This latest volume of JAS begins with Holly Brown's “Figuring Giorgio Agamben's ‘Bare Life’ in the Post-Katrina Works of Jesmyn Ward and Kara Walker,” in which she provides a searing exploration of shifting representations of the body in Ward's Salvage the Bones and Walker's After the Deluge. Christian Høgsbjerg's essay, “‘That Dreadful Country’: C. L. R. James's Early Thoughts on American Civilization,” provides an incisive mapping of the multifaceted patterns of influence and exchange regarding “the attraction of America for black West Indians.” For Sam Lebovic, the “Beatles' Invasion of America” is the issue at hand in his illuminating study, “‘Here, There, and Everywhere’: The Beatles, America, and Cultural Globalization, 1964–1968.”
In this issue of JAS, we next turn to musical dance in Ying Zhu and Daniel Belgrad's stimulating investigation into “youth versus adult authority” in their fascinating essay, “‘This Cockeyed City Is THEIRS': Youth at Play in the Dances of West Side Story.” Shifting to the intellectual and political terrain of US foreign relations, Hugh Wilford takes the CIA's covert “creation of an ostensibly private group of US citizens called the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME)” as his intellectual point of departure in his groundbreaking article “American Friends of the Middle East: The CIA, US Citizens, and the Secret Battle for American Public Opinion in the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1947–1967.” At the heart of Tom Arnold-Forster's essay is the idea of jazz as ‘America's classical music’” in his compelling investigation into “Dr. Billy Taylor, ‘America's Classical Music,’ and the Role of the Jazz Ambassador.”
Lee Spinks's illuminating essay, “‘The House of Your Church Is Burning’: Race and Responsibility in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead,” analyzes this author's work “in dialogue with her speculative reflection upon Dietrich Bonhoffer's theology to read the novel as a radically ambivalent text.” An interdisciplinary tour de force, Peter Ferry interprets the twenty-first-century beard as a touchstone for an investigation into “the contemporary condition of American masculinity” in “The Beard, Masculinity, and Otherness in the Contemporary American Novel.” The 1950s and 1960s phenomenon of British “scholarship boys” travelling to America and “sponsored by British and American foundations” is the subject of D. L. LeMahieu's pioneering study, “Exchange Value: British ‘Scholarship Boys’ in Mid-Twentieth-Century America.” Finally, Randall Stephens's “Forum on American Religion,” featuring thought-provoking contributions from Randall Stephens, Abram Van Engen, Sandra Scanlon, Paul Harvey, Matthew Sutton, Megan Hunt, and Uta Balbier concludes the articles section of this issue.
The print reviews section opens with a roundtable discussion of Mark Greif's important contribution to the intellectual history of twentieth-century America, The Age of the Crisis of Man. Adam Kelly, Will Norman, Richard H. King, Robert Genter, and Daniel Horowitz assess a knotty, complex, yet ultimately rewarding assessment of mid-century thought and fiction. This roundtable is then followed by twelve reviews on topics ranging from the myth of the Rune Stone to transatlantic blues.
The online reviews section opens with four reviews of books on the work of William Faulkner. What is striking about this recent scholarship is the extent to which it is concerned with what might be called a “sonic” turn in Faulkner studies: how Faulkner's work might be read as engaged both with what Julian Murphet calls “new technological instruments (radio, cinema, phonographs)” and with musical forms such as the blues.
