European Association for American Studies Conference Ovidius University, Constanta, Romania April 22-25, 2016 Abstracts Adeleke, Tunde, Iowa State University, usa: “The Black American Experience as a Lens for Europe

Kempf, Jean, University of Lyon / Triangle CNRS, France: “Players and Models in American War Photography”
War photographers are a special breed, and a fast-changing one. Among them, Americans—especially young American photographers—are quite numerous. This is due to various factors which have made New York one of the centers of contemporary war photography. The proposed paper is part of a long-term research I am conducting on the topic and aims at presenting some of the preliminary findings of my field study. It focusses on war photographers as a “tribe”—or, more exactly, as tribes. I will question their group identity which is a complex result of economic demands, technological constraints, and the weight of “models”. As the economic situation of photographers becomes more precarious, war photography is seen as a way of making a name for oneself. But whereas documentary photography is undergoing a fast renewal in the US, war photography, because of its specificity, is rather looking towards its own history and is somewhat ill at ease with the radical changes, both in form and structure that the field of photography is undergoing. This is a way of questionning the war image, which has a long tradition in American history, in a comprehensive perspective. Rather than approaching the subject—as is often done—through the prism of visual studies or image analysis, my aim is to focus on the producers and understand the meaning of “assignement” in its modern sense.
Kennedy, Liam, Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College Dublin, Ireland: “Witnessing US Foreign Policy: Susan Meiselas in Central America”
In “Witnessing US Foreign Policy: Susan Meiselas in Central America” Liam Kennedy (Dublin) argues that Susan Meiselas—by bridging practices of documentary photography and photojournalism—has produced an extensive body of work that is reflective about the role of the photographer as “witness” to the effects of American power enacted as foreign policy. Working in Central America in the late 1970s and 1980s she came to believe she was “discovering the reality behind the face of US foreign policy,” yet was frustrated about the potential for photography to act as evidence in documenting US power in the region. This presentation will comment on how she worked to provide such evidence.
Kern, Louis, Hofstra University, USA

Roundtable speaker: Women ‘Against the Grain’ in U.S. Film, 1945-2015
Kidder, Richard, University of Calabria, Italy: “The Imaginary of the Open Road in the English Language Works of Andrei Codrescu”
This paper looks at certain of the Romanian–American writer Andrei Codrescu’s texts, especially at Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century (1993) and Hail Babylon! NPR’s Road Scholar Goes in Search of the American City (1998) and at Codrescu’s selected poetry, in order to examine them in the light of U.S. predecessors such as Walt Whitman, Jack London, John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, and Jack Kerouac in whose works the various thematics of the open road figure prominently. The work will organize itself around the various themes and motifs associated with the road, in order better to explore the Bakhtinian thesis of the chronotope of the open road, and to analyze the manner in which this tropic configuration manifests itself in the North American context in light of its Occidental forbears.
Kim, Hye Won, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea: “Reconstructing American Broadway Musical Theatre South Korea in the Form of Hybridity”
American musical theatre have been giving a major contribution to global performance scene, yet how it has been reproduced and circulated in the international productions has been dismissed from the study of the history of American, and world musical theatre at large; it is only recently it has caught the attention of few scholars. This presentation observes how American Broadway musical has been introduced and received in South Korea, with a focus on the element of hybridization—or the lack of. Particularly when Broadway productions are imported to South Korea, the show is duplicated from its stage props and blocking to the intonation of lines, instead of adapting the text in consideration of the two different culture, historical context of the work and its audiences. The idea that keeping the original production is the most ideal contradicts the very essence of theatre and the experience of it. This talk will build onto Roland Barthes’ theory that theatrical texts are innately open and incomplete, and how theatre cannot be institutionalized but should function as a product of its historical and cultural moment through perpetual hybridization in the globalizing world. This interdisciplinary research will look into 1) the process of text and performance, 2) production process observed through field work such as interviews with the Korean staff and the international production team, and 3) the audience reception in the Korean production of Fiddler on the Roof (1964) to illustrate my thesis. 
Kimble, James J., Seton Hall University, USA; University of Rijeka, Croatia: “Who Was Rosie the Riveter? Investigating the Lost Identity of an American Icon”
This project investigates a number of myths and misunderstandings that have evolved around the

famous “We Can Do It!” poster. Extensive archival research shows that most of what we think we know about this well-known depiction of Rosie the Riveter is untrue, ranging from its role as a recruitment tool in World War II to its empowerment of women on the home front. Even the identity of its model—generally acknowledged to be Geraldine Hoff Doyle—is based on a misunderstanding. In this presentation you will meet the artist J. Howard Miller, examine some of his other wartime posters, and find out more about the unknown woman who might actually have inspired his famous feminist icon. Along the way, you will also be able to reconsider the cultural status of the Rosie the Riveter legend and modern culture’s willingness to believe the historical misunderstandings it has produced.

Kirk, John, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA: “Housing − The Forgotten Civil Right: Reflections on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Failure of the 1966 Civil Rights Bill”
Recent years have witnessed celebrations of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet while the desegregation of public facilities and accommodations and the expansion of the franchise are success stories of the civil rights movement it is unlikely that the failed Civil Rights Bill of 1966 will receive much attention. Unlike the earlier acts, the Civil Rights Bill of 1966 failed to become law because of its attempts to address unfair housing practices. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1968 after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. took up the cause again, its weak provisions made little immediate impact. The struggle for fair housing remains one of the United States’ most important but neglected areas of civil rights. Recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, have underscored the centrality of residential segregation to racial discrimination. This paper will examine the historical context of fair housing struggles and uses a case study of Little Rock, Arkansas, a city that is bound up with the memory of the halcyon days of the movement as the scene of the 1957 Central High School desegregation crisis, to examine the impact of housing practices that were common in postwar southern cities. In subverting federal policies of slum clearance and urban renewal, and in adopting private practices such as blockbusting, redlining, and racial steering, southern cities managed to impose a new structural racism in the built environment at the very same time that they were notionally desegregating other facilities.
Kökény, Andrea, University of Szeged, Hungary: “Borderland Communities: A Comparative Study of the Colonization of Texas and Oregon”
In 2016 it will be the 180th anniversary of the birth of the Texas Republic and the 170th anniversary of the signing of the Oregon Treaty between the Great Britain and the United States of America. The successful Texas Revolution in 1836 meant the end of Mexican rule in the region and led to the American annexation of Texas in 1845, while the agreement of 1846 ended the joint British-American occupation of the Oregon Country and gave the territory in possession of the USA. The two events profoundly changed the geopolitical relations of the American continent. In my paper I propose to outline and compare the early 19th century history of what is now the American Southwest and the Pacific Northwest. The main focus will be on the different phases of American colonization and the formulation of communities in the borderland regions. What were the immigrants’ motives and expectations? Who were they? Where did they come from? How did they relate to and interact with the Native American population, other ethnic groups, and the local authorities? Why and how did they establish their own government and what were its consequences? My presentation will also reflect on how the parallel events were interrelated and intertwined both in national and international politics and diplomacy.
Kolář, Stanislav, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic: “Fictionalizing the Holocaust: The 2nd and 3rd Generation Responses to the Genocide”
Since the authors of the 2nd and 3rd generation did not experience the Holocaust directly, their response to Holocaust trauma necessarily differs from the writers whose experience of atrocities was immediate. The works of the children of survivors depend on postmemory (using Marianne Hirsch’s term) that was inherited from their predecessors or influenced by the general knowledge of the traumatic events of World War II. The vicarious experience of the genocide forced them to use different narrative strategies, to employ what Hirsch termed as imaginative investment. My paper will attempt to address the thin and often problematic borderline between facts and fiction, between reality and imagination in several works of the post-Holocaust authors.
Kölling, Angela, University of Gothenburg, Sweden: “Black Sails, Green Sails: Pacific Island Utopias”

Panel speaker: Knowledge Surrounded by Water: Islands in the American Imagination
Konyshev, Valery, Saint Petersburg State University, Russia: “Congressional Black Caucus and the U.S. Foreign Policy under Barak Obama”
This paper focused on the impact of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) on the  U.S. foreign policy decision-making during the Obama presidential terms. Main foreign policy priorities of  the CBS during the Obama administration are examined. Liaisons and interactions between the CBS, from one hand, and the other caucuses of Congress, Executive Office of the President, State Department, and groups of interests, from the other hand, are analyzed. It is an ambition of the paper to figure out specific features of the CBS strategy and tactics in lobbing of foreign policy legislation. It is important to define efficiency as well as limits of influence of the CBS on decision-making under the first Afro-American president.
Kopp, Luvena, Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany: “On the Symbolic Production of Blackness in a ‘Post-Black’ Era”
According to writer, journalist, and television personality Touré, black identity formation in 21^st-century America is shaped by the era of ‘post-blackness.’ In his book Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now (2011), Touré celebrates, the era of ‘post-blackness’ as a time of infinite identity options wherein African Americans can be said to be grounded in, but are no longer restricted by, dominant notions of blackness. African Americans of the ‘post-black’ age deconstruct established, or stereotypical, notions of blackness by choosing to be anything and anybody at any time. Touré’s optimist and, in many ways, individualist and elitist position de-emphasizes not only the relational aspect of identity formation—the grounding of such formation in structures of interdependencies and power—but also, and perhaps more importantly, the inertia of the traditional conflation of blackness and devious criminality. Contrary to Touré’s concept of blackness as a set of ideas which can be embraced or rejected at will, this paper uses the example of Ferguson to highlight the reality effect of the symbolic production of blackness as civic felony, a notion coined by the French sociologist Loïc Wacquant. Employing the analytical tools of figurational sociology, most notably Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, this paper exposes the covert, and yet structural, workings of ‘race’ as a form of national disposition—an objective and embodied principle of perception and classification—that limits the identity options of blacks, particularly the black poor, in ways unnoticed by critics such as Touré.
Kosc, Grzegorz, University of Lodz, Poland: “From Elizabeth Hardwick’s Eleusian Speech to a New Poetics of Bimetallism: Robert Lowell’s Critique of Usury”
From his poems of the 1950s dedicated to Ezra Pound, to his sonnets of the early 1970s on the opposing manners of speech affected by his second and third wives, Elizabeth Hardwick and Caroline Blackwood, Lowell repeatedly questioned the poetic expression driven by the gold standard and the desire of verbal hoarding. In his view Hardwick embodied an alternative set of values, implying a poetics different from that he had inherited from modernists and he could hear in the voice of his last, British wife. Unstinting, Hardwick would open herself up to the plenitude of language, would yield to its ambiguity and recalcitrance. If Hardwick, a Kentuckian, stood for Eleusis, the natural abundance and fertility of the earth associated by Pound with America, Caroline Blackwood, an Anglo-Irishwoman, embodied Usura. While Hardwick’s expression is likened to the spouting of silver dollars, gold-haired Blackwood has her eyes compared to “silver spoons,” only giving off a mysterious glint, or to a miser’s “closed fist.” Lowell imagined Hardwick as embodying forces which, in Pound’s account, threatened America and which ravaged the British Isles at least since the establishment of the Bank of England through Churchill’s return to gold standard of 1925. Attuned to his Hardwick’s manner of speech, Lowell contemplates a different poetics and a different economics. Thus he anticipates human life as driven by different desires, which promise a different social organization and a different economic system.
Kotlowski, Dean, Salisbury University, USA; University of Salzburg, Austria: “Transatlantic Conceptions of Security: Stefan Zweig, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Paul V. McNutt: 1933-1945”
The 1930s and 1940s were a time of global insecurity—economically, politically, and even culturally—that encompassed the Great Depression, the rise of dictatorships, war, and genocide. Transatlantic connections in the thought and actions of Stefan Zweig, Franklin Roosevelt, and Paul McNutt allow one to see that insecurity, and the attendant quest for security, in a unique transatlantic light. For the writer Stefan Zweig, “security” represented nostalgia for an earlier time of peace and order, hierarchy and continuity. In his autobiography, Zweig described the era “prior to the First World War” as “the Golden Age of Security.” Security during the 1930s eluded Zweig, an Austrian Jew, who fled his homeland following the rise of Hitler and became stateless. Although Franklin Roosevelt’s government did little to help Jewish refugees, the president fostered greater economic security for Americans through his New Deal. Unlike Zweig, FDR saw promoting security as a forward-looking response to the effects of industrialization, one that involved state-sponsored protection against the hazards of daily life. Like Roosevelt, Paul McNutt, a rising U.S. politician, used the power of the state to help people live “as normal human beings,” with freedom from privation and persecution. As governor of Indiana (1933-1937), McNutt put into place Roosevelt-style reforms to alleviate the economic hardships of his constituents. As high commissioner to the Philippines (1937-1939), McNutt went further than FDR, by helping German and Austrian Jews resettle in Manila. As head of the Federal Security Agency (1939-1945), he coordinated Roosevelt’s New Deal and refined his own thinking on security. With World War II looming, McNutt stressed economic security for Americans at home, national security for America abroad, and collective security for nations threatened by Nazism. A study of security in the thought and actions of Zweig, FDR, and McNutt enables one to see transnational links among: (1) an Austrian man of letters born into an upper-middle class Jewish family in one of Europe’s oldest monarchies; (2) a New York patrician who became a U.S. president and patron of the “Forgotten Man”; and (3) a politician from the American Midwest who rose from modest origins to senior positions in the U.S. government. In promoting security, each person played the role of mediator. Zweig aspired to act as a cultural bridge among Europeans, FDR tried to moderate capitalism’s excesses through state-centered reform, and McNutt navigated between the needs of Jewish refugees and resistance to liberalized immigration in America. The historians David M. Kennedy (1998), Elizabeth Borgwardt (2005), and Ira Katznelson (2013) have identified the quest for security as a major theme in U.S. history from 1933 to 1945. A transatlantic, interdisciplinary, and comparative study will enrich the understanding of how and why countries seek to protect their security, an issue with contemporary relevance.
Koutsi, Penny, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece: “The Performativity of Violence in the Theatrical Adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)”
Violence as a social issue has troubled our societies since the first humans organized into groups. The 20th century, although the most democratic era in the sense that around the world democratic authorities exceeded other totalitarian regimes, was inanely the most violent time. The invention of the atomic bomb and the influx of technology changed the way people perceived violence, which at that point obtained indirectness facilitating the detachment of the individual from its immediate results. This distancing effect was intensified with the invention of the Internet which evolved into an inexhaustible source of information. The constant reproduction of pictures and videos from warfare events to animals’ tortures contributed to the integration of violence in the individual’s everyday life and his/her familiarity with it, and even its use as a medium of entertainment. In this way, violence lost its primmer shocking effect and created violence proof viewers. These dilemmas are my present project’s basis and the reason I endeavor to deal with the visualization of violence on stage and, particularly, the adaptation of the popular novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. As for the reason why I chose to show this novel’s adaptation on stage the answer is that as readers we experience the world that the writer presents alone, but when we go to watch a play, the violent world that unveils in front of our eyes transforms into a mass spectacle. Thus, my project aims to explore the ways in which violence can be transferred from the pages of a book on stage and discuss its use as a tool of commending on social life.
Koval, Marta, University of Gdansk, Poland: “The Sounds of Music in Richard Powers’ Novels”
The paper will focus on two novels by Richard Powers – The Time of Our Singing (2003) and Orfeo (2014). Both of them use musical topic that brings into play dilemmas and broader matters of political and social significance: life beyond racial constraints in the pure world of art in The Time of Our Singing and a possibility of spiritual escapism in the complex world of molecular biology in Orfeo. In both novels music functions as a specific language that can be used in the mutual interrogation of individual and society, and a tool which in the characters’ mind can help in ordering reality. The works of music created by great composers of the past that are full of harmony and beauty contrast with the cruelty of political struggle and social prejudice (in the first of the novels) and the dangers of bioterrorism as an expression of the perversion of human mind (in the other one). Music gives shelter from social pressure, helps to preserve individual freedom and charges the world with significance – be it the America seized by the Civil Rights Movement or the luring universe of modern science. The paper will reflect upon the mixture of music, personal life, and social challenges and will analyze how (and if) music and its emotional power can change those who feel it and help the characters come to terms with reality or understand its impossibility.
Kozák, Kryštof, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic: “The Struggle to Shape the Collective Memory of the U.S. in the Czech Republic”
This paper explores the efforts to shape the collective memory of the United States in the Czech Republic. After a theoretical introduction linking collective memory to International Relations theory as well as politics, the paper will provide an analysis of various efforts at shaping the collective memory of the United States in the Czech Republic. Its main thesis is that due to the necessary simplification of the dominant historical narrative and crucial political factors, deeply inconsistent versions of collective memory of United States arise in the Czech context. The United States is generally seen as a liberating agent. This trope of liberation first draws on the collective memory of U.S. military might, such as the lavish annual Liberation Festival, which in 2015 commemorated 70 years since liberation of the town of Pilsen from Nazi German occupation in World War Two. At the same time, this “American” liberation is also sociocultural as well as sexual, with the collective memory of United States full of exported cultural icons. The problem is that most of these cultural icons (also commemorated) were often critical of U.S. militarism as well as the country’s expansionist foreign policy. In conclusion, the paper discusses the implications of the inconsistent collective memory of the U.S. and puts the problem in the wider global perspective of the image problem which the United States is facing at the moment.
Krabbendam, Hans, Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, the Netherlands (chair)

Verheul, Jaap, Utrecht University, the Netherlands (chair)

Panel: Towards a Transatlantic Global History: American-European Cooperation and Competition to Save the World in the Twentieth Century
The seemingly unceasing growth of world’s interconnectedness, a process arguably started in the late nineteenth century, has spurred historians' interest and curiosity. The discipline has witnessed an abundant production of "global histories" focusing on intersecting connections rather than on parallel trajectories. Overtly pushing the boundaries of traditional diplomatic history, historians as Akira Iriye, Douglas Northrop, Jürgen Osterhammel, Emily Rosenberg, and Odd Arne Westad have considered transnational political, cultural, economic, and social exchanges as the main engine of historical development. Taking on this methodological revolution, cultural historians have reflected on the transformations brought about by the fragmentation of national identities; for economic historians the process of globalization, being it linear or not, has meant an exponential increase in the exchange of goods and factors of production; social historians, to use Matthew Evangelista's expression, have described how collective and organized "unarmed forces" have benefitted from a shrinking world. Of course, historians of the U.S. too have enthusiastically taken part in this debate. Many, like David Armitage and Erez Manela, have focused on what the U.S. has contributed to this process of globalization; others, like Ian Tyrrel, have explored what impact have the forces of globalization had on the shaping of the U.S. as a truly "transnational nation." Princeton historian David Bell, however, posed a compelling question to the historians working in this field of inquiry: Is it possible to write global history in a more vigorous manner? To Bell, some of the most interesting historical phenomena have started with intense changes that were spatially well-defined and that apparently did not follow the intersections so exalted by global historians. Therefore, how is it possible to reckon with the complex changes brought about by the globalization and at the same time provide a credible historical account of the local characteristics of this change? Providing a preliminary response to this complex methodological issue is the main objective of this panel. Here, we seek to explore the relationship of a regional community – the transatlantic one – with the emerging global issues of an increasingly interdependent world. More specifically, we want to look at the ways in which the American-European community imagined new solutions to save the world from imminent danger. On both sides of the Atlantic, individuals and groups identified global threats and began to realize that in order to solve global problems they needed global mobilization. Americans and Europeans often joined hands to identify global problems, draft solutions, recruit supporters, and launch actions. During this process of organizing mutual solutions, however, they also encountered opposition from each other and quarreled about intentions, means, and effects. Reciprocal misunderstandings and joint solutions were therefore integral part of this quintessentially transatlantic process. The central question of this panel is what happened in the transatlantic relationship when a common, global goal brought together citizens from both sides of the Atlantic. Which contributions could each side bring in? How did they harmonize their different expectations? How did they navigate between the call to concentrate on one issue and the temptation to broaden their campaign to a comprehensive program? Did citizens dwell on their national prestige to put weight in the scale and what happened when power balance changed? How did external and internal factors interact in finding (or losing) common ground?
Panel speakers: