The beginning of Space Age coincided with the global spread of a subterranean, post-apocalyptic imagination of the bunker. The coexistence of faith in technological progress and fear of a nuclear-caused self-annihilation created a tension between a claustrophilic and a claustrophobic relation to space that deeply shaped American spatial imagination. As I argue in this article, this spatial tension can be profitably illustrated by focusing on the cartographic imagination of science fiction produced in America between the 1950s and the 1980s. Drawing on David Seed and Fredric Jameson among others and focusing on both exemplary novels and films, this article shows to what extent Cold War American science fiction not only translates territorial anxieties into alternative universes or versions of the future, but spatially stages its inner conflict, the tension between a claustrophobic distress on the one hand and an unfulfilled claustrophilia on the other.
{"title":"Escaping the map: American science fiction and its cartographic imagination","authors":"Federico Italiano","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00009_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00009_1","url":null,"abstract":"The beginning of Space Age coincided with the global spread of a subterranean, post-apocalyptic imagination of the bunker. The coexistence of faith in technological progress and fear of a nuclear-caused self-annihilation created a tension between a claustrophilic and a claustrophobic\u0000 relation to space that deeply shaped American spatial imagination. As I argue in this article, this spatial tension can be profitably illustrated by focusing on the cartographic imagination of science fiction produced in America between the 1950s and the 1980s. Drawing on David Seed and Fredric\u0000 Jameson among others and focusing on both exemplary novels and films, this article shows to what extent Cold War American science fiction not only translates territorial anxieties into alternative universes or versions of the future, but spatially stages its inner conflict, the tension between\u0000 a claustrophobic distress on the one hand and an unfulfilled claustrophilia on the other.","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":"39 1","pages":"29-43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47158099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First-Century America, Inderpal Grewal (2017)","authors":"J. Gratale","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00015_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00015_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First-Century America, Inderpal Grewal (2017)Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 322 pp.,ISBN 978-0-82236-898-4, h/bk, $104.95, p/bk, $27.95","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":"39 1","pages":"122-124"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49095011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Representations of Childhood in American Modernism, Michelle Phillips (2016)","authors":"Emily Murphy","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00014_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00014_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Representations of Childhood in American Modernism, Michelle Phillips (2016)New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 234 pp.,ISBN 978-1-13750-806-5, p/bk, £22.99","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":"39 1","pages":"119-121"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43315530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 1968, photographer Laura Gilpin published The Enduring Navaho, which intentionally juxtaposes colonialist cartography with an immersive understanding of landscape. This article situates Gilpin’s project within the broader historical trajectory of traditional Navajo spatial imaginaries, including the work of contemporary Navajo artist Will Wilson. Euramerican settler-colonist maps of the Navajo Nation at mid-century were tools for Native displacement, revealing the transnational dilemma of the Navajo people. Their twentieth-century history was one of continual negotiation; on a pragmatic level, it often entailed the cultivation and education of Euramerican allies such as Gilpin. For her, landscape photography offered an alternative indexical authority to colonial maps, and thus had the potential to redefine Navajo space in the Euramerican imagination ‐ in terms that were closely aligned with Navajo ideology. Without escaping the contradictions inherent in her postcolonial situation, Gilpin sought a political space for Navajo epistemology, and thus for Navajo sovereignty.
{"title":"Seeing the four sacred mountains: Mapping, landscape and Navajo sovereignty","authors":"L. Siddons","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00011_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00011_1","url":null,"abstract":"In 1968, photographer Laura Gilpin published The Enduring Navaho, which intentionally juxtaposes colonialist cartography with an immersive understanding of landscape. This article situates Gilpin’s project within the broader historical trajectory of traditional Navajo spatial\u0000 imaginaries, including the work of contemporary Navajo artist Will Wilson. Euramerican settler-colonist maps of the Navajo Nation at mid-century were tools for Native displacement, revealing the transnational dilemma of the Navajo people. Their twentieth-century history was one of continual\u0000 negotiation; on a pragmatic level, it often entailed the cultivation and education of Euramerican allies such as Gilpin. For her, landscape photography offered an alternative indexical authority to colonial maps, and thus had the potential to redefine Navajo space in the Euramerican imagination\u0000 ‐ in terms that were closely aligned with Navajo ideology. Without escaping the contradictions inherent in her postcolonial situation, Gilpin sought a political space for Navajo epistemology, and thus for Navajo sovereignty.","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":"39 1","pages":"63-81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47682289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Although science fiction of the Golden Age in the 1940s and the 1950s is often associated with narratives of progress, this article demonstrates that there was a fascination within this period with narratives of cyclicality, rather than progress, narratives in which social and scientific systems collapse back into new dark ages and/or re-emerge out of such new dark ages. Furthermore, the article explores how these narratives were mobilized in relation to the Cold War and particularly the ways in which nationalist agendas were seen as repressing the international exchange of ideas that many science fiction writers regarded as central to science. However, these stories did not simply oppose politics with science so that the former was associated with ignorance and repression and the latter with knowledge and liberation. On the contrary, these stories were preoccupied with conceptual crises, in which one system of thought was overthrown by another. In other words, these were stories of scientific revolution rather than linear progress and they often presented all systems of thought as potentially restrictive. In short, these cyclical narratives were a reminder of a challenge from which many science fiction writers believed that science could not escape, a challenge that would therefore continually reassert itself: the narratives demonstrated that scientists not only needed to take responsibility for their discoveries but also to recognize that the advancement of science did not inevitably lead to (or even go hand in hand with) social, political or cultural enlightenment.
{"title":"‘Chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork’: Science fiction, cyclicality and the new dark age during the Cold War","authors":"M. Jancovich","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00005_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00005_1","url":null,"abstract":"Although science fiction of the Golden Age in the 1940s and the 1950s is often associated with narratives of progress, this article demonstrates that there was a fascination within this period with narratives of cyclicality, rather than progress, narratives in which social and scientific systems collapse back into new dark ages and/or re-emerge out of such new dark ages. Furthermore, the article explores how these narratives were mobilized in relation to the Cold War and particularly the ways in which nationalist agendas were seen as repressing the international exchange of ideas that many science fiction writers regarded as central to science. However, these stories did not simply oppose politics with science so that the former was associated with ignorance and repression and the latter with knowledge and liberation. On the contrary, these stories were preoccupied with conceptual crises, in which one system of thought was overthrown by another. In other words, these were stories of scientific revolution rather than linear progress and they often presented all systems of thought as potentially restrictive. In short, these cyclical narratives were a reminder of a challenge from which many science fiction writers believed that science could not escape, a challenge that would therefore continually reassert itself: the narratives demonstrated that scientists not only needed to take responsibility for their discoveries but also to recognize that the advancement of science did not inevitably lead to (or even go hand in hand with) social, political or cultural enlightenment.","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49388777","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Got to be real’: Evaluating the significance of realness in 1970s New York disco culture","authors":"W. Rees","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00004_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00004_1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43055635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editorial","authors":"J. Wills","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00001_2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00001_2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42298056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Black Lives Matter movement, crime and police brutality: Comparative study of New York Post and New York Daily News","authors":"Brian Chama","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00002_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00002_1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1386/ejac_00002_1","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48225989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：