This interview with Jesmyn Ward, conducted in November 2013, takes as its starting point the publication of her memoir, Men We Reaped. It explores the role of her writing in the context of Hurricane Katrina, the US South, African American culture and identity, and new trends in twenty-first-century US writing.

Not every book sent for review comes with two pages of endorsements from the great and the good. Stokely is accompanied by glowing approval from such familiar names as Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, Robin D. G. Kelley, Michael Eric Dyson, Gerald Horne, Charles Oglethorpe, and David Levering Lewis. Even without the para-textual apparatus to guide one's judgement, however, there is enough in this biography of Stokely Carmichael for any scholar of the civil rights movement to relish. This may not be the “definitive biography” that John Stauffer declares it to be, but it is indisputably important. In essence, Joseph argues that Stokely is the missing panel in a triptych of heroes, flanked on either side by the already canonized Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. In key respects, he insists, Stokely was the synthesis of Malcolm and Martin.

This article traces the long and antagonistic fashioning of the National Recovery Adminstration's code of practice for the film industry during 1933. The NRA code process publicly exposed resentful fissions within Hollywood, and the oligarchic, if not monopolistic, way in which the major film studios had set up their vertically integrated consolidation of the motion-picture industry in terms of production, distribution and exhibition on a national scale. A media spotlight flooded onto their soundstages and executive suites, and many, including President Franklin Roosevelt, were not pleased with what they saw. The NRA, signed into law in 1933 by Roosevelt, implemented an unprecedented reorganization of the American economy to restore employment to combat the Great Depression. Perhaps most controversially, especially for the union-averse film industry, the NRA established collective bargaining. Though they supported it initially, the major studios would not long abide by the NRA. Throughout 1933, they violated the spirit and letter of the code, ensuring as much as possible that the economic pain and sacrifice of the Great Depression in Hollywood was visited upon artists and technicians, not studio heads and executives. They used the making of the code to attempt to cement and further the advantages they enjoyed while offering little to other interests in the film industry.

This article looks at Eleanor Roosevelt's role within the intense debate on nuclear fallout as it developed in the US in the early 1950s. In particular, the article analyzes Mrs. Roosevelt's position on nuclear weapons, deterrence, and disarmament; her condemnation of nuclear testing; and her role as both a public intellectual and a mass educator who helped people to understand the real consequences of nuclear fallout. Here, Mrs. Roosevelt emerges as an active voice that, by defending freedom of speech, also contributed to popularizing the issue of nuclear fallout and making American citizens aware of the urgency of a ban on nuclear testing.

This essay analyzes The 9/11 Report, exploring its connection between the defense of the nation and the defense of the humanities. Comparing American civic engagement with the work of literary criticism, the report argues that America's “most important failure” before 9/11 “was one of imagination.” Significantly, each of its four major recommendations for improving future intelligence work parallels a specific literary-critical skill. Grounding these skills in the work of the humanities classroom, The 9/11 Report concludes that America's global power requires the imagination and the ethics central to a liberal arts education.

Anna Hartnell's “When Cars Become Churches” begins by establishing a helpful context for understanding and fully appreciating the most recent gift to readers from Jesmyn Ward, her 2013 memoir titled Men We Reaped. In the wake of the tragedies of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, John Crawford III, and Eric Gordon, Ward's memoir is a critically important addition to our understanding of the fragility of the lives of young black men. These are lives that matter deeply to Ward and to the community of DeLisle, Mississippi – and because of Ward's fearless, honest, and emotionally searing story, they are lives that matter to her readers. She realizes one of the great achievements of literature: the transformation of the reader who looks at the other from a distance into a reader who sees with the other. As such, her work – especially Salvage the Bones and Men We Reaped – helps to enhance affective and cognitive understanding of others and cultivate moral imagination.

Over the past thirty years or so the study of American fraternity has been used to explore a variety of phenomena in the nation's evolution, especially around the turn of the twentieth century. Fraternities have been used to understand the exploration, taming and exploitation of the West. They have been shown to represent proof of the various turn-of-the century crises of gender, race and ethnicity. They have been seen as the very embodiment of bygone caring, sharing, communities. However, among the aspects to have escaped attention is the importance of fraternity in criminal organizations. Given that crime, then as now, was seen as one of the most pressing of social issues, and given that over these years there was a deep suspicion that there were a variety of ultra-secret fraternities organizing, facilitating and manipulating wide-ranging criminal activities, this may be considered a little odd. This article investigates the idea that there was really such a thing as a genuine criminal “fraternity.” Looking at three of the most famous of such organizations – the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the Molly Maguires and the Mafia – it demonstrates that not only were ideas of fraternity central to their very existence, but they are also crucial to our understanding both of them and of the period in which they were situated.

Worker correspondence was a form of found poetry employed by radical left writers during the 1930s. Readers' letters to publications such as New Masses and the Daily Worker were reworked with end stops and presented as free verse. This essay examines the practice of worker correspondence as a form of readymade, a consciously avant-gardist collision of politics and “high” culture. This examination is put forward as a reflection on current thinking on the literary left of the Depression decade and – along the way – suggests points of contact with the Objectivist poetics of George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff.

This article examines the concept of authenticity in American politics through its construction and representation in fictional election campaigns in film and television. This article will posit The Candidate (1972), Tanner '88 (1988), Wag the Dog (1997) and The West Wing (1999–2006) as crucial sites of popular cultural critique of this aspect of the electoral process: The Candidate as a damning critique of television's influence, Tanner '88 as a satirical take on campaign films in the Reagan era, Wag the Dog as a savage indictment of spin-doctoring during Clinton's presidency, and The West Wing's attempt to rescue the process through the construction of an “authentic” political candidate. This involves close textual analysis of the four examples identified, examining the contrasting visual styles, strategies and tones. The textual discussions will not take place in isolation, however: this article will chart the simultaneous developments in real-world electoral politics, with particular focus on the influence of the media in the election campaigns contemporaneous with the fictional examples discussed. The article charts a shift in the representation of political authenticity, from a cynical attitude towards its possibility in the 1970s, to an uncomplicated reversion to traditional markers of this elusive concept in the 2000s.

Throughout this interview, Jesmyn Ward emphasizes the humanity of her fictional and nonfictional subjects – subjects whose humanity has been eviscerated by what has been characterized as the postwar, neoliberal shift in American politics and economics. The socioeconomic and political neglect of African Americans was, of course, demonstrable in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, revealing the structural racism that had often resided in the US's political unconscious. Ward's emphasis on the ideas of survival and renewal – a “savage” resilience of humanity in its most precarious state – offers a corrective to the proclivities of some critical theory deployed in the framing of Hurricane Katrina's victims and the longer history of suffering they represented. For examples, theories of biopolitics used to conceptualize the ways in which African American life has been removed from the protections of citizenship and state sovereignty do run the risk of universalization. A transhistorical version of that life, consistent from slavery to the present day, might emerge from such theory, indistinct from examples of “bare” lives rendered by states of emergency beyond the US and across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as Giorgio Agamben might describe such life. In other words, theory risks a process of re-othering and a suspension of historical agency. Anna Hartnell finds in Ward's work the resonance of the jeremiad, and so narratives that are structured by the possibility of the redemption of historical experience – future-oriented narratives. These are narratives that represent the negotiation of historical conditions, not utter submission to them, and following Hartnell's reference they are aptly framed by Henry Giroux's reconceptualization of biopolitical life and the limits of American democracy.