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Joshua Parker, Robert A. Winkler

Introduction: Notes on the Relation of Narrative, Environment, and Social Justice

The idea for this JAAAS special issue comes from the 49th Annual Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies, which took place at the University of Salzburg in Fall 2022. Presentations covered stories we tell about our environment, and about pressing social issues of the past or present. As varied as the presentations were, the common thread was inquiring into how we – as individuals and collectives – frame our experiences in these areas through narratives, to whom we tell them, and when, where, and why. The contributions here range in their treatment of subject matter from speculative prose to theater, from film to poetry, to a history of the advertising industry. They illustrate how issues of social justice, climate change, and storytelling are intimately linked, and explore various manifestations of this nexus in fresh and surprising ways.

Johannes Walter Vith

Remaking Columbine

High school shootings in the United States generally receive enormous amounts of journalistic coverage and thus spark a lot of public interest. However, the topic appears to be taboo for mainstream cinema, and there are barely any films about real-life school shootings. This article seeks to show that Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2003) is both an enlightening exception to this seeming contradiction and an interesting response to the popular narratives surrounding the Columbine High School shooting of 1999. The film is not only unique in its portrayal of a real-life school shooting but also in the way that it approaches the topic. There are three important processes that make this depiction of the Columbine High School shooting so powerful: remaking, remediating, and reflecting. First, Van Sant's film is a remake of Alan Clarke's 1989 film of the same name. Clarke's film depicts several incidents of gun violence in Northern Ireland without any commentary, and Van Sant employs the same techniques in his film about gun violence at a school. Second, the film critiques the discourse around the shooting, as it remediates video games for its filmic rhetoric. Lastly, Gus Van Sant de-narrativizes the shooting and creates a reflective space for the audience. These three aspects all influence the film's storytelling and cinematography, which aim at promoting reflection rather than providing a straightforward narrative.

Marina Zigneli

The Abortion Road Trip Film and the Pronatalist Discourse in the Post-Roe v. Wade US

With the overturn of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which protected the constitutional right to abortion for almost 50 years, women in America are now faced with extreme difficulties when seeking an abortion. Given this dramatic pronatalist shift that seems only to be getting worse, more and more women will now have to travel through "abortion deserts" in order to seek safe and legal abortion care. Cinema has sought to mediate the troubles and struggles of women "on the road" to safe abortion. Thus, in recent years, we have watched a surge in the representation of abortion within the realm of the road-trip film genre in US-American cinema. Since 2015, several films, such as Grandma (2015), Little Woods (2018), Never Rarely Sometimes Always(2020), Unpregnant (2020), and Plan B (2021), have tackled this issue. Interestingly, only one of those films was directed/written by a male individual, highlighting the way female filmmakers are currently reshaping reproductive health narratives. Additionally, three of these films, namely Grandma, Unpregnant, and Plan B, also fall under the comedy-drama genre, particularly the road trip-buddy comedy genre. This paper aims to explore how the road-trip film genre, which has featured predominantly male characters, is now helping women to share their stories and gain more visibility regarding reproductive rights and how comedy is being used to subvert the overtly dramatic representation of abortion that enhances the pronatalist ideology in most film and television narratives.

Marija Krstic

"Last Frontier. North to the Future." – Oil-Age Alaska and the Environmental Critique in Mei Mei Evans's Oil and Water

This article discusses Mei Mei Evans's 2013 novel Oil and Water as a critical response to the competing narratives that have historically shaped three dominant versions of Alaska in the national imagination: as the Last Frontier to be explored, as an enduring frontier promising a balance between resource extraction and environmental protection, and as a wilderness to be preserved. Inspired by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which takes a pivotal place in US environmental history, the novel offers a realistic exploration of the environmental, social, and cultural consequences of oil dependency. By dramatizing the spill's devastating impact on both human and more-than-human life, Oil and Water challenges the images of Alaska as a limitless resource frontier and the enduring frontier, while advancing the notion of Alaska as a wilderness to be protected.

Nassim Balestrini

The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry. Edited by Timothy Yu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), xix, 246pp.

Nassim Balestrini reviews Timothy Yu's Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Mark M. Smith

In Praise of Discord: Beyond Harmony in Historical Acoustemology

This piece explores writing on historical acoustemology.  It charts the emergence of the field, identifies its strengths and weaknesses,  and calls for greater critical engagement amongst its practitioners.

Michael Fuchs

Editor's Editorial

This is the editor's editorial. In lieu of an abstract, here is the editorial's first paragraph: In the first issue of Textual Practice, the late Shakespeare scholar Terence Hawkes claimed, "It is never a good time to start a new journal." "The Humanities in particular feel marginalized and underfunded," he continued. "[T]hey sense themselves to be hopelessly at odds with a culture which has long abandoned any recognition of the value of their role."¹ More than thirty years later, some of these words still ring very true.

Sylvia Mayer

Narratives of Resilience in Times of Climate Crisis: Angry Optimism and Utopian Minimalism in Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 and Jenny Offill's Weather

The essay discusses two climate change novels, Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 and Jenny Offill's Weather, as resilience narratives. It argues that these novels – New York 2140 speculating about a possible future, set more than 100 years in the future,Weather engaging our present cultural moment, the early 21^st century – explore diverse experiences of, and responses to, human-made climate crisis, directly engaging with the interconnected ecological, political, economic, social, and cultural effects of global warming, but also with responses such as climate skepticism and denial as well as cognitive dissonance, climate anxiety, and grief related to climate change. Applying the concept of resilience in its diverse meanings as an analytical framework emphasizes that fictional climate narratives often go beyond merely "sounding the alarm" about climate risks or concentrating exclusively on catastrophe. Rather, they also shed light on strategies of adaptation, flexibility and endurance and on the potential for transformation to allow for a more hopeful and even utopian reading. For this purpose, the concepts of "angry optimism" and "utopian minimalism" are introduced, the former articulated by Robinson, the latter introduced by critic Anahid Nersessian, who have both participated in the debate on the relevance and timeliness of utopianism in times of climate crisis.

Robert A. Winkler

"Out there in that cabin in the middle of nowhere in Montana": Narrating the Geographical and Mental Deviance of the Unabomber

In 1996, the mathematician-turned-terrorist Theodore J. Kaczynski, nicknamed the Unabomber, was arrested in his self-built cabin in the woods of Montana after having terrorized the nation for over 20 years. He had modeled his cabin after Henry David Thoreau's idealized Walden cabin. This article argues that the Unabomber's cabin in Montana, often considered a so-called flyover state, serves as the pivotal point for his geographical marginalization in the media coverage of the case. Its location in what is discursively constructed as a 'wilderness' makes it impossible to perceive his cabin through the perspective of the pastoral ideal – this imagined middle ground between nature and culture. The over-determination of this material form in its location apparently off the grid furthermore enables the othering and medicalization of Theodore J. Kaczynski. This article demonstrates that the media coverage of the Unabomber case displays these three tendencies which come together in the nexus cabinsanity, i.e., the conflation of pseudo-geographical, cultural, and medical discourses. Projecting cabinsanity, in turn, enables the dismissal of the Unabomber's critique of technologized society as delineated in his manifesto.

David Bebnowski

Murray Rothbard's Populist Blueprint: Paleo-Libertarianism and the Ascent of the Political Right

In his 1992 pamphlet "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement," libertarian economist and intellectual Murray Rothbard drafted a strategy that foreshadowed the rise of populist politics that was to come some years later. Central to his populist vision was the idea of a "paleo-coalition" consisting of "paleo-libertarians" and "paleo-conservatives" that he saw coming closer to power by addressing the masses directly. This, Rothbard proclaimed, would be possible if a presidential candidate were able to short-circuit the traditional media and appeal to disgruntled parts of the population, namely the "rednecks" and Middle America. With Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election in 2016, Rothbard's ideas seem to have become reality. This article draws on the concept of flyover to describe this special populist framework by analyzing libertarians' appeals and politicizable connections to an imagined "real people" and by historically tracing populism in US conservatism. Based on a discussion of the social functions of pamphlets as contentious formats that are interwoven into social conflict, a close reading of Rothbard's 1992 pamphlet shows the decisive political edge that populists were able to gain by employing the strategies for the "paleo movement."

Alexandra Hauke

Black Im/Mobilization, Critical Race Horror, and the New Jim Crow in Jordan Peele's Get Out

In the United States, people of color are not allowed to move around freely in spatial or social terms. Confronted with the everyday horrors of racial segregation, discrimination, and the legacies of slavery, African Americans continue to be excluded from opportunities of upward mobility and experience cultural displacement based on the immobilizing practices of what Michelle Alexander calls "the New Jim Crow." On-screen representations of Black individuals in the horror genre mirror this racial(ized) ideology. Many earlier horror films, texts Isabel Cristina Pinedo classifies as "race horror," mark them as ferocious monsters who must be villainized, imprisoned, or murdered and thus subscribe to a logic of race as the root of American fears. Jordan Peele's directorial debut Get Out (2017) provides a counter-argument, depicting racism as the primary horror in American (popular) culture by investing in the decolonizing strategies of critical race theory to uncover the very real horrors of the prison industrial complex, commodification of the Black body, and racial profiling. In this article, I read Get Out as an example of what I term "critical race horror," texts whose narrative, generic, and cinematographic strategies subvert essentialist strategies of racial silencing and thus invest in necessary measures toward (Black) mobility justice.

Heinz Tschachler

George Washington, the Godfather of American Entrepreneurism

Among all U.S. presidents, George Washington still ranks as the wealthiest. By the time of his death, he owned more than 52,000 acres, which secured his position among the top-ranked land-holding gentry of his day. In Washington's America, secured property was one of the most potent and consequential ideals, much as it also was a dominant cultural investment, with property figuring as "a matter of progress," in the words of a British social philosopher. In eighteenth-century America, individual property was related to working one's own land, which became the basis of civic virtue, conveying status and authority. At Mount Vernon, Washington was a farmer, not a planter, and a scientific farmer at that. Farming was not the easiest route to riches, though, and Mount Vernon's glorified façade of wealth and grandeur only covered up an operation that was, at best, only marginally profitable. Over the years, therefore, Washington became an intrepid figure in financial investment and risky enterprise, not the least of which was the development of the new national capital, whose location on the Potomac had been decided upon in June 1790. With his involvement in the capital venture, Washington fashioned for himself a new mode of economic selfhood and familial belonging that was keyed to the emerging market economy. He became what Joseph A. Schumpeter in 1911 described as a "risk-taker," America's "first commercial man" (President Calvin Coolidge in 1932), and, finally, the "godfather of American entrepreneurism" (historian Richard Norton Smith in 1993).

Lena E. Leßlhumer

Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric. By Virginia Jackson. Princeton UP, 2023, 304 pp.

Lena E. Leßlhumer reviews Virginia Jackson's Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023).

Nassim Balestrini

Intermedial and Transnational Hip Hop Life Writing

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of this forum contribution:

The growing popularity of celebrity life writing and of memoirs which focus on the respective memoirist's specific social, professional, ethnic, or other context also spawned a large number of autobiographical publications by persons in the music industry. The field of musical autobiography is a recent development for which a niche in life-writing scholarship has only been carved out in the past decade. The growing number of autobiographical book publications as well as autobiographical self-representations in non-analog, non-printed, not primarily verbal formats raises the questions as to whether specific genres of hip-hop life writing have been evolving and as to the perspectives from which scholars should discuss them.

Sabrina Völz

The 'Games' People Play: The Dangers of Holocaust Simulations and Thought Experiments in Nathan Englander's and Ellen Umansky's Short Stories

According to a 2018 survey conducted by The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, "over one-fifth of Millennials (22%) haven't heard or are not sure if they have heard of the Holocaust." Since the publication of that study, calls for Holocaust-mandated education have been intensifying. Some academics and teachers have advocated the use of simulations to create empathy for Holocaust victims and survivors. However, sensitive subjects such as the Holocaust must be taught with great care, keeping sound, age-appropriate pedagogical goals in mind. Otherwise, it may do more harm than good. This article discusses two early twenty-first-century Holocaust-themed short stories which serve as stern warnings about the potential dangers and lasting effects of irresponsible Holocaust pedagogy. In Ellen Umansky's "How to Make it to the Promised Land" (2003) and Nathan Englander's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" (2013), characters engage in "what if" scenarios by playing seemingly harmless Holocaust "games" that take a dark turn and conclude with unsettling revelations. While the stories are works of fiction, the analog "games" described in both narratives are loose adaptations of actual games hat Umansky and Englander played as teens.

Johannes Vith

Violent Landscapes: James Benning's Landscape Suicide (1986)

While serial killings, murders, and other violent deaths are traumatic incidents for the communities in which they occur, they also attract a great deal of media attention and form the basis for numerous cinematic adaptations in US-American cinema and beyond. Many of these movies employ a sensationalist approach and focus on the social environments of the killings: the perpetrator's upbringing, triggering experiences, or a generally troubled personality. There are only a limited number of cinematic treatments of violent killings that focus on the natural environment or the landscapes where these incidents occurred.

This article is concerned with filmmakers using (cinematic) landscapes as a mode of cultural expression for violence and trauma. It seeks to show that James Benning's Landscape Suicide (1986) calls for a different understanding of landscape that goes beyond a mere setting for narrative, as it gives landscape active agency in its mediation of two seemingly unconnected murder cases. The film compares and juxtaposes the murder of Kirsten Costas by Bernadette Protti in a suburb of San Francisco in 1984 with the killings of Ed Gein in Plainfield, Wisconsin, in the 1950s. In doing so, the film presents viewers with two distinct functions of landscape in mediating violence and trauma: as a spatialization of time and as socio-political surroundings. Analyzing these aspects of the film helps us to better understand the link between landscape, violence, and trauma in cinematic treatments of violent incidents and also sheds light on the broader connection between landscape and trauma culture.

Leopold Lippert

On Being Topped: Vulnerability and Pleasure in Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

This article explores the sexual and racial politics of anal vulnerability in Ocean Vuong's 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. The article shows how the book negotiates the relationship between vulnerability as an embodied relation—configured as forms of bodily receptiveness, permeability, and dependency that necessarily constitute the formal basis of any intersubjective encounter—and vulnerability as a social relation, configured as frameworks of legitimation that differentiate populations in terms of how they encounter, and are affected by, risk, attachment, desire, violence, and physical and mental health. By reading a series of teenage sexual encounters between the Asian American narrator-protagonist Little Dog and Trevor, his white first lover, the article shows that the novel uses anal sensation and metaphoricity to negotiate the vulnerabilities that come with sexual shame and stigma, racial trauma, internalized homophobia, as well as with racialized sexual stereotypes, all the while suggesting ways in which these vulnerabilities may be turned into sources of pleasure, care, reparation, and healing.

Tatiana Konrad

Mobility, Car Culture, and the Environment in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

Set during the Great Depression, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) focuses on an American family who are forced to leave their home in Oklahoma and travel to California in search for a better life. Apart from its authentic representations of the economic instability in the U.S. in the 1930s, industrial transformations that took place throughout the country, as well as the severe draught, the novel also comments on the issue of (auto)mobility that this articles analyzes from an eco-critical perspective. The major part of the novel takes place on the road, as the reader witnesses the family traveling west on Route 66. While the road turns into a symbol of freedom and, in a way, a means to pursue the American Dream, the truck that the family travels by makes one ponder the meaning of U.S. mobility and the nation's fascination with, and dependence on, cars. Through its focus on the highway and car, The Grapes of Wrath also touches upon the issue of environment. Providing meticulous descriptions of the vehicle, commenting on its enormous size and the large amount of smoke that it exhausts, the novel introduces automobility as menacing to ecology and the environment.   

Kosal Khiev, Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt, Martina Pfeiler

Performing Vulnerability and Resistance in Spoken Word Poetry

This article explores the duality of Kosal Khiev's poetry performances as performing vulnerability and resistance within global cultural contexts. While his live performances vocalize several forms of systemic racism that he experienced as a refugee, in the US foster care system and with the US prison-industrial complex, his live-streamed performances reach beyond national borders that have jeopardized his very existence. Over the past few years, his livestreams and social media posts have most succinctly served as creative channels through which Kosal Khiev addresses his vulnerability. His poetry included in this article not only acknowledges and comments on his vulnerability as interconnected with US politics but also writes himself back into the national discourse from the perspective of an exiled poet.

Lukas Hellmuth

In Search for Alternatives: Queer Theorizing, Affect, and the Horror Film

This article argues that queer theories of affect not only offer an alternative approach to analyzing the horror film in the twenty-first century, but also that a new wave of horror media negotiates its social criticism in newly queer ways. Analyzing Ari Aster's 2018 film Hereditary, it becomes clear that its horrifying effect stems from queer affects within its narrative that both its character and audience share. In this, Hereditary goes beyond traditional forms of criticism regarding its deconstruction of normative family structures, present in horror films as early as 1974's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as it not only points to potential horrors within the traditional family but instead lays open the inherent, inescapable affective horrors of these normative structures and narratives of belonging, necessitating the need for alternative forms of self-determination and community. Doing so, the film utilizes the established forms of the genre but plays both within and outside of its conventions, affecting its audience beyond mere shock. In applying queer theories of affect and negativity to the film, this article demonstrates a critique of the horrors of real-life institutions and systems that plague (queer) existence in our neoliberal society: normative family structures, sexual and romantic normativities, and complex feelings of (not) belonging. In this reading, Hereditary serves as a powerful counternarrative to the cruelly optimistic narratives of everyday life.

Burak Sezer

Going West, Slow and Fast: Speed and Surveying in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

This article examines the speed and mobility of surveying of pre-revolutionary America in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (1997). Pynchon contrasts the extremely slow and directed physical drawing of the Mason-Dixon line with the infinitely fast and undirected speed of magic and dream. This confrontation of mobilities extends into a more general discussion of Enlightenment science and romantic reverie and their clash in Pynchon's novel.  I contend that this investigation of mobility furthermore helps to extend the conceptualization of the well-established opposition of rationality and irrationality in current Pynchon scholarship and beyond. 

Leonardo Nole'

William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses: A Chronicle of Im/Mobilities

"William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) focuses on what the author calls the "earth's long chronicle," a century-long story about an imaginary and truthful land of the American South. In this article, I show how this chronicle is built on the idea of "im/mobility," considered from different perspectives. First, the seven stories that form Go Down, Moses depict various forms of exploitation, the effects induced by time and human movements on fields, woods, and animals, underlying the contrast between an "immobile" wilderness and a "mobile" (tamed, exploited) plantation. Second, these stories follow the destiny of the im/mobile people who inhabit the land—like Ike McCaslin, the most prominent character, who is blamed precisely for his "immobility," i.e. his inability to take action and change the status quo, at the end of the story. Finally, the literary form of Go Down, Moses contains the idea of "im/mobility" in its hybrid and fragmented structure, halfway between a novel and a short story collection.

Ralph Poole

'Ta, te, ti, toe, too': The Horrors of the Harsh Female Voice in 1950s Hollywood Comedies

Hollywood comedies of the 1950s saw the decline of a specific kind of female comedian, as unruly comediennes in the screwball tradition transformed into silly sexy vixens or tamed into homely sexless housewives. There are, however, some comedies which self-reflectively negotiate this shift. In this article, I would like to suggest that the voice of the comedienne serves as a marker of distinction. My article accordingly explores two pivotal examples of such transformative processes: Judy Holliday as Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday (1950) and Jean Hagen as Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain (1952). Both heroines feature what critics have called "the horrors of the harsh female voice." Whereas Billie's voice "survives" through schooling and refinement, Jean's voice resists all training and remains shrill and rowdy, leading to the violent expulsion of her character altogether. With the transformation and eventual disappearance of these extraordinary female actresses and their roles, such voices remained silent for a long time, until loud and brassy comediennes of a new generation were allowed to reappear on the silver screen and to raise their harsh and distinctive voices once again.

Juliann Knaus

The Dissolution of Racial Boundaries: Colonial Diction and Mixed-Race Representations in Natasha Trethewey's Thrall

As the field of mixed-race studies continues to expand, my article adds to this growth by analyzing the representation of mixed-race children in Natasha Trethewey's Thrall in relation to the corresponding Mexican casta paintings she refers to. I explore how Trethewey uses diction and etymology in Thrall by performing close readings of her Mexican casta painting poems. Throughout my analysis, I pay special attention to how aspects of knowledge and colonialism affect the portrayal of these mixed-race offspring. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that Trethewey skillfully uses diction and etymology to emphasize the relationship between knowledge and power, particularly with regard to the representation of mixed-race people in society. Trethewey intertwines mixed-race representation and experiences that seem disparate—her poems cross geographical, temporal, and spatial boundaries—in order to illustrate how mixed-race peoples' positioning and representation in society often transcends such boundaries while additionally critically assessing power dynamics controlling said representation. Accordingly, by closely examining the representation of mixed-race people and miscegenation in art and poetry, this article sheds a new light on how meaning can be developed between races and cultures and stresses how colonialism and knowledge can be connected to contextualizing difference across time and space.

Jennifer A. Reimer

From Crisis to Cata/Strophe: Prepositional Poetics as Decolonizing Praxis

This article shows how Aracelis Girmay's The Black Maria (2016) and Raquel Salas Rivera's while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (2019) turn the ongoing catastrophe of coloniality into a visual grammar of/for loss. Aracelis Girmay's The Black Maria offers a prepositional poetics to visualize the catastrophe of Mediterranean migrant crossings within the spacetime of an oceanic coloniality that joins Mediterranean to Atlantic and Caribbean. Raquel Salas Rivera's poetic response to Hurricane María invokes prepositional relationships to reveal and contest the United States' existing hierarchies of colonial-imperial power. Through form, their poetry visualizes how witness, survival, and mourning become decolonizing tactics of resistance. In the two texts, I identify a prepositional poetics that, by signaling movements through space and time, locates the specific catastrophes of displacement and climate change disaster in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean as part of a continuum of coloniality that stretches from the sixteenth century to the present.