This issue of JAS features a range of essays and review pieces which amply demonstrate the exciting intellectual range that is so characteristic of American studies. Each of the eight articles embraces the commitment to interdisciplinary research that we believe marks JAS out as such an innovative journal.
The powerful ways in which a modernist aesthetic in general and experimental literary devices in particular succeed in doing justice to the physical and psychological realities of impoverished lives lived in the US South is the subject of David Davis's article “The Irony of Southern Modernism.” This is followed by Tao Zhang's “The Start of American Accommodation of the Chinese: Afong Moy's Experience from 1834 to 1850,” which provides a profoundly compelling mapping of renowned, yet little-discussed, celebrity and performer Afong Moy, in order to shed light on key debates related to dominant forces and shifting constructions of paternalism, acculturation and nationalism. Jay Garcia's article “Richard Wright and the Americanism of Lawd Today!” provides an in-depth examination of this renowned African American author's posthumously published novel in order to fill in the contours regarding the influence of 1910s and 1920s social criticism on his development as a “literary artist.”
Taking a stance against mythological and reductive representations of Tijuana in mainstream debates, meanwhile, Stephanie Fuller examines the indelible relationship between Mexico and social revolution in US cinema in her article “‘The Most Notorious Sucker-Trap in the Western Hemisphere’: The Tijuana Story (Leslie Kardos, 1957) and Mythologies of Tijuana in American Cinema.” Nathan Abrams, by focussing on a renowned and iconic filmmaker, signals the importance of the Holocaust, European anti-Semitism and stereotyping in “A Jewish American Monster: Stanley Kubrick, Anti-Semitism and Lolita (1962).” Say Burgin's article “‘The Most Progressive and Forward Looking Race Relations Experiment in Existence’: Race ‘Militancy’, Whiteness, and DRRI in the Early 1970s” provides an in-depth examination of the contradictions embedded in white-formulated and white-designed US military policies that were implemented in response to “fears of black ‘militancy’.” Effortlessly debating the interrelationships between modernism and postmodernism in textual practices, Martin Eve comes to grips with literary representations of the 2003 Iraq War in “‘Too Many Goddamn Echoes’: Historicizing the Iraq War in Don DeLillo's Point Omega.” Finally, Kun Jong Lee, in “The Making of an Asian American Short-Story Cycle: Don Lee's Yellow: Stories,” demonstrates the rich insights that focussing on Korean American short stories can have for a wider understanding of the way that diasporic communities have influenced American literary forms and aesthetically experimental practices.
The reviews section leads with a thought-provoking essay by Tom Adam Davies, which examines three recent titles on the economic dimensions of the black freedom struggle. We then include thirty-eight reviews, led in the print section by three examining various aspects of the relationship between Jewish identity and US culture, and in the online section by two focussing on the politics and print culture of American modernism.
