NYMASA

NYMASA Salon Talks Fall 2010

NYMASA is proud to announce our Fall 2009 series of Salon Talks. Once again, we have a terrific array of scholars talking about their recently-published books. Salon Talks are an opportunity for local American Studies scholars to share their published work with an intimate audience. They tend to be small, lively, and informative. This semester all Salon Talks will be held at 7:30pm at Hunter College (Lexington Avenue and 68th Street) in the Faculty/Staff Lounge, 8th floor of the West Building.

For more information, contact Sarah Chinn at sarah.chinn@hunter.cuny.edu

Wednesday, September 15

Anna Mae Duane (University of Connecticut)
Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (University of Georgia Press)

This book offers a compelling look at the use of childhood as metaphor in early America. Nothing tugs on American heartstrings more than an image of a suffering child. Anna Mae Duane goes back to the nation's violent beginnings to examine how the ideal of childhood in early America was fundamental to forging concepts of ethnicity, race, and gender. Duane argues that children had long been used to symbolize subservience, but in the New World those old associations took on more meaning. Drawing on a wide range of early American writing, she explores how the figure of a suffering child accrued political weight as the work of infantilization connected the child to Native Americans, slaves, and women. In the making of the young nation, the figure of the child emerged as a vital conceptual tool for coming to terms with the effects of cultural and colonial violence, and with time childhood became freighted with associations of vulnerability, suffering, and victimhood that shaped the perception of childhood itself: as a site of vulnerability, suffering, and victimhood. As Duane looks at how ideas about the child and childhood were manipulated by the colonizers and the colonized alike, she reveals a powerful line of colonizing logic in which dependence and vulnerability are assigned great emotional weight. When early Americans sought to make sense of intercultural contact - and the conflict that often resulted - they used the figure of the child to help displace their own fear of lost control and shifting power.

Thursday October 27

Hester Blum (Pennsylvania State University)
The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (University of North Carolina Press)

With long, solitary periods at sea, far from literary and cultural centers, sailors comprise a remarkable population of readers and writers. Although their contributions have been little recognized in literary history, seamen were important figures in the nineteenth- century American literary sphere. In the first book to explore their unique contribution to literary culture, Hester Blum examines the first-person narratives of working sailors, from little-known sea tales to more famous works by Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Richard Henry Dana. In their narratives, sailors wrote about how their working lives coexisted with--indeed, mutually drove--their imaginative lives. Even at leisure, they were always on the job site. Blum analyzes seamen's libraries, Barbary captivity narratives, naval memoirs, writings about the Galapagos Islands, Melville's sea vision, and the crisis of death and burial at sea. She argues that the extent of sailors' literacy and the range of their reading were unusual for a laboring class, belying the popular image of Jack Tar as merely a swaggering, profane, or marginal figure. As Blum demonstrates, seamen's narratives propose a method for aligning labor and contemplation that has broader applications for the study of American literature and history.

Monday, November 10

Tim Raphael (Rutgers University, Newark)
The President Electric: Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Performance (University of Michigan Press)

When Ronald Reagan first entered politics in 1965, his public profile as a performer in radio, film, television, and advertising and his experience in public relations proved invaluable political assets. By the time he left office in 1989, the media in which he trained had become the primary source for generating and wielding political power. The President Electric: Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Performance reveals how the systematic employment of the techniques and technologies of mass-media performance contributed to Reagan’s rise to power and defined his style of governance.

The President Electric stands out among books on Reagan as the first to bring the rich insights of the field of performance studies to an understanding of the Reagan phenomenon, connecting Reagan's training in electronic media to the nineteenth-century notion of the "fiat of electricity"—the emerging sociopolitical power of three entities (mechanical science, corporate capitalism, and mass culture) that electric technology made possible. The book describes how this new regime of cultural and political representation shaped the development of the electronic mass media that transformed American culture and politics and educated Ronald Reagan for his future role as president.

Thursday, December 9

Cynthia Wachtell (Yeshiva University)
War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914 (Louisiana State University Press)

In War No More Cynthia Wachtell offers an important, new interpretation of American antiwar writing and reveals the shared antiwar impulse of some of the giants of American literature. Voicing their opposition to war's brutality, absurdity, inhumanity, and irrationality, these authors gained favor during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the implications of modern warfare became increasingly evident. "War will yet be, and to the end," predicted Herman Melville. His prophecy, borne out by the course of American history from the Revolutionary War through to our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, seems all too depressingly likely.

Drawing upon a wide range of published and unpublished sources, including letters, diaries, essays, poems, short stories, novels, memoirs, speeches, magazine and newspaper articles, and religious tracts, Wachtell makes strikingly clear that pacifism had never been more popular than in the years preceding World War I. War No More concludes by charting the development of antiwar literature from World War I to the present, thus offering the first comprehensive overview of one hundred and fifty years of American antiwar writing.