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

Durrans, Stéphanie, Michel de Montaigne University, Bordeaux 3, France: “Redefining the Home in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Detective Fiction”

Panel speaker: EAAS’s European Study Group of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Literature 10th Anniversary Panel
Enciu, Elena, Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania: “Social Retrofuturism in The Difference Engine and Boneshaker”
A subgenre of neo- Victorianism, steampunk is a type of speculative fiction that re-imagines the pre-electronic Victorian past from the perspective of the future. By deviating from the established facts of the past, steampunk remakes the present in a new image. In this imagined reality, the technological roads not taken in the nineteenth century alter the past as we know it and lead to a different kind of future – the retrofuture. Steampunk’s retrofuturist scenarios are almost always associated with technology; thus, steampunk retrofuturism rarely takes into consideration the main historical preoccupations of the nineteenth century, which were often more concerned with social reform than building better clockwork automata or steampowered machines. This paper focuses on William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990), a piece of first-wave steampunk literature, Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker (2009) and their potential to re-imagine the social spaces of the past. Both novels provide eccentric and entertaining answers to the “What Ifs” posed by the social and technological changes of the steampunk alternative history.
Fabre, Claire, University of East Paris Créteil, France: “Re-membering the Present: Narrative Strategies in Contemporary Short Fiction”
Contemporary short fiction is a privileged medium for the representation of the brief and the instantaneous and focuses usually on the re-presentation of the present moment. The fusion between the temporality of the narrative voice, the time of writing and the act of reading enhances the performative value of these texts. However, instantaneity does not preclude the accretion of various temporal layers in the interstices of the texts, at all levels of their structure, thus constructing and re-constructing memory in spite of its apparent absence. Through the close study of an array of texts by contemporary short story writers, such as David Foster Wallace, Diane Willams, Christine Schutt and Dawn Raffel, this paper would like to show that the textual present itself is impossible to conceive outside remembrance strategies.
Fackler, Katharina, University of Graz, Austria: “Sick and Tired of Being Invisible: Black Women Protesters from Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer to Blacklivesmatter”

In “Sick and Tired of Being Invisible: Black Women Protesters from Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer to Blacklivesmatter” Katharina Fackler (Graz) examines the visual staging of protest performances by black women activists from Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer to female participants and leaders of the contemporary protests in the wake of the killings of unarmed black men and women by the police. This presentation argues that public photographs in the press and in social media networks have both challenged and perpetuated the (gendered and racialized) double erasure of black women by visualizing and framing performativity, political leadership, dissent, and agency.

Fagan, Abigail, University of Connecticut, USA: “Transnational Temperance: the American Temperance Society and European Anti-Alcohol Reform in the Nineteenth Century”
In American Studies in the United States, academics have begun talking back to the historical understanding of the USA as primarily isolationist in ideology. Transnational studies of nineteenth-century American society and politics recognize that American ideologies of citizenship were not formed in a vacuum, but rather were influenced by the influx of immigrants and world events, such as the European revolutions of the 1840s. Although American authors were oftentimes exceptionalist in their renditions of events in Europe, the continual formation of United States conceptions of ethnicity and citizenship were fundamentally affected by transatlantic conversations, represented by international reportage, letters between immigrants and their families in the homeland, and the endeavors of immigrants in the USA. This paper models a transnational methodology that focuses on the interaction between Americans and continental Europeans. In order to elucidate the values of a transnational methodology that celebrates the highly changeable ideologies of the Nineteenth Century, this paper focuses on the development of an international temperance movement. 2016 marks the 190-year anniversary of the founding of the first successful anti-alcohol reform organization, the American Temperance Society. Ten years after this Society’s founding, member Reverend Robert Baird introduced temperance to Europe with his 1836 speech Histoire des sociétés de tempérance des États-Unis d’Amérique. The values represented here, which eventually led to Prohibition in the USA, spread quickly throughout continental Europe. This case study will show that our understanding of reform in the United States is incomplete without taking European thought and reform activity into account.
Fatalski, Marcin, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland: “Between Idealism and ‘Realpolitik’: Dilemmas of US Policy toward Developing Countries after the Second World War”
Foreign policy of the United States has been always strongly influenced by idealism. American public opinion and political elites believed in historical mission of promoting American values both in the American continent (in 19th century) and later abroad. U.S. foreign policy was simultaneously determined by political and economic interests of the growing power. After the II WW the United States rivaled with the Soviet Union and “international communism” politically, economically, militarily and ideologically. The third world became main area of the rivalry between superpowers. U.S policymakers were convinced that successful struggle with the Soviets required not only “hard” tools of foreign policy but also more sophisticated mechanisms. Promoting democracy and implementing principles of modernization theory seemed to be the best directions of US policy toward developing countries. However, when US administrations had to deal with the problem of political stability in a developing country, they faced the dilemma whether to maintain processes of democratization with the risk of “losing” such a country. This problem can be observed in US policy after the end of the cold war. I am going to discuss the differences between Democratic and Republican administrations when their attitude toward the idea of democratization and modernization is considered. It is also my intention to analyze dilemmas of US policy toward selected countries of Latin America and Asia.
Feleki, Despoina, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece: “Wikia Fandom Craze: Connecting, Participating, Creating, and Re-negotiating Boundaries”
This essay draws attention to latest online fandom practices that take place in online participatory environments as a result of intersecting technological and economic variables in the context of Henry Jenkins’ “Convergence Culture.” After tracing the origins of fan practices in literary theories that regard readers as active agents in the processes of reading and making meaning of cultural texts, it investigates fandom as a cultural event that is determined by current technological, economic, and generic conditions. Through the study of Wikia.com, one of the world’s most vibrant online communities the article explores the de-territorialization of fan-fuelled media production, its re-territorialization, and the fans’ efforts to enter what Pierre Bourdieu calls the industry’s “circle of belief.” Its wiki structure and technology as well as the latest smart Web 2.0 tools that it employs are examined here as they allow fans to access, edit, and share media content, helping them push the fuzzy boundaries between corporate and grassroots production further. Finally, this study maps out the efforts of media platform producers, of the industry, and of the fans to renegotiate their roles and relationships. By rejecting a romanticized view of fans who choose to exercise resistance to the center, it lays emphasis on fans’ tactics as they voluntarily succumb to the policies of the popular culture industry and get integrated into the system.
Fellner, Astrid, University of Saarbrücken, Germany:

Roundtable speaker: Women ‘Against the Grain’ in U.S. Film, 1945-2015
Ferens, Dominika, 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)”

Panel speaker and chair: Knowledge Surrounded by Water: Islands in the American Imagination
Fernández-García, Andrea, University of Oviedo, Spain: “Daily Migrations in Esmeralda Santiago’s Almost a Woman (1999): Continuities and Discontinuities between Home and School”

Numerous social and human geographers are surprised that in the United States the incorporation of space and place as tools for reading literature has generally been undertheorized and understudied. I argue nonetheless that most bildungsromane by US Latina writers prove convenient to analyze the characters’ selfdevelopment by using spaces and places as hermeneutical tools. Thus, this paper aims to examine the identity negotiations portrayed in Esmeralda Santiago’s Almost a Woman (1999) by focusing on the spaces and places that the main character inhabits. This coming-of-age memoir focuses on Negi’s challenging adolescence in Brooklyn, where she moves with her mother and siblings in 1961, when she is thirteen. I concentrate on the way Negi negotiates her identity in and through the main settings in contemporary children’s lives, that is, the home and the school, focusing on the links that can be established between both places. When dealing with home-school relations, some scholars argue that immigrant children experience continuous dissonances between both settings. For them, migration is not “a singular act, it is performed daily as children ‘migrate’ from home to school and back” (Highmore 2005: 75). This means that although school and home might be a few meters apart, in journeying between them each child migrate daily between profoundly different cultural universes. In this sense, we see how Negi generally exhibits different behaviors at home and at school, which hints at the complicated interrelations of the gendered, sexual, ethnic and class identities she occupies. Nonetheless, I also address instances that do not show a strict separation between each different place, that is, when it is clear that the value systems governing each setting infiltrate one another. This infiltration, made possible by Negi’s practices, brings about a redefinition of the gender, race and class relations governing each place, thus emphasizing fluidity over fixity, and change over stasis.

Ferrández San Miguel, María, University of Zaragoza, Spain: “The Ethical Impulse in E.L. Doctorow’s Early Fiction”
E.L. Doctorow started his career back in the 1960s, and many of his early novels are generally considered to be tightly connected to postmodernist aesthetics. However, despite sharing some of the most common features traditionally associated with a postmodern poetics, these novels also implicitly reject the postmodernist contempt for the world “out there”. Instead, they seem to stage a return to the idea that art can provide a sense of reality, even if a cursory one. Therefore, this paper claims that Doctorow’s early novels mark a transition, or rather, an evolution towards the recuperation of realistic meaning. Doctorow’s early postmodern novels anticipate the late 1980s and 1990s ethical turn towards a recovered position of the subject and its encounter with the other. This can be observed in the novels’ eminently social scope, their preoccupation with oppression and their commitment to an ideal of social and economic justice. Further, such project manifests itself in the novels’ engagement with issues of psychological trauma, traumatic memory and resilience in the face of adversity, as well as in their explicit support of feminist concerns and denunciation of hegemonic gender configurations. Thus, this proposal concludes that Doctorow’s early fiction effectively extends postmodernist aesthetics and anticipates future trends by incorporating a clearly ethical dimension, which stands out as a key part of the US author’s literary project.
Filimon, Luiza-Maria, National School of Political Science and Public Administration, Bucharest, Romania: “No Longer a ‘Bad Word’? Feminism’s Resurgence in Popular Culture”
More than half of a century since President John F. Kennedy signed into law the Equal Pay Act, women continue to be underrepresentated and underpaid to various degrees – the further down one travels on the minority hierarchy, the worse the wage gap is. To the point that white women earn 78% of white men’s median annual earnings, black women earn 64%, American Indian and Alaska Native earn 59%, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander earn 65% while Hispanic and Latina women earn 54% (U.S. Current Population Survey and the National Committee on Pay Equity, 2013 cited in American Association of University Women, 2014). Rape culture – though brought to the forefront, is perpetuated with impunity while a woman’s right to choose, continues to be severely restricted, penalized and even criminalized. One hundred years since the opening of the nation’s first birth control clinic and 43 years since Roe v. Wade, finds Texas – the second largest state in the US – with potentially fewer than ten abortion clinics. From 2000 to 2013, the number of women living in restrictive states went from 31% to 56% (Guttmacher Institute, 2014). In such a bleak and unequal environment, “[a] specter is haunting popular culture – the specter of feminism” (Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters in Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique, 2013). 2014 witnessed a change in the mainstream perception and reception of feminism. The “radical notion” of women rights’ on the basis of equality between sexes, has steadily moved on the Overton window of public opinion, from taboo to acceptable. Nigerian feminist author Chimamanda Adichie was quoted at length in the videoclip for Beyonce’s Flawless single while during a live performance, the word “feminism” appears in the background, in big, capital letters. Products of a fickle supply and demand chain, musicians have struggled to accept and adopt the word. From Madonna (who identifies as a “humanist”) to Bjork, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Kate Perry, Kelly Clarkson, Carla Bruni or Beyonce, they have all previously stated how they are not feminists. Once informed of the issue, Taylor Swift acknowledges that: “What it seemed to me, the way it was phrased in culture, society, was that you hate men. And now, I think a lot of girls have had a feminist awakening because they understand what the word means” (The Guardian, 2014) while Lady Gaga claims: “[...] a feminist, like I am, which is good...” (Los Angeles Times, 2009); “Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you’re wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn’t love you anymore” (Cosmopolitan, 2010). The TV landscape has started to be populated with shows from Orphan Black to Orange is the New Black, Veep, Scandal, The Good Wife, Empire, How to Get Away with Murder or Agent Carter, where female characters take charge of the narrative and no longer play second fiddle to their male counterparts. The study explores the impact of the feminist progressive discourse on the American traditionally “conservative” landscape of popular culture. We identify the characteristics of this phenomenon, while also addressing the negative representations and tropes that have enabled the permanentization of a culture of shame in which women embody simultaneously and paradoxically the prey / predator duality.
Frelik, Paweł, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland: “Southland’s Dark Rapture: California, Apocalypse, and Digital Technologies”

Although New York must be a close second, Los Angeles seems to be the No. 1 American city to be destroyed in all possible media of science fiction: by earthquakes, invasions monsters, gangs, plagues, and cults. In Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, Mike Davis notes that “no other city seems toexcite such dark rapture.” What many of these diverse visions of the Southland’s end share is a degree of completeness, neatness, systemic-ness. The calamities befalling LA are narrated in an comprehensible fashion, although much chaos is presented diegetically. Science fiction’s long-standing commitment to objectivism and coherence has also contributed to the conclusiveness and totality of such catastrophic gaze. But as John Crowley writes in Daemonomania, “when the world ends, it ends somewhat differently for each soul then alive to see it; the end doesn’t come all at once but passes and repasses over the world like the shivers that pass over a horse’s skin” (17). In my paper I would like to discuss Richard Kelly’s 2006 film Southland Tales and the digital cybertext LA Flood Project by the Angeleno writing collective LAinundación as texts which, while presenting SoCal’s “dark rapture,” do so in a manner that seems individualized, chaotic, and non-instantaneous. Both texts envision the apocalypse (the term which really indicates the end of an old order as much the unveiling of a new one) as something impossible to comprehend, totalize, and narrate in a comprehensible manner. In my discussion, I would also like to link this mode of representation to the material and technological circumstances of digital technologies, which, by their very nature, afford new opportunities for story-telling practices.

Frelik, Paweł, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland: “On Not Calling a Spade a Spade: Climate Fiction as Science Fiction”
Whether labelled climate fiction, fiction of the Anthropocene, or eco fiction, most fiction dealing with the topics of climate change and global warming is really science fiction. There are, of course, political/ideological reasons behind most critics unwillingness to admit just that, but the lack of awareness of this synonymity may also lead to the essential misunderstanding of how climate fiction performs its cultural work and how exactly its representations of global ordeals figure and signify. As my contribution to the roundtable, I’d like to map out this relationship and examine its consequence for our understanding of climate fiction.
Fuqua, Joy, Queens College, City University of New York, USA: “The Role of the Rural: Examining Place in Cli-Fi”

In the beginning of Interstellar, the film depicts a series of scenes summoning images from the 1930s Dust Bowl. A rural farm house surrounded by corn fields becomes a place of domestic, family hardship, revealed to be the result of eco-disaster. TV programs such as The Walking Dead, The 100, and Falling Skies and other narrative films including Take Shelter represent the rural as both a site of salvation and horror. The ultimate quest is to rebuild civilization through reuniting heteronormative families. The rural becomes queer and wild; the rural represents the outside and outsider. This presentation raises questions about the ways that ‘cli fi’ (and other science fiction media focusing on the environment) tend to privilege the urban center as the site of suffering and harm while the effects of environmental devastation on rural areas is exploited for dramatic effect but is not central to recovery.

Fyta, Anna, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece: “Cassandra/ Andromache/ Hecuba: Trojan Women at War in H.D. and Euripides”
H. D.’s Red Roses for Bronze (1931) has been widely assessed as a work in transition from the short lyric poetry of H.D.’s post-Imagist period to the longer poems of her late poetry. It has been considered repetitive and indicative of H.D.’s purported poetic standstill. After the translations from Hippolytus and Hippolytus Temporizes, H.D. returns to Euripides’ War plays, this time with the “Bird-Choros from Hecuba,” a post-Trojan War play she presents alongside two other choral sequences, “Choros Translations from the Bacchae” and “Choros Sequence from Morpheus.” The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how H.D.’s creative translation of Euripides’ Hecuba attests that war is responsible for the derailment of female identity. I examine how H.D. incorporates in her text aspects of Euripidean poetics such as his use of the Trojan narrative, the experimentation with the form of the choral ode and its tropes. H.D.’s ongoing dialogue with Euripides regarding their generic and formal transgressions becomes evident through examination of typological traits in variations of lyric poetry that include lamentation, devotional song, and H.D.’s post-imagist practices. I will approach H.D.’s “Sea Choros from Hecuba” by cross-referencing her poems “After Troy,” “Cassandra, O Hymen King” and her novel Palimpsest, all of which are interwoven into her translation. I will attempt to show that H.D.’s translation experiment might also be read as a partial poetic episode in preparation of her later epic poem Helen in Egypt.
Gander, Catherine, Queen’s University Belfast, UK (chair)

McGowan, Philip, Queen’s University Belfast, UK (chair)

Negotiating the Seen and the Felt: Where American Art Meets American Writing
‘Once we start thinking, talking and writing about …art, we discover that the line between abstraction and representation is no more impermeable than the line between images and words.’ (James A.W. Heffernan, Cultivating Picturacy [2006]).
‘Art is the objectification of feeling.’ (Herman Melville)

These panels seeks to bring together papers whose focus is on modern and contemporary American works that address the space between expression and experience in both written and visual terms. This may include imagetext works, literary works that respond to visual arts, or visual arts that respond to literary works. The recent turn in American literature and art has been toward affect: a position that privileges an embodied encounter of the artwork as an experiential interface rather than as an object removed from the practice of everyday life. According to such approaches, the human body is positioned as central and unbounded; affect is understood to exist in constant motion between it and other bodies, be they human or otherwise. This has meant a renewal of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s primacy of perception, leading to a methodological shift in the connected fields of ekphrastic creative writing, aesthetics, art writing, curatorship and literary studies. In recent years, negotiations between discursive and immersive practices have sought to move beyond old paradigms of the sublime or transcendent influence of aesthetic experience to an understanding of materiality that still acknowledges the persistence of the ineffable. Despite these innovations, however, the spaces in which affective literary and visual practices overlap remain largely untheorised. Contiguous to this turn is the reappraisal of the physical space of the aesthetic encounter itself. Contemporary installations and exhibitions increasingly take into account the participatory needs of the art-viewer, whose full sensorium is engaged in an often interactive experience. Likewise, creative literature, especially that responding to the visual arts in ekphrastic or critical terms, seeks methods of attending to cross-currents between visual and verbal expression that include visual poetics, the use of three-dimensional space, and the intersections of photography and text, for example. The papers on these two proposed panels therefore attend to the interplay between the felt and the seen in American texts and artworks that operate at the intersections of the written and the visual.

Panel I speakers: