JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies
The Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAAS) is a peer-reviewed diamond open-access journal which seeks to provide an interdisciplinary space for debate on all aspects of American studies. It functions as a forum for Americanists in Austria and the global academic community. Published twice a year, the journal welcomes submissions on a wide range of topics (e.g. American film, American literature, US politics, US-European relations, US-Austrian relations, American television, American music, American visual culture, and American history) and approaches (e.g. cultural studies, political science, sociology, critical race theory, gender studies, media studies, transnational American studies, geography, and the environmental humanities). JAAAS is listed in the the MLA Directory of Periodicals, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and in ErihPlus (European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences).
Austrian Association for American Studies & University of Innsbruck
JAAAS is committed to real open access. Accordingly, all of JAAAS's articles and reviews are free to access immediately from the date of publication. There are no author charges prior to publication (APCs), and no charges for readers to download articles and reviews. Hence, JAAAS is free to all at any time and as long as it remains in operation. To make this possible, JAAAS depends on the technical and financial support of the University of Innsbruck, the financial support of the Austrian Association for American Studies, the goodwill of its editorial team and advisory board, and the continuing support of its network of peer reviewers. A Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license applies to all content published in JAAAS. While anyone may copy material published in JAAAS for any purpose if proper credit is given, all materials are published under an open-access license, with authors retaining full and permanent ownership of their work. JAAAS has a perpetual, non-exclusive right to publish the work and to include it in other aggregations and indexes to achieve broader impact and visibility. Authors are responsible for, and required to ascertain that they are in possession of, image rights for any and all photographs, illustrations, and figures included in their work or to obtain publication or reproduction rights from the rights holders. By submitting their work for publication in JAAAS, authors agree to the terms stipulated above. Authors are free and encouraged to store their work elsewhere, for instance in institutional repositories or websites to increase circulation (see The Effects of Open Access). Authors are also able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal. JAAAS does not charge any reprint fees and it is not necessary to contact JAAAS for reprint permission, as authors retain their copyright.
Introduction: Versions, Narratives, and American Studies
This introduction lays out the concept of versioning as a cultural practice and highlights key premises and potentials of the analysis of such practices in the context of American studies. Drawing from narrative theory and theories of speculation, it theorizes the notion of a version as a copy with a difference. Moreover, the introduction identifies three forms of versioning in relation to the field of American studies: revisionist versioning, speculation-focused versioning, and code-oriented versioning.
Copyright (c) 2025 Matthias Klestil https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Puerto Rico: A National History. By Jorell Meléndez-Badillo. Princeton UP, 2024, 312 pp.
Martin Gabriel reviews Jorell Meléndez-Badillo's Puerto Rico: A National History (Princeton UP, 2024).
Copyright (c) 2025 Martin Gabriel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Becoming bell hooks: A Story about the Self-Empowerment of a Black Girl Who Became a Feminist. By Aneta Ostaszewska. U of Warsaw P, 2023, 161 pp.
Lena E. Leßlhumer reviews Aneta Ostaszewska's Becoming bell hooks: A Story about the Self-Empowerment of a Black Girl Who Became a Feminist (U of Iowa P, 2023).
Copyright (c) 2025 Lena Leßlhumer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Profiles and Plotlines: Data Surveillance in Twenty-First Century Literature. By Katherine D. Johnston. U of Iowa P, 2023, 207 pp.
Joshua Parker reviews Katherine D. Johnston's Data Surveillance in Twenty-First Century Literature (U of Iowa P, 2023).
Copyright (c) 2025 Joshua Parker https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Transplantation and Alternative Worlds: Speculation in Doctors' Life Writing
Even though organ transplantation has turned into a repeatable and comparatively reliable practice, it still presents ample cause for speculation. In fact, various works of speculative fiction explore the practice in relation to the future. Yet, as this article suggests, speculation about transplantation does not only occur within the pages of fictional works but also impacts the life writing of medical professionals. This article engages specifically with the life writing of transplant surgeons: Thomas Starzl's The Puzzle People: Memoirs of a Transplant Surgeon (1992), Kathy E. Magliato's Heart Matters: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon (2010), and Breathless: A Transplant Surgeon's Journal by Thomas R. J. Todd (2007). By focusing on two distinct forms of speculation – the employment of elements from speculative fiction and the pervasiveness of the question "What if …?" – this article emphasizes the underlying but often overlooked significance of speculation in medical contexts.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ruth Gehrmann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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 21st 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.
resilience, resilience narrative, climate fiction, climate anxiety, angry optimism, utopian Minimalism
Copyright (c) 2025 Sylvia Mayer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Splintered Archives -- Versions and Versioning through Erasure Arts and Poetry
A predominantly twenty-first-century, textual-visual practice in othering and versioning documents, erasure (arts and poetry) is the outcome of a variety of disruptive techniques such as black-out, white-out, or strike-through of segments of the "pre-text," text-that-is-already-there. Erasure thus bridges and separates the "original" (however we may define and understand the term) to and from the subsequent versions of the original that are erased out of it by the same or subsequent authors. A study of two single works of erasure by Niina Pollari and Jenny Holzer in order to showcase some of the ways creative works of erasure "version" documents and "splinter" archives, this essay examines erasure poetry and arts as a creative activist response to the documental crises of US empire in the present century.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mahshid Mayar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Re-envisioning America's Frontier: A Speculative Journey through John Wesley Powell's Expedition to the American West and Jaclyn Backhaus's Men on Boats
Histories of the American West, including reports of settler colonial expeditions to newly occupied territories of the United States and accounts of life at the "frontier" have often been told as "heroic tales: stories of adventure, exploration and conflict" (Jameson and Armitage 10). White cisgender male protagonists captured the imagination of Americans in historiography and fiction. Gradually, historians like Patricia Limerick (1987), Anne M. Butler and Michael J. Lansing (2008), and Stephen Aron (2022) acted as game changers when they re-told the story of the American West as a shared space where different groups came into contact and conflict. Limerick describes the American West as "an important meeting ground" (27). This article argues that Jaclyn Backhaus's play Men on Boats (2015) brings such a "meeting ground" to the stage by re-versioning the story of the first government-sanctioned expedition on the Colorado River (1869). By means of an analysis of the play's devices, particularly its gender-fluid mode of casting, the article demonstrates how the dramatic text challenges the dominant ideology of manifest destiny and actively engages the audience in a transformative reimagining of America's frontier. This article dissects multiple versions of the Powell narrative: Powell's journal, a bronze statue of his boat, a monument on the Grand Canyon's South Rim, and a dramatic reimagining of Powell's journey performed by students based on Backhaus's text. It concludes with findings from two acting workshops conducted in the summer and winter semesters of 2023-2024, where pre-service teachers engaged with Men on Boats as the core text.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ingrid Gessner, Angelika Ilg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"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.
Alaska, oil spill, last frontier, discourse
Copyright (c) 2025 Marija Krstic https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cabin Fever, or: Back to the Future? The (Anti-)Pastoral in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Walden (1854)
Canonized classics of US-American literature such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly and Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods were published at the beginning of the 1850s – that crucial moment in the history of the United States when it found itself on the brink of the Civil War. Both works epitomize the nation's contemporaneous racial climate, i.e. the legacy and workings of the institution of slavery, in the simple material form of the cabin. Deploying the theoretical frame of the pastoral, essentially qualified by the anti-pastoral (Bennett, M. 195–210) and the strategic pastoral (Klestil 85–124), this article argues that Stowe and Thoreau materialize the past and presence of slavery in the cabin in order to explicitly (Uncle Tom's Cabin) or implicitly (Walden) imagine and speculate about a future nation without slavery. This article hence compares and historicizes two defining literary versions of a United States the cultural influence and power of which are rooted in their respective depiction of the cabin as "both icon and shelter" (Hoagland 8).
The Scarlet Letter, A Romance; Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly; Walden; or, Life in the Woods; cabin-existence; 19th Century American Literature
Copyright (c) 2025 Robert A. Winkler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This introduction to the special issue titled "(Re)Imagining Flyover Fictions" theorizes the flyover trope (as in "flyover country/state") as a critical concept in cultural studies in order to make it an abstract tool to explore, among others, the historical continuities and present facets of polarization in the United States. In addition to these theoretical and methodological elaborations, we will also provide a specific and particularly topical example by analyzing flyover fictions in the context of the 2024 US presidential election.
Copyright (c) 2024 Cornelia Klecker, Sascha Pöhlmann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From the Capitol to the Heartland: Analyzing Congressional Rhetoric and the "Flyover Country" Narrative
This study examines the evolution and strategic use of the term "flyover country" in US congressional rhetoric from 1995 to 2024. Initially a benign geographic descriptor, "flyover country" has transformed into a potent symbol of cultural and political identity, particularly among Republican members of Congress. Through a comprehensive analysis of congressional speeches, committee hearings, and constituent correspon­dence, this research identifies an increase in the use of flyover rhetoric, especially during the Trump era. The study reveals that "flyover" is employed to evoke a sense of victimhood and marginalization among rural constituents, highlighting perceived economic and cultural disenfranchisement by coastal elites. The findings underscore the adaptability of political language and its role in shaping and reflecting socio-political divides in the United States. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the dynamics of congressional rhetoric and the cultural and political undercurrents that influence US-American identity and discourse.
Flyover, American Politics, Congressional Politics
Copyright (c) 2024 Phillip J. Ardoin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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.
Copyright (c) 2024 Joshua Parker, Robert A. Winkler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Heaven's Harsh Tableland: A New History of the Llano Estacado. By Paul H. Carlson. Texas A&M UP, 2023, 386 pp.
Martin Gabriel reviews Paul H. Carlson's Heaven's Harsh Tableland: A New History of the Llano Estacado (Texas A&M UP, 2023).
Copyright (c) 2024 Martin Gabriel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This introduction to the special issue "Digital America" sketches some of the ways in which "the digital" has influenced both American culture and American studies scholarship before summarizing the contributions to this issue.
Copyright (c) 2023 Michael Fuchs https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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.
Copyright (c) 2024 Lukas Hellmuth https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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."
Libertarianism, Populism, Conservatism, Paleo-Libertarianism, Far-Right
Copyright (c) 2024 David Bebnowski https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"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.
Copyright (c) 2024 Robert A. Winkler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A brief note from the new editor.
Copyright (c) 2023 Cornelia Klecker https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays. Edited by Sheri-Marie Harrison, Arin Keeble, and Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo. Edinburgh UP, 2023, 368 pp.
Karla Rohová reviews Sheri-Marie Harrison's, Arin Keeble's, and Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo's Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays (Edinburgh UP, 2023).
Copyright (c) 2023 Karla Rohová https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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).
Copyright (c) 2023 Lena E. Leßlhumer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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.
Copyright (c) 2024 Johannes Vith https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Genre, Space, and Social Critique in Chloé Zhao's Nomadland (2020)
This article examines the extent to which Nomadland is a convincing representation of poverty in the United States and to assess the film's political stance concerning race, gender, and age. By analyzing Nomadland's narrative and filmic techniques, this article points out three major characteristics of the film that are relevant for its portrayal of characters defined chiefly by their poverty and age. Firstly, Nomadland employs genres subtly to undercut their inherent ideological effects. Secondly, in its portrayal of space, it represents the characters as placemakers, showcasing their agency in the face of structural problems. Thirdly, it adopts a particular neorealist production style that lays a powerful claim to authenticity. While the film falls short of addressing the root causes of poverty and bypasses the question of race altogether, Nomadland serves as an exemplary model of socially conscious filmmaking in other regards. It transcends mere entertainment and counters a more mainstream strategy of personalizing structural problems through a nuanced portrayal of elderly working nomads while also displaying attention to gender and age.
Copyright (c) 2024 Klaus Rieser https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Aesthetic Innovation and Activist Impetus in Climate Change Theater
Canadian-American playwright and activist Chantal Bilodeau finds that we need innovative plays that meld climate change into the aesthetics, arguments, and social fabrics of drama and performance. Testing Bilodeau's suggestion, this essay focuses on the poetics of her newest full-length play, No More Harveys (2022). This reading of climate change theater and in particular of Bilodeau's one-actor play applies Caroline Levine's New Formalist method, which strives to read aesthetic and social forms simultaneously and non-hierarchically, and which raises pertinent questions as to how activist theater manages to balance aesthetics and (political and/or scientific) argumentation. While Levine's New Formalism offers a productive analytical angle on small- and large-scale forms, it cannot cover all literary and social phenomena single-handedly. The analysis offered here proposes to demonstrate the usefulness of complementary readings that take into account (a) decolonial and ecocritical concepts of planetarity, (b) a historically informed understanding of monodramatic and of autobiographical generic practices, and (c) the affordances of climate change theater at the present moment. As this contribution argues, Bilodeau employs and modifies elements of form and genre in a manner that allows multiple narratives of social injustice, violence, and detrimental hierarchies across large swaths of time and place to bleed into each other.
Copyright (c) 2024 Nassim Balestrini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Localizing the Global in Sylvia Plath's "Fever 103°"
The essay presents a close reading of Sylvia Plath's poem "Fever 103°" and argues that Plath's construction of her speaker's vulnerable self facilitates a breakdown of the boundaries between the embodied self and its socio-cultural environment. The argument is built on recent scholarship on Plath's work that views it in the context of the global political movements of her time. By examining the ways in which Plath's use of Cold War discourses shapes her construction of vulnerability, the essay shows how this construction produces the embodied self as deeply entangled with global political movements manifesting in and through the embodied self. By evoking and concurrently undermining the "poetics of hygiene," the poem suggests that any attempt to ascertain a state of utmost purity, of clearly delineated bodily and cultural boundaries, can only end in annihilation. It is in this sense that Plath's representation of her speaker's vulnerable self allows her to develop an astute perspective on the interconnectedness of the private, the national, and the global socio-political environment. In this way, the poet's construction of a vulnerable self represents an understanding of a globally interconnected world that poses localized dangers of (self-)destruction.
Copyright (c) 2024 Julia Machtenberg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
On June 24, 2022, the United States Supreme Court officially overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision thus ending the constitutional right to abortion. Much of the subsequent mainstream media narrative has focused on the fact that this decision does not even carve out exceptions for victims of rape and incest, which, while important and horrifying, diverts attention away from the actual issue: a person's right to decide not to give birth for any reason. This reframing of the abortion debate around the most extreme cases is clearly informed by a pronatalist ideology that is still pervasive in US culture. However, it is not just the news media that frequently buys into this pronatalist narrative by evading the inclusion of, if not actively undermining, a woman's right to be childfree. Depictions of abortions are rare in popular fictional narratives, be it in television, film, or literature, and so are voluntarily childless female characters, not only but particularly when it comes to lead characters. This introduction to the special issue on childfree female characters in fictional narratives frames the issue of childfreeness, i.e., voluntary childlessness, in the still dominant pronatalist ideology and examines some stereotypical depictions in recent US-American television series.
Climate imaginaries – collectively held visions of future climate change – take shape in a variety of media and genres, from computer models to poetry. While some climate imaginaries have proven particularly enduring and have managed to attain a hegemonic status in climate change discourse – for example, the "techno-market" imaginary and the "climate apocalypse" imaginary – others remain marginalized. Drawing on Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018), this article theorizes the "colonial Anthropocene" imaginary as an alternative imaginary and examines its co-production at the intersection of academic discourses, activism, and literature. The "colonial Anthropocene" imaginary generally and Moon of the Crusted Snow specifically negotiate ideological tensions that have emerged in the discourse on the Anthropocene and forge a connection between the seemingly exceptional event of anthropogenic climate change and a historical sequence of colonial violence and forced displacement of Indigenous peoples. As one of this imaginary's manifestations in the literary domain, Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) embeds climate change into a longer story that begins with settler colonialism on the North American continent by drawing on an equally old genre: the Indian captivity narrative. Significantly, the "colonial Anthropocene" imaginary is a reaction to the impulse toward claims to universality resurfacing in the discourse on the Anthropocene, particularly in the notion of "the human."
Copyright (c) 2024 Marina Pingler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article discusses four movies in which transgressions between gameworlds and diegetic realities take center stage: Brainscan (1994), Stay Alive (2006), Livescream (2018), and Choose or Die (2022). By exploring the interactions between videogame worlds and "reality," these movies do not simply project anxieties onto digital games, but rather reflect on media-specific affordances of videogames, inquire into discourses surrounding videogames, and explore game cultures. I am particularly interested in the strategies and aesthetics of remediating videogames in the horror films and the conceptualizations of videogames and game cultures thus produced, as well as the larger cultural fears and anxieties (and hopes and dreams) that these representations evoke.
American Studies as Vulnerability Studies
This special issue explores the ambivalent nature of vulnerability as a "politically produced" condition of suffering which contains the potential for resistance and consequential social change for minoritized individuals and communities. Judith Butler's now-classic rendering of vulnerability as "unequally distributed through and by a differential operation of power" helps us better grasp interrelated forms of oppression, yet we argue that narratives of vulnerability also foreground the relational and interconnected conditions of vulnerable lives, while at the same time engendering worldmaking projects centered around agency and resistance.
Copyright (c) 2022 Silvia Schultermandl, Gulsin Ciftci, Jennifer Reimer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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.
Copyright (c) 2022 Jennifer A. Reimer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0