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

Caroline Blinder, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK: “American Photographs Part Two: Walker Evans’ 1974 Polaroids”
Catherine Gander, Queen’s University Belfast, UK: “SAMOesthetics? Basquiat, the integrated body, and the extended mind”
Philip McGowan, Queen’s University Belfast, UK: “Theories of Life and Art in Mark Doty’s Poetry”
Justyna Wierzchowska, University of Warsaw, Poland: “Embodied Aesthetics in the Public Space: the Visual and the Discursive in Krzysztof Wodiczko’s War Projections Post-9/11”

Panel II speakers:

Sarah Garland, University of East Anglia, UK: “Packaging and Unpackaging Experience in Aspen: The Magazine in a Box”
Robert Jones, University of Leicester, UK: “‘You think as much with your big toe as you do with your brain’: William S. Burroughs, Alfred Korzybski and Somaesthetics”
Kathy-Ann Tan, University of Tübingen: “The Aesthetics of Encounter: Queer Affect and Visual Perception/Cognition in American Art and Writing”
Gander, Catherine, Queen’s University Belfast, UK: “SAMOesthetics? Basquiat, the integrated body, and the extended mind”
Poet and artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) began his short-lived career as a graffitist whose tag on the New York streets was SAMO (an intertextual nod to ‘Sambo’ and ‘Satchmo’ while evoking the disaffected notion that urban life, especially for a young black man, was ‘the same old shit’). From the start then, Basquiat made his mark on his environment via the loud materialisation of language. His subsequent artwork contained frenetic melanges of figures, icons, symbols and words, their forms appearing correspondent and incoherent. This paper addresses Basquiat’s aesthetic of marrying text and image in terms of a perceptual poetics grounded in embodiment. ‘I use words like brushstrokes’, Basquiat remarked, emphasising his utilisation of what Roland Barthes called ‘a line that is both writing and image’ as well as his employment of language through bodily gesture. Indeed, across an impressively large oeuvre that contains around 600 paintings, 1500 drawings and uncounted notebooks, Basquiat repeatedly sought ways to respond to his surrounding culture’s commodification, violation, and aestheticisation of the (black) body. Image motifs such as skeletons and skulls depict, fragment and expose the body, enlisting it as form, context and artistic apparatus; words located in corporeal experience connect strikingly to rap and hip-hop performance, extending the somatic aspect of his aesthetics to the linguistic realm. Appealing to a pragmatist aesthetics stemming from the founding concepts in John Dewey’s 1934 Art as Experience (according to whose pedagogical theories Basquiat was taught), and applying pragmatism reconfigured in the somaesthetics of Richard Shusterman and the cognitive theories of Richard Menary, this paper argues for the status of Basquiat’s works as visual poems, exploring how his practice negotiated seen and felt experience by requiring those encountering his creations to do the same.
Gardaphe, Fred, Queens College, City University of New York, USA: “Taboo or Not To Boo: Humor and the Trauma of Being Italian American”
Italian immigrants to the United States had much to dream about as they made their way to the U.S., and they also had much to fear. Often those fears became the basis for humor that appeared in the macchietti of actors like Eduardo Migliaccio, known on the state as Farfariello. The loss of Italian language entertainment due to the loss of the Italian language as the major means of communication among generations has led to the loss of a tradition of humor that once was a major tool in dealing with fears and coming to terms with issues of personal and public identities. Without the vehicle of humor, immigrant fears would grow into terrors that would be repressed. Take a look at the perils involved with immigrant travel and entry experiences, crystallized in such films as Nuovo Mondo, the 1891 mass lynchings in New Orleans, the terror of the experiences of Sacco and Vanzetti, and that of alien enemy internment during World War II, and then the Post War Rise of the Mafia, and you will see the obstacles that kept Italian Americans from publicly identifying as Italian Americans, a crucial step in creating a tradition of humor. Not knowing their own past has led Italian Americans to combat fictional representations the way Don Quixote went after windmills. Only though knowledge of self and of Italian American cultural history can Italian Americans successfully develop a culture that both defeats and transcends the mafia stigma that has stained their public image. Because Italian Americans have been cut off from knowledge of their own histories, through the loss of language, the subsequent non transference of personal histories and stories due to that loss of the primary language of those experiences has created a safe sense of Italian American identity rooted in the past and protected by the inability to change so that the identity could continue with later generations. The failure to deal with historical problems has led Italian Americans into the trap of being identified with fictional representations that have gone on to cause real social problems. This failure to produce a multiplicity of identities associated with being Italian Americans would affect the way Italian Americans relate to umor and irony. There has been very little critical analysis done on the role that humor plays in Italian American culture. Emelise Aleandri has present some of history and translated some of the sketches of the Italian immigrant theater great Edoardo Migliaccio, Sal Primeggia and Joseph Varacalli have done some earlier descriptive history and commentary on Migliaccio, Nicola Paone, Pat Cooper, Floyd Vivino and others; there’s an article on Jerre Mangione by John Lowe and a recent address he presented at this year’s American Italian Historical Association conference, but beyond these articles, there has been virtually no serious study of Italian American humor, and so it is my goal in this work to advance that discussion. By studying humor and its relations to the psycho-social traumas experienced by Italian Americans we can better understand how Italian Americans, through the practice of literalism, have created a rigid notion of Italian American culture based on an immigrant paradigm that no longer works in terms of contemporary identities.
Garland, Sarah, University of East Anglia, UK: “Packaging and Unpackaging Experience in Aspen: The Magazine in a Box”
Aspen, the multimedia “magazine in a box” (1965-1971) prefigured current object-based collectors' magazines like McSweeneys, Arkitip and The Thing by half a century, working between verbal, tactile, visual and aural and billing itself as “the first three dimensional magazine”, as a 'Happening!' and an 'assemblage'. Aspen moved reading into the immersive, affective and eventual, promising its readers that “being three-dimensional, and therefore not limited to the printed word it [Aspen] stimulates touch and hearing as well as sight like no two-dimensional magazine has ever done before”. This paper will investigate how the “wealth of reading and hearing and touching and moving and thinking matter‟ that the editor, Phyllis Johnson, asserted was the aim of the magazine might tell the beginning of the story of how the design and packaging of the immersive, experiential, interactive environments in the happenings, pop art and assemblages of the post-war period became an integral part of our own contemporary moment. Aspen managed in its relatively short publication time to include some of the most interesting and important artists, critics and writers of late sixties and early seventies including multi-media representations of works by artists including Peter Blake, Marcel Duchamp, John Lennon, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Nam June Paik, Hans Richter, Eduardo Paolozzi, David Hockney, Richard Serra, Tony Smith and Robert Smithson. This paper begins the task of conceptualizing and contexualising the manipulations of feeling, imagination and affect that Aspen brought together.
Garrigós, Cristina, National University of Distance Education, Spain: “Hospitality and Gender: Anzaldúa’s Nepantleras and Spiritual Activism”
The theories of hospitality have become a new interest in recent immigration and border studies. The works of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas are fundamental to understand a tricky term that, as Derrida points out, carries its opposite within itself. However, despite the increasing popularity of the concept, not much has been done on gender and hospitality. Feminist theorist Seyla Benhabib has worked on hospitality and cosmopolitanism, Maurice Hamington has published on feminist hospitality, and Suryia Nayak has explored hospitality in black feminism, specifically in the work of Audre Lorde, but the role of hospitality in Gloria Anzaldúa’s texts remains to be explored. My paper proposes a re-evaluation of her work in terms of hospitality. This implies the reading of her work approaching both the moral and practical stances of hospitality for woman. Anzaldúa introduces the idea of the bridge and the nepantlera: “Bridging is the work of opening the gate to the stranger, within and without”. Hospitality, or bridging, as Anzaldúa proposes, is an act of will and love, but also of conflict and resistance. The nepantlera facilitates passage between worlds. Her function is spiritual, but highly political too. By exploring the role of hospitality, this paper aims to analyze Anzaldúa’s ideas on identity and agency to address the paradoxical nature of hospitality in terms of gender struggle.
Geerlings, Lonneke and Babs Boter, VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands: “Writing a (Wo)Man’s Life, Or the Autobiographical Self in Female Portraits of Men”
Writing the narrative of the other, many biographers seem to consistently write themselves into that narrative. For our paper, the title of which is borrowed from Heilbrun’s seminal Writing a Woman’s Life (1988) we will focus on a particular form of this self-inscription. The scholar and social activist Rosey E. Pool (1905–1971) and the travel journalist Mary Pos (1904–1987) each presented the lives of historically and culturally important male figures (either dead or alive), and their life-writing demonstrates how the boundaries between the authorial (female) self and (male) other at times seem to have dissolved and disappeared. In the early 1950s Pool wrote a biography of George Gershwin, brought out by a Catholic publisher that aimed ‘to bring the music of famous composers in the reach of young music lovers via life stories.’ Presenter Geerlings will show the ways in which Gershwin’s biography incorporates Pool’s own life story. Presenter Boter will focus on two “American narratives” (Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Henry Ford) in which the main figures have likewise been put on a pedestal, but also need to share the biographical space with Pos herself. The paper will investigate these questions: 1. How exactly do the two women, via their biographical work, construct and perform their own public personae (Bosch 2012)? 2. How is our knowledge of the written lives (of men) “infected” by the biographers’ (gendered, class and race-informed) discourse, cultural background and historical context?
Gencheva, Andrea, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria: “Skeletons in the Cupboard: Subverting Patriarchy in Emma Tennat’s Felony and Walter Jon Williams’s Wall, Stone, Craf”

Panel speaker: Liaisons, Families, Texts: Henry James and the Fictionalization of Lives
Gennaro Lerda, Valeria, University of Genoa, Italy: “Rebecca Latimer Felton and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin: Memoirs of Southern Ladies in the Transition from the Old South to the New”
Both Rebecca L. Felton and K. Du Pre Lumpkin were from Georgia. Rebecca Felton Papers (University of Georgia Special Collections), would suffice to trace the long life and the intense activity in the field of social reforms during the social and economic crisis of the post bellum South, but Felton decided to leave a legacy of memories of her times, publishing two recollections of her life: My Memoirs of Georgia Politics, Written by Mrs. William H. Felton (1911), and Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth (1919). The author describes the needs of her country caught up between the disruption of the old plantation economic system and the hopes of a New South not without nostalgia for what she recalls as the opulent cotton kingdom. In 1947 Du Pre Lumpkin in her illuminating The Making of a Southerner, on the contrary, analyzes the contradictions, myths and ironies so deeply embedded in southern culture and in her own education as a child and a teenager. As Darlene Clark Hine in her Foreword to the 1981 edition argues, Lumpkin “dissects the ‘southern’ essence of her identity.” At the same time, weaving together her memories of the past as a child (both in Georgia and in South Carolina), and of the present as an adult with a doctorate in Economics at the University of Wisconsin, Lumpkin describes southern society, from the myth of the Confederacy, to the long story of segregation, discrimination, and civil rights movements.
Georgescu, Sorina, Hyperion University, Bucharest, Romania: “Marketing the American Dream Through Science Fiction Movies: Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek and Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s Star Gate”
In a world characterized by a great ethnic and cultural diversity, by huge differences among people, and, at the same time, in a world of globalization and/or Americanization, which leads, on the contrary, to closeness, the present study looks at today’s major economic and military power through two of its most famous series: Star Trek and Star Gate. The paper starts from the online article “The Two Sides of Star Trek” (The New York Times) which emphasizes the movie’s political and historic context, and discusses the significance of every (main) character in the story in order to see how they all mirror the internal and external tensions in John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s America. The analysis continues with a comparison between this version of the series and today’s American Presidency and, especially, President Obama, and expands to the last version of the same series, with different characters, more races and colors, as well as to other SF movies with the same massage, such as “Star Gate. As I argue, the most important message America chooses to promote as a definition of itself and of the dreams that shape her people, is that we should live in a peaceful world, where all races, religions and nations can live in harmony. And the best way to re-write/screen this fundamental creed in order to reach people’s hearts and minds is…..through its science fiction movies.
Gerke, Amanda, University of Salamanca, Spain: “Migrant’s Speech – A Case Study of Linguistic Space in American Literature”
In his Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau establishes an intricate relationship between linguistic acts and spatial acts. He places an ‘enunciatory’ function on the act of walking as he equates the movement of the body with the movement of language, thus, creating a notion of ‘linguistic space’. In the specific context of migration, this concept exemplifies the displacement of the migrant, who through searching for physical and linguistic mobility, seems to struggle to hold on to both. The crossover of movement and language, and the struggle of the migrant, is something that resonates with Dominican-American author Junot Diaz who has quickly become a significant literary figure for his unique approach to fiction, and for his approach to multilingual writing. Diaz very often plays with language in a way that specifically draws attention to its implications for his characters, as well as purposefully pushing his monolingual readers into uncomfortable linguistic situations; almost as a way to center on the angst of the conflict. This language play, as well as the power that language holds over Diaz’s characters and readers, are the underlying tones that structure his most recent collection of short stories, This is How You Lose Her (2012). In one of these stories, “Invierno,” Diaz pushes deeper into his themes of language use by developing a character that is denied language all together. By combining the contemporary theme of migration, adding an element of imprisonment and a focus on the denial of speech, this crossing-over of the spatial and the verbal serves as a centering point for a systematic oppression of the characters within Diaz’s story, and alludes to themes of migration on a much broader scale. The notion of applying spatial concepts to language has not received substantial focus, and at this time is a rather innovative approach. Although Junot Diaz’s work has received many treatments, in this paper I attempt to use “Invierno” as a case in point to demonstrate the connectivity of language and space. As a point of departure, I contend that the concept of linguistic space helps demonstrate the interplay of different occupied spaces throughout the story, at the same time that it uncovers overarching themes of knowledge, power, and oppression in the context of migration. This paper places “Invierno” within a linguistic framework that reveals the fusion of physical and linguistic spatial concepts that are seemingly on different planes; notions of ‘prison’ that are maintained by physical force, natural boundaries, and a verbal space that work together that lead to a resolution. This analysis takes on an interdisciplinary approach relying on notions of knowledge and power, theoretical developments on critical discourse analysis, and also theories of language spaces.
Gerits, Frank, New York University; University of Leuven, Belgium: “The American Politics of Pity: American NGOs in Africa (1960s-1970s)”
In the mid-1960s development NGOs became credible vehicles of aid, when state-led development programs and the technocratic optimism that had stimulated their creation ran aground. The belief in the universal potential of modern, rational methods of socioeconomic progress was undermined when dependency theorists began to see modernisation programs as fronts to obtain Cold War loyalty, acts to sustain the American economy and academic testing grounds. NGOs which had provided aid to a war torn Europe such as CARE or Oxfam extended their humanitarian activities into Africa while older Catholic or Socialist organisations such as Broederlijk Delen/Entraide et Fraternité in Belgium professionalised. The offering and political use of food aid, education and the construction of health care infrastructure – what is called here the politics of pity – created an arena where state and non-state actors fought over what development in Africa was supposed to achieve. It is argued here that the development NGO was able to exploit the cynical turn behind modernisation, a cynicism that was strengthened by NGO public image campaigns. In this paper I will focus on how Cold War labor diplomats, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the Peace Corps and USAID engaged in a competition to set political, economic and development goals and in doing so established an image of Africa as a continent of protracted suffering. Contrary to the existing literature, the 1960s are assessed here as a formative moment for NGOs in Africa, while Cold War labour diplomacy is fully integrated within a transnational history of the Global Cold War in Africa. The ‘politics of pity’ is a case study of how new development norms and practices institutionalized and matured en how practices were adopted and adapted by American NGOs.
Gerstle, Gary, Paul Mellon Professor of American History and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, the University of Cambridge: “Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History”
Key-note address 2
The American political system in 2016 is awash in private money, a situation that may well compromise, contest, and eviscerate America’s democratic aspirations. How did the United States arrive at this state of affairs? Most current commentary focuses on the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens’ United decision, which overturned laws limiting what wealthy individuals and organizations could give to political candidates. I will suggest, however, that the troubled relationship between money and democracy in America is much deeper and more intractable than this commentary suggests. It originated in the nineteenth century, when America first became a mass democracy, and one notably lacking in public organizations and mechanisms necessary to make a democracy work. Political parties arose at this time (initially as private organizations) to superintend the unruly electoral system that had unexpectedly emerged, becoming, in the process, among the most inventive, improvisational, and successful institutions that America has ever produced. Managing American democracy turned out to be an expensive business, however; and with the US Constitution making no provision for public funds for elections (or for limiting expenses), political parties turned to private sources for funds and also to selling access to government through patronage and graft. As parties made themselves into entrepreneurial organizations larger than almost any other in nineteenth century America, they gave private interests, especially monied ones, extraordinary opportunities to penetrate governing institutions. Democratic movements in the 19^th and 20^th centuries sought repeatedly to contest the influence of private money, but few enjoyed more than temporary or partial success. Indeed, in America, the expansion of democracy and the influence of money have often seemed to march hand in hand. Making sense of this paradox—and its legacy for 2016—is the principal aim of this paper.
Gerund, Katharina, University of Erlangen- Nürnberg, Germany (chair)

Schultermandl, Silvia, University of Graz, Austria (chair)

Workshop: Transnational Feminism and American Studies
Taking the 165th anniversary of Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman”-speech as an occasion, this workshop seeks to assess the historical significance and current role of transnational feminism in and beyond the United States. It draws both on a (re)reading of Truth’s famous text and its multi-facetted reverberations as well as on current debates in the field of transnational feminism as exemplified by Samantha Pinto’s Difficult Diasporas and Leela Fernandes’ Transnational Feminism in the United States (both New York UP 2013). These texts serve as starting points to explore the multiple interconnections between transnational feminism and American Studies. As umbrella term for the diversity and contradictions of global exchanges, transnationalism describes how people increasingly live in more than one nation and the ease with which persons, goods, and knowledge travel across borders. Transnational feminism critically investigates these exchanges and proposes ways in which borders and boundaries of nation, culture, race, and gender need to be reconceptualized, confused, challenged, and, potentially, eliminated. At the same time, it highlights the importance of specific locations that contribute to the social construction of people’s lived worlds as well as the global inequalities that emerge from a world order based on binary (gender) oppositions and neo-liberal market logics. It offers a nuanced set of parameters, diction, and frameworks for a contemporary discussion of the dynamics at play in migration, transnationalism, diaspora, and globalization. Our workshop is designed to bring together American studies scholars whose interest in transnationalism, globalization, American exceptionalism, neo-imperialism, and critical race studies draws from transnational feminist theory and practice. In lieu of a set of papers, we invite participants to share their insights into the ways in which transnational feminism has shaped new directions in American Studies in the past decades. We are equally interested in theoretical debates and best-practice examples which discuss the role of transnational feminism in the knowledge production in American studies, both in the US and in Europe.