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

Twardowska, Marta, TU Dortmund University, Germany: “Breaking the Code of Silence: Sexual Violence and Harassment against Women Journalists, Female Agency and Feminist Perspectives on the Body”
See, being a woman helped me gain access to the chief justice recollects Kim Barker, the former South Asia bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, in The New York Times article titled “Why We Need Women in War Zones” in a highly jokey manner with an attempt to turn the experience of being touched and groped by a group of men while reporting from Pakistan in June 2007 into a positive one. As noted by Barker farther in the text, [she] was lucky. A few gropes, a misplaced hand, an unwanted advance — those are easily dismissed. Sexual violation of women reporters, claims Judith Matloff of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and a former correspondent for Reuters, is the last remaining taboo in the profession, like trauma used to be. In 2007 Matloff addressed this very problem in the Columbia Journalism Review article titled “Unspoken”, but it went virtually unnoticed. The problem needed spokeswomen: Lara Logan of CBS News, Lynsey Addario, an American photojournalist contributing to The New York Times, National Geographic, and Time Magazine, or Kim Barker, just to name a few, to be finally uncovered and addressed. The breaking of the code of silence by these women reporters has fostered new possibilities for the investigation into the question of embodiment and female agency, being regained through its materiality, over both language and a gendered body. What then may be the implications of a sexed object starting to speak the performative utterances? The focus on the feminist subject of corporeality as the means to undermine fundamental gender binaries within the field of professional journalism leads in fact to the recognition of new hybrid voices of social, cultural, and political significance.
Twelbeck, Kirsten, Leibniz-University Hanover, Germany (chair)

Ferens, Dominika, University of Wroclaw, Poland (chair)

Panel: Knowledge Surrounded by Water: Islands in the American Imagination
Commonly perceived as geographically marginal spaces, islands have played a key role in the history and culture of the United States. Museum visitors learn about the late 16th-century “failed colony” on Roanoke island as a “mystery;” Manhattan Island remains tied to the sentimental legend of a $24 deal in beads; defenders of 19th century slavery conjured up the island of Haiti as a miniature test case for a revolution that had to be prevented at all costs; the so-called “Sea Islands” off the South Carolina and Florida coast have been defined as an early “rehearsal site” for reshaping Southern society after slavery; Ellis Island and Angel Island are heavily contested discursive sites in debates about immigration, deportation, and citizenship; the Philippines, Hawaii, Samoa, Guam, and Puerto Rico suggest an American “frontier” that extends beyond the continental West Coast; the decorated oil islands off the California coast rely on Edenic fantasies to keep criticism low and environmentalist groups out. Their relative smallness makes islands prone to belittling and appropriation, but, as O.A. Bushnell observed, it is thanks to their smallness that “you can see how people affect the land and are affected by it.” Whereas the misuses of land by agribusiness and the military can be done out of sight on the American continent, the smallness of islands makes such misuses much more apparent. Islands, in other words, “know” more than their small size indicates, yet the knowledge they hold is often hidden under a veil of exoticism that this workshop hopes to lift to at least some extent. To understand the meaning of islands in the American imagination we may turn to all the American writers who imagined islands as eden or hell—Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, Jack London all took an interest in islands as an imaginary refuge from the inauthentic, modern world. Until this very day, popular culture combines utopian dimensions of a lost paradise with cultural fears of mischievous natives, man-eating maidens, and disturbingly foreign tribes. A recent example is the television drama series LOST (2002-2010) which casts the island as exotic purgatory and home of supernatural forces and mysterious “others.” Most of these examples refer to islands as locales of a new beginning and as places that derive meaning from their relationship to the continental center. As points of destination for explorers, missionaries, traders, soldiers, tourists, scholars, writers, and artists, they often appear homogenous, immobile, and a-historical; there tends to be something strategic about the choice of island destinations as temporary removes from home, in-between stops during a longer journey, functional sites in a larger national endeavor with global dimensions. Islands as sites of ethnographic research and idyllic holiday destinations, where outsiders take pleasure in observing the insiders’ “banality and boredom” in order to forget their own, are the subject of Jamaica Kincaid extended essay A Small Place (1988). Both this book and Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969) send a strong signal that amateur and professional ethnographers alike are themselves the subjects of the islanders’ curious - and sometimes resentful - gaze. The very title of Stephen Sumida’s study And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawaii (1991) announces a reversal of the gaze from that of the outsider approaching the shore to that of the islander at home. Yet the discourse of islands is by far more complex and multivocal than the logic of “native vs intruder” suggests. As Richard Grove and other scholars of island colonization have pointed out, islands have also been recognized as “in the making”, as heavily connected, conflicted, and historically specific both in themselves and in their relationship to the larger geographical region, including the continental centers.

Our workshop addresses such issues as

· the geography of islands as vehicle for alternative conceptions of identity, society, and nature.

· the island as temporal experience (usually as either a place of the past or the future)

· the positioning of islands as between-worlds, intra-regional links, and transnational connections

· journeys, arrival scenes, and departures: the role of time and movement in the discourse of islands

. the island as home; the view from the shore of the water and the continent beyond

. the island as a site for testing alternative economies and social relations

· the impact of island discourse upon both islands and continental center

· the island as aesthetic experience in contexts of cultural, political, and ecological crisis

. the uses of island representations for exploring new ways of writing (for instance about the relationship between self and other)
Panel speakers:

Kirsten Twelbeck, Leibniz-University Hanover, Germany: “Surfing on Words. Jack London’s Pacific Islands”
Dominika Ferens, University of Wroclaw, Poland: “How Can Islands Know Themselves? The Relationality ofCaribbean Islands in the Writings of Sui Sin Far (1896) and Jamaica Kincaid (1988)”
Dorothea Löbbermann, Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany: “Fantasy Islands and Islands of Fantasy”
Angela Kölling, University of Gothenburg, Sweden: “Black Sails, Green Sails: Pacific Island Utopias”
Tzouni, Maria, Independent Researcher, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece: “De/Mythologizing the Las Vegas Topos: Digesting the Burlesque Lotus”
In less than a century, the city of Las Vegas transformed into the mythological locus of unfulfilled dreams and longings. It became linked to mesmerizing, ephemeral reality/ies, where already suppressed material falls into (deliberate) oblivion. As in the Greek myth of the Lotophagoi, wherein the lotus eaters are bound to forget or neglect duties and routines, the famous slogan “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” indexes a topos analogous to the Greek myth. The Las Vegas topos builds on the fantasy of a new promising dreamland or adult playground, featuring extraordinary sums of money, goddess-like female performers, acts and transactions of ambiguous moral shading, and paradoxical connections among all the above. This topos trades on promises; promises of the realization of the impossible, from gambling in the “Mecca” of casinos to the attendance of burlesque spectacles and the experience of performing bodies in the Strip. In Las Vegas, the phosphorescent lights of the night create multiple cities within the city where a plethora of performers are hosted and occasionally serve as hosts for the casinos, the strip/clubs, and the performance venues. Here, the burlesque shows flesh out a topos in which the mythical bodies of the performers function as the lotus consumed by the spectator who seeks escape from rigid normativity and other distresses. This paper will explore the multiple reasons why and the processes through which the Las Vegas topos and its commercialized burlesque reality feed upon and are in turn fed by the distressing reality/ies of the spectator, thus generating a vicious circle of consumption and oblivion of mythical inflections.
Urakova, Alexandra, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia: “Rereading Antebellum Gift Books: Hawthorne’s ‘A Simple Black Veil’ in The Token”
My paper is the result of my work at the British Library as an Eccles Fellow on the economy of antebellum gift books. In connection with the conference focus on the varying practices and methodologies in American Studies, I will discuss how literary texts can be read in antebellum periodicals where they were originally published. Gift books, or literary annuals, present an especially interesting case for such study being a sentimental genre with a number of distinctive features and specific target audience. The paper will argue that classic texts by antebellum authors rather than merely being placed in gift books engage directly with the culture of gift books and gift book literature. “The Minister’s Black Veil” in The Token, a gift book where Hawthorne published most of his early tales, is one example of such engagement. A tale about alienation, “The Minister’s Black Veil” is anything but a token of affection and sentimental sociality and yet it is embedded in the volume of The Token in many different ways. There is a cross-reference to Hawthorne’s own “The Wedding Knell” in the same volume; there are striking thematic interconnections with other gift book pieces; the tale’s central image, a black veil becoming a material symbol or a token for Pastor Hooper and his congregation resonates with the annual’s title, “The Token,” and the annual’s rhetoric. Recasting this famous story to its original publication in the gift book allows us to look at Hawthorne’s symbolism and his troubled notion of his authorial status from a different perspective. The proposed approach may shed light on Hawthorne’s early “years of obscurity” (later he would describe his tales as “rummaged out” “within the shabby morocco-covers of faded Souvenirs”) as well as contribute to the study of Nineteenth Century American periodicals, print cultures, and communities.
Vajda, Zoltán, University of Szeged, Hungary: “Thomas Jefferson on Class and the European Perspective”

Panel speaker: Thomas Jefferson and Europe: A Complex Legacy
Vale de Gato, Margarita, University of Lisbon, Portugal: “Trauma and Bereavement in the Work of Erika de Vasconcelos”
Erika de Vasconcelos is a Portuguese-American writer, based in Toronto, whose two novels to date interweave the negotiation of transnationality with the treatment of familial bereavement (My Darling Dead Ones, 1997) and collective ethnic trauma (Between the Stillness and the Grove, 2000). In doing so through symphonic narratives that leave the reconstruction of memory to the active reading of each individual, de Vasconcelos emulates the modernist tradition of Joyce and Faulkner — as in their work, characters move from novel to novel, giving us new and dissonant insights into their (hi)stories. As Joyce does through Stephen Dedalus (Kearney 2012), she uses handed-down storytelling and its revisionism to fulfil the relational need of assuaging grief. However, de Vasconcelos differs from those models in two respects: i) memory is retrieved mostly through dialogue between different generations of women witnesses ii) her storytelling is also very much geographically disruptive – especially in her second novel, where a crucial scenery of loss is the Armenian genocide during WW I, and frequent shifts of setting occur among this and other places. This study will explore the hypothesis of a necessary relation between the abovementioned characteristics, linked to a projection of the empirical writer’s condition of second-generation immigrant struggling with authorship as a woman in mainstream North-American literature. Another element that will come into play is the recourse to fictionalized cultures of descent as a source for “bilanguaging” (Kral 2009) in traumatic situations where words are found to be lacking. These lines of enquiry are expected to be productive to further studies on transnational women writers.
Valenta, Markha, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands: “Is a Comparative American Studies Possible? Global Politics beyond ’America’”
The centrality of “America” to the practice and idea of American Studies would seem to make a truly comparative American Studies impossible. Notwithstanding widespread interest and commitment to transnational, continental and global approaches to our field, “America” still always returns as the preeminent referent, subject, and object – the central portal through which history, culture, politics and meaning flow. Yet what current global cultural, economic, geo- and religious politics require are something else: an American Studies that not only addresses America’s work in the world and the world’s response to America, but that also, as necessary, is able to displace “America” itself to the sidelines in the interests issues and dynamics that transcend America: notably questions of global equality, justice, peace, welfare and democracy. That is to say, what is needed is an American Studies able at moments to subsume itself to the greater imperatives of our times - an American Studies in the interests of a moral, intellectual and political community that transcends the bounds of “America” as culture, place, society, problem and ideal. This paper will take up the question of how to do this in theory and in practice, drawing on my current work comparing religious politics in North America, Western Europe and South Asia.
Vallas, Sophie, Aix-Marseille University, France: “The Æestheticization of Memory in Paul Auster’s Autobiographical Work”
After a first career in poetry, essay writing and translation, Paul Auster moved to self-writing in 1982, with The Invention of Solitude, a strange essay which was triggered off by his father’s sudden death and which led him to fiction writing. Even though from that moment on his novels became increasingly successful, Auster has regularly gone back to autobiographical texts, publishing several short texts in the 1990s and, very recently, Winter Journal (2012) immediately followed by Report from the Interior (2013). These autobiographical texts compose a multi-layered self-portrait on which Auster has been working for over thirty years. This paper will focus on the triptych composed of The Invention of Solitude, Winter Journal and Report from the Interior, in which Auster goes back to the beginning of his childhood and starts unrolling the film of his life using a different filter for each exploration of his memory—his father’s ontological absence and their missed relationship, the forever puzzling life of his body and finally the birth and development of his earliest thoughts. About his own attempt at capturing the memory of himself as a child Louis Aragon wrote : «When I think I am watching myself, I imagine myself » (1964), underlining the fictional dimension of any autobiographical enterprise, a dimension which is today widely acknowledged and which undermines the notion of « autobiographical pact » once developed by Philippe Lejeune. Self-writing is a means to «aestheticize » one’s memory (Ph. Vilain), which this paper will analyze through Auster’s prose.
Valsania, Maurizio, University of Torino, Italy: “Thomas Jefferson and 19th-Century Corporeality”

Panel speaker: Thomas Jefferson and Europe: A Complex Legacy
Vaquera-Vásquez, Santiago, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA (chair)

Panel: Borders of the Nation: Open Wounds
Drawing on the famous observation by Gloria Anzaldúa that the US/Mexico border is “una herida abierta,” an open wound, this paper seeks to assess the historical significance and current role of the southern border of the United States. Looking at the border as an open wound, we explore the diverse connections between Border Studies on both sides of the border and American Studies. This paper aims to examine the evolution of the US/Mexico border by probing the effects of regional and national policy towards the border communities, to see how these policies —political, linguistic, and/or cultural— aid or hinder the consolidation of these communities into a national narrative. It will also explore the following questions:

—How has the representations of the US/Mexico border changed over the history of the border?

—How does the border challenge and add to national identity?

—How does the US southern border compare with the northern border?

—Compare and contrast the US/Mexico border with other borders.

—The border as a site of migration.

Panel speakers:

Meldan Tanrisal, Professor, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey: “Creating Art Through Facts: Luis Alberto Urrea’s Works and the US-Mexican Border”
Bilge Mutluay Cetintas, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey: “Borders of the Mind, the Body, and the Frame: Isis Rodriguez and the Masked Woman Series”
Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA: “Sounds Across the Rio Grande: Imagining Border Music”
Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA: “The Open Wounds of the Borderlands”
Verheul, Jaap, Utrecht University, the Netherlands: “Literature, History and National Identity in Antebellum America: John Lothrop Motley as a Literary Writer”
Verheul, Jaap, Utrecht University, the Netherlands (chair)

Krabbendam, Hans, Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, the Netherlands (chair)

Panel: Towards a Transatlantic Global History: American-European Cooperation and Competition to Save the World in the Twentieth Century
The seemingly unceasing growth of world’s interconnectedness, a process arguably started in the late nineteenth century, has spurred historians' interest and curiosity. The discipline has witnessed an abundant production of "global histories" focusing on intersecting connections rather than on parallel trajectories. Overtly pushing the boundaries of traditional diplomatic history, historians as Akira Iriye, Douglas Northrop, Jürgen Osterhammel, Emily Rosenberg, and Odd Arne Westad have considered transnational political, cultural, economic, and social exchanges as the main engine of historical development. Taking on this methodological revolution, cultural historians have reflected on the transformations brought about by the fragmentation of national identities; for economic historians the process of globalization, being it linear or not, has meant an exponential increase in the exchange of goods and factors of production; social historians, to use Matthew Evangelista's expression, have described how collective and organized "unarmed forces" have benefitted from a shrinking world. Of course, historians of the U.S. too have enthusiastically taken part in this debate. Many, like David Armitage and Erez Manela, have focused on what the U.S. has contributed to this process of globalization; others, like Ian Tyrrel, have explored what impact have the forces of globalization had on the shaping of the U.S. as a truly "transnational nation." Princeton historian David Bell, however, posed a compelling question to the historians working in this field of inquiry: Is it possible to write global history in a more vigorous manner? To Bell, some of the most interesting historical phenomena have started with intense changes that were spatially well-defined and that apparently did not follow the intersections so exalted by global historians. Therefore, how is it possible to reckon with the complex changes brought about by the globalization and at the same time provide a credible historical account of the local characteristics of this change? Providing a preliminary response to this complex methodological issue is the main objective of this panel. Here, we seek to explore the relationship of a regional community – the transatlantic one – with the emerging global issues of an increasingly interdependent world. More specifically, we want to look at the ways in which the American-European community imagined new solutions to save the world from imminent danger. On both sides of the Atlantic, individuals and groups identified global threats and began to realize that in order to solve global problems they needed global mobilization. Americans and Europeans often joined hands to identify global problems, draft solutions, recruit supporters, and launch actions. During this process of organizing mutual solutions, however, they also encountered opposition from each other and quarreled about intentions, means, and effects. Reciprocal misunderstandings and joint solutions were therefore integral part of this quintessentially transatlantic process. The central question of this panel is what happened in the transatlantic relationship when a common, global goal brought together citizens from both sides of the Atlantic. Which contributions could each side bring in? How did they harmonize their different expectations? How did they navigate between the call to concentrate on one issue and the temptation to broaden their campaign to a comprehensive program? Did citizens dwell on their national prestige to put weight in the scale and what happened when power balance changed? How did external and internal factors interact in finding (or losing) common ground?
Panel speakers:

Hans Krabbendam, Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, the Netherlands: “Saving Europe: American Protestants’ Visions for a Postwar Transatlantic Relationship”
Jaap Verheul, Utrecht University, the Netherlands: “Literature, History and National Identity in Antebellum America: John Lothrop Motley as a Literary Writer”
Matthew Chambers, University of Lodz, Poland: “Cultural Receivership: International Institutions and Postwar America”
Damian S. Pyrkosz, University of Rzeszów, Poland: “Crisis of Economy or Values? The Ethical Roots of the America’s Economic Crisis”
Vizan, Iuliana, Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania: “Culture, Power and Society: A New Historicist Reading of I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita”
As the title suggests, the present research paper is intended to focus on the concepts of culture, power and society when analyzing Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel, in this way attempting a new historicist analysis of the already mentioned novel. Because new historicism focuses on the individual as being part of a major system that functions on power centers, the paper will specifically resort to analyzing how Yamashita’s characters dealt with the concept of power when thinking about their culture and the society in which they live. Although new historicism is an approach that focuses less on historical events and more on the power relations and structures of a culture in a certain society, the paper will also analyze the ways in which history is reflected in the novel, as it is crucial to relate different representations of power to historical events. Therefore, a selection of important key terms (culture, history, power, society) is needed when attempting a new historicist interpretation of Yamashita’s I Hotel. Another aim of the research is to analyze the different ways in which immigrants of Japanese descent have managed to deal with issues of racism and sexism in a space in which they were considered aliens. To put it differently, representations of power can be encountered in the selected novel due to the fact that there are many scenes which focus on the oppression of societies and institutions over weak individuals. Thus, the paper will demonstrate that in a post-ethnic context past events are still relevant for the contemporary reader due to the numerous questions related to the historical and political sphere reflected in the novel.