Spring/Summer 2009 — Volume 4, Edition 2 — Issue credits
From the Editors
ABSTRACT:
After months of preparation, NeoAmericanist is pleased to release Volume 4 no. 2 in our newly redesigned and much improved format. To build on our mission of making the journal an interactive and accessible environment, we have moved to a web 2.0 system, which allows for extensive feedback, discussion, better archiving and a host of other features...
NeoAmericanist Forum
ABSTRACT:
“AfPak” is the controversial neologism recently adopted by many in US foreign policy circles to designate Afghanistan and Pakistan as a shared and monolithic “theatre of operations.” While the term has been popularized by Richard Holbrooke and a host of think tank and university papers on the contentious borderland region, NeoAmericanist’s Simon Toner set out to problematize this new iteration of strategy asking what the idea of blurred boundaries reveals about the US, NATO and the domestic political cultures of some of the countries involved. Asked to address what the shifting language in strategy means or reveals, this NeoAmericanist Forum offers four original, critical papers by scholars across the U.K. and North America, a solicited response by Marilyn Young of New York University, and a series of follow up questions and additional replies for further discussion in our comments section.
Undergraduate
ABSTRACT:
Since the late 1990s, Indian-Americans have begun acting on a desire to see their experience of America reflected through the mass culture they consume. American Desi (2001), which offers a comedic, coming-of-age college narrative of US-born Indian-Americans, was the first true film-based articulation of this desire. A cultural look into identity among ‘Desis’—a word meaning literally “someone from India”—through the lens of youth is the film’s ambitious proposition. This paper places American Desi in its historical and cultural context by privileging what Homi Bhaba coined as “cultural difference”; an examination of the textual articulation of culture to illuminate and analyze the tensions it houses. Through this lens, culture is revealed to inform individuals on simultaneous, multiplex levels that include gender, race and racism, class, consumerism and nationalism. Locating and evaluating the presentation of these dynamic categories and their tensions within the praxis of culture is thus the critical benchmark for American Desi.
ABSTRACT:
Infotainment — the portmanteau of “information” and “entertainment” — is virtually renounced by traditional journalists, who believe that information and entertainment should not be mixed. Despite this resistance, infotainment is an increasingly popular and prevalent method as news networks use it to lure in viewers and advertising dollars that continue to drift to other mediums. Infotainment has many faces, the most popular being cable news talk shows in which pundits such as Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Lou Dobbs host shows that, without admitting as much, blur the lines between news and commentary. This piece explores how infotainment pundits use emotional frameworks, dialogical formats, and appeals to the “good vs. evil” mentality to attract viewers and appeal to deeply ingrained cultural discourses. Focusing particularly on the “good vs. evil” trope in infotainment works, this binary mode of thinking is central to how Americans perceive issues in the news. However, the information news pundits provide is purposely skewed, often patently false, and uses the veil of media objectivity to mask hyperbolic opinion as unbiased reporting. This piece goes on to explore how infotainment not only effects the perception of world events but also fails to reflect the diversity of America, with visible minorities largely appearing only when race-centric stories are discussed. While infotainment reveals deep tensions between journalism’s faith in objectivity, on the one hand, this essay also explores how pundits provide a dangerous “echo chamber” for audiences — encouraging and reinforcing largely under-informed opinions rather than challenging them with a truly journalistic exploration of the complexities of issues.
Graduate
ABSTRACT:
This essay examines the songs, performances, videos, public comments and magazine cover appearances of Beth Ditto, the lesbian lead singer of dance-punk band the Gossip. Drawing from queer theory and fat studies scholarship I argue that Ditto has challenged dominant conceptualizations of beauty, gender and sexuality and, in the process, constructed an alternative to conventional standards of attractiveness. Through a variety of recuperative strategies, Ditto has staged a critique of normative iterations of the body and rescued fatness from its representation as revolting and worthless. She has done this, first of all, by embracing her body in its current form, thus serving as an example of what I term “embodied corpulence.” Embodied corpulence is about taking pride in the fat body in its existing state and refusing to change, shrink or disappear. Second, Ditto has been a major figure in the struggle to reclaim “fat” as a term of positive self-identification, taking away its power to injure. Third and finally, by foregrounding her various identities as a fat lesbian femme, Ditto has brought attention to the commonalities between these identities, including the fact that they can all be contested via performative acts that disrupt their fixity and recast them as sites of strength, complexity and renewal.
ABSTRACT:
Every year on Good Friday, Pax Christi International, a Catholic lay organization dedicated to peace and social justice, performs a radically modern interpretation of the traditional procession, the Stations of the Cross. Unlike conventional re-enactments of the Gospel, Pax Christi’s Stations of the Cross maps the narrative of Christ’s passion onto the New York City landscape, using the modern cultural significance of the city’s landmarks to illustrate to universal relevance of the ancient morality story. Using three modes a performance, witnessing, processing, and speaking, the procession reinterprets both traditional meanings of the Gospel, and the significance of popular landmarks. This paper will evaluate how Pax Christi utilized this traditional ritual to address conflicts and concerns facing the world in 2006, specifically, torture, discrimination, and war. By blending traditional forms of ritual with the hyper-modern landmarks of New York City, Pax Christi blurs boundaries of time and space, politics and spirituality, self and other, whereby challenging participants to reconsider and subsequently transform norms in their faith and in society at large.
Interview
NeoAmericanist interviews Randall Balmer, professor of American religious history at Barnard College, on the past, present and possible future roll of religion in the Presidency.
NeoAmericanist interviews Gwynne Dyer, independent journalist and renowned commentator on American politics, on the Obama administration and the logistics of capitalizing on the crises in America.
Reviews
