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

Skurowski, Piotr, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland: “Poland’s Post- WWII Borderlands and the Aesthetics of the American Western in Polish Film: Prawo i pięść (The Law and the Fist, 1964), Wilcze echa (Wolves’ Echoes, 1968), Róża (Rose, 2011)
The aesthetics of the American western has played an important role in the history of Polish cinematography. Some of the best known Polish historical movies, most notably perhaps the film versions of Pan Wołodyjowski (Fire in the Steppe) and Ogniem i mieczem (With Fire and Sword), set in the 17th-century Ukrainian steppes (geographic and symbolic equivalent of the North American prairie and the filmic Wild West) and pairing off the chivalric and “European” Polish protagonists with their often ruthless and “exotic” enemies (Ukrainians, Cossacks, Tartars, Turks), inevitably bring to mind the strongly polarized classic Hollywood westerns where the (good, “civilized”) European cowboys and settlers clash with (bad, “non-civilized”) Indians. This paper will focus on three films set in Poland’s immediately post-WWII borderlands – freshly morphed out of what Timothy Snyder called Europe’s war-time “bloodlands” (Bieszczady mountains in the Southeast, Lower Silesia in Southwest and Mazury in Northeast), where the irresistible Wild West metaphor and the “western” plot structure were likewise employed to convey a bundle of national myths pitting the righteous Polish protagonists against the ruthless and ethnically marked enemies in their struggle for law and justice. The paper’s larger goal is to reflect on the politics of cultural importations and the ideological uses of borrowed clichés and formats.
Slade, Joseph W., Ohio University, USA

Film Screening: Dunbar Unmasked.

A Documentary on the Life and Career of Paul Laurence Dunbar
Slavova, Kornelia, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria: “Arthur Miller on the Bulgarian Stage: Politics against Poetics”
In honor of the centenary of Arthur Miller in 2015 my paper looks at the uneven and winding journey of the American playwright on the Bulgarian stage for more than 70 years. It traces the warm reception of Miller’s social drama in post WWII Europe and Bulgaria, its triumph in the 1960s, its forceful silencing in the 70s and its redescovery and reevaluation after the collapse of communism. Special attention is paid to the ideological filters, screening the interpretation and staging of Miller’s drama in the context of the Cold War, the re-writing of his plays, and the use and abuse of his moral universe by the communist propaganda. Additional light on Miller’s reception in Bulgaria is thrown by cross-cultural comparisons with theatrical practices from other European countries. The theoretical framework relies on cultural translation theories and performance studies.
Słotwińska--Pełka, Karolina, University of Warsaw, Poland: “Zombie Protest Novel”
In an ironic essay “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism” Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry offer a grim alternative to posthumanist celebratory vision of the new human, arguing that what awaits the individual beyond the confines of capitalism is the anti-catharthic antisubject, a zombie. As I argue, such a strictly ontological treatment of the figure deprives it of its original political and ethical import, evident in the popularization of zombie walks all around the world. As a walking testimony to the pop-cultural/folk reworkings of power’s hold over material life, the zombie is a powerful expression of popular engagement with the global politics. The awakened biopolitical awareness of the masses has become the focus of many recent zombie narratives, notably Max Brooks’s World War Z (2006) and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011). Revealing the consequences of social inequality on a global scale, Brooks’s mock oral history of a war on zombies reconnects popular sensibilities with the problems of global division of labor and the monstrosities of modern political economy. Whitehead, in turn, presents the underside of this picture in the microcosm of Manhattan’s corporate skyscrapers ravaged by the zombie apocalypse. Both novels can be seen as paradoxical protest novels, foreshadowing a revolutionary awakening of the (undead) civil society.
Soltysik Monnet, Agnieszka, University of Lausanne, Switzerland: “Adventure, Killing and the Pleasures of War”
This presentation will focus on the genre (or more accurately, mode) of adventure, especially in relation to narratives of war and combat. My presentation will begin with a discussion of the way that American scholarship has paid relatively little attention to this genre, which has long been associated with British literature. I will argue that adventure is one the three main modes used to organize war narrative in American culture -- both textual and cinematic as well as fictional and non-fictional -- the two others being melodrama and horror/irony. Adventure as a mode is characterized by ideological investments in both racial and gender formations of a particularly conservative and essentialist nature. It is also very interested in exploring the pleasurable aspects of combat, military experience and killing itself, for which protagonists often discover they have a talent or a taste. In US culture, this blatant pleasure in killing is often in tension with the preference of American audiences for a distinctly righteous violence informed by religious or moral imperatives. By looking at two texts, The Green Berets (1965) and the recent Clint Eastwood film, American Sniper (2014), this presentation will examine how the adventure mode has evolved in post WWII American culture from Vietnam to the present.
Søndergaard, Rasmus Sinding, Center for American Studies, University of Southern Denmark: “The (Ab)Use of Human Rights: Executive-Legislative Struggles over United States Policy towards Nicaragua in the 1980s”
During the 1980s the Reagan administration pursued a policy to rollback communism in Central America, with Nicaragua as the key battleground. This paper examines congressional opposition to President Reagan’s Nicaragua policy, with a special focus on the role of human rights. The Reagan administration fought a two-front war on Nicaragua as it sought to oust Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista regime: It supported the Contra rebels and conducted covert CIA operations, while also waging a domestic “public diplomacy war” to gain public support for its policy. Congressional opponents of Reagan’s Nicaragua policy countered the President by denying aid to the Contras and prohibiting the United States’ participation in the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government through legislation such as the Boland Amendments. These restrictions imposed by Congress and Reagan’s failure to gain congressional and public support for his policy eventually culminated in the greatest foreign policy crisis of the Reagan administration, the Iran-Contra Affair. Congressional opposition was motivated by several factors, including the fear of “another Vietnam”, dissatisfaction with presidential unilateralism in foreign policy, partisan politics, and the desire to stop human rights abuses. Based on extensive research in congressional and presidential archives and other sources, the paper explores the struggle over American Nicaragua policy and shows how both Congress and the Reagan administration evoked the concept of human rights to justify their positions. The paper aims to use the Nicaraguan case to draw perspectives on the wider use of human rights in the Executive-Legislative battles over the making of American foreign policy.
Song, Jung Gyung, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea: “Cultural Hybridization with the U.S. Reflected in the Reception of M. Butterfly in South Korea”
Ka-eul Yoo, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea: “Traumatic Hybridization: Remembering Sex Labor Women and American Military Camp Town in South Korea in the Address Unknown and Tour of Duty” On the 63rd anniversary of the Korean War in 2014, 122 women from an American military camp town accused the Korean government of promoting prostitution for American GIs since the Korean War. This accusation brought to attention the indelible dark side of modernization and violent U.S. hybridization in Korea. American military camp towns in Korea, kijich’on, have multi-layered cultural identities, making them a diasporic place that belong neither to the U.S. or Korea. Kijich’on women, mix-blood children, and kijich’ons in general bear the stigma of being symbols of humiliating subjugation to the U.S. Therefore, their existence and role in constituting the collective national identity of Korea had been devalued and even ignored before experts and activists began active discussion of them in the 1990s.  This paper discusses the aftermath of the U.S. military presence in South Korea, especially on psychological affective of present day kijich’on women and Amerasian children. Analyzing two Korean cultural products, Ki-duk Kim’s movie Address Unknown (2012) and Dong-ryung Kim and Kyoung-tae Park’s documentary Tour of Duty (2012), the paper explores how these two recent products capture the remnants of psychological trauma the aftereffect of troop withdrawals in particular. The paper will also examine how they react against historical and societal alienation by reestablishing identity and healing themselves in light of their marginalized past through the analytical lens of gender, race, class, and nation. This approach is worthwhile to help understanding similar experiences in other Asian countries with military camp towns that can reshape neoimperialistic relationship between U.S. and Asia more fully than ever before.
Sorin Delpuech, Claire, Aix-Marseille University, LERMA, France: “In the Name of the Defenceless: Animality, Femininity in late 19^th Century America”
2016 marks the hundredth anniversary of the death of Caroline Earle White, the mother of animal rights advocacy in the United States, whose legacy can still be felt through women’s enduring and powerful commitment to the defense of animals. Caroline E. White (1833-1916) founded the Women’s Humane Society in 1869 and the American Anti Vivisection Society in 1883 in order to promote the defense of animals in an industrializing society that increasingly treated non-human beings as objects to be exploited or transformed—a trend that is epitomized in the “disassembly line” devised by G. Swift in the Chicago slaughter houses. But as a white upper-class suffragist, C. White developed strategies that also aimed at extending women’s power beyond the domestic realm. By focusing on the rhetoric and the actions organized by White, this paper will address the broader conflations between women’s voices, feminist consciousness, and the issue of animal rights. Crossing the fields of gender and animal studies, it will assess how various women’s rights advocates constructed and deconstructed discursive analogies between female and animal nature in order to promote their own cause as well as that of animals. In a post-Darwinian society, how did women at once exploit and reject identification with animals? To what extent was man’s mistreatment of animals interpreted as proof of male violence and tyranny, thus feeding an essentialist approach that tended to dehumanize men and “overhumanize” women? This will lead to questioning the representations of animality in late 19th and early 20th century America and their impact on the theory of sexual spheres, as well as on the relations between gender, science and power.
Staats, Hans, Stony Brook University, USA: “In the War - Torn land of Ooo: Adventure Time and the Poetics of Boyhood”
Now in its sixth season on Cartoon Network, Adventure Time (2010-present) features the exploits of Finn (voiced by Jeremy Shada), a teenage boy, and his best friend Jake (John DiMaggio), a dog with magical powers to change shape and size at will. Finn and Jake live in the wartorn Land of Ooo and interact with the other main characters of the show: Princess Bubblegum, the Ice King, and Marceline the Vampire Queen. A popular and critical success among children, teenagers, and adults, Adventure Time, according to Emily Nussbaum of the New Yorker, “is the kind of cult phenomenon that’s hard to describe without sounding slightly nuts. It’s a post-apocalyptic allegory full of helpful dating tips for teen-agers, or like World of Warcraft as recapped by Carl Jung.” Through the “accessible” and “universal” language of animation, Adventure Time is able to negotiate a variety of mature themes ranging from postwar trauma to childhood gender, sexuality, and affect. Similar to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, 1884), the representation of boyhood and innocence in Adventure Time reinforces the illusion that time and place, both in the Land of Ooo and along the Mississippi River, are inherently flowing and sequential. Likewise, the horrors of adolescent bodies and postwar mutations in Adventure Time are strategically located within a cultural geography that is outwardly fantastic and, at the same time, marked by a shocking anxiety about the economic, geopolitical, and environmental future. In this regard, my essay has some parallels with the work of Cindi Katz, whose recent article, “Childhood as Spectacle,” argues that anxiety and futurity are masked and managed through the commodification of children, the blurred boundary between adulthood and childhood, and the securitizing of children’s everyday lives. The spectacular construction of boyhood in Adventure Time operates as a tributary of memory and fantasy, a “philosophically risky and, often, emotionally affecting” time and place in which the poetics of childhood live “just outside all the categories that the world considers serious” (Nussbaum).
Stanca, Nicoleta, Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania: “Irish-American Journeys in Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic”
This paper aims to highlight the relevance of an alternative Irish – American history by discussing Colum McCann’s novel TransAtlantic as a semi-historical narrative, combining male historical figures and fictional female characters and relying on multiple time frames. The real figures going from America to Ireland and back are: Frederick Douglass, the African-American, who travelled to Ireland during the Great Famine in a lecture tour to promote his autobiography, Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown, the aviators who flew the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic in a modified bomber in 1919, and Senator George Mitchell, who leaves New York for Belfast to chair the Northern Ireland peace talks leading to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Their journeys may have been forgotten by History, yet their transnational endeavours have contributed to the strengthening of the transatlantic relations between Ireland and America. The fictional characters are imagined as members of the same family, whose (life) journeys, across generations, are intertwined with those of the men previously mentioned and for whom they are portrayed as heroes: the Irish housemaid Lily Duggan, influenced by Douglass, her daughter, Emily Ehrlich, and granddaughter, Lottie Tuttle, the journalists who admire Alcock and Brown, Lottie also encouraging Mitchell, and finally Lottie’s daughter, Hannah Carson, whose son dies randomly shot by paramilitaries. The exquisite blending of fictional and fictionalized persons in one fictional world reinforces the complete imaginative freedom of the fictional writer; thus, we may allow Senator Mitchell take care of his son’s diaper before flying to Northern Ireland, to give only one example of how the Great Famine, the American abolitionist movement, the financial crash of 1929 and the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland events are revisited in McCann’s novel.
Stelmasiak, Katarzyna, Kochanowski University of Kielce, Branch in Piotrkow Trybunalski, Poland: “‘The Vaunted Scenes of Europe’: Thomas Jefferson’s Thoughts on European Entertainment and Culture”

Panel speaker: Thomas Jefferson and Europe: A Complex Legacy
Stelowska, Diana, University of Warsaw, Poland; University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA: “Art as a Tool of US Public Diplomacy towards Europe”
Art Diplomacy seems to be a neglected tool of Public Diplomacy. United States have made great use of promoting its art abroad during the Cold War, but as soon as it ended funding for cultural activities was cut. It was not until the invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan which impaired America’s image that the American Department of State looked back to Cultural Diplomacy for answers. US Cultural Diplomacy towards Europe has been researched quite throughly in the areas of film and music. The area of art seems to have been less interesting to the international relations scholars and this is the gap the author wishes to fill with her research and paper. The aim of the paper is to show what the US government has planned to achieve in Europe by organizing American art exhibitions and also how were they received. Exhibitions researched range from “Advancing American Art” which started its tour in 1946, at the beginning of Cold War to “Mark Rothko” - exhibited in Warsaw in 2013, when America was aiming at strengthening its image after it suffered severely due to the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions. The paper will be preceded by a short survey among the audience. Thus the study will serve as an example of purposefulness of using art as a tool of Public Diplomacy. It may also pose as a useful guideline for the future US activities in the area and be an inspiration for European countries.
Stelowska, Diana, University of Warsaw, Poland; University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA (chair)

Panel: Times, Roles and Places of American Public Diplomacy
US Public Diplomacy is held one of the most effective in the world. Especially the Cold War era has shown its power to change the global politics. The aim of this panel is to show how diverse and broad where the activities undertaken by the US State Department and other government agencies in the area of Cultural Diplomacy, as well as its flaws. The panel is to arouse discussion on the current role of Public Diplomacy in the US Foreign Policy, as it has changed with the end of the Cold War and again after the attacks of 9/11. The panel is to show the diversity of US Public Diplomacy - the case studies presented will focus geographically on United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Poland, France and Latin America and in terms of the subject: on art exhibitions, film and sports. This panel aims not only at presenting different case studies of US Cultural Diplomacy in various regions, but also at presenting different theoretical approaches of the scholars, who represent diverse disciplines.
Panel speakers:
Juanjo Bermúdez De Castro, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain: “US ‘Coercive’ Diplomacy in Films: State-Sponsored Terrorism in the Guise of Entertaining Cinema”
Jolanta Szymkowska-Bartyzel, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland: “Towards the Co-Creation of Cultural Diplomacy. The Case of ‘American Dream’ Exhibition – Poland 2009”
Diana Stelowska, University of Warsaw, Poland; University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA: “Art as a Tool of US Public Diplomacy towards Europe”
Stephan, Lea, University of Toulouse − Jean-Jaurès, France: “Half a Century of Health Care from a Racial Perspective”
Half a century ago President Johnson declared War on Poverty and the US committed itself to end discrimination and addressing the effects of past discrimination. Despite all these good intentions, the Civil Rights Act and affirmative action only had a limited impact on structural inequality. African Americans still represent the most economically fragile community today and personal bankruptcy due to sickness is still among the main factors for loss of middle-class status. Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965 as temporary solutions before achieving comprehensive health care coverage, but still leaving many Americans to fend for themselves in health matters. By 2010 this temporary solution had proven quite long lasting. Moreover, this system allowed a polarization of social policies along racial lines, leading to an identification of Medicare as a white program and Medicaid as a program for minorities and the undeserving poor. This divisive representation along racial lines contributed to making Medicaid more vulnerable to cutbacks and thus increasingly limited in scope. Medicaid failed to help an increasing number of working poor, seriously affecting African Americans who are disproportionately concentrated at the lowest rungs of the social ladder. Moreover, the middle class was left alone facing soaring costs in private health insurance. Because of the greater fragility of the African American middle class, this was particularly detrimental to the black community. This paper will examine how the Affordable Care Act of 2010 manages to address those initial shortcomings of exclusion, lack of economic safety net, and vulnerability to racial polarization by creating a comprehensive, racially effective, but apparently race-neutral reform.
Stevenson, Guy Stevenson, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK: “Sacrifice and Expenditure: The Mad Sexual Economics of Georges Bataille and Ezra Pound”
It has been widely pointed out that the radicalized political atmosphere of 1930s Europe produced a host of unlikely, often unwitting literary and philosophical bedfellows. Even against this backdrop of shifting and interchangeable ideas, however, the common ground occupied by Georges Bataille and Ezra Pound is remarkable. Poles apart politically and aesthetically, the two writers are rarely figured together by scholars seeking to understand the late modernist landscape. Put simply, while Bataille actively opposed fascism through his 1930s magazine Critique, Pound sided infamously with Mussolini; while Bataille cut his teeth writing Surrealist automatic prose, Pound was – in his capacity as a co-founder of Imagism and Vorticism – a zealous advocate of direct, concrete expression. When it came to finding alternatives to a capitalist system both abhorred, however, they sought surprisingly similar solutions, redefining wealth according to pre- Western models. Part of an inter-war trend that saw an unprecedented number of authors, poets and philosophers turn their hands to amateur – and often primitivist - economics, Bataille’s fascination with Aztec sacrifice and Pound’s with an idyllic pre-usurious age brings them together in bizarre and fascinating ways. This paper uses these crossovers to examine the literary and philosophical fallout of a period in which, as Robert W. Dimand puts it, ‘mainstream economists were unusually open to the ideas of monetary reformers whom they would at other times have dismissed as cranks& (Robert W. Dimand, ‘Cranks, Heretics and Macroeconomics in the 1930s’, History of Economic Review, 16, 1991, 11-30).
Streif, Michael, University of Salzburg, Austria: “Digital Archives and Copyright Issues”

Workshop speaker: Digital Archiving in the Context of Early American Studies
Stulov, Yuri, Minsk State Lingusitics University, Belarus: “Prospects for Belarusian Americanists: Lessons of the Past”
American Studies in Belarus is quite a recent phenomenon, some 20 years old, though the study of American history, literature and culture had been part of the university curriculum for students of English, and a few PhD dissertations in these fields had been defended mainly in Moscow. The situation changed with the declaration of independence of Belarus in 1991. The USA was among the very first countries to recognize the new state. Educational programs began to be revised, the study of America becoming a vital issue. Thanks to the Fulbright and IREX programs a number of Belarusian scholars got a chance to study in the USA. Their hands-on experience in the USA greatly contributed to the changes in their home universities in the 1990s. The first American Studies Center was established at the European Humanities University in 1995 providing access to the latest developments in US science, technology and the arts. The Belarusian Association for American Studies was established in 1995 to become a member of EAAS in 2000. The prospects seemed bright. However, political and ideological pressures had their effect on American Studies. The European Humanities University had to move to Lithuania; the American Studies Center was closed down; PhD students began to have problems with defending their dissertations. Therefore, the function of BelAAS has become even more important as it encourages the study of America and research through annual international AS conferences, student competitions and American and European Studies journal published biennially. Its activities are ever more important in light of unprecedented political tension of 2014-2015.