Drawing on recently established zine archives and oral-history interviews with former girl zine producers, as well as with zine librarians, archivists, and commentators, this essay explores the significance of the fact that dissident girls and young women developed an interest in what are now called “girl zines” through a number of different routes, with a range of different interests, and at different moments over the course of the last twenty-five years. Some were directly inspired by riot grrrl bands in the early 1990s. Others happened upon zines at alternative bookstores and info-shops and as part of their participation in the larger punk underground. Still others learned of them through popular magazines, college courses, and public and private libraries, or through quite varied friendship networks. The fact of this social, material, and temporal variability raises important questions about whether “girl zines” should be thought of as a unitary genre and, correlatively, about whether the girl zine explosion itself should be construed as a secondary effect of the riot grrrl phenomenon of the early 1990s. Building on recent critiques made by punks and zinesters of color of the now-dominant narrative about the history of riot grrrl and the role of zines within it, the essay traces how that narrative developed in the context of a backlash against feminism and how it led, ultimately, to the creation of the genre now known as “girl zines” and the founding of archives designed to ensure their preservation. Though both are seen as significant political achievements for feminism, by considering Mimi Thi Nguyen's recent claim that the dominant narrative and the genealogies it constructs tend to ignore the important but often differently motivated contributions of punks and zinesters of color, the essay explores the question of what it might mean to focus on the varied itineraries that girls pursued into the punk underground and on how those itineraries affected the zines they created for often quite distinct purposes. Ultimately, the essay asks how riot grrrl and girl zine-ing ought to be understood. That is, should they be construed as a singular event, as a coherent social movement, as a fractious discourse, as a complex set of social practices, as a political intervention, or as something else? In the end, the author argues that attending to the disagreements and contestations among girl punks and zinesters who constantly called each other out over their differences suggests that as a youthful cohort profoundly affected by the vast social and cultural change associated with what is now call neoliberalism, these young people were arguing among themselves and with the surrounding culture over how to craft new, more flexible forms of subjectivity and sociality adequate to the challenges of the twenty-first century.

In the mid-1700s, when Denis Diderot wrote Les bijoux indiscrets, the French modern nation-state was being actively imagined through philosophical and revolutionary discourse as distinct from the monarchical and feudal structures of the ancien régime. At the core of the emerging, transformative vision of Enlightenment thought lay knowledge produced by colonial and enslaved peoples, symbolized in the black female body that is positioned in Diderot's novel as disruptive of and yet central to European social, economic, and cultural norms.

Two competing strands of intellectual history, which arose from divergent interpretations of human nature, impacted the democratic tradition in the United States. This paper examines this divergence through a succinct comparison of Benjamin Franklin's and George Whitefield's teachings on human perfection. Whitefield's view of perfection is derived from Protestant Christianity and argues that man is called to constantly pursue a personal and earthly unattainable goal. Franklin sought to replace the religious view with one grounded upon enlightenment and sought to establish an earthly perfection, which aligned with his democratic ideal. This view of perfection was attainable to all through the education of the citizens of the new nation in a liberal tradition.

Commonly regarded as one of the pioneers of motion-picture technology, Eadweard Muybridge carried out several photographic studies of animal and human movement in the late nineteenth century. One of Muybridge's lesser-known commissions was an album of interior photographs that he created in 1880 for his friends Kate and Robert Johnson. This article offers a close reading of this album and argues that it has more in common with Muybridge's motion studies than historians have previously recognized. Far from being a commercial outlier, the album offered Muybridge an opportunity to experiment with the technological and cultural possibilities of photography in a new way. Through ghosts, mirrors, and other forms of representational excess, these images make visible Muybridge's handiwork as a photographer and the intellectual complexity of his collaboration with Kate and Robert Johnson.

“‘Can't Repeat the Past?’ Gatsby and the American Dream at Mid-Century” analyzes The Great Gatsby's Cold War rise to explain its subsequent canonization. The essay uses Ernst Bloch's theory of disappointment and utopianism to dwell, in particular, upon the novel's representations of the American Dream as intimately related to failure and the promise of the New World. Bloch's insistence that disappointment is embedded within utopian formations suggests that the novel's tragic take on Gatsby's dreams is the key to its mid-century fame and its continued cultural appeal.

Patent medicine shows became popular in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century by selling their products alongside free musical and theatrical entertainments. The “doctors” promised a range of cures, but usually mixed their remedies with alcohol or narcotics – using the promise of health to evade religious authorities and law enforcement, even in dry counties. Many talented black performers toured with medicine shows, including a number of artists later associated with the blues. I argue that the medicine show had a decisive impact on the blues by providing not simply training in performance, but also an impetus for the notorious suggestiveness of its lyric code. The blues borrows from the medicine show its lawless appeal to ailments uncategorized and ignored by socially sanctioned experts.

The first in a series of regional studies by the photographer Paul Strand, Time in New England pairs the iconographical landscapes and portraits of Strand with a cross-section of historical and fictional accounts of New England life from 1630 to 1950. The texts, chosen and edited by Nancy Newhall, constitute a counterpoint to Strand's images, designed to historicize the ideological parameters, subjects, and faces of a vernacular New England. This essay examines some of the problems inherent in Strand and Newhall's attempts to record an essentially democratic vision of America through a specific cultural landscape both found and constructed. Partly a postwar response to the trauma of fascism in Europe, Time in New England sought to confirm the intrinsic values of America as a safe haven for democratic principles, a project jeopardized by the increasing harassment of leftist artists that drove Strand out of the US in the same year Time in New England was published.

This essay considers the television series Breaking Bad in light of Nicos Poulantzas's concept of the new petty bourgeoisie and Bruno Latour's notion of the production of “monsters” in modern society as a result of the compartmentalization of science from society. Breaking Bad, which has received near universal praise from the popular press, established itself as the most recent dominant show in the recent wave of serial dramas. As a show that resembles the experimental vacuum chamber described by Latour, Breaking Bad succeeds in naturalizing its own terms so that they go unquestioned by viewers. My article views the character Walter White not as the everyman antihero presented by the show, but rather as a representative of what Poulantzas has termed the new petty bourgeoisie. A contention made in this essay is that the quarantined nature of such serial dramas allows them to work as vehicles for ideologies that go unexamined by their viewers.

During and after the 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, thousands of photographs were taken. None, however, would become as iconic as Thomas Franklin's photo of three firefighters raising an American flag above the rubble of the World Trade Center. Franklin's photo, I argue in this essay, casts 9/11 in the familiar myth of American exceptionalism, screening out but still gesturing to the heterogeneous memories left unsettled and animate in amateur photographs, missing-person posters, bodies in pain, and performance. In considering the struggle over the visual memory of the attacks, I first consider how, in the wake of 9/11, the discourse of exceptionalism served to disavow the exceptions historically taken by the state and to rationalize the War on Terror. I show how this system of myths works in dialectical relation to other disruptive forms of cultural memory. I then read Franklin's iconic photograph as a screen by which traumatic memories are masked and onto which nationalist desires are projected. Finally, I analyze 9/11 photography that troubles the exceptionalist optics of Franklin's photo by evoking the visual legacy of the Vietnam War and so challenging the logic of righteous warfare.

This interview with Jesmyn Ward, conducted in November 2013, takes as its starting point the publication of her memoir, Men We Reaped. It explores the role of her writing in the context of Hurricane Katrina, the US South, African American culture and identity, and new trends in twenty-first-century US writing.

Anna Hartnell's “When Cars Become Churches” begins by establishing a helpful context for understanding and fully appreciating the most recent gift to readers from Jesmyn Ward, her 2013 memoir titled Men We Reaped. In the wake of the tragedies of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, John Crawford III, and Eric Gordon, Ward's memoir is a critically important addition to our understanding of the fragility of the lives of young black men. These are lives that matter deeply to Ward and to the community of DeLisle, Mississippi – and because of Ward's fearless, honest, and emotionally searing story, they are lives that matter to her readers. She realizes one of the great achievements of literature: the transformation of the reader who looks at the other from a distance into a reader who sees with the other. As such, her work – especially Salvage the Bones and Men We Reaped – helps to enhance affective and cognitive understanding of others and cultivate moral imagination.

Throughout this interview, Jesmyn Ward emphasizes the humanity of her fictional and nonfictional subjects – subjects whose humanity has been eviscerated by what has been characterized as the postwar, neoliberal shift in American politics and economics. The socioeconomic and political neglect of African Americans was, of course, demonstrable in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, revealing the structural racism that had often resided in the US's political unconscious. Ward's emphasis on the ideas of survival and renewal – a “savage” resilience of humanity in its most precarious state – offers a corrective to the proclivities of some critical theory deployed in the framing of Hurricane Katrina's victims and the longer history of suffering they represented. For examples, theories of biopolitics used to conceptualize the ways in which African American life has been removed from the protections of citizenship and state sovereignty do run the risk of universalization. A transhistorical version of that life, consistent from slavery to the present day, might emerge from such theory, indistinct from examples of “bare” lives rendered by states of emergency beyond the US and across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as Giorgio Agamben might describe such life. In other words, theory risks a process of re-othering and a suspension of historical agency. Anna Hartnell finds in Ward's work the resonance of the jeremiad, and so narratives that are structured by the possibility of the redemption of historical experience – future-oriented narratives. These are narratives that represent the negotiation of historical conditions, not utter submission to them, and following Hartnell's reference they are aptly framed by Henry Giroux's reconceptualization of biopolitical life and the limits of American democracy.