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

Whitney, Elizabeth, City University of New York; University of Turku, USA; Finland: “The Dangerous Real: Queer Solo Performance in the U.S.”
This presentation looks at three U.S. based solo performance artists whose work queers popular culture: Dynasty Handbag, a self-deprecatingly comedic performer who embraces artistic and personal failure, M. Lamar, a classically trained vocalist and pianist who explores black identity with a goth/rock sensibility, and Erin Markey, who writes and performs original musicals as pop culture parodies. Aesthetically disparate, their work is connected by common threads of vulnerability and precarity. Central to my argument is the concept of the dangerous real, or the reality of queer experience, and the challenge it presents to an imagined unified U.S. national identity. My research explores what these three artists’ work reveals about intersections of sexuality, gender identity, race, and religion in U.S. popular culture.
Wiegmink, Pia, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany: “A View from Abroad: Slavery, Transatlantic Relations and European Revolutions in African American Women’s Writing”
This paper explores transatlantic relations in various examples of nineteenth century autobiographical writing by African American women. More precisely, it will examine how African American women writers and travellers reflected upon both their personal experiences abroad and the political upheavals in Europe in order to criticize slavery at home. Whereas the experiences and travel narratives by African American abolitionists like Frederick Douglass or William Wells Brown have been extensively researched, little attention has thus far been paid to the transatlantic discourses inherent in the writings by authors like Harriet Jacobs, Eliza Potter, or Nancy Prince. My analysis will show how the women’s physical travels to Canada, England, France, Denmark, Russia and Jamaica, their participation in a transatlantic political discourse of abolition, and comments on European political transformations such as the Decembrist Uprising or the Hungarian Revolution offer them not only a comparative perspective on the peculiar institution but also represent various means of establishing agency for themselves as a (independent) black women, subject positions that profoundly challenge stereotypical depictions of African American women as victims of slavery and dependent on white (abolitionist) benefactors.
Wierzchowska, Justyna, University of Warsaw, Poland: “Embodied Aesthetics in the Public Space: the Visual and the Discursive in Krzysztof Wodiczko’s War Projections Post-9/11”
Krzysztof Wodiczko (b. 1943), a Polish artist based in New York, for over thirty years has engaged in visual-textual interventions in the public space that address political, psychological and ethical questions. In his projections, Wodiczko temporarily appropriates the most spectacular sites of hegemonic authority (e.g. civic buildings, monuments and memorials) by casting upon them images and auto-narratives of the underrepresented (e.g. war veterans, immigrants, the homeless). In my presentation, I want to discuss Wodiczko’s post-9/11 works in which the artist combines the visual and the textual in projecting American war veterans’ testimonies that “transmit the unspeakable experience [of war] in an emotionally charged way.” In doing so, Wodiczko defies the traditional totalizing discourse of the disembodied “universal” subject and works along the lines of the affect theory, understanding the subject as embodied, situated and biographical, constantly on the make by coming into contact with other people. At the same time, by clashing individual images/texts of the underrepresented with hegemonic structures, Wodiczko welcomes a direct yet critical involvement of the spectators who are drawn into becoming active participants of the event by forming a temporary relationship with the speaking subjects. By engaging the full sensorium of his viewers in a strongly cathected artistic situation, Wodiczko makes use of depth psychology, feminism and critical philosophy in order to trigger a transformative process in the spectators’ perception of the ideological status quo.
Wilczynski, Marek, University of Gdańsk, Poland: “Poland: From American Literary History to American Studies”
As everywhere else in Europe, Polish American Studies are rooted in the philological heritage of academic literary history. Before World War II, Professor Roman Dyboski (Jagiellonian University, Cracow) and Professor Tadeusz Grzebieniowski (University of Warsaw, University of Lodz) were pioneers of the study of history of American literature, although it was not yet officially recognized as a field of research in its own right. In 1935, Grzebieniowski published the first account of American Literary History in Polish (Historia literatury polnocnoamerykanskiej), while Dyboski followed in 1958 with the posthumously published study of “great American writers” (Wielcy pisarze amerykanscy). In the communist times, the prewar tradition was continued by Professor Andrzej Kopcewicz, Professor Marta Sienicka (both at the University of Poznan), and Professor Teresa Kieniewicz (University of Warsaw). Even before 1989, since 1970, the number of Americanists in Poland started growing, with more and more young scholars interested mainly in twentieth-century American fiction and poetry. Thanks to the Fulbright Program, they could visit the United States, use American academic resources, and establish contacts with US scholars. After 1989, the situation changed dramatically and today Polish Association for American Studies, founded in 1990, has about 150 regular members representing several universities. The range of interests includes contemporary American literature and film, performance arts, popular culture, gender and queer studies, feminism, ecocriticism, and minority studies, as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American culture and literature.
Wilczynski, Marek. University of Gdańsk, Poland (chair)

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

Panel: American Studies in Europe; Past, Present and in the Future
The panel will address the history and the present of American Studies in Eastern Europe and focus on the importance of the study of the USA, problems that have arisen and possible prospects for promoting American Studies in the near future. It will contain four papers presented by Prof. Elvira Osipova (St Petersburg State University, Russia), Dr. Yuri Stulov (Minsk State Linguistics University, Belarus), Prof. Natalia Vysotska (Kyiv National Linguistics University, Ukraine), and Prof. Marek Wilczynski (University of Gdansk, Poland) that will show similarities and differences in the approach to American Studies in the countries of Eastern Europe. As everywhere else in Europe, American Studies in Eastern Europe are rooted in the philological heritage of academic literary history. In post-Soviet countries (Belarus, Russia, Ukraine) the study of America meant American history and literature and only in recent decades American Studies are beginning to become an interdisciplinary field that has evolved from common roots in the Soviet ground. As such American Studies have been subject to ideological pressures and to this day continue to suffer from similar economic and institutional constraints. It is noteworthy that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have developed American Studies “branches” in the former Soviet republics that are affected by national academic traditions, general intellectual climate in their respective societies and links with their neighbors and the United States that used to play a major role in training a new generation of scholars and updating the knowledge of America in the countries where America had been regarded as the image of the ever dangerous Other. Hundreds of scholars and students who had an opportunity to study in the USA under Fulbright, IREX and other programs managed to give a hands-on experience of the USA and to provide a more insightful look into what American Studies should be like. The papers in the workshop are going to explore peculiarities of the development of American studies in Eastern Europe (Belarus, Poland, Russia and Ukraine) focusing on common features and problems that arose in the study of the USA, the specificity of doing American Studies, societal, cultural and ethical configurations in each particular country as well as questions of university curricula, methodology and possible modules of American Studies that can be introduced into the curricula in situations when the field of American Studies is not institutionalized. The speakers will also address the role of national associations for American Studies in encouraging the study of America and research and the various forms that can be used to promote AS: annual international American Studies conferences, student competitions, American Studies journals, reviews of books related to the study of the USA, student and faculty exchange, etc. This is of special importance for post-Soviet countries in light of unprecedented political tensions and confrontation of 2014-2015. The importance of American studies as seen from Eastern Europe consists in promoting fundamental values of liberty, equality in law, popular representation, and human rights and combating xenophobia and, particularly, anti-Americanism, which is quite trendy in some parts of the world today. Today the range of interests of academics and researchers involved in American Studies is quite wide and includes contemporary American history, economy, literature and film, performance arts, popular culture, gender and queer studies, feminism, ecocriticism, minority studies as well as eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury American culture.
Woods, Marianne Berger, University of Texas of the Permian Basin, USA: “Ladies on Ladders: A Skill Befitting Midwest Women Muralists”
From Mary Cassatt to Hildreth Meiere, women who created murals engaged in what was then-perceived a “manly” vocation. Most of the time the murals were painted but many artists such as Meiere used materials in their work that were also considered manly. This “double-whammy” made the pursuit of mural-making even more difficult for the average woman. One had to be adventuresome and have chutzpah to pursue such an endeavor. Although most murals of the mid-twentieth century were undertaken as projects of the WPA (Works Progress Administration), murals were also created prior to the era known as the New Deal. The first murals created by women were generally done as overmantels for private homes. In 1893 Mary MacMonnies and Mary Cassatt created murals more than sixty-four feet wide for the Women’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. MacMonnies’ mural dealt with the subject of “Primitive Woman” whereas Cassatt’s was linked to the expanded educational opportunities women had in the late nineteenth century and was titled “Modern Woman.” The murals were situated in the tympani of the Woman’s Building at the exposition. After the collapse of the stock market in 1929, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was encouraged to provide opportunities to put Americans back to work. He thus created the WPA and its spin-off agency dedicated to the Arts, the Section of Fine Arts (under the auspices of the Treasury Department). The idea was to help support indigent artists and decorate public buildings -- especially Post Office buildings. It was supposed to be egalitarian with blind sketches that were submitted in local competitions, however, in the twelve states identified as the midwest, only twelve percent of the winning Post Office murals were executed by women. This may be in part because fewer woman submitted sketches for consideration. In this paper murals located in the area known as the Midwest will be examined along with the themes the women pursued in their works. According to scholars Marlene Park & Gerald E. Markowitz, “One of the themes that emerges most clearly in the Midwest is the role of the pioneer and the farmer, not only in producing economic growth...but also in developing political democracy.” A more thorough investigation will reveal whether women pursued different themes or whether in fact they were similar to those “assumed” to be more “manly.”
Yasko, Ekaterina, The National Research University “Higher School of Economics”, Moscow, Russia: “Music and the Architecture of Memory: a Comparative Reading of Carson McCullers’s Sojourner and Vladimir Nabokov’s Music”
The paper offers a comparative reading of the stories by Carson McCullers, the American novelist and short story writer, and the Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov, focusing on the reconstruction of memory through the prism of engagement in musical experience. The stories share the subject of the protagonist’s painful encounter with his divorced spouse. The music he happens to be caught in – accidentally or advisedly – makes, referring to Nabokov’s biographical metaphor, the memory speak. Both writers employ the image of music as a sheltering “domelike” medium, which guides the character in time and space. The trajectory of memories moves backwards, giving voice to the long-silenced traumatizing experience of loss. According to Rosalind Cartrwright, “Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original…it is a continuing act of creation”. In this regard, the paper examines the essence of the transformation, brought in by the reliving of the memories through the musical experience, which challenges the horizons of the character’s humaneness and introduces the ability to forgive.
Yoo, Ka-eul, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea: “Traumatic Hybridization: Remembering Sex Labor Women and American Military Camp Town in South Korea in the Address Unknown and Tour of Duty”
On the 63rd anniversary of the Korean War in 2014, 122 women from an American military camp town accused the Korean government of promoting prostitution for American GIs since the Korean War. This accusation brought to attention the indelible dark side of modernization and violent U.S. hybridization in Korea. American military camp towns in Korea, kijich’on, have multi-layered cultural identities, making them a diasporic place that belong neither to the U.S. or Korea. Kijich’on women, mix-blood children, and kijich’ons in general bear the stigma of being symbols of humiliating subjugation to the U.S. Therefore, their existence and role in constituting the collective national identity of Korea had been devalued and even ignored before experts and activists began active discussion of them in the 1990s. This paper discusses the aftermath of the U.S. military presence in South Korea, especially on psychological affective of present day kijich’on women and Amerasian children. Analyzing two Korean cultural products, Ki-duk Kim’s movie Address Unknown (2012) and Dong-ryung Kim and Kyoung-tae Park’s documentary Tour of Duty (2012), the paper explores how these two recent products capture the remnants of psychological trauma the aftereffect of troop withdrawals in particular. The paper will also examine how they react against historical and societal alienation by reestablishing identity and healing themselves in light of their marginalized past through the analytical lens of gender, race, class, and nation. This approach is worthwhile to help understanding similar experiences in other Asian countries with military camp towns that can reshape neoimperialistic relationship between U.S. and Asia more fully than ever before.
Yoo, Min Kyung, Free University of Berlin, Germany: “Transnational Hybridization with the U.S.- from the Perspective of Media Ecology”
My presentation observes the pervasive American influence abroad by reflecting on its role in the modern South Korean national identity “imagining” process (B. Anderson). Ever since the U.S. supported South Korea as a part of its Cold War agenda in the 20th century, it has played a major role in determining the course of the young modern nation-state’s growth. As a postcolonial nation, South Korea has often been weary of foreign influences, yet it has grown into today’s dynamic and unique culture under hybridization (H. Bhabha) after its encounter with the U.S. Divided into two parts, the talk will first focus on the theoretical workings of how I perceive national identity as a collective performance; it is a repeated and normalized performance of everyday life (R. Schechner), modes of conduct, which eventually grows into a collective identity during social interaction. The basic premise of my argument is that an identity emerges in the midst of a socialization process (G. H. Mead) and thus the “self” emerges through its relations with the “other”. Next, by observing the rise of South Korean television networks in the 3rd Republic (1962-1972) and how it heavily borrowed from the U.S. television culture, I will demonstrate how South Korean national identity is a result of active hybridization with the States. Such connection between television culture and national identity will be illustrated through the nexus between the ritualization of TV watching, textual understanding of TV programs, and the transnational character of television culture.
Yoo, Min Kyung, Free University of Berlin, Germany (chair)

Panel: Transnational America: U.S. and Hybridization in South Korean Mass Culture
The pervasive American culture all over the globe represents globalization of art, lifestyles, goods and entertainment that are no longer restricted within the national boundaries. South Korea was one of those enthusiastic recipients of American mass culture, and its impact can be seen everywhere in the development of its modern popular music, fashion, literature, television, plays, films and musical performances to name a few. This panel, titled “Transnational America: U.S. and Hybridization in South Korean Mass Culture” introduces the visible American culture within the field of musical theater, play and television in South Korea as a vibrant source of hybridization. The primary objective of this panel presentation is to raise awareness in the new form of South Korean modern mass culture, which exemplifies how our world cultures are becoming more dynamic and complex through its hybridization with the U.S. The talks of this panel rejects a one-dimensional reading of the role of the American cultural production such as “Americanization” by emphasizing the notion of “hybridity”. Each panel member will address the hybridizing South Korean popular culture production in the field of musical theater (Hye Won Kim), play (Jung Gyung Kim) and television (Min Kyung Yoo) to demonstrate how the American culture should be understood as a part of the entirety of modern South Korean national culture. This theoretical approach is significant in that it takes the transnational angle in American Studies and further challenges us to understand the role of American cultural production in the developing countries and their relations to national cultural growth among the pervasive American influence.
Yushkova, Elena, Independent Scholar: “Dance of the Future and My Life: Two Facets of Isadora Duncan’s Writings”
«I believe in the religion of the beauty of the human foot», - claimed the American dancer Isadora Duncan in 1903. This quite shocking statement from her manifesto Dance of the future, published in Germany in English and German, shows not only a new approach to dance, but the evident poetic gift of the author. Duncan had always felt the limitedness of dance. Although through her plastique she managed to express complicated human emotions and to create impressive stage images, but, as a rule, after performances she often delivered lectures formulating goals of her art. Moreover, Duncan constantly published essays in order to explain to her audience the content of her dance. Duncan’s epistolary heritage also reveals her obvious gift for poetry. Being in love with Gordon Craig the dancer writes to him in rhythmic prose, and sometimes –in free verse, using even the method of visualization. After her death, Duncan acquired fame of a writer, when in 1927 her memoirs were released. Autobiography by Duncan My life is written in prose, but in a very poetic and romantic way. It is based on the tradition of the novel of the 19th century, having a plot, characters (sometimes they are quite mythologized compared to real people), and characterizes certain social strata (sometimes sarcastically when the author writes about millionaires). Narrative alternates with philosophical digressions. We can find features of psychological (in particular – bildungsroman), social, adventure and sentimental novel within her writings. However, mostly her prose looks like philosophical fiction because the meaning of the heroine’s life is the realization of her idée-fix: to transform the humanity using free dance, to make people more harmonic and beautiful. The presentation will be devoted to the peculiarities of My life, and characteristics of the dancer’s famous essays. These works represent different facets of Isadora Duncan as a writer.
Zawadka, Beata, Szczecin University, Poland: “Swamp Is the Limit: The Southern as the (New) Western”

It has been a while since Owen Wister’s Virginian (1902) was sent West to tame it. As a result, he also “domesticated” the genre of Western so that it became widely recognizable – and equally widely revised latter on – as, to use the phrasing of Robert Jackson, an “all-male morality play of freedom and conquest and heroism and limitless space and triumphant whiteness we get in the films of John Ford.” However, by the same token, Wister also “disenfranchised” those motifs of the Dixie culture, apparently female, judging from the region's popular name, which lay dormant there. In effect, he, too, accelerated the creation of the genre of Southern as the story of the “dark family secret, the mysterious mansion, the long suffering matriarch, the emotional extremes, the motivating force of honor, the sense of history as burden.” Consequently, he also culturally legalized the then freshly (1890) constituted segregation as a political programme and social system. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate, via the theory of performance, how the two genres eventually get “desegregated” into what culture critics enthusiastically refer to as the “contemporary southern” and what they believe culturally performs as the “new western.” In order to do that I shall analyse the works of such filmic directors as e.g. David Gordon Green, Benh Zeitlin, or Jeff Nichols, among others.

Zetterman, Eva, Karlstad University, Sweden: “The Impact of Frida Kahlo in Contemporary Visual Art”

In December 1976, the exhibition Women Artists: 1550–1950 opened at Los Angeles County Museum of Art with paintings and drawings by eighty-five women artists, all from Europe and the USA with the exception of Frida Kahlo. Two years later, in 1978, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Galería de la Raza in San Francisco mounted the first solo shows in the USA of Frida Kahlo’s work. With these exhibitions, Frida Kahlo’s work were introduced to a first generation of Anglo American feminist artists and Chicana/o artists in the 1970s searching for role models. Also in the 1970s, Frida Kahlo’s work was revived in Mexico with two large retrospectives in Mexico City; one at the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1973, the other at Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1977. In Europe, an exhibition of Frida Kahlo and Italian photographer Tina Modotti was held in 1982 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. Kahlo’s art has from that time on been showed in numerous exhibitions all over the world. Today, Frida Kahlo is one of the most important Latin American artists of the 20th century, and she as an artist and her work are referred to in visual art by later generations of artists globally. This paper investigates the legacy of Frida Kahlo in contemporary visual art after the introduction of her work on the US and Mexican art scenes in the 1970s. This legacy represents a shift in interest, from museological and art historical, to feminist, cultural and post-colonial role model. Examples of references to Frida Kahlo and her work in the USA and Mexico, but also in Sweden and Japan, are found in several various techniques and reveal two main modes of impact: as icon and of unique visual composition

Zhang, Jiachen, University of Leeds, UK: “Inside the Chinatown: Food, Filth and Animal Dirt in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club”
Although Chinese food is most welcome throughout the world, Chinese unique immigrant dietary fortitude, such as the ingestion of some animals or animal organs considered inedible by the western standard, remains notorious for the western consumers and poses unique identity confusion to the American-born Chinese immigrants. Such cultural anthropologists as Mary Douglas provide insights to the forbidden eating, calling such habits as “matter out of place”, yet my reading of Amy Tan’s well-known The Joy Luck Club, and Chinese American literature from a broader sense, aims to suggest that the culturally defined food taboos construct more complicated divisions between edible and inedible than some cultural anthropologists can construct. To achieve this, my paper’s vision examines not only how and why the second-generation Chinese immigrants feel filthy by their mother’s cooking and manipulative education by extension in the novel, but also attempts to delineate the post-structural binaries of in/out, daughter/mother, human/animal, and America supremacy/Chinese inferiority. On the tables of The Joy Luck Club, Chinese unique food has been regarded as a gesture to consolidate the ethnic pride for Chinese parents who feel distanced from the American mainstream; meanwhile, from the domesticated to the wild, from the loved to ones destined to be served on the table, a collection of animals and even human flesh figuratively composed as animals for consumption populate many pages of the second-generation immigrant’s filth toward Chinese eating and also their Chinese ethnic roots. With the help of anthropological criticism of cannibalism (Maggie Kilgour), psychoanalytic criticism of filth (Julia Kristeva) and gender criticism of pollution (Judith Butler), the disturbance of the imperialistic animal eating system conjures up not only the pathological consequences of Chinese food toxins, but also produces the intergenerational violence built on the dichotomy generated from food lying behind the seemingly harmony of intergenerational sameness.