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

Gessner, Ingrid, University of Regensburg, Germany: “‘Hillary for America’: Pictorial Staging and the Communication of Power and Politics"
In “‘Hillary for America’: Pictorial Staging and the Communication of Power and Politics” Ingrid Gessner (Regensburg) analyzes the multiple visual dis/appearances of Hillary Clinton (including the Situation Room photo and the picture albums of her two memoirs) and focuses on the political iconography of Clinton’s 2016 campaign for a presidential nomination. Referencing the photo of the Charlie Hebdo unity march of political leaders in January 2015, a transnational lens will be employed to highlight dominant patterns in the representation of political women, such as the performance of authenticity and conspicuous absences/presences (i.e. the editing out of German Chancellor Angela Merkel from the photo in an ultra-orthodox newspaper, as with Clinton in the Situation Room photo).
Gkotosopoulou, Dimitra, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece: “Panem et Circenses: Violence as a Spectacle in The Hunger Games”
In the past violence was considered to be inextricably connected with the concept of spectacle, as Michel Foucault suggests in his work Discipline and Punish. Violence was perceived as a spectacle to be enjoyed by citizens of every stature and of all ages. When this practice came to an end, it was substituted by more secretive methods of inflicting violence that would not attribute negative characteristics to the governing regimes. Nevertheless, violence is still perceived as a spectacle which entertains the masses and this is proven by the fact that it constitutes an essential ingredient of the media reality. Particularly in the United States, where gun holding is considered to be a norm, violence is not perceived as a reminder of past practices, but as an integral part of the sociopolitical reality. Furthermore, the prominent position that both violence and the image hold in the American culture has been conducive to a reinstitutionalization of violence as a spectacle. Since, nowadays, power is entailed in visuality, violence can only designate power through public display. This paper will present a discussion on the issues of violence, power and resistance through Suzanne Collins’ postapocalyptic, dystopian world created in The Hunger Games trilogy. Collins revives an institution inspired by the Roman arenas and presents violence as a popular form of entertainment, while she successfully stresses the fact that what may be perceived as an inhumane, irrational, and violent practice may not be too far from reality.
Glavanakova, Aleksandra, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria: “Cultural Translation: Transcultural Identities post 9/11”
The paper focuses on the interrelation between migration – internal and external – cultural mobility, denationalization, perception of the homeland, and the imagination. It aims to explore identity at the crossroads of cultures in immigrant narratives from the post-9/11 period within the framework of transnational American Studies, building on the premise that in order to understand the ways in which the United States functions globally, its cultural and political expressions and functions should be explored. The analysis will be carried out from the theoretical perspectives of cultural translation and postcolonialism, examining the dynamic transformations of self in the act of movement between languages, cultures and geographic locations. Firstly, the perspective of cultural translation will be applied, which Homi Bhabha interprets as the process of human migrancy marked by the emergence of the “translational transnational” (1990), and the understanding of the postcolonial diasporic authors that “we are all translated men” (Salman Rushdie 1991). Such an approach provides a perspective on translingual and transnational identities and cultures within the ideology and practice of multiculturalism as a recognition and celebration of cultural difference. The paper will focus on issues of cultural identity related to the processes of transcultural mobility in several recent Bulgarian feature films depicting the process of migration to the United States in the decade 2001- 2011, the dislocation and expatriation from post-communist, post-totalitarian Bulgaria, geographically located in Eastern Europe, but historically - at the continuously fluctuating borderland between East and West. The goal is to study the construction of identity and subjectivity in the act of border-crossing: interpreted as linguistic, cultural, political and ideological, as revealed in contact zones and multicultural encounters, which the United States provides. The paper will examine the meaning of this act of translating oneself, alongside the main questions these cultural texts posit: What does it mean to live in translation? How are national belonging, identity and self refashioned when transmitted from one culture and language to another? How are the East and the West constructed in the context of “the anxiety of belonging” (Bhabha 1997), with the feeling of spiritual homelessness implied by Walter Benjamin (1968), and the state of self-imposed “inner immigration”?
Goggin, Maureen Daly, Arizona State University, USA; University of Graz, Austria: “Going Around the Bend: The Inventiveness of Gee’s Bend Quilters”
The quilters of Gee’s Bend, in southwest Alabama, work from a long, distinguished history of African American quilt making. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, quilts in this area have demonstrated multidimensional characteristics and a seemingly endless inventiveness that is the mark of American cultural output. Yet despite ebbs and flows of attention to their artist work, the quilts were, until recently, largely ignored. The art quilters’ work finally caught the attention of critics in the early part of the twenty-first century. However, typically art critics praise the quilts in words similar to Alvia Wardlaw, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts: “There’s a brilliant, improvisational range of approaches to composition that is more often associated with the inventiveness and power of the leading 20th-century abstract painters than it is with textile-making.” In this presentation, I challenge this view by arguing that 20th century abstract painters culturally appropriated African aesthetics for their work, aesthetics that had long inspired Gee’s Bend quilt makers and appeared in the quilts nearly fifty years before the abstract paintings. I argue for understanding the quilts as art proper without resorting to comparisons to paintings, for to do so erases a long social and cultural history of the quilting tradition that was a significant African American marker of Gee’s Bend. Understanding quilts properly as art, however, requires a new paradigm to displace the gendered, vertical one of the turn of the last century; I offer such a paradigm.
Gondor-Wiercioch, Agnieszka, Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora Jagiellonian University Cracow, Poland: “Rediscovering Homing Novels through Eco-Feminist Perspectives – Linda Hogan”
In my paper I would like to focus on the idea of William Bevis (1987) that Native American novels more often explore the theme of coming home than Euro-American novels which show journey outside as crucial for the characters. Native American homecoming is connected with their quest for the lost land and history and in my opinion Linda Hogan is one of the writers whose characters participate in this quest. I would like to focus on the novels The Mean Spirit (1990) and Solar Storms (1995) because they illustrate Hogan’s transition from writing counter-history of the U.S. towards writing an eco-feminist myth. In the background of both novels one can trace a historical context of Choctaws’ relocation to Oklahoma and the tragedy resulting from Oklahoma oil boom as well as the autobiographical context of Hogan’s personal tragedies. While The Mean Spirit is a novel that focuses more on historical perspective, Solar Storms centers around an eco-feminist myth that further complicates transcultural double-coding strategy subtly signaled in Hogan’s Oklahoma novel. In both cases Hogan tries to maintain the fragile balance between the Euro-American novel and Native American story-telling and asks the question what it means to be a Native American woman in contemporary multiethnic context of the American tradition. Supporting my argumentation with the criticism of Catherine Rainwater, Arnold Krupat and James Clifford, I would like to address the issues of Native American representation, sovereignty and the tension between history and myth reflected in the hybrid form of the ethnic novel.
Gonzalez, Jesus A., University of Cantabria, Spain: “Cardinal Points in Contemporary Transnational Post-Westerns”
The term post-Western was first used in the 70s and has been employed since then by a variety of critics to refer to different books and films. Probably the most comprehensive analysis of the category has been provided by Neil Campbell, who in his recent monograph Post-Westerns (2013) has defined “post-Western cinema” as films “coming after and going beyond the traditional Western whilst engaging with and commenting on its deeply haunting assumptions and values.” This paper uses Campbell’s definition to expand it to an international context and analyze some recent transnational films (from Spain, Ireland, Turkey, and Russia) as post-Westerns in Campbell’s sense of the term. If Westerns started as a regional genre, they soon became an international phenomenon. Once Westerns disappeared (with a few notable exceptions) from mainstream cinema, it is only natural that post-Westerns exploiting their heritage appeared all over the world. Transnational post-Westerns use American Western references to apply them to a specific national context, where the West is not necessarily in the geographical West, and where the specific national identity and particular foundation myths are questioned. For example, in Spain, the South played a role similar to the West during the Spanish Reconquista; likewise, Istanbul is in the geographical West, but, in the development of contemporary Turkey, it has played a role similar to the East in American Westerns. Some of the films analyzed from this perspective will be Mickybo and Me (Ireland, 2004), No habrá paz para los malvados (Spain, No Rest for the Wicked, 2011), Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da (Turkey, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 2011), and “Ostern” films from the USSR which use the far East of Siberia as an equivalent of the American West.
González Groba, Constante, University of Santiago, Santiago de Compostela, Spain: “‘When You Disappear in Mississippi, You’re Dead’: The Reverberations of the Emmett Till Case in Southern Autobiography”
One of the most impressive ways of recording history is through autobiography, and the knowledge of the self is inseparable from the knowledge of one's place or region. As historian John Inscoe says, "autobiography and memoir offer an exceptional window into the southern past and an accessible means of addressing the past on a variety of levels" (Writing the South through the Self). Autobiography is never exclusively about the self, and in the case of southerners it often springs from their attempt to understand what aspects of the society they feel alienated from and hostile toward. The infamous case of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black Chicago boy brutally beaten to death in rural Mississippi on August 28, 1955, for allegedly whistling at a white woman, aroused even greater emotion in Mississippi than the Brown decision on school desegregation of the previous year. The brutality of the murder and the ensuing acquittal of the murderers produced unprecedented emotional outburst in both black and white circles. Many southern African Americans from Muhammad Ali to John Lewis dated their civil rights activism to an awareness of the Till case, which occurred when they were also teenagers. Like John Lewis, they felt that Emmett Till "could have been me" (Walking with the Wind). The incident gripped young southern blacks in a special way, "maybe because he was more or less our age" (Hunter-Gault, In My Place). It made them lose faith in the justice system and convinced them of the need for the direct action to which they devoted a life whose maturity Till was denied. For African American activist Anne Moody, herself fifteen at the time, Till became a controlling image of black victimization and a shocking symbol of the precariousness of black lives under Jim Crow. In her memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi, Moody records powerful emotions of fear and hate: "a new fear known to me--the fear of being killed just because I was black," and "hate of the white men who murdered Emmett Till," as well as of African Americans "for not standing up and doing something about the murders." If the Till case raised black feelings of guilt at having been so meek under the weight of oppression, it also made many southern whites confront their guilt as members of the dominant group, as we see in Lewis Nordan's Boy with a Loaded Gun, and engage in finding their own liberation from the shackles of a tradition based on a system of oppression. In the case of the writer Elizabeth Spencer (Landscapes of the Heart), her reaction to the event brought a complete break with her father and with the "closed society" of Mississippi where she suddenly felt culturally dislocated. The white civil rights lawyer Morris Dees wrote that the Till story "touched me so deeply that for the first time I seriously examined the Southern way of life" (A Season for Justice).
Gordon, Ian, National University of Singapore: “Superman: An American Icon”
Since his debut in June 1938 Superman has grown from an American comic book character into an icon of American culture and a globally recognized symbol of America. Clearly Superman is a comic book icon having given rise to the genre of superhero comics. Scholars such as Umberto Eco have accorded him mythological status. As an icon of American culture Superman has a complex history that plays into any consideration of his status. As a fictional character Superman has had so many iterations that probably no one has seen or heard every version. His media appearances include numerous comic books, a comic strip, a radio serial, animated short features, movie serials, three live action television series, five major films, and several animated television series. Superman’s list of product endorsements extends from Peanut Butter to American Express and his public service announcements from buying War Bonds in WWII to anti smoking campaigns. In addition to these instances of Superman the almost eighty year history of the character includes media profiles in The Saturday Evening Post, Time, courts cases over copyright issues, fan discussion in letters pages, scholarly articles and books. Superman is a sum of all these elements and the way he resonates with different audiences probably depends on what alignment of different incarnations they bring to their interaction with Superman. In this paper Ian Gordon will examine this rich history for the way in which Superman conveys idea of what it means to be American.
Got, Monica, University of Bucharest, Romania: “Reading Chicana Feminisms through the Lens of Traumatic Experience: Violence, Madness, and Marginalization in Yxta Maya Murray’s Locas and Graciela Limón’s The Memories of Ana Calderón”
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.
Graff, Agnieszka, University of Warsaw, Poland: “Taming (and Loving) the Feminist Shrew – Another Look at Adam’s Rib”
Adam’s Rib (dir. George Cukor, 1949) is a cross between screwball comedy and courtroom drama, with Tracy and Hepburn as husband and wife and opponents in court. Critics have disagreed on its ideological message. In her pioneering study of the treatment of women characters in Hollywood films, Molly Haskell (1973) described it enthusiastically as “that rara avis, a commercial feminist film […] years ahead of its time when it appeared in 1949.” Stanley Cavell (1981) read Adam’s Rib as a “comedy of remarriage”, a meditation on love, mutuality, reconciliation, and the transfiguration of womanhood. Feminist lawyer and film critic Orit Kamir (2006) views it as an antifeminist movie, one that refuses to acknowledge structural injustice and rejects the very possibility of women’s community. This paper argues that the film’s ideological message – like the narrative structure – is split or dual. The plot is driven by conflicting desires: to take gender justice seriously and to ridicule it. This ambivalence must be read not only through genre conventions but also through historical and social context. The film predates the gender conservatism of the 1950s, the feminism of the 60s and 70s, and the backlash of the 1980s. Oddly, it is a model of both feminist and antifeminist cinema of subsequent decades. It embraces equality in ways unthinkable just a few years later AND it anticipates backlash culture’s strategies treatment of feminism as an obstacle or rival in love (as in Kramer vs. Kramer and Fatal Attraction).
Gray, Sara, Swansea University, Wales, UK: “America, a Settler Colony? The Difficulties of American Settler Colonial Theory”
Settler Colonialism represents a new trend in historical and cultural studies throughout the colonised world. It focuses on the colonial invasion, both past and present, caused by predominantly white settlers and experienced by Indigenous peoples. While the United States fits into a settler colonial model, it is largely ignored by settler colonial theorists in favour of Australia, Canada, or Palestine. This paper will interrogate why less attention is given to the U.S. as a settler society. My aim is to investigate the theoretical and conceptual hesitations to categorise the United States as a settler colony, not the practical limitations. The United States denies its violent and colonising origins, arguably more so than any other settler colony. Settler colonial structures are impervious to regime changes or new constitutions. They obscure their own making, rendering settler colonialism almost invisible. Narratives of vanishing Indians and hardworking white families are constructed, creating a new vocabulary of settlement instead of occupation. The narrative structure of American settler colonialism presents one challenge the theory must overcome. Furthermore, there are academic motivations to avoid using a term like ‘settler colonialism’. Colonialism, however it is qualified, has significant baggage that must be clarified and addressed. The U.S. also boasts a more diverse and complex settler population than any other settler colony. Researchers from different disciplines are investigating American settler colonialism but choosing not to label it in that manner. My presentation highlights the difficulties facing American settler colonial theory and why it must be expanded further.
Green, Laurie, 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”
When the nation re-discovered hunger and malnutrition in the U.S. during the late 1960s, amidst hard-fought struggles around race and poverty, it spotlighted African Americans—especially rural southerners. Print, visual, and broadcast narratives of a voyage by prominent senators to the Mississippi Delta, followed by an epidemiological investigation by physicians from outside the state, bound hunger and malnutrition together with contested beliefs about blackness, Mississippi, the South and the rural (and, frequently, the potential for urban migration to northern cities). Such narratives prevailed well after community activists and public health officials had documented malnutrition, including kwashiorkor and marasmus, among Native Americans, poor whites, Latinos, and African Americans outside Mississippi. This slippage had two major ramifications. For Blacks, medical and political narratives of hunger shifted from physiological impacts to mental development and, by extension, the concept of an irreversible race-specific “culture of poverty.” Conversely, activists among groups such as Mexican Americans had to struggle to make malnutrition and related health crises in their communities visible. In the historiography of race, health and medicine in the U.S., such dynamics are usually missed. In many cases, focusing exclusively on a single racialized group may obscure relationships that had significant consequences at the time. This paper uses a relational framework to examine the crisis of hunger and malnutrition among Blacks in Mississippi and Mexican Americans in San Antonio, Texas in the late 1960s. It will explore how cultural narratives and political activism surrounding each of these disparate yet fundamentally similar crises influenced each other.
Gregorio Fernández, Noelia, University of Alcalá, Spain: “Robert Rodríguez’s Hyperreal Aesthetic of Violence: Exploitation and the U.S.-Mexican Border in Machete”
U.S. mainstream cinema has increasingly provided a site of convergence for depicting both violence within Chicano communities and for promoting a renewed tolerance of racism, reinforcing the popular misconception about this ethnic group. The moment of violence in films, thus, cannot be ever understood as arbitrary or innocent since cinematic violence operates on many registers (Gronstad 2008). In the case of Robert Rodríguez’s Machete (2010), the hyperreal violence displayed throughout the film, an ultra violence marked by “technological overstimulation, gritty dialogues, dramatic storytelling, parody, and an appeal to gutsy naturalism” (Giroux 2002:195) is either experienced or perpetuated by the main character Machete in a way that echoes former Hispanic representations of violence, as corridos or the mythical cult of death. In the film, the protagonist is responsible for the protection of the Mexican American immigrants that suffer the injustices of border policies, either coming from the U.S. side or the Mexican side in an exploitative and parodic style. Yet, as Solórzano-Thompson and Butler claim (2011), the exploitation and mainstream nature of this film doesn’t hide the true reality: there is a real war against immigrants in the United States being fought today. Therefore, the primary focus of my analysis will be how violence emerges in Machete as a form of sociopolitical critique in which Rodriguez offers a rupture with previous representations of violence in U.S. cinematic works. By doing so, I attempt to forge a new understanding of a phenomenon, filmic violence, whose defining feature seems to be perpetually elusive.