america adrift

Constitution, 2008
8 x 25 feet in five panels
Depicts 83,000 Abu Ghraib prisoner photographs, equal to the number of people who have been arrested and held at US-run detention facilities with no trial or other due process of law, during the Bush Administration’s war on terror. Continue Reading »

If you found Bent’s recent post on American Post-9/11 fiction interesting you may want to check out the Cafe discussion on Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland.

Michael Shaw has a very important post about the US military censorship of photojournalists in Iraq. Michael (and co.) do an incredible job deconstructing and analyzing the most current images within their broader social and political contexts. But this post, which includes a stunning, provocative photograph, is about the broader social and political context. Robert Hariman has a complementary piece worth checking out here.

Also, some of you may be aware that Vanity Fair produced their own “satire” cover which parodies the now infamous New Yorker Obama cover. Btw, Vanity Fair, like the New Yorker is a Condé Nast publication.

See Michael’s take here.

And Historiann slams it out of the park with, Limp “satire” begets more limpness.

I’ve just upgraded Wordpress, again. There’s been some problems with the comments so please bear with us. I know that David for example left a comment which was waiting moderation. Now it has disappeared. Sorry David.

I’ve installed the Askimet spam blocking plugin so hopefully all the spam showing up in the comments will be removed. There was over 100 “comments” from jewelry designers appearing on a post from over a year ago about a John Waters interview on NPR. Very bizarre stuff.

I’m trying to figure out how any non-spammers can just leave comments without having to wait for moderation. Anyone have any ideas. I don’t have the time to moderate comments nor do I think its conductive to open blog style discussions.

Thanks for your patience.

Newsweek has an interview with the creators of this hilarious parody worth checking out. I’ve seen this three times now and it keeps on laughing. In order for satire to work as satire, it must address the absurdities of what is being satirized. In the New Yorker cover, which the editors claim was meant to satirize right-wing media and pundits, there is no point of reference that suggests as much. Notice here what’s in Clinton’s “box of tricks.” Brilliant. The portrayal of McCain’s overt militarism is really funny, as it’s also not far from the truth. And Obama singing about change while jumping rainbows on a unicorn? Priceless.

This morning I read a fantastic article, Update: Michelle Obama as Racial Rorschach Test over at Open Left. About a month or so ago Open Left, a fairly influential progressive community blog, began a “guest blogger” program. Stemming from the overt sexist and misogynistic portrayals of Hillary Clinton during the primary, the mostly White, male, writers at Open Left made a decision to reach out to the broader progressive blogosphere, initially feminist bloggers. You can find the terrific guest blog series here.

Today’s post is by rikyrah, who writes for Jack and Jill Politics, “a black bourgeois perspective on U.S. politics.

Continue Reading »

I just received a pre-notification on a cfp for an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.

The organisers are Burroughs and Beat Gen. scholar Oliver Harris, in partnership with fellow-Burroughsian - see for instance Reality Studio - Ian MacFadyen (they are also co-editing the book, Naked Lunch@50), and with Andrew Hussey, Dean of the University of London Institute in Paris.

The organizers promise that the event website will be developed shortly, but you can already take a sneak peek here.

The following four streams will organize the discussions:

We welcome proposals that range from short papers (15 minutes) to longer talks (30 minutes), from multi-media presentations to panel discussions and open mic debates. In English and in French, we are looking for original and innovative contributions from scholars and Burroughsians under the headings: The Untold Naked Lunch / A Post-Colonial Lunch / Naked Paris / Naked Lunch Now.

I hope a lot of scholars will gather in Paris next July to discuss and celebrate this extraordinary novel.

You are free to download and distribute the flyer for the Symposium. (PDF, 324 kb)

Which I wish to remark

And my language is plain

That for ways that are dark

And for tricks that are vain,

The heathen Chinee is peculiar.

Which the same I would rise to explain.

Ah Sin was his name;

And I shall not deny

In regard to the same

What that name might imply,

But his smile it was pensive and child-like,

As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye.

It was August the third;

And quite soft was the skies;

Which it might be inferred

That Ah Sin was likewise;

Yet he played it that day upon William

And me in a way I despise.

- The first three stanzas of Bret F. Harte’s “Plain Language from Truthful James”, (Overland Monthly, September 1870, 287-288)

The controversial front page of the July 21 issue of the New Yorker depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as terrorists or subversives is by no means the first such instance of satire being interpreted wrongly, and with long-ranging consequences, in American history. While the New Yorker is claiming that the cover was a satirical jab at the smears propagated by conservative pundits and on the internet, responses from the public range from belief in the smears to rage at the smearers. But ultimately, satirizing the smears merely gives attention to the outrageous claims and helps cement the claimed connection between the Obamas, Islam and terrorism. Continue Reading »

Every year the International Literature and Psychology Conference offers scholars an opportunity to discuss literature and the other arts, using insights from psychoanalysis and other psychological approaches. We have psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, Freudians, Lacanians, a few Jungians and myth theorists, Zizek’ers, post-Zizek’ers, plus an assortment of literature and culture scholars who like to dabble in the psychology of narratives and objects. The 25th annual conference took place in Lisbon at Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, ISPA, and just finished a few days ago.

My paper there had a certain American Studies relevance, as I spoke about recent American post-9/11 fiction as trauma narratives. Here are a few excerpts from that paper:

The post-traumatic aftermath of 9/11 is currently playing itself out in every conceivable arena, generating cultural texts in many different modes and genres: memoirs, documentaries, political analyses, therapeutic discourse, poetry, drama and film, to name but a few. Not surprisingly, given such a plethora of discourses, several novels have also recently appeared which thematize directly the effect of the 9/11 events on individuals, in or outside America. In my paper I propose to analyze these novels as trauma narratives, as well as aesthetic products. I shall focus mainly on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, but I also draw in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, and, to a lesser extent, Ken Kalfus’ A Disorder Peculiar to the Country.

Continue Reading »