American Mobilities investigates representations of mobility - social, economic, geographic - in American film and literature during the Depression, WWII, and the early Cold War. With an emphasis on the dual meaning of "domestic," referring to both the family home and the nation, this study traces the important trope of mobility that runs through the "American" century. Juxtaposing canonical fiction with popular, low-budget independent films with classical Hollywood, Leyda brings the analytic tools of American cultural and literary studies to bear on an eclectic array of primary texts...

From Josephine Baker's performances in the 1920s to the 1970s solidarity campaigns for Angela Davis, from Audre Lorde as "mother" of the Afro-German movement in the 1980s to the literary stardom of 1993 Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Germans have actively engaged with African American women's art and activism throughout the 20th century. The discursive strategies that have shaped the (West) German reactions to African American women's social activism and cultural work are examined in this study, which proposes not only a nuanced understanding of African Americanizations as a form of cultural...

This interdisciplinary study examines the still vivid phenomenon of the most controversial psychiatric diagnosis in the United States: multiple personality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder. This syndrome comprehends the occurrence of two or more distinct identities that take control of a person's behavior paired with an inexplicable memory loss. Synthesizing the fields of psychiatry and the dynamics of the disorder with its influential representation in American fiction, the study researches how psychiatry and fiction mutually shaped a mysterious syndrome and how this...

This book presents the meticulous case studies of three individual houses from different eras, which serve to depict the social, political, and cultural effects that domestic architecture and interior design had on the upper class, the city of Boston, and a national American identity. It takes the reader on a journey to 18th and 19th century Boston and provides insight into the lives of these prominent men and women as seen through the perspective of their homes. It is a novel examination of the cultural significance of domestic architecture and interior design and, because of its...

Published within a decade around 2000, Kathryn Bigelow's Hollywood film Strange Days (1995), Karen T. Yamashita's novel Tropic of Orange (1997), and Larissa Lai's novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) are aesthetically intricate, speculative fictions, passing perceptive critique on current political-economic discourses and their subtle reconfiguration of race, class, and gender. This study focuses on these three North American fictional texts whose dystopian near-future scenarios expose the significance of risk as a new rationality of governance. At the same time they illustrate...

After the Storm traces the cultural and political responses to Hurricane Katrina. Immediately after Katrina, and during the past nine years, its devastating consequences for the Golf region, New Orleans, and the American Nation have been negotiated in a growing number of cultural productions - among them Spike Lee's documentary film When the Levees Broke, David Simon and Eric Overmyer's TV series Treme, or Natasha Trethewey's poetry collection Beyond Katrina. This book provides interdisciplinary perspectives on these and other negotiations of Hurricane Katrina and puts special emphasis on the...

Michael Rodegang Drescher analyzes national mythologies in American and German literature. He focuses on processes of mythological resignification, a literary phenomenon carrying significant implications for questions of identity, democracy, and nationalism in Europe and America. Precise narratological analyses are paired with detailed, transnational readings of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Gutzkow's Wally, die Zweiflerin, Brown's Clotel, and Heine's Deutschland. Ein Wintermarchen. The study marries literature, mythology, and politics and contributes to the...

For more than two hundred years hotels have played a significant role in American history. The modern hotel is even an American invention. In five case studies of iconic New York hotels, this book presents the hotel experience of the white upper class, literati, young artists, African Americans, and Jewish Americans in the twentieth century. Using a variety of texts, including autobiographies, movies, and novels, the impact of the hotel experience on society and culture--which has been neglected until now--becomes apparent. This unique approach offers a new way of reading New York and helps...

According to relational sociology, power imbalances are at the core of human conflicts. They shape subsequent physical and symbolic struggles between interdependent groups or individuals. The contributions to this volume highlight the role of power relations in the black experience. By applying key concepts of Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias--habitus, field, capital, symbolic violence, established-outsider relationships--to African American literature and culture, the authors offer new readings of power asymmetries as they are represented in the works of canonical and contemporary black...

The arrival of telegraphy and railroads changed power relations throughout the world in the nineteenth century. In the Mesilla region of the American Southwest, it contributed to two distinct and rapid shifts in political and economic power from the 1850s to the 1920s. Torsten Kathke illustrates how the changes these technologies wrought everywhere could be seen at a much accelerated pace here. A local Hispano elite was replaced first by a Hispano-Anglo one and finally a nationally oriented Anglo elite. As various groups tried to gain, hold, and defend power, that region became bound ever...