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Events
Jan. 9 | Call for papers: Identities and Technocultures
A 2-day conference about American culture and technologies that examines how new technologies dominate and define Americaness in the US and abroad. Co-sponsored by the University of Iowa Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts (CESA) and the Mid-America American Studies Association (MAASA).
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Norman, Brian. "Addressing Division: The American Protest Mode in the Twentieth Century," English, University of New Jersey, May 2004.
This dissertation traces a genealogy of a protest mode that takes seriously the American project of a democratic republic. These writings share key rhetorical strategies: direct address to divided citizenries, speaking for those lacking full social status, journalistic documentation of injustice, and citation of inclusive state promises. I concentrate on twentieth-century writers such as James Baldwin, June Jordan, and the Combahee River Collective, who draw on traditions stretching back to earlier writers and orators such as Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Douglass. Protest writing solicits urgency through opening gestures of antagonism that underscore divisions among the addressed. These writings therefore risk rejection as factionalizing, too polemical, or ephemeral. Rather than advocate balkanization, most writers in my project offer a collective space;often a “we” to achieve inclusive national pronouncements. In the later twentieth century, American social movements pitted integration against self-determination or unity against separatism. These debates manifest the protest mode’s dilemma: an acute recognition of social divisions that threatens an ultimate desire to come together. After Chapter One outlines a protest essay tradition, two chapters reconsider works by Baldwin accused of being too polemical and prone to simplification. When Baldwin segregates the stage into Blacktown and Whitetown in Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), his polemicism makes visible the lines of division that integration must address. Baldwin’s never filmed screenplay about Malcolm X (1972) also presents seemingly incommensurate political projects, black nationalism and interracial solidarity, for instance, in single scenes. Concluding chapters analyze how Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970) and the Combahee River Collective (1977) follow Baldwin’s essays by analyzing injustice through personal experience. Like integration, the project of unity in second wave feminism is often read as naïve. But women’s liberation writings regularly address differences dividing women within projects that seek collectivity, and that make collectivity possible.
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