Created in 1944, Americans United for World Organization was a private internationalist organization promoting US entry into the United Nations, and although it has been overlooked by historians it deserves re-evaluation. This is less a result of its contributions to the public and congressional debates over UN ratification, and more closely related to the internal ideological and bureaucratic divisions that afflicted the organization from its very beginning. Americans United for World Organization was in fact anything but united, and it foreshadowed the divisions of the internationalist movement in the early years of the Cold War.

This article explores the role of Japanese merchants within American art and collecting circles and analyzes the ways in which the construction of “Asianness” and, in particular, “Japaneseness” became intertwined with the classification of Asian art. In order to reconstitute the market for high art and to create their own positionalities as legitimate cultural intermediaries, Asian art dealers such as Bunkio Matsuki (1867–1940) and Sadajiro Yamanaka (1866–1936) used their connections to Japan as cultural capital. Ultimately, their experiences illuminate the complexities of the reconceptualization of ethnic–racial identities through the lens of aesthetic discourses.

What is the relationship between American studies and affective production? In what specific ways does our scholarship participate in the creation, circulation, and appreciation of affective practices? These questions provide a foundation for understanding the sometimes obscure connections between academic scholarship and mass culture. I argue that the history of American studies involves a specific and influential imbrication with affective production that has shaped notions of identity and affect since the nineteenth century. Usually this history is understood in terms of how the field used to advocate conservative notions of nativist national identity; this paper brings the history of this advocacy into new focus by histricizing the relationship between scholarship and affective production in the often-overlooked field of humor studies. The first section traces the invention of an academic tradition that articulated humor practice to national character, and identifies this articulation itself as the affective labor of that scholarship. The second section addresses alternative histories that might be written once we recognize this articulation of affective practice to identity as itself a form of affective labor. In three case studies, I briefly explore the relations between humor, mass culture, and politics in the works of the late nineteenth-century humorists David Ker, Marietta Holley, and Bill Nye, whose humor was produced in the same period that saw the durable articulation of humor practice to national identity emerge. These cases gesture, polemically, to the important work American studies can still do with humor, especially as we realize the key role of affective production in our disciplinary history.

Though now seen as a key turning point in the Cold War, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act provoked considerable opposition in the United States. The principal line of criticism was that the United States had given away too much in the negotiations and had required little of the Soviets. The Helsinki Final Act initially was unpopular domestically with Eastern European ethnic groups as well as members of Congress due to concerns about its implications for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe. At the root of many of these complaints was a larger critique of United States President Gerald Ford's policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Understanding the sources of opposition to the Helsinki Final Act in the United States illuminates the potential conflict between foreign policy formulation and domestic politics, and it reflects the Ford administration's inability to explain his support for the agreement to the American public. Furthermore, the controversy engendered by the Helsinki Final Act illustrates how contentious Cold War politics remained even in an era of supposed détente with the Soviet Union and demonstrates the extent to which the pact's long-term benefits were unforeseen by participants at the time. The Ford administration was never able to counter condemnation of the Helsinki Final Act sufficiently, enhancing existing skepticism about his leadership and policy toward the Soviet Union.

A frequency survey of Google Books and other digital sources indicates that in political terminology the use of the phrase “American socialism” yielded to “American left” in the course of the twentieth century. Reasons for this include the tactical and personal ambitions of reformers who saw advantage in dropping the socialist tag in the face of domestic antisocialism. In mid-century, domestic antisocialism revived both in extremist rhetoric and in mainstream Republican charges of “creeping socialism.” The Cold War also played a role in changing the nomenclature balance, as it led to the identification of American socialism with the creed of the Soviet adversary. At the same time, a broadening in the left's agenda beyond the election platforms of the Socialist Party of America contributed to the change. The nomenclative “-ism” failure is significant as an indicator of left tendencies because it relates to perceptions of the failure of socialism itself.

Contemporary US political and academic discourse is a site for constant irruption and circulation of encapsulated arguments to delegitimize social criticism. Strategies such as the “trope of the angry feminist” – which disparages the arguments of feminist academics and feminists in general as “angry” – perform, enact, and instantiate gendered power. Because we have not adequately theorized the discursive role of such tropes, we fail to recognize the limits of our conventional reading practices, so that our responses often reproduce the problem. Whether we claim that feminists are not angry, or are legitimately angry, or that some feminists have a right be angry (though, perhaps, not all), we are responding to the logic of the trope rather than challenging it. In Wahneema Lubiano's terms, we are being mugged by a metaphor. Reframing the problem begins by transforming the terms of reading; I propose for that purpose a critical toolkit that I call “feminist socioforensic discursive analysis.” Using this toolkit I analyze two discursive events. One – a response by “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger to the inauguration of a new doctoral program in feminist studies – demonstrates what is at stake in the relentless operation of this cultural training program. The other – in which law professor Patricia Williams recounts the editing of an article she wrote for a law review – demonstrates how conventional discursive practices defend and deny their deeply political uses of racialized and gendered power by calling on what Williams calls “an ideology of style rooted in a social text of neutrality.” This episode also demonstrates how feminists can anticipate these moves and turn them to our own advantage.

This essay examines the political meanings of John Ford and Dudley Nichols's film The Hurricane (1937). The Hurricane appears at a pivotal moment in American history, a moment when Ford and Nichols set out to make films for a “new kind of public.” This new audience was forged by new political forces, including the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the Popular Front, and Roosevelt's New Deal. Building on previous work that documents Nichols's affiliation with Popular Front organizations, and Ford's own political cinema (including The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and How Green Was My Valley (1941)), I argue that The Hurricane offers a fundamental critique of European imperialism, and imperial “whiteness.” At the same time, the energies for that critique come from a paradoxically “progressive” orientalism that represents South Seas “natives” as inherently wild and independent. It is this projected hunger for independence that allows Ford and Nichols to argue against colonial “whiteness,” while, almost simultaneously, they portray African Americans as servile and dependent, thus justifying white supremacy and racial oppression in the United States. Finally, by way of conclusion, I suggest that this dyadic representation – natives as independent, blacks as dependent – continues to structure the politics of Ford's post-World War II cinema, allowing him to normalize white supremacy at home, while at the same time justifying American military adventures abroad in the name of freedom for “the world's afflicted races.”

This paper describes a change in how American radio dramatists used sound effects around the time of Pearl Harbor, particularly on Suspense, one of the signature “shocker” anthologies of the 1940s. In Suspense dramas by writers such as Lucille Fletcher, sound effects no longer merely described settings and action, as had been the custom previously. Instead, effects swept away interpersonal forms of colloquy and coded character psychology, often to the detriment of the populist spatial aesthetics that had prevailed during the Depression. Using accounts of studio technique, as well as a close reading of Fletcher's “The Hitch-hiker,” I argue that when radio told tales of characters under the sway of sound effects, it helped to promulgate the idea that minds are available to penetrating and persuasive “signal-based” communicative acts, just the sort of language required to make works of propaganda meaningful. In a larger way, this paper tries to rediscover the American radio play of the 1940s by treating it as not only “theater of the mind,” but also a theater about the mind.

There are three kinds of gangbanger autobiography: those told from inside the life, those told from outside the life, and those told by those who are outside the life but whose sense of self is still inextricably connected with gangbanger deeds and the respect/status won by those deeds. Stanley “Tookie” Williams's autobiographical writing provides a telling example of the third kind. To understand Williams's autobiographical writings we need to look at them in relation to the whole range of gangbanger autobiography – and the wide range of autobiographies that come to us from tribal warrior cultures.

Robert Coover's 1977 novel The Public Burning is a dramatic re-presentation of the last three days of the lives of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Dubbed the “atomic spies” by the media, the Rosenbergs were accused of passing on the “secret” of the atomic bomb to the Russians. The sensational trial provoked widespread attention for its seeming encapsulation of the fault lines in American society opened up by anticommunism and the emergent Cold War. Found guilty, they were the first American nationals to be executed for espionage. This paper analyses the different narrative methods that Coover employs to re-present the past. In particular I focus on Coover's juxtaposition of a third-person, seemingly omniscient, narrator with the first-person narratological voice of then Vice President Richard Nixon. I suggest that we can best understand this not simply as providing objective and subjective versions of the event, as some critics have claimed, but rather as a distinction between history as chronicle (or what I call a synchronic method of history), and history as storytelling (or diachrony). Through this The Public Burning becomes not just a satirical critique of the specific political culture of the time, I contend, but, more fundamentally, a general exploration of the difficulties of reconstituting past events into knowledge. It is here, perhaps, where the novel's continuing relevance for today lies.

This article examines the representation of intersexuality in Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2002 novel Middlesex. It situates the depiction of intersexuality within the context of current scholarship on sexed identity within the field of gender and sexuality studies. It argues that while a fictional focus on ambiguously sexed identity might appear to be aligned with queer critiques of fixed categories of “sex,” Eugenides's narrative remains implicated in heteronormative assumptions. More specifically, it will explore the narrative strategies which frame Calliope Stephanides's intersexed body, focussing on the relationship between the male-identified adult Cal, “author” of this fictional autobiography, and his remembered teenage girl self. It will suggest that the retrospective logic at work in this narrative is complicit in a heteronormative temporality which reinforces the causal relationship between sex, gender and sexuality which queer theorists have sought to interrogate.