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

Tanrisal, Meldan, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey: “Creating Art Through Facts: Luis Alberto Urrea’s Works and the US-Mexican Border”
Despite the long debates on immigration reform carried on by United States policymakers, only the ills of the border dominate the popular media. The realities of the escalating conflicts along the United States-Mexico border call attention to Chicano writers. The term Chicano includes those who have moved to the United States and those born in the United States of Mexican ancestry. Therefore, Chicano literature is the literature written by Mexican Americans in the United States. According to scholars, the origins of Chicano literature can be traced back to the sixteenth century, however it is following the Mexican-American War, more specifically the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, when the Unites States of America annexed vast territories of Mexico that it began to emerge. As a result of the conquest of their homelands, former Mexican citizens became United States citizens and like Native Americans, they also turned into an ethnic minority. Naturally, the change in legal status did not signify an immediate change in culture or language. Further shaped by the migration of Mexicans, gradually Chicanos or Mexican Americans developed a culture of their own that was unique, and that did not belong fully neither to the United States nor to Mexico. Following the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Chicano Movement began as a reaction to over a hundred years of marginalization. The Chicano culture found its voice in literature and thus made its appearance on the literary scene. It became a vehicle through which Chicanos not only express and represent themselves, but also a means of critique and protest. Chicano writers focus on themes of identity, discrimination, culture, history, migration and the problems of living between two cultures and languages. The 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction, Luis Alberto Urrea is one of the major figures in contemporary Chicano literature. As this paper will convey, Urrea creates art through facts in his nonfiction works such as, Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993), By the Lake of Sleeping Children (1996), and The Devil’s Highway (2003) that explore the US-Mexican border.
Theuer, Eugenie, University of Barcelona, Spain, and Eva Schörgenhuber, University of Vienna, Austria: “From Domestic Violence to Violent Dominatrices: Deconstructing the Dominatrix Figure in Female Artist’s Music Videos”
Approaching the topic of violence in American culture from a different angle, the present paper will draw on critical perspectives of gender studies and feminist criticism to explore new facets of the same phenomenon. Yet, against common expectation, attention will not rest on women as victims of violence, but will shift instead to women capable of inciting violence by studying the female figure of the dominatrix. Although their appearance in American culture by no means confined to this medium, the paper will focus on dominatrix in music videos of female popular musicians. The analysis will be based on the examples of three selected videos, which were chosen as illustrative of the manifold ways in which dominatrix are represented and allow for different interpretations: Rihanna’s “SM” (2010), Britney Spears’ “Work Bitch” (2013), and “Nicki Minaj’s “Only” (2014). The paper will analyse how these female singers stage themselves as dominatrix in their music videos, how biographical knowledge about their respective lives shape our interpretation of the dominatrix motif, and how these interpretations in turn have an impact on our perception of the singer’s star persona. The dominatrix often expresses an ambiguous stance regarding gender relations, and by relating the motif to patriarchal, feminist, and post-feminist discourses, the analysis will finally contemplate to what degree violence is depicted as a means of female empowerment in these music videos. That is, does patriarchy come under assault by the dominatrices in these videos, or is it actually perpetuated?
Tomášik, Marek, Prešov University, Slovakia: “The Visual and the Verbal in Storytelling: the Playful Deployment of Narrative Dynamism in (Audrey Niffenegger’s) Semi-visual Novels and Shorts”
The present paper focuses on the ‘narrative texture’ of Audrey Niffenegger’s visual novels and short stories, analysing the communicative interplay between two channels that are often torn apart and treated separately, namely the visual and the verbal. In her relentless effort to widen the line between text and image and re-entangle the visible with the readable, Niffenegger has crafted both short and extensive narratives that combine aquatint colours and shapes with prosaic imagery. In each and every story that she fashions in this way, the author subtly – perhaps even unknowingly – deploys varying degrees of what can be termed, for lack of a better term, ‘narrative dynamism’. The paper explores the relative distribution of narrative dynamism between the visual and verbal elements employed in Niffenegger’s The Adventuress, Three Incestuous Sisters, The Night Bookmobile, and Raven Girl, making additional references to other non-comic hybrid narratives that manifest a certain amount of non-verbal imagery, such as those by Edward Gorey, Shaun Tan, Cyril Pedrosa, and the like. Upon closer inspection, some hybrid stories employing images and texts turn out to be driven by forces that may very well lead to endless battles rather than clear-cut victories.
Tønnessen, Alf Tomas, Volda University, Norway: “Resistance to Paid Parental Leave in the United States”
According to Bloomberg.com, Papua New Guinea and the United States are the two only countries in the world that do not offer any “legally protected, partially paid time off for women who’ve just had a baby.” In the U.S. only about 12 percent of workers have access to paid leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A 2015 New York Times/CBS poll found that four out of five Americans support the idea of requiring employers to offer paid parental leave. Some companies have introduced paid parental leave, and a few states have introduced paid leave. The Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act (Family Act) has been stalled in Congress since it was introduced by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Congresswoman Rose DeLauro (D-CT) on December 12, 2013. The bill proposes three months paid leave of 66% of the salary. The maximum benefit would be $1,000 per week. In order to finance the paid leave the bill proposes the creation of a social security trust fund to which the employer and employee would contribute two tenths of one percent of wages each. This paper will discuss the resistance to a federal system of paid parental leave and why not a single Republican supported the bill in the House. To what extent can the resistance be explained by anti-Europeanism and the idea of American exceptionalism?
Toth, Gyorgy, University of Stirling, UK: “Commemorating World War Two as U.S. Cultural Diplomacy in Europe after the Cold War”
The recent (2014 and 2015) commemorations of the 70th anniversaries of World War Two certainly stand aut in the ways in which the dramatic changes in geopolitics have loomed over the memory of the last open world conflict, but also in how they have been ‘deploying’ the public and cultural memory of WWII to frame current issues and mobilize for the recent conflict between Russia and the West. However, when read in the context of earlier crises, it becomes clear that such commemorations’ potential for intervention in the politics of the present was both recognized and utilized by governments for their foreign policy objectives. Based on research of government records and using a framework from Performance Studies, this paper will trace the ways in which various branches of the U.S. government used World War Two commemorations for cultural diplomacy in the 1990s and beyond.
Toth, Gyorgy, University of Stirling, UK (chair)

Panel: The Politics of the Memory of “Victory in Europe” World War II, Part I
Even as the last of the World War Two generation – in American parlance “the Greatest Generation”, while in Europe categorized as collaborators, Nazi perpetrators, La Résistance, partisans, and the heroes defending the (often Russian) homeland – are passing away, the cultural memory of the allied victory in Europe (VE) in World War Two has been playing a variety of roles that go far beyond the official commemorations of the 70th anniversary of VE Day in our countries. Less than a month after those ceremonies were over, armed conflict was renewed in the Eastern Ukraine, and the militaries of the Baltics and Eastern Europe have been trening for a new war, hot or cold. In the region, much of this new East-West conflict has been couched in the discourse of the memory of World War Two. It is clear that the memory regimes of WWII are actively being used to reinforce today’s geopolitical divisions in Eastern Europe just as they are celebrating the reconciliation of the former enemies in Western Europe and across the Atlantic. This panel will investigate the present and past of the politics of the Transatlantic memory of World War Two’s allied victory in Europe. In terms of disciplinary approaches, we will bring into dialogue the concerns and methodologies of various strands of Memory Studies with those of American Studies, History, International Relations, Performance Studies, and Popular Music Studies. The topics of our papers will range from the use of WWII commemorations in Transatlantic diplomacy in the post-Cold War period, the role of music and photography in remembering the war, the transnational dimension of the U.S. war cemeteries in Europe, to the contradictory meanings of “liberation” in the Czech memory of the United States.
Panel speakers:

Frank Mehring, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands: “Performative Diplomacy and the Transnational Imaginary of Music”
Allison Wanger, University of Iowa, USA: The U.S. Postwar National Cemetery System and the Transnational Containment of Worl War II Memory
Gyorgy Toth, University of Stirling, UK: “Commemorating World War Two as U.S. Cultural Diplomacy in Europe after the Cold War”
Trautsch, Jasper, University of Regensburg, Germany: “American Exceptionalism and Western Civilization: Re-Imagining the Transatlantic Relationship after World War Two”
This paper seeks to reconstruct how the notion of Western Civilization permeated American political discourse between 1945 and 1955 and how it undermined traditional claims of American differentness from Europe. In particular, it will advance three claims. 1.) The notion of the West served as a decisive justification of America’s continued military commitments in Western Europe after the Second World War. An analysis of the congressional debates and the newspaper discourse demonstrates that the trope of western civilization played a formative role in the shaping of the postwar order and that the fact that even opponents of a further American engagement in Europe such as Robert A. Taft and Herbert C. Hoover acknowledged that America was part of “the West” contributed to the defeat of the exceptionalists/unilateralists in the political struggles over the course of U.S. foreign policy in the late 1940s and early 1950s. 2.) Contrary to common wisdom, “the West” was not exclusively and not even primarily based on shared forms of democratic government, but was frequently imagined as a “Christian civilization” in the early phase of the Cold War. This was essential to legitimize the inclusion of the former fascist enemy states of Italy and West Germany into the Atlantic alliance. 3.) The “reinvention” of America as the guardian of a “western world” after 1945 was a transnational enterprise, as the concept of the West was negotiated in numerous transatlantic networks and promoted by European intellectuals publishing in American newspapers and magazines.
Trušník, Roman, Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Czech Republic: “Jim Grimsley at the Crossroads: From Literary Fiction through High Fantasy to Science Fantasy”
My paper will focus on the “southernization” of genres of science fiction and fantasy in the works of Jim Grimsley, a native of North Carolina, who finds himself at a unique crossroads of southern literary fiction, American gay fiction, and genre literature. While his novels Winter Birds, My Drowning, and Comfort & Joy can be classified as distinctly southern literary fiction with autobiographical traits and a noticeable Gothic flavor, his lesser known novels Kirith Kirin, The Ordinary, and The Last Green Tree belong to the literature of the fantastic, ranging from high fantasy, through the hybrid genre of science fantasy, to science fiction. The paper will examine how Grimsley’s favorite thematic elements, including child abuse, alternative sexualities, or family relationships, are employed in the two groups of novels.
Tryphonopoulos, Demetrios P., University of Brandon, Manitoba, Canada: “The Palingenetic Processus in H.D.’s Late Long Poem Vale Ave”
Ιn the 1930s Sigmund Freud suggested to H.D. that she wished “to be the founder of a new religion,” identifying thus not only the potential but also the actuality of H.D.’s poetic praxis. Instigated with an “avalanche” of occult books Ezra Pound brought to her in 1905, H.D. had continued to translate her reading and experiences into a “continuous” narrative marked by radical syncretism. All along, the goal of her poetical education and of her writing was gnosis, a reading of a modern world in need of being rewritten and reshaped by her own brand of occultism. Though long thought to have culminated in the great work of the mid-1940s, especially Trilogy, H.D.’s syncretism continued to develop and is in evidence in her Hirslanden Notebooks as well as the long poems of her old age, especially Vale Ave. Continuing to discuss “the Eastern mysteries / Pythagoras and rebirth,” the alchemical, syncretist narrative of Vale Ave “introduces Adam’s first wife, Lilith” and invokes Adam as “Lucifer, the Light-bringer,” reworking the story of palingenesis, the ritual of rebirth or soul-making ostensibly experienced by both poet and reader in H.D.’s late poetry and prose, a narrative replete with allusions to initiation ritual and mythopoetic praxis—which moreover is presented from the point of view of a female speaker and, therefore, a voice that questions the patriarchal tradition of “late Rome, dynastic Egyp, legendary, Provence, early seventeenth-century England, and contemporary London.” This paper draws briefly on Hirslanden Notebooks to read Vale Ave in the context of H.D.’s occultist myth of palingenesis, the story of “Resurrection and the hope of Paradise.”
Tryphonopoulos, Demetrios P., University of Brandon, Manitoba, Canada (chair)

Panel: New Translations / New Readings of Hilda Doolitle
This panel offers a cross-section of approaches to the work of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), the American-born writer (1886-1961) whose groundbreaking Imagist poetry established her as a leading Anglo-American modernist in the early twentieth century. Her late oeuvre includes long poems that re-imagine the epic mode, as well as a fascinating collection of fiction and memoirs, most of which remained unpublished until the twenty-first century. The diverse topics of the four papers that comprise the proposed panel testify to the depth of H.D.’s innovative thinking and methodology, and to the breadth of scholarship that her works continue to generate.
Panel speakers:

Demetrios P. Tryphonopoulos, University of Brandon, Manitoba, Canada: “The Palingenetic Processus in H.D.’s Late Long Poem Vale Ave”
Anna Fyta, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece: “Cassandra/ Andromache/ Hecuba: Trojan Women at War in H.D. and Euripides
Tseti, Angeliki, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece: “Telling the Story through Others: Photo-textual Life Writing and Trauma Memory in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project”
This paper wishes to discuss photo-textual life writing as a narrative model that may respond to the challenges of addressing an allegedly unrepresentable traumatic experience, while establishing a nexus of affiliations between different traumatized subjects in a non-linear temporal continuum. As Leigh Gilmore suggests, the construction of an (auto)biographical trauma narrative, where “the portals are too narrow and the demands too restrictive” (The Limits of Autobiography 3), is often performed by an individual narrating their life story through the experiences of others. The Lazarus Project (2008) constitutes an eloquent example of this model, consisting in a disguised autobiography, or a fictional biography of the writer’s doubles, that unfolds on multiple levels. Hemon, a Bosnian writer who was stranded in the US at the outbreak of the war, recounts his narrator’s (Brik)—also a Bosnian refugee—attempts to explore his immigrant identity and work through the traumatic experience of violent expatriation in the present by way of turning to the past and producing a fictional rendition of the true life story of Lazarus Auerbach, an immigrant arriving in the US at the turn of the century. Significantly, these (auto)biographical gestures are performed in photo-textuality, in other words the combination of photography and written text in a relationship of reciprocity and complementarity. As this paper argues, the photo-textual quality of the novel—the aporias raised by the constituent elements’ interaction and the consequent involvement of the viewer/reader in the production of meaning enhances the interweaving of life stories and, thus, testifies to the ways in which, as per Cathy Caruth, “one’s own trauma is tied up to the trauma of another” (Unclaimed Experience 8). More importantly, the juxtaposition of life stories across national and temporal borders enacted in Hemon’s fiction signals a recurrent pattern of displacement and trauma that neither purely addresses the traumatic experience as an “unassimilable residue” of the past in the present, nor clearly delineates the representation of memory as grounded in the present. Rather, it defines a non-linear temporal continuum where the memory of the past is informed in/by the present and vice versa.
Tunc, Tanfer Emin, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey: “Giving the Voiceless a Voice: The Impact of American Women’s Archives on Turkish Feminist Research”
Over the past two decades, one specific way in which Turkish women’s voices have been retrieved from the shadows and margins has been through the creation of women’s libraries, archives, museums, and research centers. These sites, the most prominent of which is the Kadın Eserleri Kütüphanesi ve Bilgi Merkezi (Women’s Library and Information Center), established in Istanbul in 1990, provide a comfortable, non-judgmental atmosphere for female researchers, and function as an activ(ist) “kadınist” (womanist) force in the preservation of cultural and historical information dealing with women—much of which was either destroyed in past generations (for various social and political reasons), or never safeguarded adequately precisely because it dealt with women. As this paper will examine, Turkish feminists have turned to the United States, whose libraries and academic institutions have a great deal more experience with documenting women’s lives, as a framework for the women’s archives that are being established around the country. This collaboration has led to some very important accomplishments, like the establishment of the Kadın Eserleri Kütüphanesi ve Bilgi Merkezi, and interesting transnational discoveries, like the Sophia Smith Collection’s YMCA papers, which narrates the story of American missionaries in Turkey.The archival footprint of American women especially that of missionaries, educators, and reformers, are likewise scattered in Turkish archives, and beckon to be given a voice through excavation. Thus, above all, this paper asserts that researchers must work between the lines to capture the transnational nature of both Turkish and American women’s archives in order to make women’s voices heard.
Tunc, Tanfer Emin, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey (chair)

Excavating Women from the Archives: Feminist Research in the United States, Turkey, and Italy (An EAAS Women’s Network Panel)
This panel will trace the history of women’s archives in the United States, their connection to the Second Wave Feminist Movement of the 1960s and 70s, and how such American archives have “gone transnational,” influencing the development of similar feminist institutions in both Turkey and Italy. This panel will also assess the state of feminist research as a discipline, both within the US and outside its borders, and hopes to stimulate discussion on the current state, and future direction, of Women’s Studies within American Studies.
Panel speakers:

Tanfer Emin Tunc, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey: “Giving the Voiceless a Voice: The Impact of American Women’s Archives on Turkish Feminist Research”
Annessa Ann Babic, New York Institute of Technology, USA: “Show Me your Archive and I Will Tell You Who Is in Power: The Development of Women’s Archives in the United States”
Elisabetta Marino, University of Rome-Tor Vergata, Italy: “Italian Women’s Archives: Their Origin, Development, and American Connections”
Tunc, Tanfer Emin, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey

Shoptalk: EAAS Women’s Network General Meeting
Turek, Maciej, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland: “Big Money and the Big Mo: SuperPACs and Political Momentum in American Presidential Nominations”
With the Supreme Court landmark ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, the campaign finance system in the United States, as well as the process of running electoral and political campaigns, was significantly altered. Allowing virtually unlimited sums of money handed to candidates for public offices by rich individuals, corporations, and labor unions created a process where the elections and nominations have a potential to be decided by the few individuals or powerful interest groups. These influences can be particularly demonstrated in the campaign nomination period. In the general election Super PACs; - entities that are enabled to raise and spent vast sums in supporting or opposing candidates - impact can be successfully neutralized by both national party and candidates; organizations. But during the nomination period, not so many Americans follow the campaign, thus, they do not contribute in the massive numbers. In the intraparty races such as nomination contest the national organization does not support financially any particular candidate. Thus the questions can be asked whether these two factors leave a vacuum for a strong Super PAC influence. This paper looks to consider the Super PACs impact on the emergence and disappearing of the political momentum during the presidential nomination process, with particular emphasis on the forthcoming 2016 presidential cycle. As the selecting both parties presidential nominee is based on sequential voting in primaries and caucuses, money seems to be the crucial factor in effective gaining of the votes. Along with public opinion polls standings, party officials endorsements, and election results in subsequent state contests, money is crucial in gaining political momentum, considered essential to become presidential nominee. So, how much money do SuperPACs put in the nomination process and what are the source of these funds? How do they allocate their resources in terms of primaries and caucuses chronology? Do they serve mainly to haul the frontrunner’s candidacy or can they also be significant for the well-being of insurgent candidates? Finally, in the post-Citizens United circumstances is political momentum during presidential nomination period solely a creation of the SuperPACs, or is it a responsibility of traditional factors (elections results, endorsements, media coverage)?