This paper explores Robert Frank's photographs of southern California from his collection The Americans (1958). Using Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin's historical-materialist approach, I show how Frank dismantles Hollywood's dream factory as he travels through the heart of the culture industry. Frank's photography stands at the crossroads of Adorno's and Benjamin's philosophical fragments on modernity's ruins. Challenging any grand narrative about sociohistorical progress in his desultory arrangement of photographs, I argue that Frank's methodology is wedded to how the two philosophers approach a philosophy of history. Whether he is shooting overgrown suburban yards, a solitary figure on Main Street, or the backside of the Hollywood sign, Frank shows how California's imagined Arcadia comprises scenes of abandonment and melancholic loss. Like the philosophers from the Frankfurt school, Frank's images suggest that the culture industry fabricates a false sense of community and fuels an atmosphere of isolation inhabited by reified commodities and the obsolescence of their consumers.
This article analyzes Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) as an expression of 1960s political radicalism and a "history-from-below" perspective. The oppression faced by the novel's time traveling protagonist, Consuelo Ramos - a victim of the "prison/psychiatric state" - and her struggle in support of a possible utopian future are situated in relation to Piercy's participation in SDS and the women's movement in confrontation with postwar US political culture. Consistent with Walter Benjamin's call to uphold the subversive meaning of radical traditions threatened by historical erasure, Piercy explores contemporary acts of resistance as potentially germinal moments in a longer arc of insurgency obscured and denied by "official" history.
For centuries, historic houses have presented a romanticized vision of antebellum life, obscuring the realities of slavery. Today, as heritage sites work to unpack their history, scholars often categorize any expansion beyond a traditional introspection as a "counternarrative." This article challenges the overuse of this term, arguing that it reinforces a colonial framework where the dominant, often whitewashed, account remains the implicit norm. Through the interpretive methodology at Whitney Plantation, this article advocates for a reassessment of universal classification terminology used to describe antebellum heritage sites. It articulates the influence of scholastic intervention and inherent power dynamics in historical storytelling.
Staging an experimental sex therapy in which Black characters act as enslaved, Slave Play depicts erotic encounters charged with stereotypes of Black sexuality. While many critics dismiss this representation as distasteful, I argue that it is by staging Black sexuality in such challenging scenarios that Harris resists the dehumanising power of stereotypes. Instead of concealing stereotypes or seeking to supplant them with positive representation, Slave Play restores the unpredictability that they deny. In confronting this representation, our preconceptions short-circuit, and we are forced to apprehend Black sexuality on its own terms. This essay charts the rethinking of pleasure and agency that this confrontation compels.
Italian Americans faced a dilemma with the American intervention in the Second World War - how could they fight against the ancestral homeland and the "flesh of their flesh"? The leaders of the movement to remove the classification of non-naturalized Italians as alien enemies sought to reconcile this conflict, and demonstrate the collective and singular loyalty of their fellow ethnics to the United States by constructing a new Italian American worldview. This article provides a study of the reworking of the Italian barbarian-invasion narrative by the principal leader of the reclassification movement, Luigi Rocco Antonini, during the Second World War and the subsequent inclusion of this new variant in the framing of the American policy to continue mobilizing the Italian ethnic bloc in the United States.
In a series of detective novels published between 1957 and 1969 Chester Himes portrayed diverse individuals struggling for survival, wealth, and status in a fictionalized postwar Harlem, combining what Richard Wright called a "bio-social" perspective with an antiracist aesthetics that falsified simplistic racial categories. In this essay, I trace Himes's renderings of bodily difference and transformation, highlighting features neglected by contemporaries such as Ellison and Baldwin as well as more recent critics and readers who frame Himes's writings as protests against anti-Black violence. I conclude that Himes's Harlem novels did not simply reflect violent realities of African American lives but instead exhibited unresolved conflicts between antiracist imperatives, namely a recognition of individual complexities on the one hand, and organized struggle against racially discriminatory institutions and practices on the other.
This essay shows how the United States racialized refugees through photography. American policy makers and news media have deployed photography as a definitive tool in characterizing Haitian "economic migrants" as "bad" refugees in opposition to "good" or "model" refugees from Vietnam. A cluster of black bodies on an unseaworthy boat came to represent an economic and hygienic threat, unlike the Vietnamese who are political victims of an oppressive communist regime. To critique our optical framework regulated by the Cold War racial politics, this essay historicizes how refugees were produced by American warfare and militarism. In the United States, war making, race making, and refugee making are mutually constitutive.
