Dana Nelson, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair, ushers JAS into 2016 by cutting to the heart of the ways in which presidentialism, “simply put, is bad for US democracy,” in her essay “A Passion for Democracy: Proximity to Power and the Sovereign Immunity Test.” Originally delivered as the JAS keynote address at the British Association for American Studies Annual Conference at Northumbria University in 2015, Nelson's ground-breaking engagement with a “worrisome trend in scholarship and intellectual political culture” is published here for the first time.
The rest of this issue comprises a forum in which numerous authors commissioned by Bevan Sewell debate US immigration across a myriad of social, political, historical, cultural, ideological, philosophical, and intellectual contexts. Rebecca Schreiber sheds light on the “Undocumented Everyday” by addressing migrant rights and visual strategies in the life and works of Alex Rivera. In “Madness, Entropy, Paradox: The Legacy of Political Violence in Loida Maritza Pérez's Geographies of Home,” Jennifer Krause examines this groundbreaking literary work to further the conversation surrounding Latino/a identity politics within the United States. Shifting focus, Alexander Noonan examines the debates around anarchist restriction that shaped the eventual passage of the Immigration Act of 1903. He argues that domestically oriented conceptions of national security are both challenged and constituted by transnational and international processes and currents. Moving attention away from a sole focus on a US context, David Atkinson examines Australian responses to the imposition of stringent national-origins quotas in the United States during the 1920s. Returning us to a US national framework but within an international perspective, Anne Blaschke explores the gendered potential and limitations of Eastern Bloc immigration to the United States under Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. Carefully scrutinizing the reversals and contradictions in US political discourse, finally, Maria Lauret concludes the forum by tracing a long history of immigration policies and patterns to debate the ways in which it is common for US citizens to identify precisely – as hyphenated Americans, proud of their ethnic heritage – in a current era. The commentaries by Stephanie Lewthwaite and Meredith Oyen open up powerful and ongoing issues in what we hope is an “unfinished conversation” among readers of JAS and beyond regarding US immigration as a field of political inquiry, historiographical research, and cultural analysis for yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
The print reviews section leads with a provocative essay by Peter Ling on Peniel E. Joseph's 2014 biography of Stokely Carmichael. The essay is entitled “Does the Movement Need a King?” and draws out the key themes in Joseph's book, as well as highlighting its place within the much-debated historical narrative of the “long civil rights movement.” Nineteen reviews then follow, led by a group of three covering the politics of race and immigration in contemporary America. The online reviews section opens with an essay discussing recent titles on the history and culture of racial passing by Sinéad Moynihan, followed by sixteen reviews.
