Everyday America

A collection of seventeen essays examining the field of American cultural landscapes past and present. The role of J. B. Jackson and his influence on the field is a explored in many of them.

"In this clearly written volume, Hawke provides enlightening and colorful descriptions of early Colonial Americans and debunks many widely held assumptions about 17th century settlers."--Publishers Weekly

This book examines the evolution of information seeking in nine areas of everyday American life. --from publisher description.

Publisher Description

From the sierras of New Mexico to the streets of New York and LA by night-"a sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity"-Baudrillard mixes aperus and observations with a wicked sense of fun to provide a unique insight into the country that dominates our world. In this new edition, leading cultural critic and novelist Geoff Dyer offers a thoughtful and perceptive take on the continued resonance of Baudrillard's America.

American culture maintained a complicated relationship with Haiti from its revolutionary beginnings onward. In this study, Peter P. Reed reveals how Americans embodied and re-enacted their connections to Haiti through a wide array of performance forms. In the wake of Haiti's slave revolts in the 1790s, generations of actors, theatre professionals, spectators, and commentators looked to Haiti as a source of both inspiring freedom and vexing disorder. French colonial refugees, university students, Black theatre stars, blackface minstrels, abolitionists, and even writers such as Herman Melville all reinvented and restaged Haiti in distinctive ways. Reed demonstrates how Haiti's example of Black freedom and national independence helped redefine American popular culture, as actors and audiences repeatedly invoked and suppressed Haiti's revolutionary narratives, characters, and themes. Ultimately, Haiti shaped generations of performances, transforming America's understandings of race, power, freedom, and violence in ways that still reverberate today.

When America began to emerge as a world power at the end of the nineteenth century, Italy was a young nation, recently unified. The technological advances brought about by electricity and the combustion engine were vastly speeding up the capacity of news, ideas, and artefacts to travel internationally. Furthermore, improved literacy and social reforms had produced an Italian working class with increased time, money, and education. At the turn of the century, if Italy's ruling elite continued the tradition of viewing Paris as a model of sophistication and good taste, millions of lowly-educated Italians began to dream of America, and many bought a transatlantic ticket to migrate there. By the 1920s, Italians were encountering America through Hollywood films and, thanks to illustrated magazines, they were mesmerised by the sight of Manhattan's futuristic skyline and by news of American lifestyle. The USA offered a model of modernity which flouted national borders and spoke to all. It could be snubbed, adored, or transformed for one's personal use, but it could not be ignored. Perversely, Italy was by then in the hands of a totalitarian dictatorship, Mussolini's Fascism. What were the effects of the nationalistic policies and campaigns aimed at protecting Italians from this supposedly pernicious foreign influence? What did Mussolini think of America? Why were jazz, American literature, and comics so popular, even as the USA became Italy's political enemy? America in Italian Culture provides a scholarly and captivating narrative of this epochal shift in Italian culture.

The question “What is America?” has taken on new urgency. Weak Nationalisms explores the emotional dynamics behind that question by examining how a range of authors have attempted to answer it through nonfiction since the Second World War, revealing the complex and dynamic ways in which affects shape the literary construction of everyday experience in the United States. Douglas Dowland studies these attempts to define the nation in an eclectic selection of texts from writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, John Steinbeck, Charles Kuralt, Jane Smiley, and Sarah Vowell. Each of these texts makes use of synecdoche, and Weak Nationalisms shows how this rhetorical technique is variously driven by affects including curiosity, discontent, hopefulness, and incredulity. In exploring the function of synecdoche in the creative construction of the United States, Dowland draws attention to the evocative politics and literary richness of nationalism and connects critical literary practices to broader discussions involving affect theory and cultural representation.