This article looks at a number of James Baldwin's early essays. These include “Stranger in the Village” (1953), “A Question of Identity” (1954), “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown” (1950) and “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American” (1959). In these essays Baldwin resolves the contradiction between his sense of himself as an individual and his racial identity by affirming both his American citizenship and his racial identity as a source of cultural strength and authority. He conceives of race in dialectical terms, with the African American as the dynamic agent in a process envisaged as leading to an overcoming of both whiteness and blackness in favour of a reformulated American nationalism.

The United States after World War II experienced symbiotically the fear of the Soviet threat and the belief in its own system as the ultimate choice for the world. In the confrontation with the Soviet Union, cultural relations programs began to be organized and designed in accordance with national security interest. George F. Kennan, the architect of US containment policy, urged: “let us by all means have the maximum cultural exchange.” The mission of cultural contact, according to Kennan, was “combatting the negative impressions about this country [USA] that mark so much of world opinion.” The US government made new cultural policies in terms of Cold War political concerns and relied extensively on private resources for the implementation of cultural diplomacy via educational exchange. It mobilized the American society for the achievement of “total diplomacy” with political rhetoric, legislative measures, and financial support. Private institutions, which pioneered and dominated US cultural interactions with other nations before the war, now began to play a new but supportive role for the state. Because of their expertise and their unique roles in a democratic society, American philanthropies, professional organizations, and universities became indispensable in delivering the multitude of exchange programs.

In the United States since the conclusion of the Vietnam War, the Vietnam veteran has become known as a neglected, troubled, and even scorned individual. According to this view, the Vietnam veteran's problems began in Vietnam where he was forced to participate in a brutal and disturbing war in which he was under fire twenty-four hours a day. The enemy, the wily and tenacious Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars, were not always clearly defined nor were they above hiding behind or using civilians, leading to the unintentional – and sometimes intentional – killing by American forces of noncombatants, including women and children. Due to the military's policy of limiting the tour of duty in the war zone to one year, combat groups lacked cohesion and suffered from low morale, resulting in the excessive use of marijuana and heroin and an eventual breakdown of discipline, leading to the “fragging” of officers who attempted to reimpose order.

While American Studies continues to be a popular subject in universities and colleges on both sides of the Atlantic, several influential critics have recently expressed some sense that its methodological direction appears increasingly uncertain. To be sure, there never was a time when this field's methodology has not been problematic: arguments about what American Studies should include, and indeed whether its eclectic narratives could reasonably be said to constitute an academic discipline at all, have circulated many times since the rapid growth of the subject in the late 1940s. This development has been well documented over the last few years. Philip Gleason has shown how the end of the Second World War led to a patriotic desire to identify certain specifically American values and characteristics; this led to various mythic idealizations of the American spirit in seminal critical works of the 1950s; and this in turn was followed by a more empiricist reaction in the 1960s and 1970s, when social scientists and historians of popular culture were concerned to demystify those earlier, holistic images of a “virgin land” and an “American Adam.” These are old controversies, and I do not intend to rehearse them in detail here. From the perspective of the early 1990s, what is more urgent is to consider how, or indeed if, the field of American Studies might continue to make an important contribution to our understanding of the United States, as well as a significant intervention within the world of learning more generally.

In opposition to energy historian Vaclav Smil, who argues that “timeless literature … show[s] no correlation with advances in energy consumption,” this essay makes the general claim that energy history is significantly entwined with cultural history. Energy history is in fact entwined with changing cultural conceptualizations and representations of psyche, body, society, and environment; it is correlated not just with changing material cultures, but with symbolic cultures as well. To see this, the essay argues, one must conceptualize energy history in terms of a succession of energy systems – systems that are constituted by sociocultural, economic, environmental, and technological relationships. The essay's specific argument then traces the effects on symbolic culture, especially literature, of the nineteenth – and twentieth-century shift from coal capitalism to oil–electric capitalism. It starts by looking at the features of early oil extraction culture, from Drake's 1859 oil strike in Titusville, Pennsylvania to Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, and examines how oil–electric capitalism develops and defines itself culturally against the previous era of coal capitalism. Then the essay considers how the consolidation of the oil–electric capitalist system is significantly related to the emergence of modernist culture, affecting the production of both popular culture and high art. By the end of the twentieth century, a new phase in oil–electric capitalism emerges with the expansion of the postwar petrochemical industry, the dramatic expansion of environmental crisis discourse in the 1960s and 1970s, and the return of peak-oil discourse to the mainstream in the last decade. The essay examines how the material features of oil, as well as its dominant uses as luminant, motor fuel, lubricant, and eventually petrochemical feedstock, take on cultural importance. Exemplifying both the cultural innovations and reinventions of oil capitalism from the extraction era to the consolidation era and the post-World War II period, the essay focusses throughout on the two recurring motifs, exuberance and catastrophe, as they play out in a wide range of literary texts and popular enthusiasms.

The history of nativism in the United States has received considerable scholarly attention, yet the few systematic attempts to explain it have focused predominantly on psychological or economic causes. This article asserts that such explanations fail to address the crucial cultural dimension of the nativism issue, which must be analyzed through the prism of historical sociology. Specifically, this article argues that American nativism cannot be understood without reference to an “American” national ethnic group whose myth–symbol complex had developed prior to the large-scale immigration of the mid-nineteenth century. Without understanding this social construction, it is difficult to explain subsequent attempts to defend it. This article, therefore, does not seek to retrace the history of American nativism. Instead, it focuses on the period prior to 1850, when American nativism was in its infancy. It examines the development of an Anglo-American ethnicity during 1776–1850 and attempts to delineate its structure. This “American” complex of myths and symbols, with its attendant set of life-style images and narratives, is shown to conform to more generally models recently presented by theorists of ethnicity and nationalism. Finally, it is argued that American nativism may have exhibited a very different pattern if an “American” national ethnicity had not taken root.

As “the American century” comes to a close provocative jeremiads have become a growth industry in the United States, with just about every leading newspaper and numerous popular magazines, books, radio and television programmes depicting a nation in serious social and economic decline. A generalised sense of crisis emerges from the myriad causes of this perceived decline at home and abroad. Domestically, commentators feed ideological debates and moral panics about problems of crime, drugs, family values, ethno-racial balkanisation and multiculturalism. Externally, the uncertain endings of the Cold War and emergent economic leadership of Asiatic nations have encouraged requiems for the American Empire. These discourses of decline evidence a public paranoia about significant economic, political and social changes which have disrupted the coherence and cohesiveness of national myths and ideologies of Americanness. One notable feature of this paranoia is that it has led to a growing recognition of whiteness as a social category and more particularly of white male selfhood as a fragile and besieged identity. I want to comment on some general features of this paranoia as a signifier of whiteness and examine how it has been treated as an issue of representation in Hollywood film.

Mack: pimp; talk someone into something

“Pimptionary,” Ice-T

Mack man: Short for Mackerel man, a pimp. Possibly from the French maquereau. Connotes the working side of pimping, especially the line, the “rap,” the psychological game.

“Pimp Talk,” Christina and Richard Milner

Mack, as these definitions attest, is synonymous with pimp and is so deployed in gangsta rap as both noun and verb. From this denotative meaning, the term has assumed secondary meanings: to persuade, or as Ice-T says “to talk someone into.” The mack comes to mean the persuader, the trickster, the rapper. This semantic shift strikes at the centre of the equivalencies between rap artist and pimp. As music critic S. H. Fernando asserts, “the one specific quality that pimps and rappers share is their way with words.” If broad parallels can be drawn between pimping and rapping, what is distinctive about the notorious and highly successful subgenre of gangsta rap, which emerged in late-1980s urban California, is that here this equivalence is literalized. Many gangsta rappers actually assume pimp personae, presenting oral narratives which fulfil both denotative and connotative meanings of the word mack.

Online diaries are at once thoroughly familiar and intensely new. Their publication on the Internet may be seen as upholding a long tradition in self-representational writing even as information technology modifies the forms and functions of such texts. Studying online diaries from a literary standpoint may therefore shed light on the development of new forms of writing, and contribute to assessing the extent of this transformation and its meaning. At the same time, viewing online diaries as primary sources may afford insight into the mores of ordinary people in contemporary America. Focusing on anonymous American diarists makes it possible to explore how this contemporary social practice reflects the transformations of the heartland in present-day America, how ordinary women and men, average Americans, make sense of their society and can be seen as representative of American culture, while at the same time engaging in the most personal kind of writing.

On January 7, 1892, Forest and Stream – the magazine of “true sportsmen” – featured a photograph of wild mule deer taken by Fred Baker, a hunter from Wyoming. A doe and her two fawns rest peacefully in front of a patch of sagebrush, as the midday sun casts a bright light. “Here, by a piece of good fortune which might not come to a man once in a lifetime,” the editor George Bird Grinnell explained, “Mr. Baker discovered the deer, and creeping up to the edge of the ravine focussed his camera on them without disturbing their siesta.” Grinnell emphasized to readers the accuracy and details portrayed in the image – the large mule-like ears of the deer and the black tips of fur that marked their tails. But he also drew a moral message from this scene of tranquility. “The flesh of the mule deer is excellent eating,” Grinnell wrote, “far better in the estimation of some people than that of the Virginia deer; but we think a man would have to be pretty hungry or quite without soul who would be willing to disturb the charming family group which is shown in our illustration. As we grow older we incline more and more to the opinion that a camera is sometimes a more satisfactory implement to hunt with than a gun.”

Genealogies of continuity and disruption frequently shape the terms of the art-historical debate when discussing the gestures and insurgencies of form encapsulated in the term “modernist.” Narratives of rupture have often signaled a double bind for African American art. As a field, its existence arguably suggests the need for a paradigm shift in the teleology of Western art history. Yet the terms of this debate can often, albeit unintentionally, foreground social relevance to the detriment of artistic influence. Black artists become the supplement to, rather than catalysts of, artistic change. Their modernity is almost a byproduct: a result of these space-making gestures of “insertion” rather than an assertion of their own creative impulse.

In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope sent back to astronomers at the University of Arizona a series of vivid colour images of the Eagle Nebula, a dense formation of interstellar gas and dust the likes of which cradle newborn stars. As evidence that our perceptual universe, in every sense of the word, is defined by the representational powers of colour technology, the Hubble's “cosmic close-ups” are a clear case in point. Colour has become a standard representational form and hence the visual form. If so, what can be said of the recent popularity and proliferation of the black-and-white image?

No self-respecting café-bar or discriminating home, it seems, can now do without a black and white print on the wall. Commercial photography and certain forms of advertising have found a new niche in black and white, and even sepia is staging a come-back. The popularity of the black-and-white image cannot be divorced from the commercial culture in which it circulates; it is a “look” and a marker of taste. Monochrome is a stylistic trend but a revealing one, especially if one considers the growing preoccupation in America with heritage and memory. Both Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes give black and white a status of authenticity judged in relation to past time “properly” captured. For Sontag, monochrome gives an image a sense of age, historical distance, and aura. She writes, “the cold intimacy of color seems to seal off the photograph from patina.” Likewise, Barthes comments on the artifice of colour, how it is a “coating applied later on to the original truth of black and white.” For both critics, monochrome is an aesthetic of the authentic figured around a basic quality of pastness.

Within certain conservative narratives imposed upon the events of 2005, New Orleans has been demonized as a site promoting gay licentiousness and therefore meriting divine retribution. In queer narratives, New Orleans has been valorized as promoting that same licentiousness but lamented for having those hedonistic excesses tempered by the widespread destruction of the city. Especially in the latter scenario, there is a significant degree of nostalgia, an element that also marks other queer understandings of the city that focus not so much on the hedonism as on the day-to-day warp and woof of pre-hurricane gay communities. The main focus of this essay is on how, as gay communities have been reconfigured in the aftermath of the hurricane by temporary and permanent evacuations, job relocations, and other alterations, gay responses have continued to evince a range of emotions, including anger, bitterness, resignation, and optimism. This essay focusses on gay literary production responding directly to the hurricane to examine essays and poems published as Love, Bourbon Street: Reflections of New Orleans (2006) and Blanche Survives Katrina in FEMA Trailer Named Desire, Mark Sam Rosenthal's off-Broadway show structured around a parody of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire that, as a result of this structure, faced legal action instigated by the University of the South, owner of the intellectual rights to Williams's literary production. The collection and the play are sustained queer responses to Katrina's flooding of the city that showcase both the energizing and problematic aspects of these responses.

This paper examines Nation women's engagement and resistance in the Muhammad Speaks (MS) newspaper. MS was created as the official publication of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam (NOI) in 1960. The paper employed women as journalists and invited contributions from women who had registered with the group. Women's contributions to the paper's production and content reveal their readings of NOI mandates but they equally illuminate a gentle resistance to aspects of the organization. Elijah Muhammad's NOI implemented gender roles for men and women within the organization that were often inflexible. Women embraced the organization's gender roles and found ways to navigate the patriarchal dimensions of the movement. This paper argues that a careful analysis of women's writings for the MS newspaper reveals facets of their activism that have been overlooked in existing scholarly studies.

Oil is often thought of as a sole commodity with singular powers to shape geopolitics, economic development, and environmental change. Yet the complex hydrocarbon assemblage of crude oil is only commodified through the refining process, which produces a multiplicity of products (e.g. gasoline, heating oil, petrochemicals). In this paper, I argue that petroleum products provide the supplementary materiality for a neoliberal cultural politics of “life.” In the first section, drawing from Gramsci and Foucault, I argue that the popular basis of neoliberal hegemony is rooted in a cultural politics of “entrepreneurial life” that accompanied increasing suburbanization, single-family homeownership and widespread automobility in the post-World War II United States. By the 1970s, masses of white suburban homeowners buttressed the “rightward turn” in American politics based around an “ideology of hostile privatism” and the demonization of taxes and wealth redistribution. In the next section, I suggest that this geography of life is rooted in the history of refineries and their search for multiple marketable outlets for petroleum by-products. Increasingly, the petroleum industry sought to actively remind the public that their lives were saturated with petroleum products. In the last section, I examine a film produced by the American Petroleum Institute titled Fuel-Less, a parody of the film Clueless. In the film, the main character, Crystal, is forced to discover what her life would be like without petroleum products. Crystal is taken to an oil well and refinery to learn about how crude oil becomes the multiple products she uses in her life. As she learns to appreciate oil, she develops a neoliberal form of environmental responsibility focussed upon volunteerist actions like recycling. The overall lesson is both the unavoidability of oil in everyday life and that privatized actors (consumers and capital) can all “pitch in” to create a sustainable future.

For close on to a hundred years discourses on national identity, European ethnic assimilation and the problem of class division within the Republic had been principally addressed in the popular arts through the agency of the black mask. During the 1930s, blackface in American films shifted from the idea implied in the racial slur, “nigger in the woodpile,” to the rather less visible, but no less derogatory, “octoroon in the kindling,” a phrase used in Her Man (Pathé, Tay Garnett, 1930) to suggest something is amiss, but which is used here to suggest the cultural miscegenation that informs much of the material discussed in this article.

On the eve of the publication of his first novel, The Fire in the Flint, Walter White received a letter from T. S. Stribling, whose novel Birthright had inspired White to write Fire in the first place. Both novels tell the story of a Northern-educated black's return to his Southern hometown with the intention of uplifting the black community and improving race relations. In his letter, however, Stribling makes it clear that the similarities between the two novels end there.

Fire's main character, says Stribling, is so “poky in love making… I rather suspect a big healthy passion wouldn't have hurt.” He proceeds to criticize Fire's ending in which the main character is lynched following much violence against his family: “The repeated murder and the repeated burning is what I object to. That may be quite natural, and I admit that lynchings are monotonous, but art is the escape of life from monotony. ” At this point, it appears that Stribling is offering the standard critique of much politically-charged literature. He seems to be accusing White of being factually accurate, but aesthetically uninteresting. However, in a follow-up letter responding to White's defense of the novel's ending, Stribling criticizes White for being inaccurate:

Here you are, a young Negro writer with a very fine promise. I insist that you write in the big style, in the unhurried style that shows human beings as they are… Now White, detach yourself, my boy. Cut away, be a camera, not a gatling gun.

From The Road to The Walking Dead, contemporary apocalyptic fictions narrativize the conjunction of two central “crises”: late liberal capitalism and twenty-first-century masculinity. This conjunction underlines the insights of a variety of scholars and cultural critics who analyze the “crisis” of contemporary masculinity, often specifically white masculinity, as a product of recent economic and social transformations, including the perceived disempowering of white male authority in a neoliberal era of affective labor, joblessness and multiculturalism. But the apocalypse, especially as a television series, is a rather peculiar narrative vehicle for the articulation of a transformative future for – or a nostalgic return to – masculine agency and authority. Focussing on questions of subjection and agency in the late liberal/neoliberal moment, I suggest that zombie apocalypse stages a debate on the status of masculine agency that has roots extending deep into the foundations of liberal modernity and the gendered selfhood it produces – roots that are ironically exposed by the popular cultural referent that dominates The Walking Dead: the frontier myth. The frontier and the apocalypse both draw from Hobbesian prognostications of a state of nature as relentless competition and a war of “all against all” that are foundational to modern liberal political theory and questions of sovereignty, self-interest, and collective governance. But they also index a narrative antidote to the erasure of political agency as traditionally enshrined in liberal democratic norms and traditions. Like the western, the zombie apocalypse speculates about possible ways in which masculine agency in liberal modernity might be reimagined and/or reinvigorated. In the place of a tired, automated neo-“official man”, the apocalypse in The Walking Dead promises an opportunity to “finally start living” – reminding us that white masculinity figures precisely the Enlightenment liberal subject-citizen and the authoritative, if highly fictional, agency which has been notoriously crushed within regimes of late capitalist biopower. And yet, even as the zombie apocalypse engages foundational myths of liberal modernity, it elaborates them in surprisingly nihilistic set pieces and an apparently doomed, serial narrative loop (there is no end to the zombie apocalypse and life in it is remarkably unpleasant). The eruption of haptic elements in the television show – especially in the visual and aural technologies that allow representations of bodies, suffering, dismemberment, mutability, disgust – further counters the apparent trajectory of apocalyptic allegory and opens it to alternative logics and directions. The narrative options of the zombie apocalypse thus seem to be moving “back” to a brutal settler colonial logic or “forward” to an alternative, perhaps more ethical, “zombie logic,” but without humans. This essay is interested in what these two trajectories have to say to each other and what that dialogue, and dialectic, indicate about contemporary economic governance as it is experienced and translated affectively into popular narrative and cultural product. That is, to what extent is the racist and economic logic of settler colonialism already infected by the specter of another logic of abjection and otherness, one that is figured both by the zombies and by the nonnarrative function of spectacles of embodied male suffering? And what does that slippage between logics and directions tell us about the internal workings of settler colonialism and economic liberalism that have always been lodged within mythic fantasies of the frontier?