This essay examines the political meanings of John Ford and Dudley Nichols's film The Hurricane (1937). The Hurricane appears at a pivotal moment in American history, a moment when Ford and Nichols set out to make films for a “new kind of public.” This new audience was forged by new political forces, including the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the Popular Front, and Roosevelt's New Deal. Building on previous work that documents Nichols's affiliation with Popular Front organizations, and Ford's own political cinema (including The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and How Green Was My Valley (1941)), I argue that The Hurricane offers a fundamental critique of European imperialism, and imperial “whiteness.” At the same time, the energies for that critique come from a paradoxically “progressive” orientalism that represents South Seas “natives” as inherently wild and independent. It is this projected hunger for independence that allows Ford and Nichols to argue against colonial “whiteness,” while, almost simultaneously, they portray African Americans as servile and dependent, thus justifying white supremacy and racial oppression in the United States. Finally, by way of conclusion, I suggest that this dyadic representation – natives as independent, blacks as dependent – continues to structure the politics of Ford's post-World War II cinema, allowing him to normalize white supremacy at home, while at the same time justifying American military adventures abroad in the name of freedom for “the world's afflicted races.”

This paper describes a change in how American radio dramatists used sound effects around the time of Pearl Harbor, particularly on Suspense, one of the signature “shocker” anthologies of the 1940s. In Suspense dramas by writers such as Lucille Fletcher, sound effects no longer merely described settings and action, as had been the custom previously. Instead, effects swept away interpersonal forms of colloquy and coded character psychology, often to the detriment of the populist spatial aesthetics that had prevailed during the Depression. Using accounts of studio technique, as well as a close reading of Fletcher's “The Hitch-hiker,” I argue that when radio told tales of characters under the sway of sound effects, it helped to promulgate the idea that minds are available to penetrating and persuasive “signal-based” communicative acts, just the sort of language required to make works of propaganda meaningful. In a larger way, this paper tries to rediscover the American radio play of the 1940s by treating it as not only “theater of the mind,” but also a theater about the mind.

There are three kinds of gangbanger autobiography: those told from inside the life, those told from outside the life, and those told by those who are outside the life but whose sense of self is still inextricably connected with gangbanger deeds and the respect/status won by those deeds. Stanley “Tookie” Williams's autobiographical writing provides a telling example of the third kind. To understand Williams's autobiographical writings we need to look at them in relation to the whole range of gangbanger autobiography – and the wide range of autobiographies that come to us from tribal warrior cultures.

Robert Coover's 1977 novel The Public Burning is a dramatic re-presentation of the last three days of the lives of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Dubbed the “atomic spies” by the media, the Rosenbergs were accused of passing on the “secret” of the atomic bomb to the Russians. The sensational trial provoked widespread attention for its seeming encapsulation of the fault lines in American society opened up by anticommunism and the emergent Cold War. Found guilty, they were the first American nationals to be executed for espionage. This paper analyses the different narrative methods that Coover employs to re-present the past. In particular I focus on Coover's juxtaposition of a third-person, seemingly omniscient, narrator with the first-person narratological voice of then Vice President Richard Nixon. I suggest that we can best understand this not simply as providing objective and subjective versions of the event, as some critics have claimed, but rather as a distinction between history as chronicle (or what I call a synchronic method of history), and history as storytelling (or diachrony). Through this The Public Burning becomes not just a satirical critique of the specific political culture of the time, I contend, but, more fundamentally, a general exploration of the difficulties of reconstituting past events into knowledge. It is here, perhaps, where the novel's continuing relevance for today lies.

This article examines the representation of intersexuality in Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2002 novel Middlesex. It situates the depiction of intersexuality within the context of current scholarship on sexed identity within the field of gender and sexuality studies. It argues that while a fictional focus on ambiguously sexed identity might appear to be aligned with queer critiques of fixed categories of “sex,” Eugenides's narrative remains implicated in heteronormative assumptions. More specifically, it will explore the narrative strategies which frame Calliope Stephanides's intersexed body, focussing on the relationship between the male-identified adult Cal, “author” of this fictional autobiography, and his remembered teenage girl self. It will suggest that the retrospective logic at work in this narrative is complicit in a heteronormative temporality which reinforces the causal relationship between sex, gender and sexuality which queer theorists have sought to interrogate.