American Imaginaries

Winner of the 2009 Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association 2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Migrant Imaginaries explores the transnational movements of Mexican migrants in pursuit of labor and civil rights in the United States from the 1920s onward. Working through key historical moments such as the 1930s, the Chicano Movement, and contemporary globalization and neoliberalism, Alicia Schmidt Camacho examines the relationship between ethnic Mexican expressive culture and the practices sustaining migrant social movements. Combining sustained historical engagement with theoretical inquiries, she addresses how struggles for racial and gender equity, cross-border unity, and economic justice have defined the Mexican presence in the United States since 1910. Schmidt Camacho covers a range of archives and sources, including migrant testimonials and songs, Amrico Parede’s last published novel, The Shadow, the film Salt of the Earth, the foundational manifestos of El Movimiento, Richard Rodriguez’s memoirs, narratives by Marisela Norte and Rosario Sanmiguel, and testimonios of Mexican women workers and human rights activists, as well as significant ethnographic research. Throughout, she demonstrates how Mexicans and Mexican Americans imagined their communal ties across the border, and used those bonds to contest their noncitizen status. Migrant Imaginaries places migrants at the center of the hemisphere’s most pressing concerns, contending that border crossers have long been vital to social change.

American Imaginaries examines the diverse societies and nations of the Western hemisphere as they have emerged across the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Exploring cities, capitalism, nations, nationalism, and politics from both comparative and transnational perspectives, the book develops a unique approach based on the paradigms of civilizational analysis and social imaginaries. In addition to providing a fresh perspective on the Americas, American Imaginaries gives proper analysis of multinational and intra-national regions and, crucially, the civilizational force of resurgent indigenous nations. The book also covers regions often underemphasized in histories of the hemisphere, such as Central America and the Caribbean. The book will appeal to scholars and students of history, Atlantic studies, comparative and historical sociology, and social theory. In addition, it will gain audiences amongst academics and graduate students who follow debates about modernity, civilizations, historical constellations, and social imaginaries.

American Indians and the American Imaginary considers the power of representations of Native Americans in American public culture. The book's wide-ranging case studies move from colonial captivity narratives to modern film, from the camp fire to the sports arena, from legal and scholarly texts to tribally-controlled museums and cultural centres. The author's ethnographic approach to what she calls "representational practices" focus on the emergence, use, and transformation of representations in the course of social life. Central themes include identity and otherness, indigenous cultural politics, and cultural memory, property, performance, citizenship and transformation. American Indians and the American Imaginary will interest general readers as well as scholars and students in anthropology, history, literature, education, cultural studies, gender studies, American Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. It is essential reading for those interested in the processes through which national, tribal, and indigenous identities have been imagined, contested, and refigured.

From the American Revolution to the present, the United States has enjoyed a rich and persuasive visual culture. These images have constructed, sustained, and disseminated social values and identities, but this unwieldy, sometimes untidy form of cultural expression has received less systematic attention than other modes of depicting American life. Recently, scholars in the humanities have developed a new critical approach to reading images and the cultural work they perform. This practice, American cultural iconography, is generating sophisticated analyses of how images organize our public life. The contributions to this volume exhibit the extraordinary scope and interpretive power of this interdisciplinary study while illuminating the dark corners of the nation's psyche. Drawing on such varied texts and visual media as daguerreotypes, political cartoons, tourist posters, and religious artifacts, these essays explore how pictures and words combine to teach us who we are and who we are not. They examine mimesis in elegant portraits of black Freemasons, industrial-age representations of national parks, and postwar photographs of atomic destruction. They consider how visual culture has described and disclosed the politics of racialized sexuality, whether subconsciously affirming it in the shadows of film noir or deliberately contesting it through the interethnic incest of John Sayles's Lone Star. Students of literature, film, and history will find that these essays extend the frontier of American studies. The contributors are Maurice Wallace, Dennis Berthold, Alan Trachtenberg, Shirley Samuels, Jenny Franchot, Cecelia Tichi, Eric Lott, Bryan C. Taylor, and José E. Limón.

The Imaginary and Its Worlds collects essays that boldly rethink the imaginary as a key concept for cultural criticism. Addressing both the emergence and the reproduction of the social, the imaginary is ideally suited to chart the consequences of the transnational turn in American studies. Leading scholars in the field from the United States and Europe address the literary, social, and political dimensions of the imaginary, providing a methodological and theoretical groundwork for American studies scholarship in the transnational era and opening new arenas for conceptualizing formations of imaginary belonging and subjectivity. This important state-of-the-field collection will appeal to a broad constituency of humanists working to overcome methodological nationalism. The Imaginary and Its Worlds: An Introduction * LITERARY IMAGINARIES * Imagining Cultures: The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America - Ramon Saldivar * The Necessary Fragmentation of the (U.S.) Literary-Cultural Imaginary - Lawrence Buell * Imaginaries of American Modernism - Heinz Ickstadt * SOCIAL IMAGINARIES * William James versus Charles Taylor: Philosophy of Religion and the Confines of the Social and Cultural Imaginaries - Herwig Friedl * The Shaping of We-Group Identities in the African American Community: A Perspective of Figurational Sociology on the Cultural Imaginary - Christa Buschendorf * Russia's Californio Romance: The Other Shores of Whitman's Pacific - Lene Johannessen * Form Games: Staging Life in the Systems Epoch - Mark Seltzer * POLITICAL IMAGINARIES * Real Toads - Walter Benn Michaels * Obama Unwound: The Romanticism of Victory and the Defeat of Compromise - Christopher Newfield * Barack Obama's Orphic Mysteries - Donald E. Pease * Coda. The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer - Winfried Fluck * Contributors * Index

This book examines the future in Indigenous North American speculative literature and digital arts. Asking how different Indigenous works imagine the future and how they negotiate settler colonial visions of what is to come, the chapters illustrate that the future is not an immutable entity but a malleable textual/digital product that can function as both a colonial tool and a catalyst for decolonization. Central to this study is the development of a methodology that helps unearth the signifying structures producing the future in selected works by Darcie Little Badger, Gerald Vizenor, Stephen Graham Jones, Skawennati, Danis Goulet, Scott Benesiinaabandan, Postcommodity, Kite, Jeff Barnaby, and Ryan Singer. Drawing on Jason Lewis’s "future imaginary" as the theoretical core, the book describes the various forms of textual representation and virtual simulation through which notions of Indigenous continuation are expressed in literary and new media works. Arguing that Indigenous authors and artists apply the aesthetics of the future as a strategy in their works, the volume conceptualizes its multimedia corpus as a continuously growing archive of, and for, Indigenous futures.

Does the concept of nationality apply to the economic elite, or have they shed national identities to form a global capitalist class? In Rooted Globalism, Kevin Funk unpacks dozens of ethnographic interviews he conducted with Latin America's urban-based, Arab-descendant elite class, some of whom also occupy positions of political power in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Based on extensive fieldwork, Funk illuminates how these elites navigate their Arab ancestry, Latin American host cultures, and roles as protagonists of globalization. With the term "rooted globalism," Funk captures the emergence of classed intersectional identities that are simultaneously local, national, transnational, and global. Focusing on an oft-ignored axis of South-South relations (between Latin America and the Arab world), Rooted Globalism provides detailed analysis of the identities, worldviews, and motivations of this group and ultimately reveals that rather than obliterating national identities, global capitalism relies on them.

During the Great Depression, California became a wellspring for some of the era's most inventive and imaginative political movements. In response to the global catastrophe, the multiracial laboring populations who formed the basis of California's economy gave rise to an oppositional culture that challenged the modes of racialism, nationalism, and rationalism that had guided modernization during preceding decades. In Rebel Imaginaries Elizabeth E. Sine tells the story of that oppositional culture's emergence, revealing how aggrieved Californians asserted political visions that embraced difference, fostered a sense of shared vulnerability, and underscored the interconnectedness and interdependence of global struggles for human dignity. From the Imperial Valley's agricultural fields to Hollywood, seemingly disparate communities of African American, Native American, Mexican, Filipinx, Asian, and White working-class people were linked by their myriad struggles against Depression-era capitalism and patterns of inequality and marginalization. In tracing the diverse coalition of those involved in labor strikes, citizenship and immigration reform, and articulating and imagining freedom through artistic practice, Sine demonstrates that the era's social movements were far more heterogeneous, multivalent, and contested than previously understood.