The issue of “un-Americanism” was present at the creation of the gay rights movement. Indeed the movement emerged, at least in part, as a response to wide-ranging discriminatory policies and practices that were implemented by the federal government during the Cold War. Faced with claims that they constituted an existential threat to the United States, activists in the early gay rights movement worked hard to affirm their patriotism and appealed frequently to the nation's founding ideals of liberty and equality. At times, they also characterized those who discriminated against them as “un-American.” Fifty years later, debates about “Americanism” and “un-Americanism” have been centre stage in the battle to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell and to secure gay marriage rights. With conservative politicians, commentators and activists claiming that demands for gay marriage threaten the foundation of American civilization, the gay rights movement and its supporters have responded in kind. The increased willingness of gay rights activists to lay the charge of “un-American” is, at one level, a logical extension of the appeal to Americanism that has long been central to the movement's rhetorical and symbolic approach. But it also reflects both the greater empowerment of today's LGBT community compared with their McCarthy-era predecessors and the divisiveness of contemporary American political culture.

This article examines two films, James Marsh's Man on Wire and Spike Lee's Inside Man in relation to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It looks at both films as examples of the heist genre and explores the ways in which genre conventions enable the production of meaning about the terrorist attacks. The conventions of the heist film, it argues, help make sense of September 11 by producing a different set of relations to time and space that draw on the uncanny, rather than the traumatic, nature of the events. Narrating stories of transgression, both films place the horrors of September 11 in another context. Through the genre conventions of the heist, each film offers a view of New York in which the events of September 11 and the destruction of the World Trade Center stand as the center. Not yet complete in one, already destroyed in the other, the Twin Towers haunt these films. As Man on Wire and Inside Man each attempt to make sense of the world in which the city of New York is marked most powerfully by a profound absence, it is in their uses of the heist genre that they find a representational space in which to mourn the World Trade Center and the victims of the attacks.

As the era of globalization and comfort ends, preparedness novels embrace humanity's dystopian future and leap at the chance for societal rejuvenation on more localized terms. The three textual case studies explored here put forward a value system derived from the lives of the pioneers and settlers. The frontier, a classic trope of American mythology, is reimagined as the neo-frontier, a time–space continuum located at the porous divide between civilization and wilderness. While this trope provides an antidote against consumer culture's perceived rootlessness and effeminacy, it also legitimizes problematic attitudes, including racism, sexism and a penchant for top-down hierarchies. By regressing to traditional models, the white man avoids succumbing to the excesses of savagery, for example cannibalism, and places himself outside historic time.

This essay focusses on two music videos that filmmaker Alex Rivera directed in conjunction with the #Not1More campaign of the National Day Labor Organizing Network (NDLON). In creating these music videos, Rivera uses visual strategies to portray the “undocumented everyday,” which involves the documentation of the mundane details of existence, such as representation of the indispensability of undocumented Latina/o migrants to everyday economies in the United States.

The civilized and genteel tone of art critic Adeline Adams captures a fading historical and cultural moment that she recovers in this memory of American beaux-arts sculpture, fitfully described in a contemporary exhibition brochure as employing “the classical or Renaissance figural type, stripped of idealization and infused with baroque exuberance in composition,” and “combined with a purely nineteenth-century insistence on accuracy in surface detail.” Despite this sculptural syncretism, Adams's assessment evokes the high civic and didactic role that American public sculpture played toward the end of the nineteenth century, and her memory is even more poignant given the fact that Daniel Chester French, born in 1850, would be dead within two years of her commentary. A modest and contemporary survey of his sculpture thus might help us understand the totalizing effect that the City Beautiful Movement held for a short time in terms of aesthetic urban planning. French ranked among Frederick Law Olmstead, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and other architects and artists “to influence the heart, mind, and purse of the citizen,” as William H. Wilson simply puts it. Confronted by industry, urbanization, and immigrants, those harried and long-time residents of Adeline Adams's American urbs were reminded as they rounded street corners and ascended the steps of civic institutions that a kind of classical beauty and simplicity still existed, and that a small corps of artists and urban planners wanted to keep it that way.

The relative obscurity of Chicago's Henry Blake Fuller (1857–1929), a prolific essayist, journalist, reviewer and novelist, with collections of plays, poems and short stories to his name, in part derives from the difficulty of placing him: the work resists classification. His early fiction, for instance, reflects, debates and sometimes satirises the alternating influences of Howells and James. The Cliff-Dwellers (1893) and With the Procession (1895), “American” novels, are framed by such “European” fictions as The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani (1890) and Waldo Trench and Others: Stories of Americans in Italy (1908). His closet homosexual novel Bertram's Cope's Year (1919), a translation of Goldoni's The Fan (1925) and the non-fictional Gardens of this World (1929) testify to an incremental diversity. Characteristically, his last work, the posthumously published novel Not on the Screen (1930), which projects the interactive mimicry of “real” life and cinema, saw Fuller exploring fresh thematic and formal territory.

The critical appraisal of the 1950s organised society is well established in such now-classic texts such as David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), C. Wright Mills's White Collar (1951) and William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956). These works exposed the group-orientated, “other-directed” corporate personality, motivated by an extreme desire to belong, as a precarious foundation for individual security. If not considered from an explicitly masculine perspective, the emasculating connotations of this model of occupational identity were nevertheless evident in Mills's conception of the white-collar “little man,” Riesman's definition of the “limp” and “exceptionally sensitive” other-directed personality and Whyte's characterisation of the organisation man as the unobtrusive “man in the middle.” Collectively, the depiction of white-collar masculinity in these texts helped create the context for the stereotypical perception of 1950s business enterprise as a breeding ground for conformity and troubled male identity. Less appreciated, however, is the business community's response to this critical appraisal.

In his diary in July 1946 Senator Claude Pepper of Florida noted that Great Britain was “showing considerable progress in [a] year under its socialist government – nationalization of [the] Bank of England, coal mines … . They have enacted [a] housing program and extended [the] social security system and a national health system. That is the direction of things everywhere but here.” The question of why American social democracy did not take off in the same way after World War Two as elsewhere in the industrialised world has become an important issue in recent American historiography. Indeed, the question of what was left, in both senses of the word, of “liberalism” after the death of Franklin Roosevelt assumes particular importance when one considers the fact that there were in the United States in 1946 a fair number of liberal political thinkers who were committed to using the New Deal and wartime experience as a launch pad for further left-of-centre political experimentation. Claude Pepper, Henry Wallace, Helen Douglas, Harold Ickes, Rexford Tugwell, Paul Douglas – all were in positions of political or intellectual influence at the end of the Second World War. Yet, by 1950, they would all experience either political defeat or a shift away from vocal commitment to social democratic values.

The American poet Susan Howe is perhaps the best-known of the generation of poets that came to attention under the banner of “language poetry.” Her work has been widely anthologized and it has drawn a considerable amount of critical commentary. The “language” label, like most such tags, was unpalatable to most of the poets who came under it. It did after all mask a diverse range of poets. But, even given such reservations, it was clear from the start that Howe's poetry was out of step with certain general tendencies within language poetry. We know from the correspondence that Ron Silliman was criticized by some language poets for including Howe in his influential 1986 anthology In the American Tree. In a 1985 letter to Howe, Silliman expresses his reading of the relation between her work and language poetry: I do think one of the most important aspects of this writing [i.e. language writing], from the perspective of literary history if nothing else, is that it is anti-romantic, anti-mystical and anti-lyric (tho there are exceptions …) And your writing does seem to me to be at odds with this larger tendency. How you work with this tension in your poetry seems to me one of its most compelling dimensions.

On 1 June 1965, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) announced that it would hold hearings into the Ku Klux Klan, fifty years after the organization had appeared before the House Rules Committee. Whereas the 1925 investigation allowed the Klan to continue to claim a “100% Americanism,” HUAC unequivocally declared the Klan of the 1960s to be entirely un-American. This essay seeks to explain that turnaround in the understanding of the Klan and its activities, on the one hand, and the contested ideas of un-Americanism and Americanism on the other. It is only within the context of that struggle over un-Americanism's evolving definition, it is argued, that the official decision of civil rights organizations such as COFO and SCLC – whose members had suffered personally from Klan violence – to oppose the proposed HUAC investigation of the Klan can be understood. Similarly, that ongoing contest explains how it was that, after almost three decades of investigating left-wing organizations that often included those fighting for greater civil rights, HUAC was finally moved to turn its attention to the right. Finally, this essay seeks to determine what it was, precisely, about the Klan in 1965 that was deemed “un-American” rather than simply criminal.

This paper examines the representation of American everyday life and the language of the legal system in the work of Charles Reznikoff. It draws comparisons between Reznikoff's accounts of the lives of immigrants to America in his work, and Jacques Derrida's experience of colonial relationships as described in his book Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin. Charles Reznikoff was the son of Russian Jews who moved to America to escape the pogroms of the late nineteenth century. His parents spoke Yiddish and Russian, his grandparents spoke Hebrew, and Reznikoff's first language was English. This familial linguistic complexity was further added to by his associations with experimental modernist poetry and poetics through the “Objectivists,” an environment that provided him with the poetic forms in which to explore relationships between language, experience and its representation. I cite two other linguistic contexts: that of the law, acquired through his legal training, and that of commerce and sales, acquired through working as a hat salesman for his parents' business. Reznikoff therefore had no naturalized relationship between language and either family or national identity, or between language and place. I use Derrida's notion of “a first language that is not my own” to explore the implications for Reznikoff's poetry, and particularly the relationship between the specific accounts of experience in Testimony and the more general notions of nation and justice. While I conclude that a concern of the poems is always language, and what language means in different contexts, the poems also seek to connect with the material consequences of injustice for the fleshly bodies of the victims.

This article reconsiders Richard Wright's Native Son by comparing divergences between the published novel and an earlier typeset manuscript. It argues that such revisions render protagonist Bigger Thomas an icon of global class conflict rather than a national figure of racial tension. By revealing the continuities among critical essays that bookend the writing of Native Son, this essay also reveals how the novel's restructuring further elaborates Wright's globalism – highlighting his desire to produce work that transcended both national and racial categories. Finally, it considers Native Son as a work of “world literature” and a model for global minoritarian discourse. By examining “translations” of the novel into postcolonial contexts, it argues that the global afterlife of Native Son is no departure from the localized vision of the novel, but rather the recapitulation of its explicit globalism. This article thereby challenges critical convention dividing Wright's career cleanly into two phases: his American period and later self-exile. It emphasizes rather that Wright's worldliness should be traced back through his revision of Native Son and earlier critical essays – ultimately finding his globalism not a late-stage development, but actually the single theme that unifies his oeuvre.