A “Burlesque Queen in Bobby Socks”: Domesticity, Criminality, and Suspense in Charles Williams’s Noir Fiction

This article proposes that Charles Williams’s mid-twentieth-century noir fiction reshapes post-war representations of gender roles and paves the way for various renditions and developments of noir. Williams’s works are narratives of transgression meeting domesticity, crime meeting docility, and cunning meeting conformity; they portray a deadly recipe that comprises different, even conflicting ingredients of a fusion between domesticity, crime, and suspense. By examining the recurring figure of the criminal housewife in his work, especially Hell Hath No Fury (1953), this article argues that Williams brings forth a complex and subversive gender schema to trouble both the creed of domesticity popular in the 1950s and the stereotyping of the lethal seductress prevalent in noir fiction. By so doing, Williams’s noir not only brings the transgression of women to the fore but also displays a compelling picture of post-war gender roles in the US under McCarthyism.

Trump’s Base! You Can Say That Again!! An Optimistic Deconstruction of Base Politics

An expansion of a presentation given at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association for American Studies in Montreal in 2019, prior to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 US election, this paper playfully challenges the rhetorical idea of Donald Trump’s base political support (as unconditional and foundational) through Derridean-styled deconstruction, a line of critical inquiry that repeatedly keeps riffing and looping back on itself to undermine the authority and foundations of base support by playing with the homophonic significations of base/bass/ baise in an assortment of psychosexual, pop-cultural, and satirically philosophical ways.

American Studies in Review

The American Civil War had a serious impact in Europe because the United States supplied vital raw materials for both Britain and France and was also a major market for their manufactured goods. The prospect of intervention in the war raised difficult issues—morally repugnant support of slavery on the one hand, but on the other, in the aftermath of the rebellions of 1848 in Europe, the possibility to weaken democratic republicanism. Mediation remained elusive. Britain, being the leading economic, naval, and colonial power, was the most threatening and most involved with both the Union and Confederate sides in the war. Britain’s diplomatic and maritime policy is the most extensively studied, augmented by fresh examinations of the British minister to the United States, Lord Lyons. New research also examines possible French involvement in the war and the complications arising from France’s invasion of Mexico.

Revisiting Auburn Avenue: The Construction of an Afrofuturist Counterpublic Space

The black counterpublic, as a space where black people could exercise their discursive contestation and participatory deliberation, has too often served to produce a counter-discourse aiming at defying white hegemonic mode of rule and racialized categorization of members of society. In the same vein, Afrofuturism, as a burgeoning cultural movement in the United States, employs the Afrodiasporic experience as a backdrop against which to contest the white-narrated version of black history and to project a better future for people of African descent. Merging the underlying philosophies of the black counterpublic and Afrofuturism, this paper seeks to advance the notion of the Afrofuturist counterpublic as a more embedded concept that tends to address the past and future of the black experience in a more explicit and overt form. Drawing mainly on Inwood’s representation of the redevelopment project along Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, GA, as a contemporary form of the counterpublic, this article adds to his insights by suggesting that Auburn Avenue as a rehabilitated space is deeply informed by the undergirding tenets of the counterpublic and Afrofuturist theories so as to exalt it to a symbol of an Afrofuturist counterpublic.

The Impact of Mis-Recognition on Homeland for Muslim Second-Generation Immigrants in Post-9/11 America

This article examines literatures written largely within the last three years by poets Kazim Ali, Fatimah Asghar, and Tarfia Faizullah. It illustrates how Muslim second-generation immigrant writers construct figurative homelands that reclaim or reject their Western/ancestral identities by interrogating “them” versus “us” binaries and/or crafting notions of the “we” on which they belong. This research is guided by studies on the perceptions and mis-recognitions of Muslims since 11 September 2001 by Sadia Abbas, Naseem L. Aumeerally, and Arjun Appadurai. Overall, it examines the profound impact of 9/11 on Muslim second-generation immigrants’ sense of homeland, belonging, and security in America.