanities research center and museum at the University of Texas at Austin, to organize "Visualizing the Environment: Ansel Adams and His Legacy." The exhibition, which ran from late August 2024 through early February 2025, presented Adams's photographs in a broad historical and geographical context that drew from our shared but distinct perspectives. During the process of working on this exhibition, we have often reflected on the experience of conceiving, researching, and presenting photographs in a way that is both visually striking and intellectually invigorating – in short, on the art of photography curation. In this article, we share some of those reflections, as we discuss the relationship between creative work, scholarship, and museum collaborations. Critiquing an exhibition is not the same as creating it, even though we have sought to bring our scholarly experience into our complementary roles as exhibition curator and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) creator.
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creator: Steven Hoelscher
creator: Stephanie Zeller
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Steven Hoelscher, Stephanie Zeller https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2026-05-06
publication date: 2026-05-06
starting page: 99
ending page: 131
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v7i1.247

Paneling to Avoid 'Deer in the Headlights' Moments in Class: Critical Race Theory Counterdialogues in a Seminar on Percival Everett's Novel James (2024)
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description: There is much anxiety swirling around when three forces meet on the first day of class in a new semester: a new topic, a new group, and a new educator. "Paneling" is a guided group-work teaching tool that counters this uncomfortable atmosphere. It also equips every student with expertise within an academic framework at the very start of the semester, which can be helpful if a course addresses sensitive topics. This article describes paneling in a literary studies course that considered Percival Everett's 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James as a Critical Race Theory (CRT) counterstory to Mark Twain's 1884 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, hypothesizing that Everett's novel equips the character James with the agency he is deprived of in the original text. This assessment is underscored by Twain's extensive use of the n-word and the complexity of navigating it in classrooms today. A CRT reading of both novels, and particularly dealing with the unspeakable word, necessitated that students have an astute understanding of the concepts of structural racism and sexism before engaging with coursework. Therefore, the panels were (1) The Magical "Negro" Trope, (2) CRT and The Deconstruction of DEI, and (3) The N-Word and Bookbanning. By the end of session four, the students were well prepared to engage with the course subject after actively participating in group work and in plenary presentations about the concepts surrounding systemic intersectional oppression, while being aware of fragile and defensive reactions that may characterize such discourses in a predominantly White space.
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creator: Vanessa Vollmann
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Vanessa Vollmann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2026-05-06
publication date: 2026-05-06
starting page: 57
ending page: 76
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v7i1.246

Narrative in Crisis: Reflections from the Limits of Storytelling. Edited by Martin Dege and Irene Strasser. Oxford UP, 2024, 182 pp.
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description: Mahshid Mayar reviews Narrative in Crisis: Reflections from the Limits of Storytelling (Oxford UP, 2024) edited by Martin Dege and Irene Strasser.
subject: Book Reviews
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creator: Mahshid Mayar
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Mahshid Mayar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2026-05-06
publication date: 2026-05-06
starting page: 135
ending page: 38
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v7i1.245

Investigative Aesthetics in the American Studies Classroom: Approaching 9/11 through Alejandro González Iñárritu's 11'09''1: September 11
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description: This article introduces and explores the implementation, potential, and challenges of investigative aesthetics, a methodology established by the interdisciplinary Forensic Architecture Network, as a specific didactic method in the realm of aesthetic education in the American studies classroom, more specifically in the teaching or, rather, learning of 9/11. Investigative aesthetics is particularly suited to the hermeneutic inquiry of 9/11 because, as Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman emphasize, it is an anti-hegemonic approach to knowledge-production which acknowledges that the "capacity for collective sensing and sense-making" enables a collective to "work towards a renewed, careful, but politically powerful conception of truth practices" (4). By employing a multiplicity of methods, skills, and literacies, the methodology is inherently interdisciplinary. However, as its implementation also poses challenges, the article discusses the use of Alejandro González Iñárritu's short film in 11'09''1: September 11 (2002) as an accessible and low-threshold version of investigative aesthetics. By staging eleven minutes of (almost) visual silence, the film neither fits the dominant narratives and iconography of 9/11 nor lends itself to easy interpretations. Instead, its analysis requires a critical holistic, transnational approach, a reflection of presences and absences, a consideration of material involvements, and an openness of the learners to attune their senses to perceive and experience the film as an aesthetic object. The short film exemplifies the effects of shifting the sensibilities and of playing with different modes of perception, thus allowing the learners to simultaneously encounter the effect of 9/11 footage while also critically engaging with its aftermath.
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creator: Juliane Gamböck-Strätz
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Juliane Gamböck-Strätz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2026-05-06
publication date: 2026-05-06
starting page: 77
ending page: 98
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v7i1.244

Can Literature Come to the Rescue When History Is Under Siege? How One Novel Can Be a Trojan Horse to Engage Questions Some Politicians Don't Want Us to Ask
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description: Under pressure from right-wing Republican politicians, more than half of US states have passed measures designed to discourage teachers from teaching their students about the role that racism has played in the United States' past and present. This article argues that teaching Mark Twain's 1885 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has the potential to let teachers to do an end run around that ban. It distills arguments I make in my 2025 book, Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade (Yale UP). Recognized as a cornerstone of the United States' literary heritage, this celebrated canonical novel written by a very dead, very white male author is a book that can be a Trojan Horse enabling us to open our classrooms to issues these politicians do not want discussed. However, the novel has long been challenged by progressives who charge that it bolsters the racism that it supposedly attacks. This article argues that Jim, the main Black character in the book, has been sold down the river for nearly a century and a half – unjustly demeaned, denigrated, and dismissed as "minstrel show" stereotype. Paying him the attention that he deserves opens up new ways of understanding the history of race and racism in the United States and offers distinctive insights into the challenges of representing Black intelligence, emotion, and creativity in a world that denied their existence – a challenge shouldered not only by Twain himself but also by scores of writers, Black and white, who followed.
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creator: Shelley Fishkin
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Shelley Fisher Fishkin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2026-05-06
publication date: 2026-05-06
starting page: 34
ending page: 56
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v7i1.241

Indigenous Poets as Cartographers of Crisis and Memory: Joy Harjo's Poet Laureate Signature Project Living Nations, Living Words
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description: Joy Harjo's signature project as US poet laureate was published as an intricately designed online experience and as the eponymous printed anthology Living Nations, Living Words. While both versions feature the same poems, they differ in several respects. This article elucidates the argumentative gist of the project's online and printed versions and briefly discusses poems by Deborah A. Miranda, Kimberly Blaeser, Laura Tohe, and Craig Santos Perez. Harjo's project prefigures routes towards a future in which Native poets' conceptualizations and dynamic engagement with maps, historical trauma, and collective and individual memories will allow all readers to revise their understanding of the beginnings, components, and implications of histories of "America" and of "American" poetry.
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creator: Nassim Nassim W. Balestrini
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Nassim W. Balestrini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2026-05-06
publication date: 2026-05-06
starting page: 10
ending page: 33
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v7i1.240

Introduction: Versions, Narratives, and American Studies
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description: This introduction lays out the concept of versioning as a cultural practice and highlights key premises and potentials of the analysis of such practices in the context of American studies. Drawing from narrative theory and theories of speculation, it theorizes the notion of a version as a copy with a difference. Moreover, the introduction identifies three forms of versioning in relation to the field of American studies: revisionist versioning, speculation-focused versioning, and code-oriented versioning.
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creator: Matthias Klestil
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Matthias Klestil https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-06-18
publication date: 2025-06-18
starting page: 93
ending page: 110
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v6i2.239

Narrative in the Anthropocene. By Erin James. Ohio State UP, 2022, 207 pp.
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description: Nassim W. Balestrini reviews Erin James's Narrative in the Anthropocene (Ohio State UP, 2022).
subject: Book Reviews
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creator: Nassim Balestrini
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Nassim W. Balestrini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2026-05-06
publication date: 2026-05-06
starting page: 132
ending page: 35
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v7i1.237

Puerto Rico: A National History. By Jorell Meléndez-Badillo. Princeton UP, 2024, 312 pp.
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description: Martin Gabriel reviews Jorell Meléndez-Badillo's Puerto Rico: A National History (Princeton UP, 2024).
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creator: Martin Gabriel
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Martin Gabriel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-06-18
publication date: 2025-06-18
starting page: 226
ending page: 29
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v6i2.232

Becoming bell hooks: A Story about the Self-Empowerment of a Black Girl Who Became a Feminist. By Aneta Ostaszewska. U of Warsaw P, 2023, 161 pp.
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description: Lena E. Leßlhumer reviews Aneta Ostaszewska's Becoming bell hooks: A Story about the Self-Empowerment of a Black Girl Who Became a Feminist (U of Iowa P, 2023).
subject: Book Reviews
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creator: Lena Leßlhumer
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Lena Leßlhumer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-06-18
publication date: 2025-06-18
starting page: 222
ending page: 25
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v6i2.229

Profiles and Plotlines: Data Surveillance in Twenty-First Century Literature. By Katherine D. Johnston. U of Iowa P, 2023, 207 pp.
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description: Joshua Parker reviews Katherine D. Johnston's Data Surveillance in Twenty-First Century Literature (U of Iowa P, 2023).
subject: Book Reviews
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creator: Joshua Parker
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Joshua Parker https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-06-18
publication date: 2025-06-18
starting page: 218
ending page: 22
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v6i2.228

Transplantation and Alternative Worlds: Speculation in Doctors' Life Writing
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description: Even though organ transplantation has turned into a repeatable and comparatively reliable practice, it still presents ample cause for speculation. In fact, various works of speculative fiction explore the practice in relation to the future. Yet, as this article suggests, speculation about transplantation does not only occur within the pages of fictional works but also impacts the life writing of medical professionals. This article engages specifically with the life writing of transplant surgeons: Thomas Starzl's The Puzzle People: Memoirs of a Transplant Surgeon (1992), Kathy E. Magliato's Heart Matters: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon (2010), and Breathless: A Transplant Surgeon's Journal by Thomas R. J. Todd (2007). By focusing on two distinct forms of speculation – the employment of elements from speculative fiction and the pervasiveness of the question "What if …?" – this article emphasizes the underlying but often overlooked significance of speculation in medical contexts.
subject: Special Issue Articles
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creator: Ruth Gehrmann
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Ruth Gehrmann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-06-18
publication date: 2025-06-18
starting page: 172
ending page: 85
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v6i2.223

Narratives of Resilience in Times of Climate Crisis: Angry Optimism and Utopian Minimalism in Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 and Jenny Offill's Weather
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description: The essay discusses two climate change novels, Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 and Jenny Offill's Weather, as resilience narratives. It argues that these novels – New York 2140 speculating about a possible future, set more than 100 years in the future,Weather engaging our present cultural moment, the early 21st century – explore diverse experiences of, and responses to, human-made climate crisis, directly engaging with the interconnected ecological, political, economic, social, and cultural effects of global warming, but also with responses such as climate skepticism and denial as well as cognitive dissonance, climate anxiety, and grief related to climate change. Applying the concept of resilience in its diverse meanings as an analytical framework emphasizes that fictional climate narratives often go beyond merely "sounding the alarm" about climate risks or concentrating exclusively on catastrophe. Rather, they also shed light on strategies of adaptation, flexibility and endurance and on the potential for transformation to allow for a more hopeful and even utopian reading. For this purpose, the concepts of "angry optimism" and "utopian minimalism" are introduced, the former articulated by Robinson, the latter introduced by critic Anahid Nersessian, who have both participated in the debate on the relevance and timeliness of utopianism in times of climate crisis.
subject: Special Issue Articles
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creator: Sylvia Mayer
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Sylvia Mayer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-06-18
publication date: 2025-06-18
starting page: 186
ending page: 207
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v6i2.227

Splintered Archives -- Versions and Versioning through Erasure Arts and Poetry
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description: A predominantly twenty-first-century, textual-visual practice in othering and versioning documents, erasure (arts and poetry) is the outcome of a variety of disruptive techniques such as black-out, white-out, or strike-through of segments of the "pre-text," text-that-is-already-there. Erasure thus bridges and separates the "original" (however we may define and understand the term) to and from the subsequent versions of the original that are erased out of it by the same or subsequent authors. A study of two single works of erasure by Niina Pollari and Jenny Holzer in order to showcase some of the ways creative works of erasure "version" documents and "splinter" archives, this essay examines erasure poetry and arts as a creative activist response to the documental crises of US empire in the present century.
subject: Special Issue Short Essays
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creator: Mahshid Mayar
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Mahshid Mayar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-06-18
publication date: 2025-06-18
starting page: 208
ending page: 17
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v6i2.225

Re-envisioning America's Frontier: A Speculative Journey through John Wesley Powell's Expedition to the American West and Jaclyn Backhaus's Men on Boats
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description: Histories of the American West, including reports of settler colonial expeditions to newly occupied territories of the United States and accounts of life at the "frontier" have often been told as "heroic tales: stories of adventure, exploration and conflict" (Jameson and Armitage 10). White cisgender male protagonists captured the imagination of Americans in historiography and fiction. Gradually, historians like Patricia Limerick (1987), Anne M. Butler and Michael J. Lansing (2008), and Stephen Aron (2022) acted as game changers when they re-told the story of the American West as a shared space where different groups came into contact and conflict. Limerick describes the American West as "an important meeting ground" (27). This article argues that Jaclyn Backhaus's play Men on Boats (2015) brings such a "meeting ground" to the stage by re-versioning the story of the first government-sanctioned expedition on the Colorado River (1869). By means of an analysis of the play's devices, particularly its gender-fluid mode of casting, the article demonstrates how the dramatic text challenges the dominant ideology of manifest destiny and actively engages the audience in a transformative reimagining of America's frontier. This article dissects multiple versions of the Powell narrative: Powell's journal, a bronze statue of his boat, a monument on the Grand Canyon's South Rim, and a dramatic reimagining of Powell's journey performed by students based on Backhaus's text. It concludes with findings from two acting workshops conducted in the summer and winter semesters of 2023-2024, where pre-service teachers engaged with Men on Boats as the core text.
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creator: Ingrid Gessner
creator: Angelika Ilg
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Ingrid Gessner, Angelika Ilg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-06-18
publication date: 2025-06-18
starting page: 111
ending page: 31
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v6i2.224

"Last Frontier. North to the Future." – Oil-Age Alaska and the Environmental Critique in Mei Mei Evans's Oil and Water
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description: This article discusses Mei Mei Evans's 2013 novel Oil and Water as a critical response to the competing narratives that have historically shaped three dominant versions of Alaska in the national imagination: as the Last Frontier to be explored, as an enduring frontier promising a balance between resource extraction and environmental protection, and as a wilderness to be preserved. Inspired by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which takes a pivotal place in US environmental history, the novel offers a realistic exploration of the environmental, social, and cultural consequences of oil dependency. By dramatizing the spill's devastating impact on both human and more-than-human life, Oil and Water challenges the images of Alaska as a limitless resource frontier and the enduring frontier, while advancing the notion of Alaska as a wilderness to be protected.
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creator: Marija Krstic
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Marija Krstic https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-06-18
publication date: 2025-06-18
starting page: 132
ending page: 50
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v6i2.222

Cabin Fever, or: Back to the Future? The (Anti-)Pastoral in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Walden (1854)
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description: Canonized classics of US-American literature such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly and Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods were published at the beginning of the 1850s – that crucial moment in the history of the United States when it found itself on the brink of the Civil War. Both works epitomize the nation's contemporaneous racial climate, i.e. the legacy and workings of the institution of slavery, in the simple material form of the cabin. Deploying the theoretical frame of the pastoral, essentially qualified by the anti-pastoral (Bennett, M. 195–210) and the strategic pastoral (Klestil 85–124), this article argues that Stowe and Thoreau materialize the past and presence of slavery in the cabin in order to explicitly (Uncle Tom's Cabin) or implicitly (Walden) imagine and speculate about a future nation without slavery. This article hence compares and historicizes two defining literary versions of a United States the cultural influence and power of which are rooted in their respective depiction of the cabin as "both icon and shelter" (Hoagland 8).
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creator: Robert Winkler
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Robert A. Winkler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-06-18
publication date: 2025-06-18
starting page: 151
ending page: 71
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v6i2.221

(Re)Imagining Flyover: An Introduction
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description: This introduction to the special issue titled "(Re)Imagining Flyover Fictions" theorizes the flyover trope (as in "flyover country/state") as a critical concept in cultural studies in order to make it an abstract tool to explore, among others, the historical continuities and present facets of polarization in the United States. In addition to these theoretical and methodological elaborations, we will also provide a specific and particularly topical example by analyzing flyover fictions in the context of the 2024 US presidential election.
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creator: Cornelia Klecker
creator: Sascha Pöhlmann
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Cornelia Klecker, Sascha Pöhlmann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-10-16
publication date: 2024-10-16
starting page: 1
ending page: 19
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v6i1.220

From the Capitol to the Heartland: Analyzing Congressional Rhetoric and the "Flyover Country" Narrative
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description: This study examines the evolution and strategic use of the term "flyover country" in US congressional rhetoric from 1995 to 2024. Initially a benign geographic descriptor, "flyover country" has transformed into a potent symbol of cultural and political identity, particularly among Republican members of Congress. Through a comprehensive analysis of congressional speeches, committee hearings, and constituent correspon­dence, this research identifies an increase in the use of flyover rhetoric, especially during the Trump era. The study reveals that "flyover" is employed to evoke a sense of victimhood and marginalization among rural constituents, highlighting perceived economic and cultural disenfranchisement by coastal elites. The findings underscore the adaptability of political language and its role in shaping and reflecting socio-political divides in the United States. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the dynamics of congressional rhetoric and the cultural and political undercurrents that influence US-American identity and discourse.
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creator: Phillip Ardoin
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Phillip J. Ardoin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-10-16
publication date: 2024-10-16
starting page: 20
ending page: 34
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v6i1.219

Introduction
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description: The idea for this JAAAS special issue comes from the 49th Annual Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies, which took place at the University of Salzburg in Fall 2022. Presentations covered stories we tell about our environment, and about pressing social issues of the past or present. As varied as the presentations were, the common thread was inquiring into how we – as individuals and collectives – frame our experiences in these areas through narratives, to whom we tell them, and when, where, and why. The contributions here range in their treatment of subject matter from speculative prose to theater, from film to poetry, to a history of the advertising industry. They illustrate how issues of social justice, climate change, and storytelling are intimately linked, and explore various manifestations of this nexus in fresh and surprising ways.
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creator: Joshua Parker
creator: Robert Winkler
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Joshua Parker, Robert A. Winkler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-06-18
publication date: 2024-06-18
starting page: 131
ending page: 41
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v5i2.212

Heaven's Harsh Tableland: A New History of the Llano Estacado. By Paul H. Carlson. Texas A&M UP, 2023, 386 pp.
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description: Martin Gabriel reviews Paul H. Carlson's Heaven's Harsh Tableland: A New History of the Llano Estacado (Texas A&M UP, 2023).
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creator: Martin Gabriel
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Martin Gabriel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-06-18
publication date: 2024-06-18
starting page: 278
ending page: 80
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v5i2.211

Digital America
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description: This introduction to the special issue "Digital America" sketches some of the ways in which "the digital" has influenced both American culture and American studies scholarship before summarizing the contributions to this issue.
subject: Special Issue Introduction
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creator: Michael Fuchs
rights: Copyright (c) 2023 Michael Fuchs https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2023-06-30
publication date: 2023-06-30
starting page: 215
ending page: 221
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v4i2.210

In Search for Alternatives
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description: This article argues that queer theories of affect not only offer an alternative approach to analyzing the horror film in the twenty-first century, but also that a new wave of horror media negotiates its social criticism in newly queer ways. Analyzing Ari Aster's 2018 film Hereditary, it becomes clear that its horrifying effect stems from queer affects within its narrative that both its character and audience share. In this, Hereditary goes beyond traditional forms of criticism regarding its deconstruction of normative family structures, present in horror films as early as 1974's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as it not only points to potential horrors within the traditional family but instead lays open the inherent, inescapable affective horrors of these normative structures and narratives of belonging, necessitating the need for alternative forms of self-determination and community. Doing so, the film utilizes the established forms of the genre but plays both within and outside of its conventions, affecting its audience beyond mere shock. In applying queer theories of affect and negativity to the film, this article demonstrates a critique of the horrors of real-life institutions and systems that plague (queer) existence in our neoliberal society: normative family structures, sexual and romantic normativities, and complex feelings of (not) belonging. In this reading, Hereditary serves as a powerful counternarrative to the cruelly optimistic narratives of everyday life.
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creator: Lukas Hellmuth
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Lukas Hellmuth https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-06-18
publication date: 2024-06-18
starting page: 239
ending page: 59
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v5i2.207

Murray Rothbard's Populist Blueprint: Paleo-Libertarianism and the Ascent of the Political Right
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description: In his 1992 pamphlet "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement," libertarian economist and intellectual Murray Rothbard drafted a strategy that foreshadowed the rise of populist politics that was to come some years later. Central to his populist vision was the idea of a "paleo-coalition" consisting of "paleo-libertarians" and "paleo-conservatives" that he saw coming closer to power by addressing the masses directly. This, Rothbard proclaimed, would be possible if a presidential candidate were able to short-circuit the traditional media and appeal to disgruntled parts of the population, namely the "rednecks" and Middle America. With Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election in 2016, Rothbard's ideas seem to have become reality. This article draws on the concept of flyover to describe this special populist framework by analyzing libertarians' appeals and politicizable connections to an imagined "real people" and by historically tracing populism in US conservatism. Based on a discussion of the social functions of pamphlets as contentious formats that are interwoven into social conflict, a close reading of Rothbard's 1992 pamphlet shows the decisive political edge that populists were able to gain by employing the strategies for the "paleo movement."
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creator: David Bebnowski
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 David Bebnowski https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-10-16
publication date: 2024-10-16
starting page: 35
ending page: 53
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v6i1.209

"Out there in that cabin in the middle of nowhere in Montana": Narrating the Geographical and Mental Deviance of the Unabomber
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description: In 1996, the mathematician-turned-terrorist Theodore J. Kaczynski, nicknamed the Unabomber, was arrested in his self-built cabin in the woods of Montana after having terrorized the nation for over 20 years. He had modeled his cabin after Henry David Thoreau's idealized Walden cabin. This article argues that the Unabomber's cabin in Montana, often considered a so-called flyover state, serves as the pivotal point for his geographical marginalization in the media coverage of the case. Its location in what is discursively constructed as a 'wilderness' makes it impossible to perceive his cabin through the perspective of the pastoral ideal – this imagined middle ground between nature and culture. The over-determination of this material form in its location apparently off the grid furthermore enables the othering and medicalization of Theodore J. Kaczynski. This article demonstrates that the media coverage of the Unabomber case displays these three tendencies which come together in the nexus cabinsanity, i.e., the conflation of pseudo-geographical, cultural, and medical discourses. Projecting cabinsanity, in turn, enables the dismissal of the Unabomber's critique of technologized society as delineated in his manifesto.
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creator: Robert Winkler
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Robert A. Winkler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-10-16
publication date: 2024-10-16
starting page: 74
ending page: 92
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v6i1.206

Note from the New Editor
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description: A brief note from the new editor.
subject: Editorial
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creator: Cornelia Klecker
rights: Copyright (c) 2023 Cornelia Klecker https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2023-12-30
publication date: 2023-12-30
starting page: i
ending page: ii
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v5i1.205

Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays. Edited by Sheri-Marie Harrison, Arin Keeble, and Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo. Edinburgh UP, 2023, 368 pp.
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description: Karla Rohová reviews Sheri-Marie Harrison's, Arin Keeble's, and Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo's Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays (Edinburgh UP, 2023).
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creator: Karla Rohová
rights: Copyright (c) 2023 Karla Rohová https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2023-12-30
publication date: 2023-12-30
starting page: 123
ending page: 25
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v5i1.201

Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric. By Virginia Jackson. Princeton UP, 2023, 304 pp.
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description: Lena E. Leßlhumer reviews Virginia Jackson's Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023).
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creator: Lena Leßlhumer
rights: Copyright (c) 2023 Lena E. Leßlhumer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2023-12-30
publication date: 2023-12-30
starting page: 126
ending page: 30
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v5i1.200

Violent Landscapes
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description: While serial killings, murders, and other violent deaths are traumatic incidents for the communities in which they occur, they also attract a great deal of media attention and form the basis for numerous cinematic adaptations in US-American cinema and beyond. Many of these movies employ a sensationalist approach and focus on the social environments of the killings: the perpetrator's upbringing, triggering experiences, or a generally troubled personality. There are only a limited number of cinematic treatments of violent killings that focus on the natural environment or the landscapes where these incidents occurred. This article is concerned with filmmakers using (cinematic) landscapes as a mode of cultural expression for violence and trauma. It seeks to show that James Benning's Landscape Suicide (1986) calls for a different understanding of landscape that goes beyond a mere setting for narrative, as it gives landscape active agency in its mediation of two seemingly unconnected murder cases. The film compares and juxtaposes the murder of Kirsten Costas by Bernadette Protti in a suburb of San Francisco in 1984 with the killings of Ed Gein in Plainfield, Wisconsin, in the 1950s. In doing so, the film presents viewers with two distinct functions of landscape in mediating violence and trauma: as a spatialization of time and as socio-political surroundings. Analyzing these aspects of the film helps us to better understand the link between landscape, violence, and trauma in cinematic treatments of violent incidents and also sheds light on the broader connection between landscape and trauma culture.
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creator: Johannes Vith
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Johannes Vith https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-06-18
publication date: 2024-06-18
starting page: 204
ending page: 19
doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v5i2.187