Set during the Great Depression, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) focuses on an American family who are forced to leave their home in Oklahoma and travel to California in search for a better life. Apart from its authentic representations of the economic instability in the U.S. in the 1930s, industrial transformations that took place throughout the country, as well as the severe draught, the novel also comments on the issue of (auto)mobility that this articles analyzes from an eco-critical perspective. The major part of the novel takes place on the road, as the reader witnesses the family traveling west on Route 66. While the road turns into a symbol of freedom and, in a way, a means to pursue the American Dream, the truck that the family travels by makes one ponder the meaning of U.S. mobility and the nation's fascination with, and dependence on, cars. Through its focus on the highway and car, The Grapes of Wrath also touches upon the issue of environment. Providing meticulous descriptions of the vehicle, commenting on its enormous size and the large amount of smoke that it exhausts, the novel introduces automobility as menacing to ecology and the environment.
This forum seeks to outline a variety of research prospects at the intersection of American studies and life-writing studies. The common thread that interrelates the individual contributions is spun and twisted out of various filaments of life writing theory which productively dialogue with current trajectories in American studies. The contributors to this special forum highlight what they consider particularly significant developments of the interdisciplinary field of life-writing studies. Taken together, they raise issues about representations of the self in film, literature, and popular culture from the vantage points of transnational American studies, feminist studies, intermediality studies, oceanic studies, affect theory, critical race theory, and queer theory. The result is a rich, multi-layered conversation about the future of American studies within the interdisciplinary and decidedly transnational context of life-writing studies.
In 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's 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.
Even after decades of disability rights activism, Americans with disabilities are restricted in both their geographical and social mobility. Access to mobility still depends overwhelmingly on monetary factors, thus linking disability, poverty, and restricted mobility, both in terms of education and employment, and everyday mobility. In my article, I examine the implications of this connection by discussing the representation of disability, trauma, and im/mobility in Hanya Yanagihara's novel A Little Life (2015). I analyze how the decline of both the ambulatory mobility and mental health of the novel's main protagonist, Jude St. Francis, is represented in A Little Life. In a second step, I connect these representations to the novel's notion of upward social mobility as well as to its spatial organization. Furthermore, I discuss how Jude's mobility is restricted by his trauma and the forced institutionalization that he experiences in spite of his financial and professional success as well as his social advancement. My analysis highlights how Hanya Yanagihara's narrative of "a protagonist who never gets better" (as the author has put it) creates a highly problematic representation of disability that is linked to death and loss of humanity. This enables me to shed light on the way A Little Life also undermines American narratives of linear progress and continual improvement through its resistance to therapeutic resolutions and its representation of disability. Thereby, I show how American individualism obliterates stories of disability and poverty from its narratives of social and geographical mobility.
This 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.
This article examines the relationship of sound and gender politics in revolutionary America by reading two late eighteenth-century dramatic texts, the 1774 pamphlet A Dialogue, Between a Southern Delegate, and His Spouse (written pseudonymously by Mary V. V.), and Virginia playwright Robert Munford's five-act play The Patriots (written c1777, published only posthumously in 1798). Even though the sounds of early America cannot be accessed directly, as there was no sound recording in the modern, technology-based sense, and even though neither of the two dramatic texts has a known record of performances, the article sets out to explore how sound and speech were heard and negotiated, and how they reflected on prevailing cultural assumptions about gendered personhood, and the relationship between gender and politics. Arguably, attention to sound in these texts offers specific insights into the joint articulation of gender and transatlantic politics in the larger struggle over the American revolution. As this article shows, both texts, albeit for different reasons, strategically use gendered sounds to stage specific political interventions: By "listening" carefully to these sounds (as they are represented in writing), one can understand in more detail how acoustic environments impacted on the articulation, legitimation and deliberation of political argument in revolutionary America.
Canadian-American playwright and activist Chantal Bilodeau finds that we need innovative plays that meld climate change into the aesthetics, arguments, and social fabrics of drama and performance. Testing Bilodeau's suggestion, this essay focuses on the poetics of her newest full-length play, No More Harveys (2022). This reading of climate change theater and in particular of Bilodeau's one-actor play applies Caroline Levine's New Formalist method, which strives to read aesthetic and social forms simultaneously and non-hierarchically, and which raises pertinent questions as to how activist theater manages to balance aesthetics and (political and/or scientific) argumentation. While Levine's New Formalism offers a productive analytical angle on small- and large-scale forms, it cannot cover all literary and social phenomena single-handedly. The analysis offered here proposes to demonstrate the usefulness of complementary readings that take into account (a) decolonial and ecocritical concepts of planetarity, (b) a historically informed understanding of monodramatic and of autobiographical generic practices, and (c) the affordances of climate change theater at the present moment. As this contribution argues, Bilodeau employs and modifies elements of form and genre in a manner that allows multiple narratives of social injustice, violence, and detrimental hierarchies across large swaths of time and place to bleed into each other.
Drawing on a combination of literary, cultural and mobility studies, this article analyzes the narrative and rhetorical strategies of the Green Book travel guides (1936-1966) to illuminate the ways the guide encouraged black mobility and challenged the existing conditions that curtailed such travel. Examining different dimensions of mobility allows for a better understanding of the significance of the Green Book as not just a response to its time and a guide to keep African American traveler safe but also an understanding of its role in (re)shaping landscapes, representations and practices of black travel. The article argues that the Green Book mobilized African Americans, both in a physical way but also in the sense that it textually and visually created representations and narratives of black mobility that had the potential to change individual as well as societal perceptions of African American travelers. It deconstructs white conceptions of travel and integrates black travelers into tourist discourses that were dominated by images of white travelers. As such then, the Green Book rendered quotidian acts such as travel and vacation into political acts and forms of resistance.
Various 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's poetry collection The Taxidermist's 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.
This 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's 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.
Recreating the problematic relationship between the U.S. government and the influx of migrant laborers, films Sleep Dealer (2008) and Culture Shock (2019) both reflect a state of exception existing on the U.S.–Mexico border. In both films, the border is represented as a peripheral locus where the migrant subject is emptied of humanity and political subjectivity, in thrall to the panopticon embodied by the American immigration and border enforcement system. In their real world, the migrant protagonists are denied an access to the central, culturally dominant space; instead, they are offered a virtual realm, a digital access that is subordinated to the level of legitimacy they achieve. The blurring between the organic and the cybernetic contributes to shape a dehumanized borderland realm, at the service of a nativist state power that tries to obliterate the presence of migrants despite their fundamental role in the U.S. capitalist economy. However, the cyborg subject embodies the possibility of resistance to that same power. Relying on their humanity, and yet through the projected digital versions of themselves, the protagonists can eventually counter the dominant order—albeit mostly to an individual extent. Drawing on the relatively extensive academic literature on Sleep Dealer, this analysis highlights similarities and differences between the two films, focusing in particular on Culture Shock and how its virtual reality device allows an expansion on the topics of forced assimilation and erasure of Latinx subjectivity.
This article analyzes the relationship between power, knowledge, and an idea of American Exceptionalism in Cold War-themed videogames. The article focuses on three perspectives. The first section engages with how knowledge is positioned in videogames and what role it plays for shifting power dynamics. Next, it looks at the relationship between notable historio-political events—such as Ronald Reagan's 1983 "Evil Empire" speech and the United States' proposed Strategic Defense Initiative—and videogames to determine how historical knowledge is impacted when it is remediated in games. The third part of this article discusses how Cold War-themed videogames focusing on the US-American perspective embellish a hero who epitomizes and performs American Exceptionalism by establishing a notion of (moral) power that lies with the West. By connecting these three dimensions of knowledge and power in Cold War-themed videogames released between the 1980s and the present, this article suggests that videogames alter players' perception of Cold War ideologies by associating the US with victory while vilifying the USSR and depicting Soviets as the losers in this conflict.
In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of this contribution:
Having discussed five distinct areas of inquiry within life writing studies, we are acutely aware of the various interconnected themes. By way of a conclusion, we would like to sketch three particular aspects which merit extensive attention. First, the fact that all of the contributions highlight the constructedness of life writing can be seen as a call for enhancing our understanding of the mechanisms of self-representation and their implications for the represented autobiographical self and for the multi-genre phenomenon of life writing. The field of life writing studies has been instrumental in uncovering multiple phenotypes linked to medium-specific possibilities and to the contexts in which such content is generated, disseminated, and received. Thus, we will need to grapple further with researching competing and differing media selves, including the roles of curators and adapting generic forms like the scrapbook and the self-help manual as well as the economic backdrop and impact of production and distribution.
"William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) focuses on what the author calls the "earth's long chronicle," a century-long story about an imaginary and truthful land of the American South. In this article, I show how this chronicle is built on the idea of "im/mobility," considered from different perspectives. First, the seven stories that form Go Down, Moses depict various forms of exploitation, the effects induced by time and human movements on fields, woods, and animals, underlying the contrast between an "immobile" wilderness and a "mobile" (tamed, exploited) plantation. Second, these stories follow the destiny of the im/mobile people who inhabit the land—like Ike McCaslin, the most prominent character, who is blamed precisely for his "immobility," i.e. his inability to take action and change the status quo, at the end of the story. Finally, the literary form of Go Down, Moses contains the idea of "im/mobility" in its hybrid and fragmented structure, halfway between a novel and a short story collection.
Scott McClanahan, rising star of the US Indie Lit world and "Poet Laureate of Real America" (Moran), writes miasmic chronicles of life in a West Virginian holler. In Crapalachia: A Biography of Place (2013), as in many of the tales he releases in Dickensian pace, McClanahan ties the fate of a place to the fate of its people and connects environmental destruction to the ruins of life. Where mountains are stripped away, happiness is not at home. McClanahan tells family stories of deforestation and disability, mining disasters and mental illness, structural poverty and opportunities denied. His stories are about the slow and fast deaths of forgotten people in forgotten places and he tells them with a ballistic sensibility that opens up new spaces to negotiate difference. Crapalachia is a threnody for a wounded region that complicates imagined hierarchies of center and periphery and blends the worlds of fact and fiction as well as tragedy and comedy. The semi-autobiography mines so deeply for privation that, at its close, it lays bare some of the most hopeful principles of American transcendentalism. In between personal hardships, local misery, national movements, and universal human experience, McClanahan has us see "Crapalachia as the center of the world" (35). This paper explores how the aesthetic, narrative, and stylistic strategies of Crapalachia help navigate the local, national, and global routes of fictions of disregard.
In histories of exile and migration, LGBTQ+ people have often entered marriages of convenience. Within these arrangements, a gay man and lesbian woman typically enter a marriage to expedite immigration processes or to placate conservative family members. Most commonly, these relationships do not produce children, and they consequently call into question the pronatalism that is often associated with hetero-normative conceptions of marriage. This article explores the complex dynamics of these relationship structures through an analysis of childfree married women in the novels of two female queer exile writers: Jane Bowles and Patricia Highsmith. In Bowles's Two Serious Ladies (1943), a US-American upper middle-class couple, Mr. and Mrs. Copperfield, journey to Panama, where Mrs. Copperfield begins an affair with a female sex worker called Pacifica and refuses to return to the United States with her husband. In Highsmith's Ripley Under Ground (1970), the union between the US-American Tom Ripley and the French heiress Heloise Plisson provides a cover for Tom's ambiguous sexuality, as well as his diverse criminal activities, and allows Heloise to enjoy a life of aimless pleasure. In both these novels, queer marriages of convenience permit transnational mobility within unions that are markedly non-procreative and thereby occupy non-future oriented temporalities. This article demonstrates how these writers used the alternative temporal organization of the marriage of convenience plot to undermine the conventional structures of patriarchal genres, including the modernist quest narrative and suspense or crime fiction.
This article examines the speed and mobility of surveying of pre-revolutionary America in Thomas Pynchon's 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's 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.
Widespread police violence, often targeted at black people, has increasingly entered public debates in recent years. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, various African American young adult novelists have addressed the topic of police brutality and offer counternarratives to the stories about black victims disseminated in the media. This article illustrates how prevalent debates of Black Lives Matter are reflected in contemporary young adult fiction. To this end, the first part elucidates substantial issues that have led to the precarious position of African Americans today and to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing on theoretical concepts such as Judith Butler’s notion of "precarious lives" and Frantz Fanon’s description of the black experience in a white-dominated world, I will analyze Angie Thomas's novel The Hate U Give in view of ongoing debates about racial inequality. As I will show, the novel features striking similarities to real-world incidents of police brutality while simultaneously drawing attention to the manifold ways in which society disregards black lives and continues to subject African Americans to racial injustice.
This article examines the extent to which Nomadland is a convincing representation of poverty in the United States and to assess the film's political stance concerning race, gender, and age. By analyzing Nomadland's narrative and filmic techniques, this article points out three major characteristics of the film that are relevant for its portrayal of characters defined chiefly by their poverty and age. Firstly, Nomadland employs genres subtly to undercut their inherent ideological effects. Secondly, in its portrayal of space, it represents the characters as placemakers, showcasing their agency in the face of structural problems. Thirdly, it adopts a particular neorealist production style that lays a powerful claim to authenticity.
While the film falls short of addressing the root causes of poverty and bypasses the question of race altogether, Nomadland serves as an exemplary model of socially conscious filmmaking in other regards. It transcends mere entertainment and counters a more mainstream strategy of personalizing structural problems through a nuanced portrayal of elderly working nomads while also displaying attention to gender and age.
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.
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.
In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of this forum contribution:
The growing popularity of celebrity life writing and of memoirs which focus on the respective memoirist's specific social, professional, ethnic, or other context also spawned a large number of autobiographical publications by persons in the music industry. The field of musical autobiography is a recent development for which a niche in life-writing scholarship has only been carved out in the past decade. The growing number of autobiographical book publications as well as autobiographical self-representations in non-analog, non-printed, not primarily verbal formats raises the questions as to whether specific genres of hip-hop life writing have been evolving and as to the perspectives from which scholars should discuss them.
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.