Buddies, Lovers, and Detours: America and its Road Movies

Is an open road also a democratic one? Zooming in on two films—Queen & Slim (2019) and Unpregnant (2020)—this article discusses American road movie genre from the perspective of 2021, and how contemporary film narratives intersect with race and gender. One movie often drives in another film’s lane, meaning the genre is self-referential. Unfolding in three parts, the article begins by introducing these two films and surveying how they contribute to the road movie genre. It then discusses cars and clothing as characters and concludes by considering surveillance and how these films, in tandem, take the temperature of contemporary American society.

The Return of the (Prodigal) Son in Rita Dove’s and Luis Alfaro’s Adaptations of "Oedipus the King"

The current essay analyzes two adaptations of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King: Rita Dove’s The Darker Face of the Earth and Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus El Rey, focusing on the hero’s banishment from his original home and on his return, which enables him to obtain the inheritance and power that would have been his birthrights. Attention is also paid to Oedipus as the emblematic truth-seeker who wants to access knowledge at all costs. In navigating the wealth of sources on the adaptation of Greek tragedy for the American stage, the objective is to identify insights relevant for Dove and Alfaro, whose African American and Chicanx backgrounds influence their rewritings of the famous play. It is the conclusion of the study that the two artists successfully address urgent political issues for contemporary American society: the need to remember the injustices at the heart of its historical race-based slavery system and the need to empower underprivileged youths so that their lives wouldn’t be destroyed by incarceration in the US prison system.

Lost in the funhouse: Allegorical horror and cognitive mapping in Jordan Peele’s Us

Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) is an entertaining horror film that also contains a number of interesting interpretive complications. The film is undoubtedly meant as a commentary on the inequity, inequality and injustice that saturate our supposedly egalitarian American society. Beyond that vague and general characterization, though, the film offers a number of interesting (and more specific) allegorical interpretations, none of which in themselves seem quite adequate. This article explores the plethora of signs that circulate through Us, demanding interpretation but defeating any definitive interpretation. This article explores the way Us offers clues to its meaning through engagement with the horror genre in general (especially the home invasion subgenre) and through dialogue with specific predecessors in the horror genre. At the same time, we investigate the rich array of other ways in which the film offers suggested political interpretations, none of which seem quite adequate. We then conclude, however, that such interpretive failures might well be a key message of the film, which demonstrates the difficulty of fully grasping the complex and difficult social problems of contemporary American society in a way that can be well described by Fredric Jameson’s now classic vision of the general difficulty of cognitive mapping in the late capitalist world.

A Study of Consumption Alienation in Updike’s Works

Updike’s works reflect the characteristics of contemporary American society. There are many descriptions of consumerism in his works. The purpose of this paper is to present the consumption alienation in Updike’s works, to explore the survival predicament of people under the consumption alienation, and to point out its damage to the ecological environment.

A review essay on Lisa Wade's American Hookup and Mark Regenerus' Cheap Sex: Is Recreational Sex a Social Problem? Or what’s wrong with kid’s today?

This is a review essay about sexuality in contemporary American society based on a review of two new books, American Hookup by Lisa Wade and Cheap Sex by Mark Regenerus. The review is forthcoming in Contemporary Sociology.

Capturing Conquest: 20th Century Colonial Photography in the Philippine Islands and its 21st Century Musical Legacy

It is a common tool of empire to use racial othering to justify conquest of both land and body. Yet in spite of achieving independence twice, once from Spain in 1898 and again in 1946 from the United States, suggesting the end of colonial discourse, the question remains: why do Filipinas remain hyper-sexualized and fetishized today? The purpose of this project is to examine the tools of empire as a means of justifying an American colonial agenda in the Philippine islands. Particular attention is paid to musical representations and colonial photography to situate the hyper-sexualization, and eventual fetishization, of Filipinas in contemporary American society and 20th century American empire. To date, somewhat limited English literature exists on the topic of 20th century American colonial photography. And yet, sexualized representations of Filipinas are not limited to photography, nor did this view of Filipina bodies, and by extension Filipinas, suddenly stop after independence; problematically suggesting that consequences of empire, including race-based and/or sexual hierarchies, no longer exist. This paper hypothesizes why this imagery remains relevant in the 21st century through an examination of contemporary musical lyrics, suggesting that the hyper-sexualization of Filipinas is rampant in contemporary American society as a product of residual colonial discourse. Then, this paper attempts to retrace the start of American presence in the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American War of 1898 by examining representations of Filipina bodies as a tool of empire, justifying American imperialism until the mid-20th century, marking the beginning of colonial rhetoric.