This article examines one of the earliest novels of the Trump era, Salman Rushdie's The Golden House (2017), as part of a literary corpus that felt compelled to respond to the derealization of political culture by producing fictions commensurate to the new “American reality.” Spanning the years from the first inauguration of Obama to the election of Trump, the novel depicts a nation that has “left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe,” a turn to fantasy that precedes the final irruption of a wealthy vulgarian who calls himself the Joker, and who subverts any previous sense of identity and of what is “real.” Drawing from the notion of national fantasy as argued by Lauren Berlant (1991), Jacqueline Rose (1996), and Donald Pease (2009), the article suggests that Rushdie's novel performs and invites a rare self-examination in the context of early literary responses to the rise of Trumpism.

Exploring sanitation in postwar Los Angeles, this article argues that as white voluntary groups formed task forces to clean up the city, they endangered Mexican and black Angelinos by endorsing solutions to urban welfare defined by antistatism and carceralism. I read these activities through the lens of white ignorance, whereby white Americans elaborated folk knowledge of successful urbanism on their own terrain and terms, which had no capacity to attend to other classes and races. I treat white ignorance not as a cognitive defect or proxy for innocence, but rather as a structural condition of postwar urban political economy.

Doris Derby's photographic archive offers a powerful perspective on the civil rights movement that has yet to be critically or academically engaged with. Derby, an activist, photographer, and educator who has appeared in such texts as Hands on the Freedom Plow (2010) and in such collections as Julian Cox's Road to Freedom (2008), is a gateway figure to a richer, more nuanced visual history of the movement. This article utilizes original interviews, archival material, and a survey of secondary literature to call for increased consideration for Doris Derby's work. Derby's womanist perspective challenges the dominant visual rhetoric of the movement and advocates for increased consideration of the everyday activism of African American women. Men, women and children – but especially African American women – are presented in Derby's lens as dynamic agents of change. Derby's work challenges the dominant canon of the movement, which frequently relies on charismatic male leadership and black victimization. Instead, considering Derby's photography broadens our understanding of what everyday resistance in the civil rights movement was like for thousands of African Americans.

This essay argues that the anti-slavery periodical The Liberator cast itself as heir to a revolutionary tradition of Puritan print to sanction its critiques of the American church and state. This reimagination of Puritanism spoke to readers by tapping into desires for spiritual revival within a secularizing public sphere and a print culture shifting from Protestant scarcity to Victorian abundance. By tracking how The Liberator both utilized these new print technologies and imagined their reclamation of Puritanism, this essay ultimately reveals a more ambiguous negotiation between the sacred and the secular in the emergent public sphere than is often supposed.

From the mid-1890s to the present day, cars have been fetishized as animal in US automotive culture. This began with automotive periodical Horseless Age, which, in positing the car as a substitute for the horse, decried the material limitations of the “outdated” animal whilst at the same time seeking to coopt its symbolic value. In the first US road trip novels of the 1910s automobiles are described figuratively as animals, simultaneously evoking the horse while symbolically killing it. Examining the intertwined material and symbolic relations between humans, animals, and machines at the dawn of the motor age elucidates the necropolitical position of animals in automotive culture – of the horse in horsepower.

This paper argues that Brown's sleepwalkers in Edgar Huntly offer us an early figuration for the problems inherent in the phenomenon we now refer to as “populism.” Both populism and sleepwalking function through paradoxical and incongruent forms of expression that appear incoherent. The most prominent explanations that account for this paradoxical form of expression rely on an analysis of the breakdown of discourse. However, this paper argues that the incongruous form of expression is rooted in the reconfiguration of the social arrangements that enable Clithero and Edgar to advance socially but also places them in proximity to social crises. The contradictions of this position of social mobility are the source of the contradictions of the expression of sleepwalking. In depicting a world that makes social identity precarious, Brown offers us an explanation for how such paradoxical modes of expression are rooted in unstable resolutions of post-revolutionary society.