The US–Mexico War and American Literary History

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime Javier Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Mexican American Literature ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us ◽  
Anglo American

The US–Mexico War produced a wide range of literature in the United States that exposed the provisional and contingent qualities of US nationalism, even while it also asserted the anti-Mexican racism and xenophobia that continues to shape cultural and political discourse in the early 21st century. Much of the popular literature produced in mass-market novelette form, for example, deployed a range of Mexican enemies that ran through a sequence from noble, chivalrous opponents, to fiendish enemies and terrorist bandits. This instability in how writers saw Mexico and Mexicans suggests that the war could paradoxically generate critical self-reflections that countered essentialist notions of manifest destiny. The eventual projection of the bandit figure as the prototypical Mexican villain reinforced Anglo-American national self-definitions of moral, cultural, and racial superiority as a response to the destabilizing energies resulting from the invasion of a neighboring American republic. For Mexican American writers, the war, although a major feature of Mexican American literature, nonetheless became an environment in which to explore conditions of non-national, liminal border identities, which became strikingly relevant as the 20th century turned into the 21st. In Mexico, the agonized response to the nation’s failure to stop the “Yankee” invader led instead to a confrontation with its own lack of a unifying national identity and forced writers and political intellectuals to ask hard questions about Mexico’s destiny.

de Burton, María Amparo Ruiz

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatrice Pita
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
American Woman ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Mexican American War ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Anglo American

The novels The Squatter and the Don (1885) and Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), written by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832–1895), are the first novels written in English from the pen and perspective of a Mexican American woman. The author, born in Mexican Baja California, came to Northern California after the 1846–1848 Mexican American War, marrying US Army Captain Henry S. Burton. An extraordinarily talented woman, Ruiz de Burton addresses crucial issues of ethnicity, power, gender, class, and race in dialogue with a number of contemporary 19th-century discourses—political, juridical, economic, commercial, and literary—all to voice the bitter resentment of the Californios faced with despoliation and the onslaught of Anglo-American domination in the aftermath of annexation to the United States. Hers is a strong, distinctive—and notably—female voice with a critical Mexican American perspective; her novels have served to shift the benchmarks of US literature and 19th-century literary scholarship, moving it further away from an Anglo-centered, East Coast, and mostly male-centered canon. Her writings have been productive sites against which to reread both canonical and newly emerged texts. By addressing US government policies, and in that regard, racial, ethnic, and class formations, as well as foregrounding gender issues, Ruiz de Burton’s works have problematized and enriched the US literary and cultural landscape. Her rediscovered novels were republished (in 1992 and 1995, respectively) by Sánchez and Pita and have become key elements in better understanding US 19th-century literary history.

The Poetic Uses of Religion in The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez

1999 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis León
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Emile Durkheim ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mexican American Literature ◽  
John Rechy

It is surprising that so few historians of religions have ever tried to interpret a literary work from their own perspective.—Mircea EliadeThere are no gospels that are immortal, but neither is there any reason for believing that humanity is incapable of inventing new ones.—Emile DurkheimWas that what God expected, that ritual of more pain? She thought of Milagros. Add this to all her miseries? Milagros yearned for less pain… . Was the old woman in veils courting something more with her crawling on bloodied knees—a miracle—by displaying her endurance for greater misery?—John RechyThe past thirty years have been a watershed in Mexican American literature, witnessing the proliferation of texts with increasingly diverse themes. For the most part, this literary production has been motivated by the impulse to narrate the stories that typify Mexican cultural history in the United States.

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicia Contreras
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American Literature ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
La Mancha ◽  
The Us

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (b. 1832–d. 1895) was a Mexican-born woman who experienced the processes of Manifest Destiny and Reconstruction firsthand. At the end of the US-Mexico War (1848), Ruiz de Burton and her mother left their native Baja California for Monterey, Alta California to reap the promised rewards of US citizenship. A descendant and friend of elite, landed, and politically prominent Mexicans and Californios, she technically married the enemy, Captain Henry S. Burton, a member of the US Army during the US-Mexico War who would go on to fight for the Union during the Civil War. This marriage enabled Ruiz de Burton to cross vast geographic and cultural terrains; within the span of a decade, she left California and interacted with both Republicans and Democrats in Rhode Island, New York, Washington, Delaware, and Virginia. Her movement in social circles that included such political figures as Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Abraham Lincoln, and Jefferson Davis granted her a unique perspective of US-Mexico relations and what would soon become, with westward expansion and the transcontinental railroad, the socioeconomic displacement of her fellow Californios. An intelligent woman with a flair for writing and expressing political opinions, she was the first Mexican to publish fiction in English in the United States: her debut novel Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) was published anonymously by J.B. Lippincott & Co. of Philadelphia; her play Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy in Five Acts, Taken from Cervantes’ Novel of That Same Name (1876) was published by Carmany of San Francisco; and her second and final novel The Squatter and the Don (1885) was published under the pseudonym of C. Loyal by Samuel Carson & Co. of San Francisco. Since their republications as part of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project in the 1990s, the two novels have helped scholars mend a once-perceivable fissure in 19th-century literary history. They have also enhanced scholars’ understandings of Chicana/o and Mexican American literature; US women’s literature; and US domestic, sentimental, and realist literature. The work offers an idiosyncratic historical outlook that is practically matchless. Ruiz de Burton experienced four major wars that radically altered the lives of Mexicans and Mexican Americans—the Texas War of Independence, the US-Mexico War, the US Civil War, and the French Intervention in Mexico. Her fictional writings and posthumously published letters document the subsequent and fateful transformation of the United States and Mexico.

The Anti-Aryan Moment: Decolonization, Diplomacy, and Race in Late Pahlavi Iran

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-702
Author(s):  
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Cold War

In 1946, the entertainer and activist Paul Robeson pondered America's intentions in Iran. In what was to become one of the first major crises of the Cold War, Iran was fighting a Soviet aggressor that did not want to leave. Robeson posed the question, “Is our State Department concerned with protecting the rights of Iran and the welfare of the Iranian people, or is it concerned with protecting Anglo-American oil in that country and the Middle East in general?” This was a loaded question. The US was pressuring the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops after its occupation of the country during World War II. Robeson wondered why America cared so much about Soviet forces in Iranian territory, when it made no mention of Anglo-American troops “in countries far removed from the United States or Great Britain.” An editorial writer for a Black journal in St. Louis posed a different variant of the question: Why did the American secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, concern himself with elections in Iran, Arabia or Azerbaijan and yet not “interfere in his home state, South Carolina, which has not had a free election since Reconstruction?”

scholarly journals Quebec’s Economic and Commercial Linkages with the United States, 1994–2017

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Earl H. Fry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Trade Agreement ◽  
The United States ◽  
The North ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Big Picture ◽  
The Impact

This article examines the ebb and flow of the Quebec government’s economic and commercial relations with the United States in the period 1994–2017. The topic demonstrates the impact of three major forces on Quebec’s economic and commercial ties with the US: (1) the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which became operational in 1994 and was fully implemented over a 15-year period; (2) the onerous security policies put in place by the US government in the decade following the horrific events of 11 September 2001; and (3) changing economic circumstances in the United States ranging from robust growth to the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The article also indicates that the Quebec government continues to sponsor a wide range of activities in the United States, often more elaborate and extensive than comparable activities pursued by many nation-states with representation in the US. 1 1 Stéphane Paquin, ‘Quebec-U.S. Relations: The Big Picture’, American Review of Canadian Studies 46, no. 2 (2016): 149–61.

scholarly journals The Legal Status of Election Officials in the State of Montana

Legal Concept ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 137-144
Author(s):  
Alexey Szydlowski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
The State ◽  
Full Description ◽  
Election Law ◽  
Us States ◽  
American Federation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us

Introduction: the election law of the US states to date remains insufficiently studied not only in Russia but also abroad. This is due to the fact that the legal regulation of the electoral process in America is attributed to the powers of the states or municipalities, depending on the legal doctrine applied by the state – Cooley Doctrine or Dillon Rule, which objectively imposes a limit on its study and generalization. The purpose of the study is to acquaint a wide range of scientific community with the latest research in the field of the US election law in regard to the first in the domestic law full description of the organizers of elections and referendums at the state and municipal levels in the United States. The author reviews a wide range of regional and local legislation with references to the constitutional, legal and regulatory acts of the US States. The paper is part of a series that explores all fifty subjects of the American Federation and the District of Columbia. Procedure and methods of research: the author analyzes the constitutional and electoral legislation of the United States at the level of Montana at the beginning of 2019. The methodology of the study was the comparative law, formal-legal, formal-dogmatic, specific-sociological, empirical, dialectical, analytical methods, the systematic approach. Results: the information about the organizers of elections and referendums in Montana, which was not previously covered in the Russian scientific literature, is introduced into scientific circulation. The interpretations of certain provisions of the law and legal consciousness of the U.S election law and law enforcement practice are given. The gaps of the legislation requiring additional research are surfaced. The theoretical and practical significance lies in the generalization of both the established and the latest legal sources (constitutions, organic laws, federal laws, charters, by-laws and regulations) of the United States and the subject of the American Federation and the development of proposals for the enrichment of the Russian science and the formation of objective understanding of the processes taking place in the United States in the field of constitutional, electoral law and the state-building. Conclusions: for a systematic and comparative legal analysis the author proposed the review of the legislation on the organizers of elections and referendums of Montana, revealing the existing contradictions, from the point of view of the Russian researcher, which allows considering the full range of elements of the electoral legislation of Montana from a new angle, seeing new legal structures, previously unknown to the domestic statesmen and law enforcers.

scholarly journals POETRY OF NATASHA TRETHEWEY IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL DISCOURSE

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (87) ◽  
Author(s):  
Oleksandr Lukyanenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Library Of Congress ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Poet Laureate ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Individual ◽  
State Registration ◽  
The Right

The article provides an analysis of the presence of the American poet-laureate Natasha Trethewey in modern literary discourse. The publication emphasizes the need to combine the methods of linguistics and culturology, anthropology and everyday history in the study of the construction of everyday USA in the works of the poet. The author explains the relevance of certain topics in the work of N. Trethewey to understand the psychology of the African American population in the USA. The state of studying the work of the poet-laureate in domestic science is determined. Remarks were made on the specifics of the creative search for the master of the word. The article illustrates the problem of reflection and national (ethnic) consciousness through the prism of the poetic word. She became the poetic voice of black America in the early 21st century. The ambiguous African-American side of the history of the United States awoke in the pages of her collections. With the deepening equality movement that swept North America during Donald Trump’s reactionary presidency, the lines of her poetry condemning racism, showing the country's participation in the American nation's foundation, and the often painful diffusion of white and black worldviews sound rather poignant. America. These reflections gained special strength with the development of the Black Lives Matter public initiative. The author’s work is gaining weight with the emphasis of the world community on gender issues. During the existence of the award in its various forms, women struggled to fight for the right to be the face of American literature. Of the 30 poetry advisers in the Library of Congress (the award was named from 1936 to 1986), only 6 were women. Since the renaming of the award in 1986, an unprecedented wave of feminization has begun. In 2012, Natasha Trethewey became the sixth woman to work among the nineteen winners in this office at the Library of Congress since the late 1980s. The work was carried out within the framework of the research theme of the Department of Culturology of the Poltava National Pedagogical University named after V.G.Korolenko “Polylogue of the global and regional in the formation of the socio-cultural identity of the individual” (state registration number 0120U103840).

Unwitting Architect

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Germann
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Export Markets ◽  
Neoliberal Reforms ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Us ◽  
Pragmatic Reasoning ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Crisis Managers ◽  
Policy Elites ◽  
Interest Rate Shock

The global rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s is widely seen as a dynamic originating in the United States and the United Kingdom, and only belatedly and partially repeated by Germany. From this Anglocentric perspective, Germany's emergence at the forefront of neoliberal reforms in the eurozone is perplexing, and tends to be attributed to the same forces conventionally associated with the Anglo-American pioneers. This book challenges this ruling narrative. It recasts the genesis of neoliberalism as a process driven by a plenitude of actors, ideas, and interests. And it lays bare the pragmatic reasoning and counterintuitive choices of German crisis managers obscured by this master story. This book argues that German officials did not intentionally set out to promote neoliberal change. Instead they were more intent on preserving Germany's export markets and competitiveness in order to stabilize the domestic compact between capital and labor. Nevertheless, the series of measures German policy elites took to manage the end of golden-age capitalism promoted neoliberal transformation in crucial respects: it destabilized the Bretton Woods system; it undermined socialist and social democratic responses to the crisis in Europe; it frustrated an internationally coordinated Keynesian reflation of the world economy; and ultimately it helped push the US into the Volcker interest-rate shock that inaugurated the attack on welfare and labor under Reagan and Thatcher. From this vantage point, the book illuminates the very different rationale behind the painful reforms German state managers have demanded of their indebted eurozone partners.

The Deterritorialization of American Literature

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Giles
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The United States ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
Over Time

This book explores relationship between American literature and globalization and how this equation has fluctuated and evolved over time. In addition to works of fiction or poetry that are organized explicitly around particular conceptions of place, the book considers how a wide range of texts are informed implicitly by other kinds of geographical projection, of the type found in cartography and other forms of mapping. It argues that the connection between American literature and geography, far from being something that can be taken as natural, involves contested terrain. The book also examines how the United States has moved from a national phase to a matrix of transnationalism and relates it to the idea of deterritorialization first broached in 1972 by French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and how this move toward a transnational infrastructure has manifested itself in American literature.

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