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Tempo e Americanidade

A construção da noção de americanidade em diferentes momentos da história; ser americano e a consciência histórica e a historicidade da americanidade tratada em diferentes formas narrativas.

‘Our America’ and ‘the America that is not ours’: Buried strategies of internationalism and inclusion/exclusion in cultural and political struggles for democracy

Enviado por jude.davies (não verificado), qui, 20/01/2011 - 10:23
Panel ID: 
20
Sessões Temáticas: 
Tempo e Americanidade

This panel takes as its cue José Martí’s dualistic notion of 'our America' ('nuestra America') and 'the America that is not ours'. It examines specific examples where figures from within the United States strategically identify or disidentify with the US as part of a struggle for progressive political change. In the case of figures such as William Wells Brown and Theodore Dreiser, who combined political agitation with literary activity, these strategies are often ‘buried’ under the weight of their reputations within the field of ‘American literature’.

Comunicação 1
Título: 
Exhibiting Race ‘under the world’s huge glass case’ William and Ellen Craft and William Wells Brown at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace, London, 1851
Autor: 
Professor Lisa Merrill, Hofstra University, USA
Resumo: 
In the antebellum period after Britain had abolished slavery, but while slavery was actively dividing the United States, a number of fugitive African American slaves traveled to Britain to secure their freedom and encourage sympathizers outside the borders of the United States to work toward helping free four million enslaved African Americans on US soil. This paper will focus on a particular strategic moment where the tensions between inclusion and exclusion were intentionally performed: the visit of William Wells Brown and William and Ellen Craft, along with white British abolitionist friends to the ‘American department’ of the Great Exhibition. Drawing upon primary and unpublished material, I will explore Brown and the Crafts’ choice to place themselves within the ‘American department’, which included US sculptor Hiram Powers’ romantic depiction of ‘the Greek Slave.’ I will use this occasion to examine the performance, representation, and reception of images of American slavery as visitors encountered them ‘under the world’s huge glass case.’
Comunicação 2
Título: 
“What need of perished Martís?” Theodore Dreiser and the Ironies of American Idealism from the Gilded Age to World War II
Autor: 
Professor Jude Davies, University of Winchester, UK
Resumo: 
Theodore Dreiser's rhetorical question of 1895, "What need of perished Martís?" was part of a strategy to call for aid to the Cuban insurgency against Spanish rule, while eschewing imperialist designs. It initiates an ironic critique of “American idealism” that Dreiser would pursue for fifty years, notably with respect to Cuba, World War I, and World War II. This paper therefore considers Dreiser’s contribution to the historical negotiation between, in José Martí’s terms, “our America” and “the America that is not ours.” While for Dreiser and Martí these terms had quite different referents, I argue that Dreiser’s wide-ranging output of novels, travel writing, and social criticism pursues a similarly dual project of interrogating the mystifying rhetorics of USAmerican democracy, while rejuvenating democracy by reference to the potentially positive dynamics between different Americas, and between America, the non-American, and the un-American. Aspects of Dreiser’s critique of “American idealism” have been recognised in his novels Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. By shifting the focus to Dreiser’s hitherto neglected political writings, including suppressed material that will be published for the first time in 2011, I uncover a more productive, internationalist perspective.
Comunicação 3
Título: 
Exodus and the Americanization of the Zionist Narrative
Autor: 
Amy Kaplan (Pennsylvania U)
Resumo: 
This presentation explores how the best-selling novel of 1958 by Leon Uris and Otto Preminger's award-winning 1960 film packaged and sold the 10-year-old state of Israel to American audiences. Exodus created a myth of Israeli origins that appealed to popular American conceptions of its own revolution against the British empire. This foundational myth presented a spectacle of Israel's "specialness" which mirrored American exceptionalism in the Cold War era and which remains influential today. Written in the immediate context of the 1956 Suez Crisis, Exodus was engaged in an implicit debate with competing histories of 1948. The Palestinian narrative of the Nakba haunts what would become the dominant story of Israel's birth.

Imagining “America” across the Pacific: Interlacing American and Japanese Cartographies

Enviado por mizumi (não verificado), ter, 18/01/2011 - 10:13
Panel ID: 
16
Sessões Temáticas: 
Tempo e Americanidade

This panel investigates from four historical locations how the images of “America” as the self and the other have been strategically constructed, negotiated, and utilized within certain cultural interfaces between Japan and the United States. Fumiko Sakashita investigates wartime Japanese propaganda activities that targeted African Americans, and demonstrates how they emphasized hypocrisy of American democracy to justify Japan’s military aggressions in Asia. Yusuke Torii considers how jazz music was used in U.S.

Comunicação 1
Título: 
“Double V” across the Pacific: Japanese Propaganda Activities and African Americans during the World War II
Autor: 
Fumiko Sakashita, Kansai Gaidai University
Resumo: 
This paper investigates Japanese wartime propaganda activities that targeted African Americans by focusing on two Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports, “War and Blacks” (1942) and “Wartime Black Propaganda Operations” (1943). “War and Blacks,” written by African Americans sympathizer turned government agent Yasuichi Hikida, provided the Japanese government with up-to-date information on the status of African Americans, particularly on their wartime frustration over mob violence and racism. Convinced of the effectiveness of racial agitation among blacks, the Japanese government assigned Hikida to another report on African Americans, but this time, more precisely on wartime espionage. Believing that black antipathy to domestic racism would become a major obstacle for America’s ongoing war for democracy, “Wartime Black Propaganda Operations” detailed plans on conducting propaganda activities aimed at African Americans in the US and abroad. By examining these reports, related FBI documents, and black-oriented newspapers and periodicals, the paper will demonstrate how Japanese propaganda campaigns emphasized hypocrisy of American democracy, the same rhetoric African Americans highlighted on the home front, to justify Japan’s war to liberate the colored races from Western colonialism.
Comunicação 2
Título: 
Jazz Records at the Library: Music and U.S. Public Diplomacy in Postwar Japan
Autor: 
Yusuke Torii, Setsunan Univeristy
Resumo: 
This study considers how jazz music was used in U.S. public diplomacy in postwar Japan, focusing on jazz record concerts at Osaka CIE Information Center (1948-1952) and its successor, Osaka American Culture Center (1952-1972). The idea of jazz music being a symbol of American democracy became very popular during the Cold War, and by the late 1950s the State Department began funding goodwill tours of American jazz musicians to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. One may expect, then, that jazz would have been vigorously promoted in postwar Japan as well by the U.S. occupation authority and subsequently by the public diplomacy sector. My findings, however, suggest that Americans were not specifically interested in promoting jazz music in Japan, while they did try to introduce more American composers and orchestras in classical music to the Japanese. Based on official weekly reports at the Osaka Information Center / American Culture Center, memoirs of former employees, as well as the LP records, hand-made programs, and other memorabilia preserved by a former employee, I will argue that the Japanese interest in jazz and popular music was largely spontaneous.
Comunicação 3
Título: 
Resisting Amerika: Cultural Nationalism and Transnationalism of Japanese Taiko Drummers
Autor: 
Masumi Izumi, Doshisha University
Resumo: 
In 1970, some 30 young people in their twenties gathered in Sado Island in Niigata, Japan, to form a group to study traditional Japanese folklore, dance and music. A decade later, they became an internationally renowned Taiko drumming group, KODO. This paper examines the motives and reasons for the Japanese youths who formed Taiko groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and elucidates how their apparently non-political cultural activities were founded in their deep questioning of the “American value-system.” KODO members sought a simple and stoic communal life as an alternative to the rapid Americanization of general Japanese lifestyles. While the majority of Taiko groups advocated nationalistic traditionalism and the majority of leftist youth activists embraced Jazz, KODO drummers sought cultural nationalism and spiritual cosmopolitanism at the same time. This case study seeks to overcome the dichotomy of “nationalism” and “transnationalism” and that of “political anti-Americanism” and “non-political anti-Americanism” through a careful analysis of Japanese cultural activism from the right and the left, and seeks a hint for critical cosmopolitanism and alternative sense of belonging at this time of rapid Americanization of the global world.
Comunicação 4
Título: 
Image of Karate in America: Media and Individual Consumption of Asian Martial Art
Autor: 
Hitoshi Kamada, University of Arizona
Resumo: 
From a perspective of studying how karate, a popular martial art that originated in Okinawa and developed in Japan, is imagined and consumed in the United States, this paper studies various karate schools in the United States. Along with television, movie, and publication media, there is abundant information on the Internet about this once secretive, undocumented art that originated from a foreign culture. The survey of the karate school websites and scenes of karate that appear on television and other media prominently feature “belts” worn by karate practitioners as a popular image of karate as accepted among the public, and for American karate students, it works as a major device to create a unique space that attracts people to develop body & mind as a major perceived benefit of karate practice. The mental aspect, in relation to the influence of Asian spiritual elements, and how karate’s tradition is consumed on the foreign soil were examined further. In the end, the Americans have created its own karate as a mixture of Japanese and/or Okinawan traditions, other Asian arts, and practical combat techniques and attached their own authenticity.

The Revision of History in Contemporary American Fiction

Enviado por gisele (não verificado), seg, 17/01/2011 - 10:26
Panel ID: 
15
Sessões Temáticas: 
Tempo e Americanidade

The papers to be presented in this panel address the reevaluation of History and the notion of what it means to be an American through the analyses of Washington D.C. (1967), by Gore Vidal, Paradise (1997), by Toni Morrison, Falling Man (2007) and Point Omega (2010), by Don DeLillo. These novels approach different historical periods in America: the New Deal, World War II, the McCarthy era, the Civil Rights Movement, September 11 and the War on Terror. The techniques employed by the authors display their distinct perspectives to History.

Comunicação 1
Título: 
Reevaluating Politics and War in Washington, D.C. (1967) and Point Omega (2010)
Autor: 
Giséle Manganelli Fernandes - UNESP
Resumo: 
This paper aims at analyzing the novels Washington, D.C. (1967), by Gore Vidal, and Point Omega (2010), by Don DeLillo, in order to show the narrative strategies applied by the authors to reevaluate History in their texts. Washington D.C. addresses the period which ranges from the New Deal up to the McCarthy era, and Point Omega is related to the war on terror after 9/11. Vidal discusses not only matters concerned with the United Stated entering the Second World War and the fear of Communism, but also issues on political power, treason and the uses of publicity in politics. In 1937, Senator Burden Day and his Judiciary committee had stopped President Roosevelt’s bill to pack the Supreme Court. Senator Day had political ambitions, but he sees his assistant, Clay Overbury, become his opponent. Clay emerged as a “war hero” (a questionable one) and was a suitable candidate for the media. In Point Omega, Don DeLillo presents Richard Elster, a “defense intellectual” involved in the Bush government for more than two years with military strategies of the war in Iraq. Jim Finley, a filmmaker, wants to document Elster’s experience and the reader is led to question the consequences of the war. This discussion will be based on texts by Hutcheon (1988, 1993), White (1999) and Ricoeur (2007).
Comunicação 2
Título: 
Being an American in Paradise (1997)
Autor: 
Marcela de Araujo Pinto - UNESP
Resumo: 
Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997) reveals numerous possible Americas. The novel is set in Oklahoma, during the 1970’s, portraying characters facing the issue of affirming themselves as African-Americans at the period of Civil Rights Movement. All these characters are trying to figure out how they fit in America and how America belongs to them. For some, the definition of home in the United States is related to their ancestors who lived in that country during slavery or after it. For others, the traces of a homely America are in their connection to the ancestors who lived in Africa, before slavery. While for Morrison, there is a possible America connecting the States to Brazil through a shared history concept. She is able to assess American history through an episode that belongs to Brazilian oral history. In Paradise, the author shifts a Brazilian incident, the attack to a cathedral with the consequent killing of black nuns who practiced both candomblé and Catholicism, to an American context, reevaluating African-American history. This paper aims at analyzing how the narrative of this novel elaborates shifting ideas of what it means to be an American, formulating an inclusive shared history concept.
Comunicação 3
Título: 
Reflections on Falling Man (2007): An attempt to give memory and meaning to an empty space
Autor: 
Márcia Corrêa de Oliveira Mariano - UNESP
Resumo: 
The September 11 attacks have originated a wide range of artistic manifestations which have not only searched for plausible explanations for the tragedy, but also reviewed the events. In his novel Falling Man, published in 2007, Don DeLillo deals with this episode. The author examines, in a critical way, how such a powerful country, which has always claimed to be connected to the future, was so vulnerable to that terrorist action. On the one hand, there is capital and work; on the other, “a few men willing to die”. The novel focuses on a family going through a crisis and whose characters are victims of both 9/11 and their own eccentricities. The text also approaches the stories of survivors of the catastrophe and describes the routine of the agents in the terrorist network. The character “Falling Man” is DeLillo's vivid personalization of the tragic events of 9/11 and their aftermaths. This paper aims at analyzing the narrative strategies employed by the author to reevaluate the past of American society, presenting multiple perspectives for the interpretation of a historical fact. Thus, the readers are led to rethink official History. Texts by White (1985), Hutcheon (1988, 1991), Baudrillard (2002), Vidal (2003) and Chomsky (2001, 2004) will base the discussion of those issues.