In the documentary novel All They Will Call You (2017) Tim Z. Hernandez brings to light the life stories of the Mexican migrant workers who fatally died in a plane accident as they were being deported from California to Mexico in 1948. Inspired by Woody Guthrie's song “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon” (1961), the novel interweaves testimony, documentation, historical contextualization, and fictional mechanisms to involve the reader ethically in the pursuit of an alternative truth – one that underscores the dialectical relationship between the migrants’ lives, their communities, and neocolonial US–Mexico relations. The author entwines the lives and deaths of US and Mexican citizens and gives them historical and affective significance within the “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg) of a community of mourning enacted within and beyond his narrative. His “mestizx consciousness” (Anzaldúa), a lived awareness of the power imbalances that silence the subaltern across the US–Mexico border, manifests itself through the phenomenological leitmotif of la huesera. This southwestern tale and feminine archetype explains the impulse to bring into being a “new memory” (Irizarry) of a reconstructed community around the plane wreck and to challenge the “hierarchy of grief” (Butler) that silenced the migrants’ life stories.

This article examines a small selection of children's books by Julius Lester, a black power activist, considering them in the context of the black power movement. Lester is frequently cited for his activism and polemical works on black power but no study of his works for children has yet been published. The works considered in this article provide an example of how children's books during this period reflected aspects of black power ideology, language and imagery. Whilst books for black children in the USA had a long history of trying to instil racial pride and knowledge of African American history, these efforts were nevertheless restricted for various reasons. This article argues that it was the black power movement that provided a context in which books directed at black children could flourish. Librarians, activists, educators and publishers now engaged in providing literature for black children in a more comprehensive and directed way than before. Within this context, authors like Julius Lester could write books that celebrated African American history and folklore and could at the same time address issues of racial tension and white cultural hegemony.

Martin Luther King Jr. is widely read through his association with Gandhi's ideas and practice. Whilst it is important to neither overstate nor ignore this influence, the paper retraces the work undertaken behind the scenes to script this relationship for wider audiences. It questions how King's casting as America's black Gandhi was strategically undertaken, by whom and for what purposes, as well as exploring why it was ultimately short-lived. Although King experimented with Gandhism briefly in the late 1950s, by the early 1960s the idea had largely been dropped. In particular, the paper focusses on the role played by the American pacifist movement up to, and including, organizing King's visit to India in 1959. These sources are used to make a broader argument that King's ability to inhabit Gandhi's legacy during the movement's early years was critical to forging global anticolonial connections. As such the paper argues that nonviolence was more than a repertoire of resistance techniques, but a spatial mechanism which could fold scale, bridge distance, and thereby produce and reshape racial solidarity itself.

The Pacific War Memorial on Corregidor Island in the Philippines was erected by the United States government to commemorate Filipino and American soldiers who had lost their lives during the Second World War. Inaugurated in 1968, it was the first American memorial on Philippine soil since the United States had recognized the Philippines as an independent country in 1946, following almost fifty years of colonial rule. This article interprets the monument and the wider Corregidor memoryscape. It examines how the United States, the Philippines and the Second World War are depicted both within and around the memorial and what this suggests about the creation and persistence of colonial memory. The article explores the tensions between colonial and decolonized remembrance, and the extent to which the Pacific War Memorial serves as a historical marker for the United States’ achievements in the Philippines.

Between 1976 and 1979 Byron Preiss operated as a book packager specializing in graphic novels, bringing comics creators together on original stories and licensed properties and delivering the finished product to publishing houses. Far from being praised for his efforts, Preiss was attacked by fans and comics professionals for betraying the very medium he professed to uplift. This article explains the industrial shifts behind the rise of Byron Preiss Visual Publications and book-format comics, as well as accounting for the hostility directed against Preiss, a level of vitriol that increased after his collaborators on Empire (1978) expressed their dismay at the changes he made to the graphic novel before publication.

James M. Cain and the songwriter Al Dubin were drafted into the army and served on the Western Front during World War I. Both men would go on to play major roles in the making of American popular culture during the interwar period: Cain writing the noir bestsellers The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, Dubin providing the lyrics for several hit musicals, including 42nd Street. For both artists, the impact of the war was more complicated than the themes of disillusionment and a collective loss of innocence more famously offered by writers like Hemingway and Dos Passos. This article argues that Cain's and Dubin's pop successes in fact reflected the attitudes of millions of other veterans, who rejected the Progressive Era's moralism and asserted a new, determined, cynical, and irreverent sensibility in American life. Cain and Dubin were not alone, but part of a larger generation of Great War veteran artists who are rarely regarded as such, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, Jack Benny, Thomas Hart Benton, and Norman Rockwell among them. Working in the most accessible forms of art and entertainment, their contributions, no less than the Lost Generation's, should also be identified as an important legacy of World War I.

Since its reclamation in the 1970s, Edward S. Curtis's project to exhaustively photograph and describe American Indian cultures in the early twentieth century has invited shifting critical assessments. Complicating earlier arguments that it represents a nostalgic and inauthentic drama of a “vanishing” race, in which Indians functioned merely as props, recent scholars seek to recover his sitters’ agency or contemporary artists’ acts of reclamation. This article contributes to those efforts, but by exploring the temporal ambiguities inherent in the notion – then common among ethnographic photographers – of “preserving” a people for future viewers. It thus examines a photograph that Curtis contributed in 1913 to the Modern Historic Records Association, a short-lived organization that intended to assemble time capsules and archival vaults for historians in the distant future. Focussing on this single photograph – “The Oath – Apsaroke” (1908) – also allows us to track the way that Curtis's images could break free from his book project and resonate unpredictably across multiple domains, such as debates over the existence and meaning of Indian oaths.