American Frictions

Fostering a dialog between Critical Disability Studies, American Studies, InterAmerican Studies, and Global Health Studies, the edited compilation conceptualizes disability and (mental) illnesses as a cultural narrative enabling a deeper social critique. By looking at contemporary cultural productions primarily from the USA, Canada, and the Caribbean, the books’ objective is to explore how literary texts and other cultural productions from the Americas conceptualize, construct, and represent disability as a narrative and to investigate the deep structures underlying the literary and cultural discourses on and representations of disability including parameters such as disease, racism, and sexism among others. Disability is read as a shifting phenomenon rooted in the cultures and histories of the Americas.

In the late 1960s, the white counterculture enters the screens with Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider; in 1976, a backlash seems to have taken place with white male protagonists such as Travis Bickle, Howard Beale, and Rocky Balboa being surrounded by non-white and female others. But these films cannot be neatly identified as left-wing or right-wing, liberal or conservative; in their politics of affect, they rather express important affinities.

This study proposes the New Hollywood as an entry point into a cultural history of the postwar era sensitive to the intersections of affect, race, and gender. Following a narrative that spreads from the immediate postwar years to the 1970s, the study examines how New Hollywood films were part of a discursive and affective reconfiguration of white masculinity: the emergence of a subject position of countercultural whiteness and its affective style of expressivity.

Examining affective affinities between films of the era complicates the narrative of polarization that shapes commentary on the history of American politics, emphasizing instead the shared racialized and gendered politics of the white counterculture and those reactionary forces that allegedly lashed back against it.

Jamaica Kincaid’s works consistently explore how colonial history affects contemporary everyday lives. Throughout her novels, short fiction, and non-fictional essays, Kincaid’s texts engage with history through its medial representations, which are starkly determined by colonial perspectives. This study examines the entanglements of temporalities in current perceptions of the past and how literary text intervenes in historical consciousness. With a focus on the media text, image, and the human body, the chapters of this book demonstrate how Kincaid’s "poetics of impermanence" counter colonial representations of history with strategies of ambiguity, repetition, and redirection. Kincaid’s texts repeat and revise aspects of colonial history – a process that decenters the totality of historical colonial ideology and replaces it with self-determined versions of the past through a multiplication of perspectives and voices.

Interested in the ideological workings of fiction, I study how major avant-garde tropes promote the potential of permanent renewal as white America’s property. Renewal ties to the capacities to create, progress, transcend, and simply be. From Black critique we know that, within dominant discourse, all these capacities have been denied to Black bodies ever since colonization. Black work has been fetishized, appropriated, stolen, and dismissed in and by dominant culture, while Black being is construed as negativity and barred on the level of ontology. It follows then that racialization operates on multiple levels in the conceptual frame of renewal. I study this conceptualization by re-reading the works of and criticism on progressive white authors. I examine how images of renewal enable the claim on futurity, transformative potential, and movement forward as exclusively white properties. Premised on oppositions between positive capacities and a state of complete incapacitation, these images are often viewed as separate constructions. This project shows that, deriving from white ideology, such representations are symbiotic and simultaneous - the "good" story of white renewal rests on the continual transgression towards Black being.

This study deals with the formative powers of modern liberal ideas of private property. The liberal subject emerged with the formations of European liberalism, Atlantic slavery, and settler colonial expansion in the New World. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy is thus identified as a key literary text that generates a fundamental critique of the connections between self-making and private property at its 17^th-century scene.

This study originates in the observation that improv comedy or improvised theater has such a vast majority of white people practicing it, while other improvisational or comedic art forms (jazz, freestyle rap, stand up) are historically grounded in and marked as Black cultural production. What it is about improv that makes it such a white space? Can an absence be an object of study? If so, what is there to study? Where should one look?

This book tests the limits of fugitivity as a concept in recent Black feminist and Afro-pessimist thought. It follows the conceptual travels of confinement and flight through three major Black writing traditions in North America from the 1840s to the early 21st century. Cultural analysis is the basic methodological approach and recent concepts of captivity and fugitivity in Afro-pessimist and Black feminist theory form the theoretical framework.

ruth weiss, born in Berlin in 1928 to Austrian-Jewish parents, arrived in San Francisco in 1952 after hitchhiking through the United States. Crowned years later as the “Goddess of the Beat Generation” by San Francisco Chronicle critic Herb Caen, weiss has worked for almost seven decades with a plurality of artistic forms. Despite her extensive poetry career and very active participation in the West Coast buzzing artistic community since the early 1950s, weiss has remained an essentially overlooked figure in poetry history. This neglect might be representative of the overshadowing of female artists within the Beat Generation as “a marginalized group within an always already marginalized bohemia” (Johnson). The volume taps directly into this lacuna by proving the first close study on one of the most prolific members of the so-called Beat Generation. Offering diverse and comprehensive points of entrance into weiss’s oeuvre, the essays in this volume adopt a multidisciplinary approach that attests to the cross-pollination between art forms in postwar counterculture. In addition, the volume also includes shorter, non-academic contributions and previously unpublished archival material. Bringing together scholars, academics and artists from around the world, this volume represents a timely and much-needed response to the increasing interest in weiss’s work in the last decades.

The present work deals with the representation of trauma and violence in coming-of-age stories written by African-American and Afro-Caribbean women authors in the United States. The kinds of violence explored in this work are related to the post-colonial condition the women protagonists experience, in which racism, sexism, classism, among other kinds of discrimination, are co-created in an intersectional experience of oppression. The titles analyzed in this work are: Lucy (1990), written by Jamaica Kincaid; Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), written by Edwidge Danticat; Bone Black – Memories of Girlhood (1996), written by bell hooks; and God Help the Child (2015), written by Toni Morrison. The Bildungsroman genre serves as the form with which the authors are able to display the different forms of violence experienced during the the process of growing up female and black in the United States, and also in the Caribbean islands of Antigua and Haiti, in the cases of Kincaid and Danticat respectively. The coming-of-age stories written by women, and more specifically by African-American and Afro-Caribbean women, tend to showcase narratives in which the tensions between the protagonists' self-determination and the influence of social and cultural factors in their development opportunities are negotiated. The genre is adapted and subverted by the authors, deviating from its canonical European origins, becoming a site in which the authors are able to represent different kinds of violence, and the subsequent traumatic consequences caused by it.

In the 1960s and 1970s, soul music not only gave voice to a new sense of assertiveness among African Americans in the United States but also contributed to the popularization of Black Power across the Americas. Tracing the emergence of Afro-Latin Soul scenes among Puerto Rican youth in New York, the descendants of Caribbean labor migrants in Panama, and Rio de Janeiro´s black community, the book examines how soul as genre, a style, and a discourse became an inter-American lingua franca that provided diasporic youth with a platform to express solidarity with the African American freedom struggle and a source of inspiration in their struggles against the often denied forms of anti-black racism in Latin American contexts.

Drawing on interviews with protagonists of Spanish Harlem´s Latin Boogaloo scene, Panama´s combos nacionales and the Black Rio movement such as Joe Bataan, Benny Bonilla, Carlos Brown, Ernie King, and Dom Filó and activists such as Denise Oliver, Felipe Luciano, Melva Lowe, Alberto Barrow, Gerado Maloney and Carlos Alberto Medeiros, the multi-sited study conceives of these border-crossing dialogues as expressions of Black Power cosmopolitanism that challenged nationalist identity discourses and the related homogenizing notions of latinidad. Bridging African American and Latin American Studies, the book opens new perspectives to scholars of hemispheric black transnationalism, popular music and social movements in the African diaspora.