Vol. 4 no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2009)

We are going to stay long enough to set up their own institutions

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‘We are going to stay long enough to set up their own institutions’Test

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Obama and the ‘AfPak’ Question

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“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, thisNeoAmericanist 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.

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A review of The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States by Carla Yanni

By Claire Greslé-Favier | comments |

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From the Editors - Spring/Summer 2009

By the editors | comments |

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... 

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‘We are going to stay long enough to set up their own institutions’

Obama and the ‘AfPak’ Question

By | comments |

“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.

Read the full roundtable...

A review of What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality by Theda Skocpol, Ariane Liazos, and Marshall Ganz

By Gregory Klages | comments |

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A review of Mysteries of Sex: Tracing Women and Men through American History by Mary Ryan

By Sarah Imhoff | comments |

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A review of A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir by Donald Worster

By Silas Chamberlin | comments |

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A review of Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong by Paul Chaat Smith

By Sarita Cannon | comments |

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A Diaspora Dialogue

First Generation Indian-American Identity 
and the film American Desi

By Julian Gill-Peterson | comments |

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.  

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A Cross Across 42nd Street

Processional Performance as Peaceful Protest

By Jamie Coffey ReynoldsTara Marie Good | comments |

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.

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