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

Bateson, Catherine, University of Edinburgh, UK: “‘For America’s Bright Starry Banner’: Expressions of Dual Loyalty, Identity and Nationalism in Irish American Songs from the American Civil War”
While imprisoned by the Confederate Army in 1861, General Michael Corcoran of the 69th New York Infantry Regiment passed the time by gazing ‘into the far-away sky, spangled with its thousands of beaming stars’. His memoirs are littered with sentences paraphrasing the words of The Star Spangled Banner, as Corcoran appropriated its lyrical imagery to emphasise personal devotion to America. However, Corcoran was not American. Born in County Sligo, he immigrated in 1849 and at the outbreak of the American Civil War, commanded the most patriotic Irish regiment in the Union Army. Over the course of the conflict, some 11,000 songs were published within the Union and Confederacy. Amongst these were songs about Irish born and descended soldiers and the Irish American community, expressing sentiments about their military service and place within American society in the 1860s. Dealing with issues of nationalism, ethnic cultural identity and patriotism, this paper will analyse a key sentiment which appears in these songs: the expression of dual national identity to Ireland and America, as articulated through lyrics which sang of the Star Spangled Banner. It will explore how songs which appropriated American national imagery, particularly the flag, communicated Irish allegiance to their new homeland. Many of the lyrics and primary source examples that form the foundation of this paper’s arguments were found while undertaking research in the British Library American Civil War archives, including song sheet collections with ballads that are unique to the study of songs from the conflict pertaining to Irish military service in the Union Army. This paper will argue that American Civil War songs can be used to analyse how those of Irish birth and descent expressed their sense of Irishness while participating in a war which would alter their transnational identity perspective towards the American side of the Atlantic, thus establishing an American Irishness which is unique in the wider history of Irish Americans in the nineteenth century.
Batzke, Ina, University of Münster, Germany: “Documenting the Undocumented: Online Life Stories of Undocumented Youth in the United States”
In forms that range from traditional folk tales to online blogs, stories are told or performed in every known human culture. Unsurprisingly, when undocumented migrants decided to “come out of the shadows” – to make their previously unheard voice heard in public – at the beginning of the 21st century, they also chose to present their lives in the form of stories that recounted their life experiences as “illegal aliens” autobiographically. In particular, after a defeat of the U.S. DREAM Act in 2007, undocumented activists “came out” officially, which in their terms meant to make their life stories and their unresolved legal status public, regardless of the legal risks. Looking more closely at the different forms of life stories created, the generic categorization of undocumented stories as prototypical life writing, or even autobiographies, does not apply. There are possibly as many forms of undocumented life narratives as there are authors committing their stories to paper (or not), and publication: While all produced texts share a self-referentiality, many of the stories are not presented in writing, but instead opt for new modes of online representation. Presenting the case-study of Alberto Ledesma’s Facebook project “Diary of A Reluctant Dreamer,” this paper aims to examine how “writing the [undocumented] self” is performed. It will argue that only the avenues created by new digital media enabled undocumented youth to recount their lives of living “illegally,” while at the same time retaining a certain security of anonymity existent in online story-telling.
Benea, Diana, University of Bucharest, Romania: “Performing Social Justice in the Recent Productions of Cornerstone Theater Company”
My paper examines recent developments in community-based performance in the United States, with a focus on The Justice Cycle (2007-2010) and The Hunger Cycle (2012-) produced by the Cornerstone Theater Company, one of the nation’s foremost ensembles working in this format. Drawing on recent insights from community performance theorists and practitioners such as Jan Cohen-Cruz and Petra Kuppers, among others, my paper discusses these productions in terms of the social and political labor they perform as well as their aesthetic framing. On the one hand, I aim to foreground the ways in which community-based performance functions as an arena for the public discussion of various community-specific issues, thus enhancing the social and political visibility of the respective groups, while also contributing to the process of community building and development. On the other hand, special emphasis will be placed on the dramatic strategies at work in these performances, and on the ways in which they configure new modes of understanding aesthetic production and consumption.
Benito Sánchez, Jesús, University of Valladolid, Spain: “Hospitality In and Out of Place”
The paper traces the rituals of the hospitable encounter from hospitality as interpersonal moral act, essentially out of place, towards its later transformation into an inexorably spatial dynamics, now undermined by the deterritorialized condition of postmodernity (Appadurai). From its earliest origins, Dufourmantelle claims, the hospitable encounter resounds in “utopia,” the nonplace from which “the question of hospitality is (im)posed on us.” The early hospitable encounter, whether in the Bible or in the Greek world, was not necessarily an act of welcoming into one’s own home, territory, space; hospitality involved a crossing over into the space of the guest, to see things from his perspective, to anticipate his needs. The modern experiences of hospitality, inexorably linked to the birth of nation-sates, involved the displacement and relocation of the guest. The space dynamics superseded the cultural dynamics inasmuch as the guest came to be seen as fundamentally a (nationally) displaced individual, a presence who does not belong, whereas the host remains safely in place. Finally, the talk elaborates on what happens to hospitality as spatial dynamics if we accept Appadurai’s contention that we live in a world of widespread mobility, a shrinking world with fewer boundaries, where identities are coming to be deterritorialized, or where as Stuart Hall claims that we “are all, in some way, recently migrated.
Bennour, Lotfi, University of Technology of Belfort-Monbeliard, France: “The Plight of American Women in Office “
Nearly one hundred years ago, Jeannette Rankin from the state of Montana won her House seat in the US Congress. She declared: “I may be the first woman member of Congress but I won’t be the last.” Since then, American women have made significant strides, but much work remains to be done. Recent years have seen the highest levels of women’s representation both in the US house and senate. Nancy Pelosi who made history in 2007 by becoming the first nation’s female Speaker of the U.S House of Representatives is a very good example of this long time change in American politics. Today 104 women are serving in the U.S. Congress. Twenty in the senate and 84 in the House. The number of women in statewide elective executive post is 77, while the proportion of women in state legislatures is 24.2 percent. At the current glacial rate of progress, “women won’t achieve fair representation for nearly 500 years,” says Cynthia Terrell, chair of Fair Vote’s “Representation 2020” project, which has released a recent study on women’s representation. More than Two decades after the “year of Woman” in 1992, women still hold less than 20 percent of congressional seats, despite composing a majority of the US population. By comparison to other nations America is losing ground. It is now ranking ninety-eighth in the world for percentage of women in national legislature, down from 59th in 1998, just behind Kenya and Indonesia and barely ahead of The United Arab Emirates. If Hillary Clinton (the early front-runner in the 2016 Democratic primary), wins the election next year and make history by becoming the first nation’s female president in American history, the US may then join the UK, Germany, Brazil and Argentina as democracies that have had a woman as their top leader. Jeannette Rankin may then be happy and rest in peace forever.
Bercuci, Loredana, West University of Timișoara, Romania: “Graphic Trauma: Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Memoirs”
The rise of new media has broadened the scope of life writing and has given new meaning to the concept of confession. Autobiographical texts in the 21st Century range from printed-word memoirs to graphic memoirs to autodocumentaries, autobiographical videogames and social media posts. Among these radically different ways of organizing self-identity, a favorite topic is trauma. Not only is trauma a preferred “stabilizer of identity” (Assmann) in autobiographical texts, but this mode of writing is favored in the 21st Century for the representation of trauma. Although trauma and memory have been a focus of cultural studies for more than twenty years now, few scholarly works focus on medium-specific representations of trauma and even fewer discuss the tendency of trauma representations to be autobiographical in the 21st Century. In my paper, I hold with Alan Gibbs that traditional trauma theory produced formulaic works, defined by modernist and especially postmodernist techniques. With the waning of of these trends, however, traditional trauma representations have lost their believability. I will argue that this is why there is boom of autobiographical representations of trauma in the 21st Century which have created a new trauma aesthetics. Here, I will look at two graphic memoirs by Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (2006) and Are You My Mother? (2012), in order to see if we can talk about a narrative pattern in the depiction of trauma in graphic novels. The graphic memoirs will be analyzed through the lens of transmedial narratology.
Bergthaller, Hannes, National Chung-Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan; University of Würzburg, Germany: “Cli-Fi and Petrocriticism: Re-framing Literature for the Anthropocene”
Over the past few years, literary scholars have begun to trace the connections between energy use and cultural production. This contribution seeks to correlate such “petrocritical” efforts to the emergent discourse on “climate fiction,” arguing that both of these projects must be seen as attempts to make literature speak to the problems of the Anthropocene. Considered in this light, each of them usefully highlights the other’s respective strengths and weaknesses
Bermúdez De Castro, Juanjo, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain: “US ‘Coercive’ Diplomacy in Films: State-Sponsored Terrorism in the Guise of Entertaining Cinema”

The threat and the use of violence including assassination to intimidate, influence or affect the conduct of a government or a civilian population is defined as an act of terrorism by the US Code. However, as Chomsky points out, when the US government uses the very same tactics, they are defined as “coercive diplomacy” by Army manuals and the US Code too. In 1939 the US had no entangling military alliances and no American troops were stationed in any foreign country. Seventy-five years later the US has military alliances with sixty nations and it has over two million soldiers, airmen and sailors stationed in more than 150 countries. It has used “coercive diplomacy” to intervene in: Indochina, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, South Africa, the Persian Gulf, nearly all countries in Central and South America, supported the invasion of Cuba, distributed enormous quantities of arms to friendly governments around the globe, and fought costly wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. How does American cinema represent this “coercive” diplomacy? Zizec created considerable controversy when referring to the 9/11 terrorist attacks he stated that “America got what it fantasized about in all those Hollywood war movies.” In this paper I will analyse three contemporary Hollywood films different in nature and approach, Black Hawk Down (2001), The Hurt Locker (2009) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), in which I will explore how US “coercive diplomacy” is represented and exported through blockbuster hits disguised as art and entertainment.

Birkle, Carmen, Philipps University, Marburg, Germany: “‘The Taint of Blood’: Miscegenation and the Medical Discourse in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892)”
With the end of the Civil War and the subsequent emancipation of all slaves, the U.S. entered a new phase in ethnic relations, however, not one which gave African Americans social, political, and professional equality. For those who could pass for white and who could, thus, veil their background, access to professions such as the medical one was easier. In my paper, I will first briefly present the situation and position of African Americans in nineteenth-century medicine and the medical discourse and will then explore the representation of African Americans as doctors and nurses in Frances Harper’s novel Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted (1892). I will analyze how Harper exposes racial stereotypes as irrational, often perpetuated under the guise of seemingly scientific knowledge, and often also additionally shaped by gender constructions that made African American female nurses acceptable but African American male doctors unimaginable. I will relate Iola Leroy to historically relevant and socially constructed gender and ethnic/racial prejudices as well as to the status of miscegenation as an unofficial but socially accepted and legally prohibited practice. In this context, medical practices of looking (at patients, symptoms, etc.) gain particular relevance because of the invisible color of “tainted blood.”
Bjerre-Poulsen, Niels, University of Southern Denmark: “Unloading the Gun: President Obama, Executive Power, and the Legacies of the Bush Administration’s ‘War on Terror’”
During the presidential election of 2008, then candidate Barack Obama sharply criticized the Bush administration’s human rights record and its attempt to aggrandize executive power. He described both as violations of American standards and promised that if elected, he would end extraordinary renditions and torture, close Guantanamo, improve the protection of civil liberties, and scale back the claims to executive power that President Bush had made with reference to the ongoing “War on Terror.” The departing Vicepresident, Dick Cheney, thought otherwise. He was a leading proponent of the idea that international law and congressional oversight were hamstringing the executive branch and thus weakening its effort to strengthen national security. Cheney was convinced that the White House had to engage in “reverse lawfare, ” and that the new president would change his mind and adopt the same view once he assumed office. He told rightwing radio-host Rush Limbaugh that “once they get here and they’re faced with the same problems we deal with every day, then they will appreciate some of the things we’ve put in place.” This paper attempts to assess how President Obama has actually handled the legacy of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” - how the president’s declared intent to return to a previous understanding of the proper balance of power in the American political system has played out. It also assesses whether President Obama, despite his declared intent, has left “loaded guns” for future presidents to pick up in the White House.
Björninen, Samuli, University of Tampere, Finland: “Textual Enactment of Narrative Memory in Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Thomas Pynchon”
According to Jens Brockmeier’s Beyond the Archive (2015) our understanding of memory has undergone a change. No longer can we assume that memory is a container, a storage to be accessed and its contents recalled at will. Narrative conception of memory instead highlights the dynamic two-way between past experience and creative narrativization of remembering. Although the metaphor of memory as archive continues to have its uses, literature abounds in innovative ways of writing the workings of memory into text. Art movements at the turn of the 20th Century, in particular, endow memory with visionary qualities. In American literature Wallace Steven’s Domination of Black sees the poet simulate the abruptness of associative memory with a cluster of textual and aural motifs. William Carlos Williams’ The Great American Novel begins as a fog of phrases lamenting the impossibility of writing a novel, but out of this fog, eventually, drives a car, like a recollection summoned back into the working memory. I will treat these examples from early 20th Century American literature as evocations of active, creative memory. In their own way these texts question the notion of memory as a container or archive of past experience and enact the generative and creative potential through which memory becomes a telling. Finally, I will show how the techniques explored by Stevens and Williams find their way to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, but with the function of memory changed. Abrupt evocations and shifts now veer towards the intersubjective and social conception of memory in a way which finds resonance in the post-war context of trauma writing.
Blidariu, Şerban Dan, Independent Researcher, Romania: “Release from Entrapment through Death: A Form of Forced or Willing Escape in Morrison’s Beloved and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin”

While slavery can arguably be described as the ultimate form of entrapment while in this world, release from it can sometimes only be achieved in the next. True or not, this is what two major characters believed: Sethe (Beloved) and Uncle Tom (Uncle Tom’s Cabin). We have chosen them as an example because in their case the moment of freedom, even through death, did not come naturally. In the novel Beloved the idea of release from entrapment through death is present, yet it was not the wish of the person who died. It was, as we will show, a form of forced escape because it was the result of an infanticide. The mother’s motivation for imposing such a drastic measure can be found in her understanding of slavery, which she acknowledges as the worst kind of experience she can imagine. Uncle Tom’s case is both similar and different. It is similar because his death is also caused by someone else: Simon Legree. Yet it is also different because Uncle Tom accepts this outcome due to the fact that he had found motivation in his religious belief. He was convinced that after bearing through all the hardship, he would enjoy eternal freedom in the afterlife.

Blinder, Caroline, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK: “American Photographs Part Two: Walker Evans’ 1974 Polaroids”
This paper seeks to re-evaluate the American photographer Walker Evans' late polaroids – largely overlooked in comparison to his more iconic 1930s documentary work – and their relationship to the concept of fragmentation within American modernism.  More akin to preliminary studies for an ongoing project rather than finalised visions of the urban landscape, Evans' polaroids of individual letters – taken from road signs, advertising, and other public signage – and designed to eventually be sequenced alphabetically into a book of letters, create a new vocabulary, or alphabet, for American photography. Enabling him to 'make new' many of the same subjects he had already photographed during the Depression, Evans' aim was not to encompass ‘all’ of vernacular culture, but to prove the transcendent quality of those everyday objects otherwise deemed disposable, lacking in conventional value and increasingly part of an ever-present consumer culture. In this respect, the polaroids were part of an ongoing project designed to establish a working vernacular culture in which the inherent beauty of the mundane and the everyday is made visible through the photographer’s lens. In an environment in which objects aren't genuinely photographable until they are verifiably obsolete, Evans sought to regenerate the visionary abilities of the artist by getting ever closer to the self-same subjects he had photographed all his life.
Boczkowska, Kornelia Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland: “Spaceflight as the Transcendental and the Mundane Spectacle: Transforming the Technological Sublime in Early Imax Space Films”
In this paper I present and discuss the ways of representing outer space and space exploration ventures in one of the most remarkable early space films produced by Imax, Hail Columbia (1982), The Dream Is Alive (1985) and Destiny in Space (1994). While continuing the U.S. science documentary traditions of visualizing spacerelated concepts, the productions depict the missions of NASA’s Space Shuttle programme and its memorable moments, such as the first launch of Discovery or the crews’ stay on the shuttle. Their form, best exemplified by the late 1970s and 1980s space science documentaries, relied on a stunningly realist format as well as a mediated experience of the astronomical, technological and dynamic sublime, largely present in most American space imagery. Partly contrary to this conception, however, the new ways of deriving spectator’s pleasure also involved both domesticating and trivializing the films’ content, observable, for instance, in occasional references to domestic surroundings and activities (Cieraad 2006) as well as familiar cultural and historical conventions, such as the frontier and astronaut myth or White’s Overview Effect. Based on such a premise, I shall argue that the visual and narrative content of the examined documentaries, seen as multimedia spectacles (van Dijck 2006), tends to portray outer space and space endeavours through reconciling the technological and cosmic sublime with the mundane moments of the mission likely to demythisize the concept of an American transcendental state centered around the idea of exceptionalism and destiny in space (Sage 2014).
Bold, Christine, University of Guelph, Canada: “Did Indians Read Dime Novels? A Transatlantic Exploration”
This paper mounts a transnational reconsideration of popular print culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, based partly on Anglo-American archives in the British Library. The central argument reframes dime novels—usually positioned as the beginning of a distinctive US mass culture and a repository for some of the most demeaning caricatures of “Indians”—as also a resource for Native cultural sovereignty in the period. For almost three decades, popular print scholarship has struggled to move beyond Michael Denning’s analytical paradigm, by which he brilliantly theorized a working-class, “allegorical” reading of dime novels as empowering class-based struggle. I propose to move the discussion into the space of Indigenous culture: by mining the archive with a combination of Indigenous Research Methodologies, Performance Studies, and Transnational Studies, I will tease open the relationship between Native peoples and the dime-novel stereotypes of “Indianness” on which the genre so heavily depended for its popularity. This move belongs to the larger historical recovery of Indigenous agency in commercial entertainments—led by scholars such as Philip Deloria (Dakota), Michelle Raheja (Seneca), and Jace Weaver (Cherokee). My starting point is Go-won-go Mohawk, a Seneca playwright and performer who toured successfully through North America and the British Isles at the turn of the twentieth century. She also starred in a (much reprinted, now forgotten) Beadle and Adams mini-series by Buffalo Bill’s major author, Prentiss Ingraham. Re-positioning this dime series within Mohawk’s transatlantic celebrity—and the popular print-performance nexus more generally within the global network of Indigenous writer-performers—shows how Native authors and readers could seize dime-novel representations in the interests of their own cultural survival and self-determination.