Search

Valentina Romanzi

Staying Human in the Post-Apocalypse: The Frontiers of Individualism in The Last of Us and Its Sequel

Naughty Dog's video games The Last of Us (2013) and The Last of Us Part II (2020) stage a complex tale of human drama in post-apocalyptic settings, retrieving several features of the Frontier myth. In this essay, I argue that the characters' narrative arc is a post-apocalyptic, American Frontier tale in which the individual and collective levels clash (as they often do in such stories), generating moral challenges for the characters and, in turn, for the player controlling them. Thus, I set out to analyze how TLOU draws on and subverts some of the traditional tropes and characters belonging to the classic American Frontier tradition, investigating a number of issues related to individualism, collectivism, violence, and selfishness.

Philip McGowan

What We Imagine Knowledge to Be: Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Seventy Years of American Studies

This essay looks back to 1947, the year that the Salzburg seminar was inaugurated, as well as looking at contemporary issues in American studies to chart where we have come from to date and where the field is heading. Its main argument examines the poems "Ésthetique du Mal" by Wallace Stevens from his 1947 collection Transport to Summer and "At the Fishhouses" by Elizabeth Bishop, first published in 1947, and explores common themes of knowledge, pain, loss, and history. As the Western world experiences again a moment of political and cultural uncertainty brought to the center stage of US and European discourse in 2016 by the election of Donald Trump and the UK vote to leave the European Union, Stevens and Bishop offer routes forward through such moments of heightened politicization. American studies, as a field of interconnected disciplines, continually confronts the difficult aspects of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. As the rise of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have indicated, the open ruptures within American society will continue to pour forth debates requiring urgent critical attention and discussion. Incidents of racial hatred, of right-wing extremism, and of abusive misogynistic sexism, dormant to varying degrees prior to Trump's election, have come to the surface of a nation increasingly riven by what the reality of his Presidency means for America. Our job, as researchers and teachers, is to engage each and every aspect of this moment in history, however contested or controversial they may be.

Julia Leyda

The Feminist Futures of American Studies: Addressing the Post-Weinstein Media and Cultural Landscape

This article reflects on the long-term and recent developments in the interdisciplinary field of American studies and its imbrications with its cultural and political contexts. Pushing back against premature assertions of feminism's obsolescence, I argue that scholars and teachers of American studies and media studies must take the popular seriously―popular film and television as well as popular political movements. Given the growing demand from students for a deeper and more sustained engagement with intersectional feminism, the article works through some short case studies to urge even the confirmed feminists to rethink and refresh their approaches to teaching and performing scholarship to best provide students with the theoretical tools to strengthen and define their feminism as a discipline as well as an attitude. Inspired by the popular 2014 movement, "The Year of Reading Women," the #metoo and #timesup phenomena, and the popularity of and backlash against celebrity feminism of Beyoncé and others, this article weaves together academic and pop-cultural sources such as Sara Ahmed and Roxane Gay to underscore our responsibility to maintain, nurture, and contribute to the progress made by previous generations of feminists.

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.

Maria Proitsaki

Poetry as a Strategy for Teaching English: Using Nikki Giovanni's Poetry in the English as a Second-/Foreign-Language Classroom

This article explores ways to introduce and integrate poetry in English classes in the context of second-language education. My aim is to spark interest in contemporary poetry while addressing general perceptions by both teachers and students that poetry is difficult to engage in. I thus argue for an approach that centers on "easier" poems and involves aspects of contemporary popular culture to introduce poetry, help students appreciate it, and eventually engage in creative writing of their own. Furthermore, I suggest ways in which poetry can be integrated in English courses at large, via the inclusion of strings of poems, within their broader cultural contexts, and by linking them to different, more popular cultural forms of expression, such as songs, films, and cartoons. I exemplify this approach by focusing on two poems by African American poet Nikki Giovanni. "Knoxville, Tennessee" and "Nikki-Rosa" are autobiographical poems which offer first-person accounts of the poet's African American cultural background. However, my intertextual approach interconnects these poems with other poems and cultural texts from different parts of the English-speaking world. Ultimately, I suggest that poetry, due to its brevity and open-endedness, can enhance the study of the English language and Anglophone cultures in a variety of ways beyond the close study of verse in terms of aesthetics.

Ralph Poole

"Huck Finn at King Arthur's Court": F. O. Matthiessen, the Salzburg Seminar, and American Studies

F. O. Matthiessen was a key player in an event which took place at Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg in the summer of 1947 and which launched the legendary Salzburg Seminar and may be considered the birth of American studies in Europe. Matthiessen's reflections on this remarkable session, From the Heart of Europe, remains outstanding in its conjuring of a humanist vision amidst ruins. This travelogue, his last major—if largely forgotten—work published shortly before his suicide, has been variously reassessed as an elegiac document of his tragic failure, as a politically deluded scholar, and as a groundbreaking foray into sketching out a radically alternate transnational understanding of American studies avant la lettre. These highly diverging perspectives on Matthiessen's final book, in particular, and on the professional and personal troubles during his last years, more generally, account for the lasting myth-making fascination with Matthiessen, which has left its mark not only on academic discourses ranging from socialist criticism to queer theory but may also be found in the novels of May Sarton (Faithful Are the Wounds) and Mark Merlis (American Studies). Hence, this article reflects on Matthiessen's impact on the 1947 seminar and traces the legacy of this controversial founding father of American studies.

Anna Marta Marini

Semiospheric Borders and the Erasure of Latinx Subjectivity in Culture Shock and Sleep Dealer

Recreating the problematic relationship between the U.S. government and the influx of migrant laborers, films Sleep Dealer (2008) and Culture Shock (2019) both reflect a state of exception existing on the U.S.–Mexico border. In both films, the border is represented as a peripheral locus where the migrant subject is emptied of humanity and political subjectivity, in thrall to the panopticon embodied by the American immigration and border enforcement system. In their real world, the migrant protagonists are denied an access to the central, culturally dominant space; instead, they are offered a virtual realm, a digital access that is subordinated to the level of legitimacy they achieve. The blurring between the organic and the cybernetic contributes to shape a dehumanized borderland realm, at the service of a nativist state power that tries to obliterate the presence of migrants despite their fundamental role in the U.S. capitalist economy. However, the cyborg subject embodies the possibility of resistance to that same power. Relying on their humanity, and yet through the projected digital versions of themselves, the protagonists can eventually counter the dominant order—albeit mostly to an individual extent. Drawing on the relatively extensive academic literature on Sleep Dealer, this analysis highlights similarities and differences between the two films, focusing in particular on Culture Shock and how its virtual reality device allows an expansion on the topics of forced assimilation and erasure of Latinx subjectivity.

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.

Katharina Wiedlack

Suffragists and Russian Suffering : Vulnerability in Early Progressive US Movements

This article analyzes American pro-Russian revolutionary newspaper and magazine articles, biographies, political speeches, poems, etc. between roughly 1880 and 1917. It asks what strategies American social progressives, including suffragists and feminists, developed to create empathy for the Russian revolutionaries, and the Russian people more generally, at a time when the American authorities, as well as the public, was rather anxious about foreign and domestic radicalism. The article identifies suffering Russian women at the center of narratives that intended to create sympathy for the Russian Revolution. Particularly vulnerable female bodies were used as veneers to draw the American audience and the world into supporting the revolution. The article approaches the topic of vulnerability through the work of literary scholar Thomas Laqueur, and specifically his analyses of suffering as a literary trope, to explore the narratives' particular structures and the kinds of Russian vulnerabilities that the writers presented. It analyzes the affective attachments to the bodies at the center of these narratives, and the subsequent imaginaries they inspire, thereby crucially influencing American cultural and political imaginaries as such through the application of Laqueur's ideas. Additionally, the analysis will focus on the question why suffragists and feminists were so particularly invested in the creation and dissemination of these humanitarian narratives, suggesting that the support of Russian revolutionary women was as much in solidarity with the Russians as it was a means to further their own causes and ideas, including women's emancipation.

Jonathan Singerton

The Austrian Contribution to American Life Revisited

This review essay reviews From a Multiethnic Empire to a Nation of Nations: Austro-Hungarian Migrants in the US, 1870–1940, authored by Annemarie Steidl, Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier, and James W. Oberly (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2017) and Quiet Invaders Revisited: Biographies of Twentieth Century Immigrants to the United States, edited by Günter Bischof (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2017).

Stefan Schubert

Working-Class Labor in Postapocalyptic America: Affect, Politics, and the 'Forgotten Man' in Death Stranding

This article examines Hideo Kojima's 2019 Death Stranding as a postapocalyptic video game intent on evoking a particular kind of "Americanness." I analyze the game for its textual and cultural politics, arguing that it reconstructs a vision of the United States that is not just built on older myths like that of westward expansion and rugged individualism but that also evokes a more contemporary trope of the "forgotten man." In my reading, Death Stranding champions not just any person as the potential savior of America but it specifically marks its protagonist as a white working-class male, suggesting that this is the kind of person—and the kind of labor that he allegedly performs best—needed to bring the US back together. I trace this argument by examining how the game's visuals, narrative, and gameplay intersect in depicting a postapocalyptic America that evokes the western genre, in affectively guiding its players to feel for the game's protagonist as a "forgotten man," and in how the gameplay's embrace of working-class labor leads to a ludo-affective dissonance that complicates Death Stranding's political project.

Sascha Pöhlmann

Thereness: Video Game Mountains as Limits of Interactivity

This article theorizes the abstract quality of "thereness," or a challenging presence that both invites and resists being engaged by humans, which is central to the ludic and symbolic function of a number of related video games in recent years. I will discuss games that deliberately resist the mimetic approach of an ever-increasing "realism" in this popular medium but rather explore the allegorical aspects of the mountains, notably without turning them into "mere" metaphors but insisting on their own distinct existence as something beyond ourselves. As virtual mountains that are not really to be played with, they invite a philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic interpretation as human mediations of what resists both mediation and the human, as something always just beyond our full cognitive and epistemological grasp, a limit rather than an object of our consciousness. I will discuss how games such as Celeste (2018), Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017), and Mountain (2014) use their unique audiovisual, tactile, and ludic qualities to convey this elusive "thereness" of the mountain as something that both challenges and rejects human interaction. Instead of offering their players the fantasy of power and control that so often underlies contemporary video games, these games evoke the otherness of mountains to take their players to the limits of interactivity within a medium that is fundamentally defined by this very interactivity.

Michael Fuchs

Videogames in Horror Movies: Remediation, Metalepsis, Interface Effects, and Fear of the Digital

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.

Philipp Reisner

The Cold War and New Sacred Poetry: Li-Young Lee, Suji Kwock Kim, and Kathleen Ossip

Contrary to what one might expect, many poets who engage with the Cold War adopt not primarily a political but rather a religious voice. Indeed, poets such as Li-Young Lee, Suji Kwock Kim, and Kathleen Ossip examine the Cold War in light of theological questions. Their poems bear witness not to personal suffering inflicted by political and societal circumstances but instead to human resilience bolstered by faith in the face of traumatic experience. Their writings are not best captured by the frequently invoked "Poetry of Witness," understood as witness to injustice, but rather "new sacred poetry": colored by individual experience of trauma, their poetry serves as a vehicle for expressing spiritual and mystical experience. They thereby innovate not only poetry but also contemporary theology. The Cold War becomes the backdrop for the struggle between faith and suffering brought about by political, societal, and personal circumstances.

Steven Hoelscher, Stephanie Zeller

Pictures at an Environmental Exhibition: Reflections on the Art of Photography Curation

During the 2023–24 academic year, we worked together at the Harry Ransom Center, a major humanities research center and museum at the University of Texas at Austin, to organize "Visualizing the Environment: Ansel Adams and His Legacy." The exhibition, which ran from late August 2024 through early February 2025, presented Adams's photographs in a broad historical and geographical context that drew from our shared but distinct perspectives. During the process of working on this exhibition, we have often reflected on the experience of conceiving, researching, and presenting photographs in a way that is both visually striking and intellectually invigorating – in short, on the art of photography curation. In this article, we share some of those reflections, as we discuss the relationship between creative work, scholarship, and museum collaborations. Critiquing an exhibition is not the same as creating it, even though we have sought to bring our scholarly experience into our complementary roles as exhibition curator and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) creator.

Klaus Rieser

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.

Phillip J. Ardoin

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.

Cornelia Klecker

Childfree Female Characters: Narrating Pronatalism

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.

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.   

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.

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.

Alekszandra Rokvity

The Sign as Battlefield: Punk, Gender, and the Power to Rebel

If we assume that culture is built by signs and their meanings and that ideology is what naturalizes those meanings, what follows is that the battle between the classes is often but a battle over the sign. Punk was an anti-capitalist movement that used this logic, making the attire of the individual the battlefield over the meaning of signs. Punks rebelled against the dominant ideology through the subversion of signs on the level of fashion, challenging hegemonic rule by destabilizing the meaning of its signs. However, as punk slipped from subculture into popular culture, the meaning of the signs once again shifted as they became re-integrated into mainstream culture. Punk thus proves to be a case study for the fluidity of the meaning of signs, one which furthermore foregrounds the sexist nature of meaning-making processes.

In this context, the contemporary fashion industry functions as a weapon that the bourgeoisie deploys to sabotage the use of style as a vehicle for carrying anti-hegemonic messages. This article aims to foreground the significance of gender in the mechanisms that attempt to preserve hegemonic rule. As I demonstrate, the journey of the meaning of the signs employed by punk illustrates the significance of female voicelessness to maintain capitalist ideology as the ruling ideology.

Leopold Lippert

The Gendered Sounds of Revolutionary American Theater

This article examines the relationship of sound and gender politics in revolutionary America by reading two late eighteenth-century dramatic texts, the 1774 pamphlet A Dialogue, Between a Southern Delegate, and His Spouse (written pseudonymously by Mary V. V.), and Virginia playwright Robert Munford's five-act play The Patriots (written c1777, published only posthumously in 1798). Even though the sounds of early America cannot be accessed directly, as there was no sound recording in the modern, technology-based sense, and even though neither of the two dramatic texts has a known record of performances, the article sets out to explore how sound and speech were heard and negotiated, and how they reflected on prevailing cultural assumptions about gendered personhood, and the relationship between gender and politics. Arguably, attention to sound in these texts offers specific insights into the joint articulation of gender and transatlantic politics in the larger struggle over the American revolution. As this article shows, both texts, albeit for different reasons, strategically use gendered sounds to stage specific political interventions: By "listening" carefully to these sounds (as they are represented in writing), one can understand in more detail how acoustic environments impacted on the articulation, legitimation and deliberation of political argument in revolutionary America.

Martin Holtz

Motherhood as Narrative: Sheila Heti’s Wrestling with the Burden of Choice

Burdened with the choice whether to become a mother or not, the protagonist of Sheila Heti's autofictional work Motherhood develops a thoroughgoing critique of the notion of having to make that choice in the first place, encompassing philosophical musings on the impossibility of controlling one's existence by making decisions and astute commentary on social pressures on women to fulfill expected roles. It identifies pro-natalism as a culturally pervasive narrative, which is subtle but rigid in its exclusionary binarism and consequent pressure and divisiveness it imposes upon women. Heti dismantles the narratives that make up the concept of motherhood and redefines it as an inclusive, non-divisive, non-coercive concept. Maintaining its relational basis, she reverses its temporal trajectory and suggests the relationship with the mother as its central concern. Mobilizing the creative potential of writing, she rewrites the narrative of motherhood as the reconstruction of ancestral bonds between women through literature. Via this reversal, she undermines the one-directional conception of motherhood and allows for the term's inclusiveness of all women. In this way, she deflates the notion of decisional compulsion and so creates a spirit of egalitarianism and tolerance from which all mothers, non-mothers, and non-non-mothers can benefit.

Nathalie Aghoro

Voice, Silence, and Quiet Resistance in Percival Everett's Glyph

This article investigates how the refusal to speak becomes a resonant expression of protest in Percival Everett's novel Glyph (1999). It offers a reading of Everett's experimental work as generating a literary soundscape of the quiet voice to reflect on the functions of sonic absence in the politics and aesthetics of resistance. With Kevin Quashie's work The Sovereignty of Quiet (2012) and Fred Moten's writings on the significance of sound in black radical aesthetics as conceptual bridges, it seeks to establish that Glyph explores the boundaries and possibilities of black self-determination in the American socio-political context as it pitches the acoustics of silence and voice against the mute textuality of the book. Along these lines, the explicit refusal of a voice to speak in Glyph simultaneously reveals and complicates the dynamics of racialization in literary imaginations and reading practices.