Examining archival footage and documents about the cultural work of silent film during the 1910s and 1920s, this essay reveals the complicity of film with the work of organized Americanization at both federal and industrial levels. Specifically, it argues that early American cinema is complicit with and critical of Americanization, as it negotiates multiple new immigrant concerns. Joining the recent work of film and immigration historians, it argues that just as Americanization did not produce compliant citizens overnight, silent film as a new and powerful medium of persuasion could influence the new American viewers’ transformation only in part. Of particular interest is the use of film in industrial and educational contexts – which sometimes overlapped – purporting to both “educate” and Americanize the new immigrants to the US. It asks, what cultural work did silent film do for Americanization, the active and sometimes coercive campaign aiming to make new immigrants into good Americans? The films I read as case studies later in this essay – industrial, educational, and nontheatrical films such as An American in the Making (1913), The Making of an American (1920), and others – illustrate the potential of silent film both as mimesis (or representation of ideology) and as ideology.

Frank Herbert's influential science fiction novel Dune (1965) is usually understood as a prescient work of environmentalism. Yet it is also concerned with empire, and not merely in an abstract way. Herbert worked in politics with the men who oversaw the United States’ overseas territories, and he took an unusually strong interest in Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest, particularly the Quileute Nation. Conversations with Quileute interlocutors both inspired Dune and help explain Herbert's turn toward environmentalism. This article recovers the neglected imperial context for Herbert's writing, reinterpreting Dune in light of that context.

This article examines one of the earliest novels of the Trump era, Salman Rushdie's The Golden House (2017), as part of a literary corpus that felt compelled to respond to the derealization of political culture by producing fictions commensurate to the new “American reality.” Spanning the years from the first inauguration of Obama to the election of Trump, the novel depicts a nation that has “left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe,” a turn to fantasy that precedes the final irruption of a wealthy vulgarian who calls himself the Joker, and who subverts any previous sense of identity and of what is “real.” Drawing from the notion of national fantasy as argued by Lauren Berlant (1991), Jacqueline Rose (1996), and Donald Pease (2009), the article suggests that Rushdie's novel performs and invites a rare self-examination in the context of early literary responses to the rise of Trumpism.

This essay draws on Emmanuel Levinas's concept of the dwelling to understand how neoconservative emphases on family values impede ethical conduct in neoliberal America. Levinas's architectural understanding of egoism maps onto discourses that elevate the nuclear family to unimpeachable heights, and his notion of ethical responsibility provides a road map for rethinking social life along interdependent lines. To that end, this essay turns to Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherland to suggest that aesthetically mediated examples of family dysfunction can disclose ethical forms of sociality that move beyond the nuclear family.

The aftermath of the 1992 Rodney King crisis in Los Angeles produced a flurry of debate regarding urban social policy in America that has gone unexamined by scholars. This article suggests that by exploring grassroots activists and their proposals for how the city should be rebuilt, we can gain valuable insight into the role of racialized space in motivating protest. It therefore considers a case study of the Tourism Industry Development Council (TIDC), a largely unknown coalition of some of LA's most dynamic activists, created in an attempt to reform the city's tourism policies. By examining a series of bus tours hosted by the TIDC in 1994 and 1996, this article argues that in addition to trying to establish equitable and inclusive economic development in low-income communities of colour, these activists were also reimagining the meanings and uses of urban space. In creating these tours, organizers utilized a “spatial imaginary” to challenge the ideological underpinnings of urban redevelopment and reconceptualized how social justice could be achieved through the remaking of urban spaces in ways which would have important implications for the future of protest and resistance in modern Los Angeles.

Exploring sanitation in postwar Los Angeles, this article argues that as white voluntary groups formed task forces to clean up the city, they endangered Mexican and black Angelinos by endorsing solutions to urban welfare defined by antistatism and carceralism. I read these activities through the lens of white ignorance, whereby white Americans elaborated folk knowledge of successful urbanism on their own terrain and terms, which had no capacity to attend to other classes and races. I treat white ignorance not as a cognitive defect or proxy for innocence, but rather as a structural condition of postwar urban political economy.

Largely forgotten today, from approximately the late 1910s through the 1930s, at least a dozen young girls brought out numerous books in the US. But there was one girl who was particularly talented and successful: Nathalia Crane, who published her first collection of poetry when she was just eleven years old in 1924. This article analyzes both her work and her reception from her first success through the subsequent controversy over her authorship instigated by a local Brooklyn newspaper. In the process, the article demonstrates the complicated connections between perceptions of girlhood and women's sexuality as they relate to political agency in the early twentieth-century United States.

This essay examines how the project of national security was beset by the affective intensities of “Jeffersonian trembling.” While white nationalists today see themselves as threatened with dispossession and the loss of historical entitlement, mainstream supporters of the movement to colonize US blacks leveraged their fear to export insecurity and precarity onto African Americans. The claim of “white genocide” dates back to biopolitical anxieties that drove the colonization movement to control and manage the chimera of black population excess. Such efforts required the conversion of blacks into data so that they could be brought under a regime of “algorithmic governmentality.” Instead of targeting individual black bodies, white nationalism read the latest data about black people in toto as a threat. Different in scale from the surveillance techniques that overseers, patrollers, and other agents of slaveholding society employed, colonization represented a security algorithm for tackling a data problem that was the size of the African American population itself. In this history, we can detect how the logic of security is always a racialized formation that is intimately connected to feelings of insecurity.

Although the Vatican pragmatically accepted the establishment of segregated Catholic institutions in the Jim Crow South during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, its condemnation of Nazi and fascist racism and espousal of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ rejected racial distinctions. This article argues that Rome's postwar transnational interest in countering international communism and appealing to the global South also encouraged its support for racial equality, integration and the civil rights movement, and denial of religious legitimacy to segregationists. Yet Catholic desegregation in the South was largely token and one-sided, and closed many black institutions.

During the early twentieth century – when the United States was receiving an influx of non-English-speaking immigrants, and “standardization” was a dominant, yet polarizing, concept – having a single national language that unified Americans became a controversial topic in public discourse. In The Odyssey of a Nice Girl, Ruth Suckow, like many authors at the time, used immigrant language as a foil for midwestern speech to demonstrate its “standard” Americanness. But, as this essay will show, by using other regional American dialects in a similar manner, she questioned how “Americanness” was being understood and recognized during this period in the United States.

This article posits that the emergency shelter system which emerged in the 1970s, first as an informal network of local and faith-based assistance and then institutionalized by the late 1980s, was Washington, DC's third ghetto. Defining this “new,” visible homelessness in the context of the third ghetto exposes its points of convergence with the second ghetto in the increasing use of welfare hotels. This study revisits Arnold Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto to examine housing precarity and racial subordination in Washington, DC's first and second ghettos. Additionally, I argue that acknowledging the resilience of the black female heads of household (FHHs) living in the public housing of the 1970s and 1980s in the second ghetto and examining homeless families living in welfare hotels in connection with neoliberal policies and practices in homeless assistance service provision during the 1980s are essential to understanding the making of the third ghetto in Washington, DC.

The article studies African American narratives of indigenous captivity from its emergence in the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Taking accounts by Briton Hammon, John Marrant, Henry Bibb, and James Beckwourth as examples, the essay charts the development of this body of writings, its distinction from white-authored narratives, and its contribution to North American autobiography. In so doing, the article argues that the black-authored texts strategically employed only certain elements of the Indian captivity narrative and that they blended these with aspects of other types of Western autobiography to claim black people's agency and discursive authority in white-dominated print culture.

This article investigates the role of mid-century conservatism in shaping the College Board's Advanced Placement program. Kenyon president Gordon Keith Chalmers and superintendent of New Trier public schools William Cornog, who led the committee that directly gave rise to the AP Program, understood themselves as classically liberal but socially conservative, and their proposed program was rooted in principles associated with that movement. In keeping with other mid-century conservative thinkers, they promoted humanistic inquiry that introduced all American students, regardless of backgrounds, to the notion of individual freedom, in spaces set apart from economic activity. This article explains that Chalmers and Cornog agreed that schools should focus on reinforcing and transmitting a distinctly American heritage of constitutionalism, individualism, and universal morality by way of the liberal arts. The article ends by establishing how this ideological framing contradicts the Advanced Placement program's current shape.

Doris Derby's photographic archive offers a powerful perspective on the civil rights movement that has yet to be critically or academically engaged with. Derby, an activist, photographer, and educator who has appeared in such texts as Hands on the Freedom Plow (2010) and in such collections as Julian Cox's Road to Freedom (2008), is a gateway figure to a richer, more nuanced visual history of the movement. This article utilizes original interviews, archival material, and a survey of secondary literature to call for increased consideration for Doris Derby's work. Derby's womanist perspective challenges the dominant visual rhetoric of the movement and advocates for increased consideration of the everyday activism of African American women. Men, women and children – but especially African American women – are presented in Derby's lens as dynamic agents of change. Derby's work challenges the dominant canon of the movement, which frequently relies on charismatic male leadership and black victimization. Instead, considering Derby's photography broadens our understanding of what everyday resistance in the civil rights movement was like for thousands of African Americans.

This article examines sculptor James Turrell's late 1960s Art & Technology residency at Garrett Corporation, an aerospace and defense subcontractor based in Los Angeles. It considers Turrell's early life, his participation in the residency through the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and his and collaborators’ subsequent production, to show that artists could interact with the Cold War military–industrial complex in ways that surpassed mere protest or complicity. Despite his political beliefs, Turrell's participation in the project embedded his sculptural practice in the Cold War political economy of the American state in ways that should expand scholarly definition and study of what constitutes foreign-policy practice and doctrine.

This essay argues that the anti-slavery periodical The Liberator cast itself as heir to a revolutionary tradition of Puritan print to sanction its critiques of the American church and state. This reimagination of Puritanism spoke to readers by tapping into desires for spiritual revival within a secularizing public sphere and a print culture shifting from Protestant scarcity to Victorian abundance. By tracking how The Liberator both utilized these new print technologies and imagined their reclamation of Puritanism, this essay ultimately reveals a more ambiguous negotiation between the sacred and the secular in the emergent public sphere than is often supposed.

This article examines the role of “gifts” and “giftedness” in two recent novels about Occupy Wall Street, Barbara Browning's The Gift and Caleb Crain's Overthrow. Together these novels explore how projects designed to offset the effects of neoliberal individualism very often end up replicating, rather than disrupting, aspects of capitalist exchange: the authors temper their own utopian impulses by interrogating the factors which prevent systemic change, such as individual complacency and governmental intervention. The article considers the cycle of gift giving launched by Browning's narrator, a project which falters because her understanding of economization is inadequate, and because she refuses to take account of her own class position. Crain's group of young Brooklynites believe that mind reading draws people together and prevents social isolation. While the vagueness of their aims can be taken as an implied narrative criticism of their impractical plans, the reason they abandon the project is because it encroaches on the government's surveillance programme, which identifies them as security threats.

The origin stories of Irish America have been core narratives within the “making-of-America” discourse of the nation's founding and development and were especially potent in the cementing, in the mid-twentieth century, of the idea of the US as “a nation of immigrants.” It is an idea that has done significant psychological as well as cultural and political work for white ethnics in the US, glossing important elements of whiteness as a racial formation, mystifying its oppressive qualities and its particularistic claims to identity and values. It has informed the complex ways in which Irish Americans have reconciled their identities in the present with prejudice and discrimination in the past. The story of “how the Irish became white” has been popularly glossed as an ethnic achievement, periodically reclaiming otherness, while eliding the politics of racial power and privilege. Today, as ethnonationalism surges through the mainstream of American politics and culture, unsettling the hegemony of liberal whiteness, Irishness has become a floating signifier of white anger and angst. Perhaps the story we need to tell now is not how the Irish became white but how white folks in the US have become Irish.

American studies has developed excellent critiques of post-1945 imperial modes that are grounded in human rights and Enlightenment liberalism. But to fully gauge US violence in the twenty-first century, we also need to more closely consider antiliberal cultural logics. This essay traces an emergent mode of white nationalist militarism that it calls Identitarian war. It consists, on the one hand, of a formal ideology informed by Identitarian ethno-pluralism and Carl Schmitt, and, on the other, an openly violent white male “structure of feeling” embodied by the film and graphic novel 300, a key source text for the transatlantic far right.