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Volume 6, No. 2Versions of America: Speculative Pasts, Presents, Futures

Published June 18, 2025

Issue description

In the face of a new urgency to address the (potential of) multiplicity in a post-pandemic United States that lays open deep societal divides, this special issue, edited by Matthias Klestil and Marijana Mikić, sets out to examine the United States through its versions. Versioning as a cultural practice of imagination and speculation shapes our perceived realities and can manifest through single works of art and their variants, across media, and in diverse discourses. What is the potential of (re-)thinking our objects of study through versions, versionality, and versional narration, if we take versioning as acts of reality-making, and explore such acts in relation to concepts of narrative, discourse, speculation? If we conceptualize versionality beyond the human, through environmental and material perspectives, or in relation to climate change? Or if we self-consciously theorize our activities as American studies scholars within (or as) versioning? Contributions in this issue explore the aesthetics, epistemologies, and politics of versioning.

Full Issue

Special Issue Introduction

  1. Matthias Klestil

    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.

Special Issue Articles

  1. Ingrid Gessner, Angelika Ilg

    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.

  2. 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.

  3. Robert A. Winkler

    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).

  4. Ruth Gehrmann

    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.

  5. 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 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.

Special Issue Short Essays

  1. Mahshid Mayar

    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.

Book Reviews