Gillis set down his tan cardboard extension case and wiped his black, shining brow. Then slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw: Negroes at every turn; up and down Lenox Avenue, up and down 135th Street; big lanky Negroes, short, squat Negroes; black ones, brown ones, yellow ones; men standing idle on the curb, women, bundle-laden, trudging reluctantly homeward, children rattle-trapping about the sidewalks; here and there a white face drifting along, but Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere. There was assuredly no doubt of his whereabouts. This was Negro Harlem.

This is the first sighting of Harlem for King Solomon Gillis, the protagonist of Rudolph Fisher's story “City of Refuge,” published in 1925 in Atlantic Monthly. Gillis has fled the South after killing a white man, and comes to Harlem, “with the aid of a prayer and an automobile” (3) to escape being lynched. His arrival sees him propelled into a carnivorous city of disorienting sounds, speed and subways until, like “Jonah emerging from the whale” (3), he is burped up into a sunny, calm and all-black Harlem. The spectacle of a public space peopled by “Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere,” seems to hold a utopian promise: “In Harlem, black was white. You had rights that could not be denied you; you had privileges, protected by law. And you had money. Everybody had money…The land of plenty was more than that now; it was also the city of refuge” (4). However, this vision of plenty and security ultimately proves chimerical for the naïve Southerner who fails to see beyond the surface effects of the urban scene. For Fisher, the turned around, “black is white” world of Harlem involves complex issues of racial agency and identification which are central to the narrative of modernity associated with the experience of migration to the North. In his work – and in that of Bruce Nugent and Nella Larsen, which also form the basis of this article – we find a recurrent focus on the urban scene of Harlem as a space of spectacular and spectacularised desire, and an understanding of racial identity as contingent and performative within this space.

When a white writer portrays a black character, racial stereotypes and literary patterns almost always reveal their power. The portraits of blacks take forms that are by now archetypal: the mammy, Stepin Fetchit, the buck, the unspoiled primitive, the member of the oppressed black proletariat…. Such forms come all too easily to white writers; but “modern realism,” as Erich Auerbach called it, comes hard. Thus, white writers can seldom present a “tragically conceived life” of a black character and set that life solidly in a black culture. In portraying blacks, white writers tend toward the sentimental, the satiric, and the didactic rather than “objective seriousness, which seeks to penetrate to the depths of the passions and entanglements of a human life, but without itself becoming moved, or at least without betraying that it is moved” (Auerbach, 457 and 490). Although William Faulkner often tumbles – and sometimes leaps – into those pitfalls, occasionally he avoids them altogether. When he does so, however, readers find his work particularly hard to understand. His story “That Evening Sun” is a case in point.

On 30 November 1978 thousands of people from across the United States took part in “Justice for J. P. Stevens' Workers Day.” In seventy-four cities activities such as rallies, marches, press conferences, film premieres, and leafleting were held in support of a union boycott against a giant textile company that had persistently shown its willingness to violate the law rather than recognize its workers' right to organize. In New York City more than 3000 demonstrators marched in front of the company's midtown headquarters as part of the nationwide day of protest that was endorsed by Governor Hugh L. Carey and the City Council. In Los Angeles hundreds of trade unionists and their supporters rallied in front of City Hall, while in Indianapolis protesters gathered at the local Hilton Hotel for a “hard times luncheon” of ham and beans that was designed to express solidarity with the company's low-paid workers. Finding that the hotel's table cloths were made by Stevens, enraged protesters ripped the fabrics from the tables and dumped them in a pile on the floor. Activities were also held in many smaller cities; in Albany, New York, for example, a rally was addressed by Secretary of State and Lieutenant Governor-elect Mario Cuomo, who told consumers “to shun the products of J. P. Stevens as you would shun the fruit of an unholy tree.” Across the country, protesters carried signs urging consumers to steer clear of the company's sheets, a staple part of its textile business.

In the forty years since its publication, Hunter S. Thompson's most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has received relatively little attention from scholars, in spite of its continuing popularity and acknowledged influence. Because the narrative is so thoroughly rooted in what Thompson called “this foul year of Our Lord, 1971,” the novel is generally approached (when it is discussed at all) as a historical artifact, a gonzo first draft of history, with its fortunes rising and falling with the counterculture of the 1960s. This article argues that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, far from being merely an epitaph for the 1960s, actually anticipates the more recent work of political theorists Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. Thompson's work, like Agamben's, concerns the emergence of the state of exception and the homo sacer as new paradigms for the relationship between citizen and state; and, like Hardt and Negri, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas attempts to formulate a response to the emergence of global empire.

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory” (Nothing Ever Dies, 4). Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, begins his 2016 treatise on war and memory with these words. In the deftly named Nothing Ever Dies, Nguyen identifies the excesses of war in general and most notably the excess of the war named the Vietnam War in the US and the American War in Vietnam. There was excessive violence on the battlefields, which ranged throughout Southeast Asia, exceeding the national borders identified by the naming of the war. The experience of war and the meaning of war also exceeded the official dates of the war, chronologized differently by different historical actors but nevertheless used to conveniently bound war in time. Disregarding these official dates, the perpetrators, survivors, and witnesses of war (Nguyen points out that one can belong to more than one of these categories simultaneously) carry with them the memories and violence of war. They relive and reinterpret the war, fighting it again a second time through memory and memorialization.

This article uses the World Congress on Evangelism held in Berlin in 1966 to explore the cultural dimensions of US leadership in the world of global evangelism post-World War II. It shows how a close alliance with technology and business, as well as traditional anticommunism and belief in Western civilization, spurred US evangelicals to assume global leadership. A closer examination of the cultural and spiritual atmosphere of the congress reveals, however, that beneath the apparent American leadership tensions emerged around race and social issues, expressed forcefully by new theological and political voices from the developing world. These tensions were negotiated through common practices and behaviours, such as during prayer sessions, dinner conversations, and discussions groups, and allowed a genuine transnational evangelical community to arise.

This article looks at the landscape photographer Richard Misrach's collaboration with the architect Kate Orff in Petrochemical America (2012), a prizewinning examination of the effects of the oil industry in the Mississippi delta. Whilst situating its critique of the oil industry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Petrochemical America nonetheless uses a variety of aesthetic devices from previous centuries and traditions, in particular the use of the picturesque in landscapes of the nineteenth century. Through this and other mechanisms, the images in Petrochemical America become potential allegories for the paradoxical coexistence of a picturesque nature visibly affected by industrial transformation.

On the morning of 4 August 1892, between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m., Abby Durfee Borden and Andrew Jackson Borden were murdered with an axe in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Why did the case spark so much interest at the time? Why did throngs of people literally block the street gawking at the Borden residence? Why did the country’s leading newspaper devour and report the daily happenings in this small New England town? Why, a century later, are ‘‘whodunit?’’ novels, plays, and films still being made about this gruesome double murder?

By any criteria, Evangelical Christians constitute a significant segment of the American population, but they have always been a difficult audience for the American film industry to target, because many Evangelicals view themselves as ideologically opposed to Hollywood – a fraught relationship often referred to as the “Culture Wars.” This essay uses the recent hit Fireproof (2008) to examine the complex relationship between Hollywood, Evangelical audiences and independent Christian film producers.

Influential American studies scholars of the mid-twentieth century, such as R. W. B. Lewis, Henry Nash Smith, and Leslie A. Fiedler, focussed attention on a mythic American character, the frontiersman who penetrates the wilderness. These critics provided analyses of figures such as Daniel Boone and his fictional counterpart, Natty Bumppo, and discussed the power the romanticized western frontier had over the American imagination. Their observations were accurate, as far as they went. However, these critics did not acknowledge the many narratives in which a female character conquers the frontier. The assumption seemed to be that the literary female figure belonged in the parlor with her sewing basket and not in the forest with her weapon. Unfortunately, this incomplete assessment of the frontier adventure genre is still in evidence today. In this essay, I work towards the development of a more complete understanding of the American frontier story and point out that, even in the iconic John Filson/John Trumbull Boone tale, we find a mini-narrative involving a female hero who triumphs over the “savage” forces of the wilderness. This female figure became a cultural archetype, and similar versions of her story were repeated in countless captivity and western adventure anthologies, almanacs, and the like for the next seventy years. The popularity of this frontier narrative featuring a strong, violent female figure suggests that readers were accepting of the idea of an active, aggressive woman, at least while she was contending with chaotic forces in the wilderness. The popularity of this kind of narrative also undercuts the traditional gender paradigm (the nurturing passive female versus the active aggressive male) too often imposed by scholars on antebellum American letters and culture.

African Americans and Korean Americans have addressed Black–Korean encounters and responded to each other predominantly in their favorite genres: in films and rap music for African Americans and in novels and poems for Korean Americans. A case in point is the intertextuality between Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker. A comparative study of the two demonstrates that they are seminal texts of African American–Korean American dialogue and discourse for mutual understanding and harmonious relationships between the two races in the USA. This paper reads the African American film and the Korean American fiction as dialogic responses to the well-publicized strife between Korean American merchants and their African American customers in the late 1980s and early 1990s and as windows into a larger question of African American–Korean American relations and racialization in US culture. This study ultimately argues that the dialogue between Spike Lee's film and Chang-rae Lee's novel moves towards a possibility of cross-racial identification and interethnic coalition building.

This article explores African American armed resistance during the 1917 East St. Louis race riot in the context of black migration and ghetto formation. In particular it considers the significance of the development of the black urban community, composed of an emerging working class and a dynamic, militant and increasingly influential middle class. It was that community which came under attack by white mobs in 1917, and this work illuminates the infrastructure of resistance in the city, showing how African Americans drew upon the resources of the nascent ghetto and older traditions of self-defence to protect their homes and families.

Before his execution in 1859, the radical abolitionist John Brown wrote a series of prison letters that – along with his death itself – helped to cement the abolitionist aesthetic of emancipatory martyrdom. This article charts the adaptation of that aesthetic in antilynching protest literature during the decades that followed. It reveals Brown's own presence in antilynching speeches, sermons, articles, and fiction, and the endurance of the emancipatory martyr symbol that he helped to inaugurate. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, black and white writers imagined lynching's ritual violence as a crucifixion and drew upon the John Brown aesthetic of emancipatory martyrdom, including Frederick Douglass, Stephen Graham, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, black Baptist ministers, and black educators and journalists. Fusing martyrdom and messianism, these antilynching writers made the black Christ of their texts an avenging liberatory angel. The testamentary body of this messianic martyr figure marks the nation for violent retribution. Turning the black Christ into a Brown-like prophetic sign of God's vengeful judgment, antilynching writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries warned of disaster, demanded a change of course, challenged white southern notions of redemption, and insisted that African Americans must reemancipate themselves and redeem the nation.