This essay examines the transnational diffusion of Trumpism and its impact on the contemporary British Right. While Trumpism originated in a specifically American political context, its rhetorical style, populist strategies, and culture-war framing have migrated across the Atlantic. As a consequence, this uniquely American ideological formation is reshaping right-wing discourse in the UK. British right-wing actors- including populist figures, Conservative Party factions, and digital influencers- have increasingly adopted Americanized scripts around cancel culture, free speech, and national identity, embedding them into domestic debates over immigration, sovereignty, and multiculturalism. In a departure from soft anti-American attitudes previously expressed by British conservative figures, the British Right has adapted itself to reproduce the ideological imaginaries of MAGA Republicans. This process, termed 'yankification' in online spaces, is best illustrated in debates over collective memory in both the UK and US. The essay argues that significant sections of British Right have become 'Yankified' through the adoption of a conservative cosmopolitan vocabulary. This vocabulary can be transplanted into any Western society so as to advance anti-democratic, reactionary politics with little regard for the particulars of local political contexts.
As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, narratives of democratic exceptionalism dominate public discourse. This article challenges that self-image by tracing the contradictory history of U.S. influence on Brazil's political development. While similar dynamics appear elsewhere, Brazil is a revealing case. Across four moments-the shared Atlantic world of slavery and the post-Civil War migration that founded Americana; Franklin D. Roosevelt's wartime partnership with Get & uacute;lio Vargas's Estado Novo; the Lyndon B. Johnson administration's backing of the 1964 military coup; and Donald Trump's efforts to wield economic pressure against Brazil's judiciary as it pursued Jair Bolsonaro-the article argues that American power has repeatedly operated not as a guarantor of democratic consolidation but as an enabler of authoritarian outcomes when democracy clashed with U.S. strategic priorities. The paradox is most striking in the twentieth century: the two presidents most associated with major domestic democratic expansions, Roosevelt and Johnson, also presided over U.S. support for Brazil's two longest-lasting dictatorships. Drawing on historical scholarship and archival evidence, the article contends that this is not episodic inconsistency but a structural hierarchy in U.S. foreign policy, where geopolitical expediency routinely outweighs democratic principle. Brazil therefore illuminates a central tension in American democratic self-understanding: a nation celebrated as democracy's champion has often undermined democratic sovereignty abroad. The semiquincentennial should invite critical reckoning, not triumphalism.
As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, this essay revisits one of the republic's earliest experiments in mediated nation-building: Mathew Carey's American Museum (1787-1792). Published in Philadelphia by an Irish immigrant printer formed in the oppositional print culture of late eighteenth-century Dublin, the Museum was conceived not merely as a periodical but as a technology of public formation. It sought to convert revolutionary legitimacy into a civic habit sustained through serial reading, moral pedagogy, and circulation. Drawing on Carey's correspondence, subscriber networks, editorial negotiations, and the transatlantic movement of texts, the essay situates the American Museum at the intersection of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, sentimental moral philosophy, and the emerging commercial information economy. Carey attempted to domesticate universalist ideals within a distinctly American frame, cultivating what Benedict Anderson would later theorise as an 'imagined community' through editorial selection, framing, and repetition rather than through political mobilisation. This project, however, was structurally constrained: democratic aspirations were sustained by elite patronage, uneven payment, and inherited European models of civic virtue. Reinterpreting the American Museum as an early laboratory of American myth-making, the essay concludes by placing Carey's eighteenth-century 'information republic' in dialogue with contemporary media nationhood. The comparison highlights a persistent problem: how national publics are assembled when publicity is economically conditioned, infrastructurally mediated, and politically unstable.
This article examines the play of the mask trope in two American metafictional narratives in order to explore the interconnectedness of the problematization of the character concept and the satirizing of American postwar culture. Through a reading of Second Skin (1964) by John Hawkes and Mother Night (1961) by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the paradoxical operation of confessional storytelling, performed in both texts as role-playing, will be assimilated to a questioning of the borderline between person and persona. The mode of parody in both texts will be shown to subvert the category of the "personification mask" by altering the conventional pattern of typification in character portrayal, while the heightened theatricality displayed in the performance of the two first-person narrators will be linked to the play of the carnivalesque effect, which brings forward the operation of the 'impersonation mask." Connecting the play of these literary masks to the satiric impulse of American metafiction, I will then argue that the deliberate flaunting of the artifice of characterization induces a polemicising of the ontological status of literary character at the same time as it contributes to the satirizing of the imperialist ethos of the Robinsonade tradition (Second Skin) or also the American Establishment and popular mass media (Mother Night).
The idea of the US as an "empire" is hotly contested and is most often applied by critics of the nation's foreign policy, particularly over the past century. However, the notion of the US as "imperial" dates all the way back to the nation's founding, with Thomas Jefferson envisaging the US as an empire of/for liberty. As the US celebrates the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence from British imperialism, this comment piece outlines what it contends is the relative continuity of US imperialism across its history since 1776. This short piece considers the idea of US imperial continuity via three main themes: territorial expansion, economic coercion, and hemispheric domination. It traces these themes back to the earliest years of the United States and shows, in broad brushstrokes, how one can track imperialism all the way through to more recent policy and rhetoric from the Trump administration. Across all three thematic areas, this piece argues that the past two and a half centuries provide ample evidence that, far from rewriting them, the Trump administration of 2025 and early 2026 is largely adhering to the rules of US imperialism.
On the eve of the US semiquincentennial, this essay argues that Central and Eastern Europe is indispensable to understanding the racial and civilizational grammars shaping US democracy - past and present. We contend that Eastern and Central Europe should be treated not as peripheral or episodic, but as historically entangled with US nation-making. From early twentieth-century eugenic debates and immigration quotas to contemporary invocations of 'Western civilization', mechanisms of belonging in the United States have developed in dialogue with European racial thought and geopolitical imaginaries. Specifically, we examine how 'Balkanization' has functioned as a traveling racial technology, projecting disorder onto Eastern and Central Europe while disciplining difference in the United States. Drawing on Ivan Kalmar's concept of conditional whiteness, we show how US imaginaries position the region as racially European while casting it as 'civilizationally' unstable. This ambivalence allows Central and Eastern Europe to serve as ally, warning and mirror for US anxieties about alleged fragmentation and decline. Marco Rubio, for instance, frames Central Europe as crucial to US policy objectives while locating it outside of the 'Western Civilization' that animates much of far-right thinking today. By foregrounding these historical and contemporary entanglements, we argue for expanding American Studies' transnational coordinates to include Central and Eastern Europe as a critical site for understanding illiberal drift within US democracy itself.
As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary in 2026, national museums are once again at the centre of a contested politics of memory. Drawing on Bennett (1995), Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and Lonetree, this argues that federally operated institutions from the Smithsonian to National Park Service historic sites - function as 'exhibitionary complexes': apparatuses that simultaneously celebrate and discipline national identity. Tracing four commemorative moments - the Centennial (1876), Sesquicentennial (1926), Bicentennial (1976), and Semiquincentennial (2026) - demonstrates how curatorial practice has shifted from triumphalist mythology toward a contested, multiply-authored public history. Case studies of NMAAHC (National Museum of African American History and Culture) and NMAI (National Museum of the American Indian) illustrate how community-based and decolonial curation has disrupted the founding mythology of Anglo-Protestant nationhood. Yet these gains remain structurally precarious. The 2025 executive order directing the Smithsonian to restore narratives of 'American exceptionalism' reveals that curatorial rewriting is always subject to the pressures of political culture. National Museums now oscillate between offering comepting narratives exposing the tensions between founding ideals and historical realities - while public debate over 'revisionism' confirms that myths of nationhood remain deeply contested. It concludes that contemporary museums operate within foundational myths thickening the narrative to include what Lepore (2019) calls 'the long story of the United States' yet never fully escaping the gravitational pull of patriotic celebration.
This commentary traces the increasing polarisation of American nationalism over the past fifty years by surveying the memory politics surrounding two major recent historical commemorations: the 1976 Bicentennial and the upcoming 2026 Semiquincentennial. The 1976 Bicentennial, taking place in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, attempted to restore faith in a wounded republic and its institutions by wrapping civic renewal in spectacle. The commemoration imagined unity as both possible and desirable, enfolding heterogeneous stories of America into an impression - however misleading - of unity in diversity. Half a century later, however, the Semiquincentennial appears both more hesitant and more partisan, exacerbating rather than attempting to paper over the fractures of a fiercely divided political landscape. It stands symptomatic, I argue, of what Schertzer and Woods have recently termed the 'new' nationalism; a politics increasingly preoccupied with boundary-making, warding off perceived cultural threats, and protecting contested identities amid a world of flux. Ultimately, both commemorations offer a unique lens on the transformation of patriotism itself, revealing how the Trump Presidency has both exposed and intensified longer-standing fractures in conceptions of American citizenship, identity, and nationhood.
The COVID-19 pandemic thrust the mask into the global spotlight, transforming it into a complex symbol at the intersection of public health, individual freedom, and social identity. This study examines the multifaceted role of masks in American culture during the pandemic, highlighting the tensions between personal liberties and societal obligations. The research employs an interdisciplinary approach to explore how masks, which were initially medical tools, evolved into cultural symbols, representing political ideologies, social responsibility, and personal expression. It investigates the perception of masks as both protective measures and as instruments that hinder individual freedom, analyzing public discourse, policy debates, and social behavior surrounding mask mandates. The study also uncovers the unexpected freedoms that masks facilitated, such as providing anonymity and offering a respite from societal expectations, while simultaneously examining the challenges they posed to communication and facial recognition. The commercialization of masks as fashion accessories and political statements further underscores their transformation into cultural artifacts. By examining masks as material objects and metaphors, this paper enhances the understanding of identity, power, and resistance, providing global comparisons that extend beyond the American context.
This article examines the use of masks in the American photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard's (1925-1972) posthumously published photo-book The Family Album of LucyBelle Crater, (1974) and in the revised 2002 edition. For Meatyard, the spectral feature of photography - to make the invisible visible and vice versa - materializes itself in the use of masks as essential props designed to foreground not only a sense of secrecy and concealment but also photography's profoundly unstable ontological status. The use of masks enables an investigation into a form of spectral disorientation, a disruption of conventional time and space within photography, further emphasized by the accompanying captions in the second edition. Although critics have examined the uncanny in the LucyBelle Crater series and Meatyard's use of the family album, the interplay between masks and captions is equally significant. The use of repetition in both provides further understanding of how Meatyard defamiliarizes space, rendering photography a transformative rather than purely representational act. While it is tempting to interpret the masks as a deliberate process of estrangement, an uncanny critique of established photographic tropes, their presence transcends both the subject matter of the family album and extends the territory it occupies.
This essay offers an autoethnographic reflection stemming from the in-person conversations I have had with the activists of ISY, in M & eacute;rida, Mexico, since 2024. These conversations have taken place in the context of reading groups and semi-structured interviews that I have facilitated over the course of four fieldwork visits undertaken as part of my doctoral work. In discussions as part of my fieldwork, we connect the vulnerable situation of contemporary Mexican women and AFAB (Assigned Female at Birth) individuals with the gendered colonial history of the country. Just as my doctoral work straddles disciplinary and national boundaries, this reflection paper cuts across academic and autoethnographic modes of analysis. In this piece, I think back on the fostering community that was created during our activities; people laughed, they cried, they shared painful anecdotes about their lived experiences for the first time, and they reflected on individual topics which often quickly became collective discussions. My aim with this paper is to show how a feminist third space that sets out to be safe can represent a locus where vulnerability can be exposed, shared, and elaborated with a communal focus.
The Sonoran Desert, an ecologically and culturally diverse landscape currently divided by the U.S-Mexico border, has long been the subject of narratives shaping perceptions of this region. A Sonoran Desert imaginary has emerged from a history of written encounters with the space which has influenced how the landscape has been managed, what it has been used for, and who 'belongs' within it. In this paper, I will cite accounts from Van Dyke's The Desert, Edward Abbey's writing, to descriptions of the Sonoran borderlands crafted by state agencies, in order to illuminate the ways in which writing on the Sonoran Desert shapes a landscape of vulnerability for those deemed 'outsiders' to this space, understood then only as facets of its wilderness. This paper asks how an ostensibly benign genre of primarily non-fiction writing about this landscape can actually serve the project of ongoing border control. Even further, how does the juncture between borderlands and wilderness landscapes create an image that makes natural the death and disappearance which occur there? How can we reconcile the material consequences of these narratives, which romanticize the blooming saguaro, even while ignoring the person collapsed at its base? To answer these questions, I turn to contemporary authors working in the Sonoran region, whose work offers a way of seeing a desert historicized and lived in.
The Taliban's resurgence to power after two decades of war on terror alongside an increase in global rates of terrorism since 9/11 not only impugns our counter-terrorism measures but also solicits a return to the question that has recurrently engaged scholars in postcolonial studies: How do we respond to the global situation of 'terror'?. Elleke Boehmer identifies two responsive modalities in postcolonial literature: a 'hybridizing' and a 'resistance' inflection embodied respectively in the magic realist and national narratives. While both engage with neocolonialism, the former often comes to collude with globalization's imperio-capitalist processes which are subverted by the latter through 'nation narration' (2010, 143). Analyzing Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows via Judith Butler's theorization of a nonviolent ethics, this paper identifies Shamsie's response to terror as a departure from Boehmer's model. Debunking 'capitalist-driven colonialism' and 'neo-imperial globalization', Burnt Shadows also contests 'the nation' to endorse an ethico-politics of relationality anchored in shared human loss. This article argues that Burnt Shadows narrativizes a relational historical consciousness indispensable to apprehending our mutual constitution in vulnerability; in doing so, it advances a new paradigm of postcolonial resistance that demands a re-evaluation of 'terror' through our interdependent global history, informed by the continuities of empire, in order to reconceive politics within a relational social ontology that can forfend cycles of violence.
This article addresses vulnerability in the Americas via a comparison of a Qu & eacute;b & eacute;cois film, Au nord d'Albany (North of Albany; dir. Farley 2022) and an Anglo-Canadian collection of poetry, Arleen Par & eacute;'s Absence of Wings (2023). The constituent nation-states represented in these texts have specific relationships to each other and to continental assertions of power; moreover, power and vulnerability within these nation-states-not simply across them-vary significantly. Both the film and the collection revolve around the figure of a Black daughter to a single, white mother who attempts to mitigate elements of vulnerability for their daughter's sake. Whereas Au nord d'Albany's contrast between Canada and the United States both reinforces and troubles stereotypical distinctions between these nation-states, Absence of Wings focuses primarily on the racist failings of the Canadian state, while also invoking the United States and Brazil. Borders constitute obvious sites of adjacency, but the nature of this "up againstness" is not the same at every border, or for every border crosser, as uneven relations of hospitality and hostility attest. To different degrees, Au nord d'Albany and Absence of Wings demonstrate that the Canadian nation-state, despite its long-established rhetoric and policies of multiculturalism, presents little difference from other countries of the Americas in the precarity that structures life unevenly. .
This special issue of Comparative American Studies centres around ideas and notions of vulnerability. Insurgent in a diverse range of disciplines, Vulnerability Studies has risen to scholarly prominence in recent years, highlighting the ways in which subjects are made vulnerable by social, cultural, political, and economic policies and structures. If this vulnerability is often understood as a susceptibility to harm, the essays in this special issue move beyond a focus on that harm and its attendant damage to consider the ways in which we can productively complicate vulnerability as a condition of deficiency or passivity. This introduction traces several historical and contemporary narratives of American vulnerability, demonstrating how they reveal complex entanglements of risk, refusal, and resistance that play out across the Western hemisphere and beyond, and in multiscalar manifestations. In doing so we illustrate how an engagement with vulnerability can serve as a way in which our discipline - American Studies, broadly understood - might achieve a more sustained and meaningful commitment to a transnational or hemispheric outlook often lost in centripetal analyses of our object of study. Relatedly, we also consider the precarity of this very discipline itself (particularly in the U.K.) and posit several reasons why, in our current moment, American Studies remains vital in numerous ways in an increasingly fractured world.
Cacicazgos are forms of local social organization first identified by Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century and still present today. Although diverse, contemporary cacicazgos are characterized as systems in which autocratic leaders exercise regional dominance through family members, gunmen and other dependents who control natural, economic, political and cultural resources through violence and coercion, imposing particular forms of vulnerability on entire communities. Specifically in Guerrero, Mexico, Indigenous communities have been among the most vulnerable to these abuses of power and violence. There, this ancestral mode of domination is interwoven with colonial racism and stratification. Thus, it is also in Indigenous communities where fundamental strategies of resistance emerge to confront community division, vulnerability and insecurity. Through the case study of Xochistlahuaca, Guerrero, supported by fieldwork, monitoring of socio-digital networks, obtaining official open data and documentary and hemerographic review, this article presents a historical survey of the cacicazgo to explore how some Indigenous communities have resisted vulnerability in the forms of exploitation, dispossession and vassalage through the creation of community police, the filing of legal appeals and the demand for their right to autonomy. By situating the struggles of the Amuzgo people within a long history of caciquismo, this study contributes to hemispheric and continental Indigenous histories by illuminating how local resistance movements articulate broader patterns of colonial persistence and Indigenous decolonization.
This paper adopts and adapts a transhistorical approach to develop an important rejoinder to the theoretical mapping of twenty-first century protest movements that have sought to highlight shared vulnerabilities. Building upon the many important examinations of the phenomenon of mass public assembly - such as The Arab Spring, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter - that simultaneously highlight and resist conditions of vulnerability, I argue here that discussions of supposedly new forms of coalitional politics that challenge the neoliberal subject's precarity, are incomplete without complementary consideration of concurrent and historical movements of Indigenous people. Taking the Lakota Sioux as my focus, in this paper I develop a series of parallels between what scholars have suggested of those more mainstream popular and public protest phenomena, and the historical and ongoing affective, cultural, and environmental vulnerabilities that Indigenous communities are subject to. I suggest that the sociocultural, economic, and political conditions deliberately cultivated by forms of governmentality that today's typical subject is exposed to and which have animated much discussion amongst scholars of many different stripes, are not new and have their precursors in the treaty-making processes and assimilationist policies that have characterised and continue to animate the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the settler state.
Donald Trump's construction of a compelling fantasy for his supporters is one of the most distinctive features of his populist leadership, cultivating a 'dreampolitik' that projects an alternative reality. This essay will focus on the role of inflationary symbolism and fantasy in Trump's populist appeal during a period when 'reality' has become a volatile political as well as an ontological issue in the US. It will analyse Trumpism as an interactive fiction, an aesthetic politics which has significant carnivalesque and countercultural features. In this, I consider Trumpism as a loosely constituted counterculture of diverse constituencies bound by their investments in Trump's politics of fantasy. It is now the right and not the left in America that constitutes the most potent countercultural forces of reaction and transgression. And so I will focus on the aesthetics of Trumpism, not at the expense of politics but rather to critically illuminate the nature and appeal of a politics predicated on performance and emotionality, a politics that exists beyond the logic of policy or even rational political discourse. In this, I shall argue that Trumpism evidences and animates the escalating conflation of political fantasy and political reality in the US.
