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

Stulov, Yuri, Minsk State Lingusitics University, Belarus (chair)

Wilczynski, Marek. University of Gdansk, Poland (chair)

Panel: American Studies in Europe; Past, Present and in the Future
The panel will address the history and the present of American Studies in Eastern Europe and focus on the importance of the study of the USA, problems that have arisen and possible prospects for promoting American Studies in the near future. It will contain four papers presented by Prof. Elvira Osipova (St Petersburg State University, Russia), Dr. Yuri Stulov (Minsk State Linguistics University, Belarus), Prof. Natalia Vysotska (Kyiv National Linguistics University, Ukraine), and Prof. Marek Wilczynski (University of Gdansk, Poland) that will show similarities and differences in the approach to American Studies in the countries of Eastern Europe. As everywhere else in Europe, American Studies in Eastern Europe are rooted in the philological heritage of academic literary history. In post-Soviet countries (Belarus, Russia, Ukraine) the study of America meant American history and literature and only in recent decades American Studies are beginning to become an interdisciplinary field that has evolved from common roots in the Soviet ground. As such American Studies have been subject to ideological pressures and to this day continue to suffer from similar economic and institutional constraints. It is noteworthy that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have developed American Studies “branches” in the former Soviet republics that are affected by national academic traditions, general intellectual climate in their respective societies and links with their neighbors and the United States that used to play a major role in training a new generation of scholars and updating the knowledge of America in the countries where America had been regarded as the image of the ever dangerous Other. Hundreds of scholars and students who had an opportunity to study in the USA under Fulbright, IREX and other programs managed to give a hands-on experience of the USA and to provide a more insightful look into what American Studies should be like. The papers in the workshop are going to explore peculiarities of the development of American studies in Eastern Europe (Belarus, Poland, Russia and Ukraine) focusing on common features and problems that arose in the study of the USA, the specificity of doing American Studies, societal, cultural and ethical configurations in each particular country as well as questions of university curricula, methodology and possible modules of American Studies that can be introduced into the curricula in situations when the field of American Studies is not institutionalized. The speakers will also address the role of national associations for American Studies in encouraging the study of America and research and the various forms that can be used to promote AS: annual international American Studies conferences, student competitions, American Studies journals, reviews of books related to the study of the USA, student and faculty exchange, etc. This is of special importance for post-Soviet countries in light of unprecedented political tensions and confrontation of 2014-2015. The importance of American studies as seen from Eastern Europe consists in promoting fundamental values of liberty, equality in law, popular representation, and human rights and combating xenophobia and, particularly, anti-Americanism, which is quite trendy in some parts of the world today. Today the range of interests of academics and researchers involved in American Studies is quite wide and includes contemporary American history, economy, literature and film, performance arts, popular culture, gender and queer studies, feminism, ecocriticism, minority studies as well as eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury American culture.
Sudholt, Jonathan, Brandeis University, USA: “‘Why Does One-third of the World Hate Us?’: South Park’s Response to America’s Nationalistic Fervor After 11 September 2001”
In its first episode after the 11 September 2001 attacks, broadcast on 7 November 2001, South Park responded to the event and to America’s subsequent military action by sending its four irreverent heroes to Afghanistan, where they observe the US war machine engaged with the national boogeyman of Osama bin Laden and his followers, and, more significantly, where they meet their Afghani doppelgangers, who shock Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny with the news that one-third of the world hates America. Their explanation for this widespread hatred, an explanation the American boys dismiss as circular and therefore invalid, is that “You don’t realize that a third of the world hates you.” While Stan and Kyle object, the show sends Cartman into an alternative cartoon universe, in which he uses Bugs Bunny-style tricksterism to defeat his nation’s archnemesis. I will argue that by this means South Park finds a way to validate the Afghani boys’ argument, and thereby to criticize American imperialism, at a time when an atmosphere of heightened national selfcongratulation made cultural critique an especially delicate issue. First, it presents American foreign policy as the product of a self-indulgent, tv-addicted fourth-grader’s mind. Second, it satirizes an American national identity that, the show argues, constructs America as both victim and conqueror. This attempt to have it both ways is what, for the show, justifies that third of the world in hating America, and creates the blind spot bywhich America renders itself unable to understand that hatred as anything other than invalid.
Sulimma, Maria, Free University of Berlin, Germany: “Not That Kind of Girl: Television’s Troubled Relationship with Academia and TV Criticism”
Publications like Brett Martin’s Difficult Men and Allen Sepinwall’s The Revolution was Televised popularize the idea of a canon of television series as evident in phrases like “Quality Television” or “the Golden Age of Television.” However, the canon is also a problematic notion that critics like Emily Nussbaum have criticized for excluding woman-centered series like Sex and the City (1998-2004, HBO): “Yet there‘s something screwy about the way that the show [The Sopranos] and its cable-drama blood brothers have come to dominate the conversation, elbowing other forms of greatness out of the frame.” The talk focuses on a series that is often hailed as response or update to Sex and the City, and will investigate Girls (2012-, HBO) as well as different discourses of value and authorship surrounding it. Showrunner and actress Lena Dunham has responded to controversies surrounding the transgressions of body norms in the series with criticism of media sexism and the positioning of herself feminist. Such authorial self-descriptions shed light on the gendered implications of canonizing television, and how academic as well as journalistic writing contribute to practices of canonbuilding or canon-defying. Conceptions of authorship are central to these active reception practices as evident in the interconnectedness of text, production, and reception: The (serial) TV criticism of TV recaps, blogs, academic papers or “think pieces” accompanies and influences the subjects that they discuss, positioning audiences as critics rather than solely consumers.

Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Oxford: Polity, 2007.

Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York UP, 2010. Print.

Kelleter, Frank. Serial Agencies: The Wire and Its Readers. Winchester: Zero, 2014. Print.

Lotz, Amanda D. Cable Guys: Television and Masculinities in the 21st Century. New York: New York UP, 2014. Print.
Sulimma, Maria, Free University of Berlin, Germany (chair)

Panel: Gender and “Quality” in American Television
Panel Rationale

Responding to the immense popularity of certain US American television series within the categories of “quality” TV, the discipline of American Studies has increasingly turned to television as an object of research, thereby practicing the field’s characteristic interdisciplinarity as well as exploring implications of what it means to approach American Studies as Media Studies (Kelleter and Stein). In our panel we enter these discussions from the perspective of Gender Studies and Feminist Media Studies, to consider which conceptions of quality are ascribed to a variety of female-centered US television series (Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Masters of Sex, Girls, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt). Although most successful series in the recent QTV boom are male-centered (predominantly male stars and creators), the prevalence of men at the center of most canonical QTV series cannot be dismissed simplistically as sexism. Rather, Jennifer Clark argues that “viewers’ acceptance and enjoyment of these programs is possible, in part, because these representations appear to abide by feminist proposals about gender” (460). Thus, shows like The Sopranos engage with past masculinities in contrast to postfeminist formations, highlighting the (anti-)hero’s relative gender-sensitivity, and illuminating the more stereotypical sexism of his (outmoded) peers (Clark 446). The burgeoning discourses of “quality” around male-centered QTV circulate in the wake of a post-network boom in female-centered programming between 1995-2005, which sought to efficiently exploit female audiences by placing women at the center of an unprecedented number of series (Lotz 5). The majority of these woman-centered programs, however, do not fit comfortably into the rubric of what we now call quality television, and Emily Nussbaum has written shrewdly about the way that the influential series Sex and the City is reflexively excluded from the “quality” canon. Only in the past five years have we seen a large-scale, transnational trend of emphatic female centrality that rebuts the often still-presumptive masculinity of quality TV. Series like Homeland (Showtime, 2011-), Orange Is the New Black (Netflix, 2013-), Orphan Black (Space, 2013-), Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012-), Borgen (DR1, 2010- 13), The Fall (BBC 2, 2013-) and others. These series for the most part conform to many of the accepted definitions of QTV and also feature female leads, with large female audiences. This development can be contextualized as part of what, theorizing the history of US television, Michael Newman and Alana Levine outline as a gradual process of legitimation whereby serial drama in particular metamorphosed from despised feminized forms such as daytime soaps to event television we know as QTV. Viewing that process from a feminist standpoint, we see that QTV series first earned prestige on the backs of male heroes and only then broadened to include women-centered shows such as those mentioned above. This panel’s goal is to elucidate notable features of female-centered QTV and to examine the difficulties inherent in this seemingly simple task; we will discuss the ways in which woman-centered programming often reveals the instabilities inherent in the term and to examine reasons for this breakdown of coherence around this contested concept.

Clark, Jennifer. “Postfeminist Masculinity and the Complex Politics of Time: Contemporary Quality Television Imagines a Pre-Feminist World.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 12.4 (2014): 445-62. Web.

Fuller, Sean, and Catherine Driscoll. “HBO’s Girls: Gender, Generation, and Quality Television.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. 16 Mar. 2015. Web.

Johnson, Merri Lisa. “Gangster Feminism: The Feminist Cultural Work of HBO’s The Sopranos.” Feminist Studies 33.2 (2007): 269-96. Web.

Kelleter, Frank, and Daniel Stein. eds. American Studies as Media Studies. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. Print.

Lotz, Amanda. Redesigning Women: Television after the Network Era. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2006. Print.

Nussbaum, Emily. “My Idea of Fun.” New Yorker. April 13, 2015, 80, 81.
Panel speakers:

Maria Sulimma, Free University of Berlin, Germany: “Not That Kind of Girl: Television’s Troubled Relationship with Academia and TV Criticism”
Jennifer S. Clark, Fordham University, USA: “‘Mary Tyler Moore Can Sell Pantyhose, but How Can Mary Hartman Sell Anything?’: Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman as a Quality Soap Opera”
Hannah Mueller, Cornell University, USA: “The Inside of a Vagina: The Exploration of Female Sexuality in Masters of Sex”
Julia Leyda, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam, Germany: “Quality Cuteness: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”
Summers, Martin, Boston College, USA: “Melancholy and the ‘Madness of Fanaticism’: The Multiple Narratives of Black Insanity in Antebellum America”
This paper explores the multiple ways that black insanity in the antebellum U.S. was understood by physicians, proslavery and abolitionist activists and politicians, and enslaved people themselves. In doing so, it reveals the “polysemic” nature of illness, by which medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman means the ability to “radiate (or conceal) more than one meaning.” As Kleinman and others argue, experiences of illness, as well as the processes of knowledge production that designate particular abnormal biological states as disease, are inherently subjective and culturally bound. This paper focuses on the narratives of mental illness produced by proslavery ideologues, abolitionists, and enslaved peoples. For supporters of slavery, the “madness of fanaticism” narrative served as a countermeasure to antislavery activists’ deployment of the image of the “melancholic” slave, driven to suicide and despair by the brutality of bondage. In both of these narratives, slaves were forced into extreme actions by either severe mental distress or the inability to comprehend concepts such as freedom. The very real psychological trauma that enslaved African Americans experienced became rhetorical ammunition in the struggle over the survival of the institution itself. This politicization of melancholia and fanaticism, however, bore little relationship to how slaves understood mental illness. When it came to explaining and coping with madness, enslaved people were more than mere screens upon which proslavery and antislavery factions mounted their respective ideological defenses. Enslaved African Americans created narratives of mental illness that accorded with their own worldviews with respect to health, disease, community, and social order.
Summers, Martin, Boston College, USA (chair)

Panel: Medical Subjects: Competing Narratives of Race, Health and Medical Activism from Slavery to Civil Rights
Over the past two decades, scholars have explored intersecting histories of race, medicine and health in the U.S. Through studies of differently racialized groups in every region and period, scholars have illuminated processes of racial formation, conceptualizations of illness and health, the professionalization of medical care, and activism around healthcare. Nevertheless, the complexity of this history can remain elusive in studies that rely on a top-down methodology analyzing the production of medical knowledge and establishment of racist policies by public health officials and medical professionals or, conversely, community-based studies of local and traditional understandings and practices of illness and healing practices. This panel explores other options by concentrating on competing narratives of medical knowledge and health practices. Two papers concern antebellum slavery, while the other two address the modern civil rights era. In both periods, an array of actors—whether medical professionals, proslavery politicians, abolitionist activists and enslaved people in the antebellum period, or physicians, government officials, civil rights activists, and journalists in the civil rights era—produced, practiced and fought over racialized conceptions of illness and medical practices. Martin Summer’s paper exemplifies this effort to break down a dualistic approach to race and medicine by analyzing competing narratives of Black insanity in the antebellum period. While Summers begins with medical professionals and with politicians who used narratives of mental breakdowns to argue for or against the institution of slavery, he then turns to the African Americans who actually contended with psychological trauma within slave communities and had quite different worldviews about mental illness and health. Stephen Kenny also addresses slavery but is ultimately concerned with the medical histories of enslaved patients. He analyzes visual representations in medical periodicals that circulated among southern white physicians, in which doctors imparted knowledge about “slave disease” and about medical innovations in the treatment of illness and injury. In addition to analyzing the representations themselves, Kenny’s work illuminates how racial and medical narratives and practices emerged in part, out of physician/patient relationships in the slavery. Finally, Laurie Green’s paper analyzes the politics of race, hunger and malnutrition that erupted in 1967 following the “discovery of hunger” in Mississippi. She is particularly concerned with the racial dynamic in which officials and journalists persistently referred to malnutrition in the U.S. as the “Mississippi problem,” despite its documentation in every region. Using a “relational methodology,” she considers whether this naming obscured tragic levels of malnutrition among Mexican Americans in Texas, even as images of an intractable “culture of poverty” became firmly attached to African Americans.
Panel speakers:

Martin Summers, Boston College, USA: “Melancholy and the ‘Madness of Fanaticism’: The Multiple Narratives of Black Insanity in Antebellum America”
Stephen Kenny, University of Liverpool, UK: “The Visual Display of Slave Sufferers, Their Diseases, and Injuries in 19^th Century Medical Publications”
Laurie Green, University of Texas at Austin, USA: “The Politics of Race, Hunger and Malnutrition from a Relational Perspective: From the Mississippi Delta to San Antonio and Back in the 1960s”
Švrljuga, Željka, University of Bergen, Norway: “Cultural Miscegenation: Black Bodies, White Science, and the Sarah Baartman Industry”
Three decades after the critical discourse brought the hapless Khoisan woman to the general attention (Gould 1985; Gilman 1985), Sarah Baartman still holds a prominent place in the literary output and scholarship, having been adopted and/or appraised as icon of racial, sexual, and medical exploitation. Her role in the African American imaginary may appear surprising because of her African origin and European destiny as exhibit in freak shows and, posthumously, in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Seen in light of sexual and racial exploitation of black women in nineteenth-century US, however, Baartman gives face and name to innumerable victims of the abominable institution and its concomitant racist medical enterprise and stigmatization of black bodies. This paper aims to examine three different generic revisions of the Baartman medical plot—Elizabeth Alexander’s poem “The Venus Hottentot” (1990), Suzan-Lori Parks’ play Venus (1997), and Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus (2003)—and their critique of Georges Cuvier’s science of man, which needed the Khosian woman to argue for Caucasian supremacy. In historical terms, the “black” body was instrumental for giving birth to racialized medical science—a miscegenated body of knowledge as product of cultural and medical “rape”—which the three generic revisions explore by an admixture of gender and racial politics that engage with Cuvier’s postmortem report of Baartman’s body. While the medical-political will serve as the paper’s girder, aesthetic adaptations of the medical plot will provide it with a methodological frame.
Szymkowska-Bartyzel, Jolanta, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland: “Towards the Co-Creation of Cultural Diplomacy. The Case of ‘American Dream’ Exhibition – Poland 2009”
Co-creation is an economic term describing a form of management strategy, that brings different parties together, usually a company and customers in order to jointly produce a mutual outcome. This strategy can be also used in cultural diplomacy when local human resources and filters of local culture and experience can be used to create a mutual projects. Co-creating assures not only the involvement of both parties of the diplomatic dialogue, but also outcome that can be much more powerful in reaching the local audience. The American Dream exhibition was organized by National Museum in Krakow with initiative of American Consulate in Krakow and participation of Poles at different age and background so they could share their versions of American Dream. Although the core of the exhibition was the collection of Photorealist paintings from the collection of Louis K. and Susan P. Meisel, the context they were presented in reflected exclusively Polish experience with American Dream. The paper will present the tools and sources for co-creation strategy used in the project.
Tamaș, Monica, Osaka University, Japan: “Cultural Crossings and Isolation in Yoko Tawada’s America - The Cruel Continent”
Starting from the premise that trauma is quintessential to literary-depicted Chicana identity and that suffering and loss, as destructive forces, often lay the basis for the dissolution of women characters in Chicana fiction, the present paper aims at pinpointing, defining, classifying, and reconceptualizing trauma in two contemporary Chicana novels featuring abused and disenfranchised, yet strong and surprising female protagonists. By either employing classical psychoanalytical approaches or making use of critical props issued by trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth or Ruth Leys, the paper proposes a shift in perspective, one allowing for less conventional explanations of female character portrayal in contemporary Chicana novels. Apparent frailty and physical inferiority turn Chicana characters into canvases all the more interesting to populate with the writers’ own intellectualized notions of strength – of ‘masculinity’, as it were –, proving them more resilient and malleable in the face of adversity, regardless of its form or manifestation. As such, exposure to trauma becomes a means of empowerment in itself, on the condition that traumatic experiences lead to selfawareness and a renewed understanding of the world. Hence, fictional Chicanas graduate to a whole new level of insight and knowledge; they fail to become victims by refusing self-victimization and symbolic marginalization altogether. Be they subjected to rape, domestic abuse, gang violence or just old-school misogyny/social ostracism/gender discrimination, many a time fictional Chicanas manage to rewrite trauma as a journey of becoming. Looking at female characters in two novels by Yxta Maya Murray and Graciela Limón, respectively, the present paper aims at redefining traumatic experiences as spaces of change and reinvention, arguing that many Chicana fictional characters manage to endure in the readers’ collective memory not in spite of (being subject to) trauma, but perhaps even because of (overcoming) it.
Tan, Kathy-Ann, University of Tübingen: “The Aesthetics of Encounter: Queer Affect and Visual Perception/Cognition in American Art and Writing”
This paper extracts Bertrand Russell’s model of the interplay between perception, desire/feeling and sensations/images in The Analysis of Mind (1921) from its original context in Continental philosophy and relocates it within the critical framework of queer American art and visual writing. Russell’s theories on sensations/perception will provide a starting point for our critical analysis of how an aesthetics of encounter functions in practice, in the moment of experiential cognition when visual narrative/textual art and reader/viewer come into contact and the “actual sensations” (1921; 2004: 140) generated in that encounter. How does the transmission of queer affect from artwork to viewer (and vice versa) take place? How are elements of the grotesque and the abject that, by turns, seduce and repulse, integral to (the) queer art (of failure)? How do explorations of moments of discomfort, dis-ease, irritation or disconnect that mark the limits of empathy and identification demand a ‘queering’, a reading against the grain, and an “unlearning” (Halberstam 2012, 10) of intuitive interpretations shaped by (hetero-)normative metanarratives? While this cognitive approach of focusing on the aesthetics of encounter clearly aligns itself with the school of reader-response criticism that emerged in the field of literary studies in the 1960s and 70s in the United States, it is also interested in exploring the elements of “resistant reading” (cf. Judith Fetterley’s “resisting reading” (1978)) as well as the moments of illegibility, irritation, incongruity and disjuncture that arise in the encounter between the queer artwork/visual text and its “interpretive communities” (Fish 1980, 167 ff.). We will discuss how these concerns figure in the works of Emily Roysdon, Bridget de Gersigny and Vaginal Davis, as well as in some of Ali Fitzgerald’s own work.