This volume offers innovative ways to think about speculation at a time when anticipation of catastrophe shapes public discourse. Its chapters interrogate hegemonic ways of shaping the present through investments in the future, while also looking at speculative practices that reveal transformative potential.
Race and Ethnic Encounter in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Literature
This study re-examines the mid-1850s, a time that remains central to American literary studies, exploring new ways of looking at this cultural moment through the twentieth-century concept of ‘ethnicity.’ This approach uncovers the hidden subversiveness of American literature as it responded to scientific race theory in the debate over slavery and also highlights the ways in which the texts examined in this study – Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), Frederick Douglass’ ‘My Bondage and My Freedom’ (1855), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘Dred’ (1856), Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ (1855), and John Rollin Ridge’s ‘The Life and Adventures of Joaqín Murieta’ (1854) – powerfully resonate with ideas of affiliation and difference today. Focusing on a brief historical moment in the past from a decidedly twenty-first century perspective, the study reflects upon the texts’ movement through time and demonstrates how race and ethnicity in these texts have been transformed under the pressures of history.
The idea that the cultural history of the United States has been shaped by religion(s) is a truism few would question. Scholars in American Studies, however, have been reluctant to engage this issue in a manner appropriate to its significance and complexity. This volume of scholarly articles approaches the challenges posed by the topic „religion in the United States“ from an interdisciplinary perspective, examining the ways in which religious heterogeneity, a multitude of religious practices and holy scriptures - as well as resistance to such religiosity - are interwoven with American literature, culture, and history. The contributions address three general areas of interest: evangelical empowerment in the United States since the 1970s, religious interventions in major nineteenth-century American cultural conflicts, and contemporary negotiations of national/transnational narratives of religion and spirituality in fiction, film, and performance.