In 2008, we met at Berkeley to directly address the idea of transnationalism as part of American Studies scholarship. Ever since the first settlements in the New World, the land that became the United States has imported and exported basic ideas. The Puritans supposed that they could export the idea of the "City Upon a Hill," for instance, in 1630. In fact, the very idea of the New World was an import. Some historians have claimed that "scalping" was an imported idea. And this interchange of ideas and practices has been active ever since in every aspect of American culture. One can think of the Transcendentalists and 19th-century novel and art practices. Thinkers in the Progressive era, for instance, took many of the major reform ideas from Europe. The same is true of the Roosevelt "brain trust" during the Great Depression of the 1930s. And after World Wars I and II, American intellectuals emphasized nationalism, taking and giving ideas from everywhere. All of these points make up an old story. And even though the U.S. has always been global, there hasn't always been an acknowledgement of this international movement of ideas for the nation. Much has been made by previous generations of historians and cultural scholars of American exceptionalism. Especially in periods of nationalizing emphases, this idea seems to float to the top of American consciousness. But for our conference in Berkeley, we sought to think about the international trade in ideas. And so the theme of the conference was a very broad one, the transnationalism of the study of U.S. history, institutions, literary expression, poplar culture, music, consumerism, and the interplay of ideas between nations.
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Chair Didier Aubert, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
Everything Is Food, or a Plea for Culinary American Studies
by Kathleen Moran, University of California at Berkeley
Business Leadership and Environmental Reform in the U.S.: Connecting the 19th and 21st Centuries
by Christine Rosen, University of California at Berkeley
My paper is a think piece that will draw connections between the role that business leaders played in late 19th century pollution regulation and the recent initiatives taken by some corporate leaders, venture capitalists and business entrepreneurs to take proactive roles as advocates for reductions in green house gas emissions and other improvements in environmental policy. In the course of the research I’ve conducted over the years on the history of the American response to industrial pollution, I’ve run into several cases in which business leaders played crucially important, positive roles in movements to clean up industrial pollution problems in major American cities, either as leaders of reform or as partners with women reformers and/or public health reformers. The most striking examples occurred in Chicago, where business leaders repeatedly used their own personal time and funds to do such things as hire experts to conduct elaborate investigations of serious water pollution problems and work closely with public health officials to enforce sanitary and anti-smoke pollution laws opposed by many in the city’s business community. I will summarize some of the cases and then extrapolate out to the present time in order to raise questions about what environmentalists in the 21st century might learn about how to work with business interests to achieve environmental goals from these 19th century examples.
My goal is to be provocative rather than analytical. A variety of factors motivated my 19th century business leaders to take leadership roles in environmental reform – these factors had to do with their own concerns about local public health and the economic welfare of their cities as well as the persuasive ability of public health reformers and the competitive advantage of their firms. What is striking is how important these business led initiatives were to the success of environmental reform. Environmental historians tend to denigrate the role of business interests in environmental reform, but my research suggests business leadership may have been critical to the success, such as it was, of this kind of reform.
The cases raise a number of interesting questions for environmentalists and environmental policy makers. How do they compare with current efforts by the managers of some corporations to take a more active role in solving environmental problems? How might this history help environmentalists think of better ways to work with business to deal with the pollution problems of the 21st century? Can developing countries like China that face increasingly serious pollution problems learn from these examples, which also took place during times of rapid early industrialization? – or are they somehow unique to American business culture?
“My Remarks on Many Occasions Were Strenuously Opposed by Nine Tenths”: William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips at the 1840 World's Anti-Slavery Convention
by Hélène Quanquin, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
In June 1840, delegates from Great Britain, France, and the United States met for the First World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London. This meeting is best-known for its first day's debate over the participation of American women delegates and the final vote that excluded women from the proceedings of the convention. Taking the example of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, the paper will examine how two men of different backgrounds came to defend women's rights at the convention, but also how, during the course of the debates and the opposition they saw between the Old World's and the New World's vision of women's rights, they came to develop a specific male discourse on women's rights, as well as a particular image of American masculinity.
The “Nine American Lions” at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840
by M. M. Lovell, University of California at Berkeley
“What a different thing is American abolitionism,” Emily Winslow ruefully confided in her journal on June 26, 1840, two weeks after she, Lucretia Mott, and other women delegates from the United States were denied admittance to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention by the English abolition establishment, solely on the basis of their gender. “Almost the first act of that convention has been [to] disregard the rights of one half . . . of the World’s free spirits,” she mused, reluctantly absorbing this education in Old World social inequality.
The unpublished journal of this seventeen-year-old Quaker abolitionist delegate from Massachusetts, on her first trip to Britain, gives new insight into what she terms the “smoky murky” English anti-slavery establishment, and the heroic behavior of fellow-Americans, especially William Lloyd Garrison, in the face of English exclusionary practices.
Read against the journal of Lucretia Mott in London on the same errand, Emily Winslow’s 1840 journal of her trip abroad as delegate to a convention focused on human rights enables us to see the development of their social consciousness, and the relation of a sense of social justice to religious commitment among these women and their Anti-Slavery associates. Understanding the world as at once rational, moral, social, and political these young activists labored through lectures, conversation, and the abolitionist press, disseminating into a transnational public consciousness, sentiments these “free spirits” were unable to voice in London.
The 1848 Seneca Falls Convention Declaration of Sentiments in the World; The World in the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments
by Laura Wexler, Yale University
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Chair Robert G. Lee, Brown University
The Art of Dong Kingman: Visualizing East Meets West During the Cold War
by Mary Lui, Yale University
To shore up America’s position in the growing Cold War with the Soviet Union, the United States State Department, largely under the auspices of the United States Information Agency (USIA), employed cultural diplomacy to win the “hearts and minds” of the developing world. Beginning in the 1950s, the State Department launched good will missions featuring an accomplished group of minority writers, artists, athletes, and politicians to newly decolonized countries to promote America as a democratic nation committed to racial equality. This paper examines the experiences of one such cultural ambassador, Dong Kingman, a Chinese American watercolorist. In 1954, the USIA selected Kingman to tour several countries throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. In 1956, the USIA toured an exhibit of eighteen watercolors and nine black and white drawings by Kingman to the countries visited by Kingman in 1954. Through an examination of USIA, central State department, and USIS field correspondences as well as local Asian news coverage around Kingman’s tours, I discuss the popular reception and perception of Kingman and his art in the intersecting contexts of U.S. domestic racial segregation and desegregation and the global context of decolonization and Cold War geopolitics in Asia.
Gene Yang's “ ‘American Born Chinese,' an Autobiography in Comic Form"
by Hertha Sweet-Wong, University of California at Berkeley
In the early 1900s, industrialists developed huge new factory areas in American cities, prompting the creation nearby of large new blue-collar residential districts. Simultaneously, middle-class reformers and commercial retailers were learning how to further a subtle revolution in the ideas, technologies, and social practices for workers’ homes. Northern California’s “minimal bungalows” – small houses, often less than 800 square feet (74 square meters) – compared to earlier worker-built cottages, record how home buyers, reformers, retailers, and builders promoted and adopted notions of a single, visually uniform, and permanent national home culture for working class America. The resulting minimal bungalow neighborhoods of 1900–1930 represent new rules for house interiors linked to parallel ideas and practices at the larger scales of yard, streetscape, block, and district.
The Atlas by William T. Vollmann: A Palindrome of the U.S. and the World
by Françoise Palleau-Papin, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
The fiction writer, William Vollmann, has been a reporter in Afghanistan among the Taliban, in Sarajevo during the war, and in many other countries on all continents for his wide-ranging study of poverty. In 1996, he published a highly structured collection of short texts and stories entitled The Atlas. The collection is organized as a palindrome: "the motif in the first story is taken up again in the last; the second story finds its echo in the second to last, and so on. As for the title story [in the middle], that contains “a little something from each of the others." (Vollmann, p. xvi). This structure exemplifies Vollmann’s involvement in the world at large, his refusal to separate his country from the others. The short chapters change locations (in and outside the USA) and topics as well as narrative styles to build up a haunting chiasmus of a novel, a palindrome figure of symmetry which guarantees an unexpected exchange of views between the citizens of the world and the more or less autobiographical character at the core of the palindrome, who travels around in his search for particular people he may have lost and for meaning in his life. The palindrome gives a sense of belonging in the fluctuating exchanges, it explores relativity and differences, the impossibility of exchange at times, in echoing figures of repetitions with variations. Vollmann has crafted an intricate echoing chamber of narrations with a symmetrical structure, possibly to counter the anxiety of formlessness and the loss of self inscription in his travels in style, place and time. My paper will be a work in progress which will welcome your suggestions and comments eagerly, and I beg everyone to read the novel, which is wonderful!
The Lost Story of Watergate: Nixon, Farmworkers, and the Globalization of U.S. Agriculture
by Matthew Garcia, Brown University
What was the role of the federal government in the suppression of the farm workers movement? How did the global economic crisis of the early 1970s – the worst crisis since the Great Depression – shape the United Farm Workers? The inclination of many labor historians to tell the story of labor protest from "the bottom up" has had the unfortunate consequence of ignoring the role of the federal government in these conflicts. The story of the farm workers movement has suffered a similar fate. Most treatments of the decline of the UFW in the mid- to late-1970s has been portrayed as a consequence of the internecine labor conflict between the evil International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the angelic United Farm Workers. I offer a new interpretation. Taking into consideration the economic policy of the Nixon administration and its relation to a newly globalized economy, I demonstrate how Nixon's support of the Teamsters and his aggressive stance towards the UFW helped shift the balance of power against the farm workers. Nixon, I argue, did this in the service of a new economic policy that sought to increase agricultural exports and offset the trade imbalance created by the poor performance of U.S. manufacturers on the world market. The paper places the farm workers’ struggle in the context of the 1970s globalizing economy.
Equality, Inequality, Diversity: A Sample of the World in the USA? The 2006 Case of Texas Redistricting
by Christine Zumello, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
Equality, inequality, and diversity as concepts have served as guidelines for electoral representation in the USA. This paper will focus on a 2006 Supreme Court ruling [League of United American Citizens v. Rick Perry] which dealt with several congressional redistricting plans in Texas due to shifts in the distribution of the population of the state. The well-documented growth of the Latino (mainly Mexican) population of Texas is not only a sociological characteristic but also a more political one. Thanks to this new influx, Texas has had to rethink the way the state could be democratically and equally redistricted to devise a fair apportionment of Congressional districts. A foreign born population is thus putting local – and potentially federal – American democracy in motion again.
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Chair Laura Wexler, Yale University
North-South into East-West: The Fugitive Within and Across the Cold War U.S.-Mexican Border
by Seth Fein, Yale University
American Film, the American Audience, and International Film Culture, 1920–1945
by Eric Smoodin, University of California at Davis
My paper begins with an assumption about U.S. national cinema that is purposely polemical. I would suggest that, at least during the teens, the 1920s and 1930s, “average” American audiences understood that American cinema, and American film culture broadly, were international in scope. I mean here that viewers ranging from those who saw movies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the U.S. equivalents of Siegfried Kracauer’s “little shop girls” went to foreign films as well as Hollywood movies, appreciated the European (and even, occasionally, Asian) influences in those Hollywood films, and understood the back and forth movement of stars, directors, writers, and others from the United States to various countries. I make this claim through a reading of film culture from the period, rather than through an interpretation of a film or group of films. Thus I am proposing that we develop an understanding of national cinema based not at the point of production – through textual analyses of the movies that Hollywood turned out – but at the point of reception – the ways in which audiences at the time of production understood and learned about the movies they saw.
The Devil's Advocate: Jason Reitman's Thank You For Smoking and the European War Against Tobacco
by Giacomo Manzoli, University of Bologna
In 1994, the writer Christopher Buckley published a novel under the provocative title of Thank You for Smoking, which responded to the non-smoking campaign that had just started in the United States and which – according to the usual process of irradiation from the centre to the suburbs of the empire – would spread all over the west during the following decade. Cinema, and this paper, was interested in the novel, whose rights are bought by Mel Gibson’s Icon Entertainment International, but the story had a hard time to find a way out to the screen. In order to watch the movie, in fact, the readers of Buckley’s book waited twelve long years, because the film came out in Spring 2006. This paper examines the differing political stances of the novel and the film, as well as the role of the central character, and the extension of its subject to the U.S. role in the world.
Flights of Imperial Fancy: Faust to Cecil B. Demille
by Jean-Loup Bourget, Ecole Normale Supérieure – Ulm
Ancient fantasies of flying over the earth as if endowed with a bird’s eye view or divine eyesight are given new impetus by the invention of the balloon in the late 18th century, for instance in Goethe’s Faust. Mephisto’s and Faust’s flight figures prominently in Murnau’s film version of the German tale (1926). Murnau’s direct or indirect legacy serves widely different purposes in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), in Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940–42) and in DeMille’s 1944 prologue to The Sign of the Cross. The process of updating traditional angelic iconography through the recourse to modern technology continues and serves to demonstrate American dominion over European culture as well as European territory.
Reform, Religion, Sex, and Society: Rewriting the History of American Silent Film
by Scott Simmon, University of California at Davis
“So, When Does It Start?” “Ten Minutes Ago...”: Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs and American Film After 9/11
by Michele Fadda, University of Bologna
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Chair Margaretta Lovell, University of California at Berkeley
The Ethnocentric Boomerang: Missionary-Inspired Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Racism in the 20th-Century United States
by David A. Hollinger, University of California at Berkeley
When Buell G. Gallagher spoke in a book of 1946 about the “boomerang” effect of missionaries, he crystallized a little-understood syndrome in the interaction of Americans with the world beyond the North Atlantic West. The “boomerang” is the impact on American life of the exposure to foreign peoples created by the sending out of missionaries to Asia and Africa, especially, but also to other parts of the world. What was expected to be a “one-way street,” down which traveled American-centered religion and its cultural coordinates, turned out to produce a reverse effect, in which a recognition of the humanity of indigenous peoples inspired support for anti-racist and anti-imperialist initiatives within the United States.
Building upon several key passages is this missionary-inspired, missionary-saturated book, Color and Conscience, which is a sustained attack on racism as found in the U.S. and elsewhere, this paper calls attention to a selected set of such initiatives carried out by missionaries, the children of missionaries, and those who led missionary boards and supporting organizations.
Missionary-related Americans were strikingly prominent in the movement to reverse the racist Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, in protests against the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, in the earliest stages of the human rights movement, in gaining popular support for the United Nations, in the agitation to end racial discrimination within many Protestant denominations, in the struggle to win civil rights for black people, in the public criticism of the imperialism of European nations, and in calls for the independence of Asian and African peoples from colonial domination. Missionary-related Americans were also central figures in the development of academic programs in Asian and African Studies that broadened and deepened American understanding of foreign peoples, and in discussions within the U.S. State Department that sympathized with the Chinese Revolution and with nationalist movements of many kinds. The example of missionary child Pearl Buck, author of 65 best-sellers, and the most-widely translated of all American authors (her works are translated into more languages and dialects even than the works of Mark Twain), is a reminder of the centrality of missionary-related individuals to the presentation in popular culture of foreign peoples in non-stereotypical, fully human form.
The Prosaics of Wartime Collaboration
by Naoko Shibusawa, Brown University
The purpose of this paper is to discern what constituted wartime collaboration. In order to compare cases that are as similar as possible, I will examine four American-born women, each of whom broadcast for an Axis power during World War II. Two were Asian American, and the other two had European ancestry. Of the four, only one is familiar to us today. This, of course, is Iva Toguri, the unfortunate Nisei woman who became trapped into the role of “Tokyo Rose.” The other three also had nicknames: one was “Manila Rose,” and two were “Axis Sally.” All these women saw themselves as victims of circumstance, not as collaborators. But their self-perception did not matter: two were prosecuted and indeed convicted for their wartime actions, whereas the other two were not. Why? To figure out this historical conundrum, I look at the three institutions that were crucial in making this determination: the Department of Justice (especially the FBI), the Department of the Army, and the mainstream U.S. press. And I’ve found that how these institutions chose what was punishable collaboration were rather prosaic – or, more specifically, they were mundane motivations within a Cold War context.
Hawaii Calls: Transnational Radio, Race, and Colonialism
by Susan Smulyan, Brown University
Radio history has recently focused on broadcasting’s use in constituting Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” with radio working to construct national identity. But radio waves cross national boundaries and, in so doing, also interrogate nationalism. In this paper, I use radio broadcasts from Hawaii to examine the limits and possibilities of radio as a structuring production for the nation-state. Because of radio’s special claims to improving both citizenship and national unity, it is interesting to consider how, using radio, a territory of the United States asserted a separate identity as well as reaffirmed itself as a part of the nation.
Broadcasting the New South Africa
by James T. Campbell, Brown University
As in the United States, the introduction of broadcasting in South Africa produced intense debate – debate inflected by the country’s status as a British colony, its deepening relationship with American popular culture, and its peculiar racial dispensation. The debate first emerged amidst the introduction of radio broadcasting in the 1920s; raged anew during the introduction of television broadcasting (which the apartheid regime successfully forestalled until 1976); and erupted yet again in the 1990s as South Africa navigated its way from apartheid to democracy. At each of these junctures, opposition to new media was driven, in large measure, by fears that broadcasting would facilitate the entry of “alien” – and specifically American – values and commodities and these in turn would erode South Africa’s national distinctiveness and undermine its system of racial hierarchy. In this paper, I will examine these three moments in broadcasting history to illuminate South Africa’s deepening, complex, and always ambivalent relationship to the United States.
From Summit to Bangalore: Globalizing Pastoral Capitalism
by Louise Mozingo, University of California at Berkeley
The purpose of this paper is to discern what constituted wartime collaboration. In order to compare cases that are as similar as possible, I will examine four American-born women, each of whom broadcast for an Ax
Around the World in a War: Walter Gropius, London, and the American City
by Andrew Shanken, University of California at Berkeley
The purpose of this paper is to discern what constituted wartime collaboration. In order to compare cases that are as similar as possible, I will examine four American-born women, each of whom broadcast for an Ax
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Chair Susan Smulyan, Brown University
Americanization Illustrated: Photographing Italian Immigrants in the Progressive Era
by Didier Aubert, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
In her 1910 book entitled Our Slavic Fellow Immigrants, Emily Greene Balch suggested that the numerous immigrants who were reaching American shores were unwittingly contributing to the standardization of identiy and culture, which she called the "world process of fusion." "Civilization of the prevailing type is becoming planetary," she wrote. "Comfort, intelligence and morality increase [...] at the cost of what is picturesque."
The interplay between social progress and uniformization is often considered a central feature of American Progressive ideology. What Balch's comment makes clear is the importance of visual culture in this process. The loss of "picturesqueness" is identified as the unavoidable consequence of the standardization of living conditions, encouraged at the time by the scientific management of society and culture. Allan Sekula's influential analysis ("The Body and the Archive", 1986) states that photography had played a decisive role in inventing the standardized "social body" since the end of the 19th century. As a result, its use in the Progressive era has been described quite systematically as part of an ideology of "surveillance" (Stange, 1989).
This paper will present the first stages of a research which is attempting to discuss this model from a different perspective, through the eyes of immigrants themselves. Italians were often considered as difficult, if not impossible, to assimilate. This assessment was buttressed in part by the picturesque and often stereotypical representations of their appearance and customs. In addition, immigration to the United States is often said to have contributed to the emergence of a genuine Italian identity which Sicilians or Napoliteans did not necessarily share in their land of origin.
Events surrounding an exhibit on Italians in New Jersey suggests that immigrants were aware of the influence that photography might have on their position in U.S. society. And they were not always ready to accept the social reformers' vision of their community and culture.
Visualizing Transnationalism; Chinese Americans, Photography, and Identity
by Robert G. Lee, Brown University
This presentation will revolve around a photo album assembled by a young Chinese American woman in 1925. What is the range of Chinese American photographic practice deployed in the assembly of the album? How do these photos work as presentations of a Chinese American self against the visual representations of the Chinese as unassimilable Other? How might we understand the Chinese American photo album as a memoir of growing up Chinese in America?
Cultural Studies Between Heaven and Earth
by Tom Ferraro, Duke University
I'm working up the courage to write a big book of a sort no one writes anymore, tentatively entitled Transgression and Redemption in American Narrative, an inquiry into the mythopoetics of Eros and violence over the long American 20th century, focused on the novel (in the context of its principal rivals the movies and pop music), and designed to re-constellate and re-inflect the synthesizing work of Leslie A. Fiedler, among others. In this talk, I begin to revise and redeploy Fiedler's thesis that the Protestant/Catholic war dividing Europe for centuries morphed in the 19th century U.S. to an internecine Protestant battle between the moralistic sentimentality of de-sexualized middle-class romance and the putative innocence of male-male camaraderie in domestic flight. I am especially emboldened by Fiedler's sense that from time to time the fundamentally American Protestant imagination suffers the return of the Pagan Catholic repressed, often in the form of the resexualized Virgin. It is my suspicion that the Protestant victory stateside was less thorough and more pyrrhic than Fiedler knew what to do with, particularly after the massive arrival of Southern and Eastern Europeans (not to mention the Southwest and the Far Northeast); that Mary the Refulgent was in profound ways there even from the very beginning, especially where we should most expect her; and that what she has offered the American (Protestant) imagination is a combination of dark sexual knowing and un-looked-for grace: transgression as redemption. All we need now do – with the benefit of feminist and queer studies, critical race theory, and, mind you, the new religious social history – is read the signs.
Nathaniel Hawthorne makes an appearance – at least his words do – in, of all things, a terrific episode early in the first year of our newly mourned mafia melodrama, The Sopranos. The Hawthorne we encounter in The Sopranos is that specialist in the consummately Calvinist terrors of masquerade and self-division: "No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true." But the episode in question – when chief mobster Tony Soprano takes his daughter on a New England college tour – features a wandering priest (Father Ziti), a demonically driven yet communally sanctioned revenge plot (against the turncoat), female complicity in male-on-male violence (Carmella's confession), and the metaphysics of Evil's daughterly issue (Meadow's exposure). Now where have we encountered those narrative conceits – cuckoldry, the adulterous parson, vendetta, a bedeviled child at risk, and a cross-gender omerta – before?
I have in mind a novel or, to be more precise, a Romantic novella, featuring a diva-class sexual adventuress whose notorious act of transgressive love is at once reproductive (a daughter) and transfigurative (the daughter is no ordinary girl), a false buddy team of village divine and his pagan avenger locked in a tangle of stalking, persecution, and self-flagellation as wildly, explicitly sadomasochistic as it is necessarily homoerotic, and the projected specter of an Old Testament Godhead so intent on punishment that the only ideas of "confession" He will abide are communal humiliation (wearing the sign "A," climbing the scaffold) and face-to-face admission (there's the man whose wife you've taken, Father). Of course the book of which I speak is Hawthorne's very own Scarlet Letter, which is, I believe, not only a Protestant Romantic inversion of the classic European adultery novel but also the greatest and strangest Pagan-Catholic revenge tale of the American 19th century.
The Everyday Politics of Religious Display
by Sally Promey, Yale University