Economics, Race, and the Postwar US Novel: A Quantitative Literary History

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 775-804 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Sinykin ◽  
Richard Jean So ◽  
Jessica Young

Abstract How has the language of economics, as codified by economics as a discipline, entered the US novel in the postwar period? Have economists influenced novelists at the level of language, and if so, how and how much? We begin with the belief, inferred from current scholarship on economics and culture, but never before empirically tested, that economic language became more prevalent around 1980, especially among white men—a belief that we strive to complicate and give nuance. Readers may detect an irony in the relationship between our method and case study. No academic discipline has valorized the use of quantification for social analysis more than economics. As a discipline, its language has become saturated with the language of modeling. Cultural and literary critics have long argued that economics has even harmed society by creating false accounts of how humans behave and think. Can we take their tools, however, and make them ours as a way to critique economics itself?

Author(s):  
Joy Damousi

It is in the US that the case study genre is reinvented within a politicised psychiatric-psychoanalytical framework in the work of Viola Bernard. Bernard’s writings pose enduring questions about the relationship between activism and US psychiatry, politics and race relations. This chapter traces Bernard’s efforts to develop a new, authoritative and politically effective narrative through her case notes and advocacy about black subjects. This involved mobilising the case study genre in the public domain at large, for political as well as medical purposes, in the context of a turbulent period in US history.


2005 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-322
Author(s):  
Ryamond Vernon

The article is a case study of the relationship between the American government and US multinational corporation. It argues that while the state - MNE relationships vary from country to country, the US pattern is one of a very limited transnational role for government. Main factors in this pattern are the division of powers between the various branches and agencies of the US government, and changes in administrative staff following each national election. Few cases of government effort at business guidance are found: antitrust policy, foreign aid to friend governments, ineffectual protests again nationalisation of foreign subsidiaries of US MNE, exceptional cases of purposeful intervention, and the US adherence to international guide lines to MNE conduct sponsored by OECD. The article studies in more detail the case of oil, in which the US government is supposed to have intervened in a more direct way. The article concludes that US foreign policy is too complex to be understood simply in terms of government support of US multinational abroad. Besides us industry and the American government are themselves too split to produce a single and homogeneous pattern of policy.


Author(s):  
Jada Watson

The concept of place is integral to country music, a genre associated with geographic regions, rural landscapes, and community values. While the genre has traditionally been described as a product of rural communities of the US South, studies have demonstrated the role that urban communities played in the birth of country music and its prominent scenes. Despite the growing interest in the relationship between music and place, many studies overlooked the important role that place-themed songs play in constructing an artist’s persona. With Canadian alt-country artist Corb Lund as a case study, this study draws literature from musicology, literary studies, and cultural geography to demonstrate how the singer-songwriter describes life, work, and sociocultural issues in Alberta to create diverse conceptions of place. It develops a framework for considering how artists use music to negotiate relationships to place and construct elements of their “geo-cultural” identity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-198
Author(s):  
Tariq Dana

This article sheds light on the relationship between Israeli high-tech innovation and military/security production in the framework of settler-colonialism and the prolonged occupation of the Palestinian territories. It analyzes the global rise of Israel in military and security innovation as a result of decades-long colonial ventures and regional wars, which have been a key variable for dynamic and extensive innovation and productivity. Moreover, the article argues that Israeli military and security would not have been attainable without the extraordinary official assistance and private investment from the United States, especially since the aftermath of the 1967 war. Besides the structural dependency on the US, this article highlights other characteristics that define Israel’s military and security production, such as the vicious nature of these innovations, complicity in global atrocities, and profitability of innovation to Israel’s war economy. Finally, the article presents Gaza’s Great March of Return (gmr) as a case study to present evidence on the ways in which Israeli military forces and security companies are jointly involved in experimentation, using new weapons and unmanned devices on the Palestinian civilians.


2014 ◽  
Vol 69 (5) ◽  
pp. 389-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Mountz ◽  
J. Loyd

Abstract. This article examines transnational framings of domestic carceral landscapes to better understand the relationship between offshore and onshore enforcement and detention regimes. US detention on mainland territory and interception and detention in the Caribbean serves as a case study. While the US domestic carceral regime is a subject of intense political debate, research, and activism, it is not often analyzed in relation to the development and expansion of an offshore "buffer zone" to intercept and detain migrants and asylum seekers. Yet the US federal government has also used offshore interception and detention as a way of controlling migration and mobility to its shores. This article traces a Cold War history of offshore US interception and detention of migrants from and in the Caribbean. We discuss how racialized crises related to Cuban and Haitian migrations by sea led to the expansion of an intertwined offshore and onshore carceral regime. Tracing these carceral geographies offers a more transnational understanding of contemporary domestic landscapes of detention of foreign nationals in the United States. It advances the argument that the conditions of remoteness ascribed frequently to US detention sites must be understood in more transnational perspective.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enock Ndawana

The nexus between foreign policy and the granting of asylum exists, but scholars have not yet reached a consensus regarding the nature of the relationship. This study examines the role of foreign policy in the granting of asylum using the case of Zimbabwean asylum seekers in the United States (US). It found that although other factors matter, foreign policy was central to the outcomes of Zimbabwean asylum seekers in the US. It asserts that explaining the outcomes of Zimbabwean asylum seekers in the US needs to go beyond the role of foreign policy and be nuanced because the case study rejects a monolithic understanding.


2022 ◽  
Vol 119 (2) ◽  
pp. e2113067119
Author(s):  
Diego Kozlowski ◽  
Vincent Larivière ◽  
Cassidy R. Sugimoto ◽  
Thema Monroe-White

The US scientific workforce is primarily composed of White men. Studies have demonstrated the systemic barriers preventing women and other minoritized populations from gaining entry to science; few, however, have taken an intersectional perspective and examined the consequences of these inequalities on scientific knowledge. We provide a large-scale bibliometric analysis of the relationship between intersectional identities, topics, and scientific impact. We find homophily between identities and topic, suggesting a relationship between diversity in the scientific workforce and expansion of the knowledge base. However, topic selection comes at a cost to minoritized individuals for whom we observe both between- and within-topic citation disadvantages. To enhance the robustness of science, research organizations should provide adequate resources to historically underfunded research areas while simultaneously providing access for minoritized individuals into high-prestige networks and topics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-150
Author(s):  
William C. Hedberg

Abstract This essay examines late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century interest in Shi Nai’an, the putative author of the traditional Chinese novel, The Water Margin. Despite the paucity of reliable evidence attesting to Shi Nai’an’s composition of The Water Margin, Japanese writers of the Meiji period were keenly interested in Shi on the basis of his alleged stature as a pioneering author of Oriental or East Asian (Tōyō) fiction. This characterization of Shi Nai’an was a byproduct of the recently established academic discipline of literary history in Japan, and the concomitant desire by Meiji-period historians to locate a literary text that could compete with Western works in terms of narrative and structural complexity. When late Qing-period Chinese authors became aware of Japanese writing on Shi Nai’an, they built on this budding biographical tradition by emphasizing Shi’s identification with an incipient Chinese nationalism, evidenced by his alleged resistance to the Mongol regime during the Yuan dynasty. The case study of Shi Nai’an thus illustrates the nexus between the construction of authorial personae and the pursuit of various ideological goals, as well as demonstrates the centrality of transregional literary contact in the formation of emergent concepts of authorship and canonization in modern East Asia.


2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 600-616
Author(s):  
Joy Jenkins ◽  
Yong Volz ◽  
Teri Finneman ◽  
Youn-Joo Park ◽  
Katherine Sorbelli

This study explores the relationship between social movements and professions by focusing on the development of women journalist associations in the post-feminist era in the United States. The analysis focuses on the case of the US-based organization Journalism and Women Symposium (JAWS) using 41 oral history interviews with JAWS members and archival research. The results illustrate how the members of JAWS defined, contested, and negotiated the collective identity of their organization as well as the meaning of women journalists more broadly.


Making Milton ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 157-170
Author(s):  
Lara Dodds

In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), Gilbert and Gubar posit Milton and Paradise Lost as a ‘bogey’ for women writers. Wittreich’s Feminist Milton (1987) suggests an alternative reception history in which Milton’s poetry provided the basis for a more inclusive literary canon. This chapter re-examines the question of the relationship between Milton’s poetry, primarily Paradise Lost, and women’s literary history through a case study of the poetry of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720). Though Finch acknowledges Milton’s influence explicitly in her blank-verse pastoral ‘Fanscomb Barn’, implicit debts are present throughout Finch’s 1713 Miscellany Poems and the fair-copy manuscript compilation ‘Miscellany Poems with Two Plays by Ardelia’ (1691–1701). The very different status of Milton and his verse in these two contexts illustrates the conflicted legacy of Paradise Lost for women’s literary history.


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