In this article I argue that scholars have been insufficiently attentive to Frederick Douglass's engagement with American cities, particularly Washington, DC. I show that Frederick Douglass's 1877 speech “Our National Capital” should not be relegated, as it usually is, to an autobiographical footnote, but is in fact an important document both in Douglass's philosophy and in the history of Washington, DC. This essay places that speech in both of those traditions. First, I give a brief account of Pierre L'Enfant's late eighteenth-century plans for Washington, DC as a cosmopolitan and regionally inclusive place, then use several figures, including Charles Dickens and Eastman Johnson, to show that actually existing DC failed to meet those ideals. The bulk of the essay then shows that Douglass's speech has great affinities with L'Enfant's original ideas, with Douglass adding the crucially important category of race to L'Enfant's vision for the city. I also use a number of Douglass's other writings, including speeches, essays, and autobiographies, to show that “Our National Capital” can serve as a capstone for Douglass's career, in which he articulates how an urban environment should function if it is to live up to his ideals.

Twenty American military cemeteries dot the pastoral countryside of western Europe. Casualties of the Great War, numbering 31,000, are buried in eight sites: 73,000 of America's 93,000 overseas burials from the Second World War are interred in twelve European cemeteries. These “silent cities” are monuments to an enduring result of global conflict: a forceful American presence in the cultural and political landscapes of other countries. The cemeteries' standardized styles, laconic epitaphs, and their removal from the sphere of family and community erase much of the sense of individual tragedy associated with premature death. Indeed, the American burial grounds were not meant to be mere memorials; they were designed primarily as representations of the American spirit abroad and as a political “foothold in Europe,” according to one of their prominent exponents. They were planned to evoke a common national cause rather than mourn the death of young soldiers. Their foreign context, the New York Times stated, meant that they would “stand forever as symbols of America, our spirit and our aesthetic.”

Nick Carraway, the narrator of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), is slightly taken aback by some of his host's remarks in the course of an otherwise bantering conversation during his first visit to the Buchanans' East Egg residence:

‘Civilization's going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? … Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved … This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or those other races will have control of things … The idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are, and … And we've produced all the things that go to make civilization – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?

“I'll tell you God's truth.” His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. “I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West — all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.”

He looked at me sideways — and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn't something a little sinister about him, after all.

“What part of the Middle West? ” I inquired casually.

“San Francisco.”

“I see.”

“My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.”

His voice was solemn, as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a clan still haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg, but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.

Does Gatsby know where San Francisco is? If he does, his response is an odd gesture. “Epic theatre is gestural,” wrote Walter Benjamin of Brecht. Gatsby, too, is gestural: as Nick Carraway would have it, “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him” (p. 2). Except that Gatsby's gestures are broken, and by Gatsby himself. To “tell … God's truth” he raises his right hand — isn't that taking the truth a little too seriously? When speaking of loss he pauses in the right place; indeed, in a place so right that the addendum “all dead now” might just be bad acting, not lying. The creator of a criminal network operating Richard Godden is Lecturer in American Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of Keele, Keele, Staffs. ST5 5BG, England.

Few American writers have been so rooted in a single place as Henry David Thoreau. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, sixteen miles west of Boston, Thoreau spent nearly all his short life, some forty-four years, in the vicinity of his native town – “the most estimable place in all the world” he deemed it – with only brief sojourns beyond New England. Like many of his contemporaries, he did try out the big city, living close to Manhattan in 1843, an aspiring writer, age twenty-six, with hopes of a literary career. But he quickly recoiled from the urban scene. “I don't like the city better, the more I see it, but worse,” he wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it. It is a thousand times meaner than I could have imagined. … The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population.” Homesick, he was back in Concord within six months. Only once did he stray outside the United States, for a week-long excursion to Montreal and Quebec. To this “Yankee in Canada,” it was a disappointing jaunt. “What I got by going to Canada was a cold.” Thoreau was simply happiest in his hometown, where he “traveled a good deal,” exploring the ponds, woods, and fields, observing and provoking the neighbors, and transforming his chosen ground, in Walden and in his journals, into a sacred site on the American literary landscape. Concord, he declared, is “my Rome, and its people … my Romans.”

He has fertilized an A to Z of postwar creativity, quite literally from Kathy Acker to Frank Zappa; he has acted as godfather for literary countercultures from the Beats to the Cyberpunks; he has haunted our media zones as an icon of iconoclasm – and William Burroughs has remained a critical curse. Leaving aside what Burroughs' academic marginality tells us – about Burroughs or academia – the main reason he has hexed his critics is also the key to the proliferation of his image and its power of mimetic magic: those he does not repel, Burroughs fascinates. This is the basis to his distinct iconicity, infectious now across four decades.

Self-styled as El Hombre Invisible, Burroughs fully inhabits Maurice Blanchot's construction of fascination as “the absence one sees because it is blinding”: “Whoever is fascinated doesn't properly speaking, see what he sees. Rather, it touches him in an immediate proximity; it seizes and ceaselessly draws him close, even though it leaves him absolutely at a distance.” Unable or unwilling, Burroughs critics have done little with such knowledge other than to pass it on. Robin Lydenberg, author of the ground-breaking study Word Cultures (1987), could go back twenty years to quote Joan Didion praising Burroughs for “a voice so direct and original and versatile as to disarm close scrutiny of what it is saying”; so too, Robert Sobieszek in his artwork catalogue Ports of Entry (1996), could go back twenty to cite Philippe Mikriammos' formula, “vox Williami, vox monstrorum,” to account for the sound “which ultimately seduces the listener.” A voice that disarms scrutiny; a voice that seduces. In the critical context, to approach Burroughs disarmed and seduced has meant taking him on his own terms – and being taken in by him. Burroughs resists power to the extent that he also exercises it, understands power so well precisely because he has always worked from its deep insides. From the outset, this WASP scion of American big business (public relations on his mother's side, adding machines on his father's) was born to live out power's painful contradictions. His life as addict, homosexual, and writer literalized that undesired inheritance with a perverse vengeance, queering the legacy of “Poison” Ivy Lee and Burroughs computers by reincarnating it as a pathogenic cultural virus. And so Burroughs dedicated himself to immortality by becoming what Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene (1976), called a “meme”: “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” which propagates analogously to the genetic code and the parasitism of viruses, and is more than metaphorically “alive”. If memes survive by parasitizing human minds, so, reciprocally, can the mind survive through parasitic self-replication: the viral programme “simply says ‘Copy me and spread me around.’” This is Burroughs: “all poets worthy of the name are mind parasites, and their words ought to get into your head and live there, repeating and repeating and repeating.” He could scarcely be more explicit. And so to exempt Burroughs from the terms of his own critique is to miss the whole point of his textual politics – that is, not only his texts' analysis of power, but their own relation to it – since complicity in all he opposes is the condition of his work's extraordinary brinkmanship. As I have argued elsewhere, it may well be those who would gladly burn Burroughs who have best understood the unique force of his work, a force at its maximum in his two crucial decades, falling either side of The Naked Lunch (1959).

This article examines the rise of the Nation of Islam (NOI) within America's penal system during the late 1950s and the 1960s. In doing so, it explores the reasons for the NOI's appeal among African American prisoners, its contribution to the politicization of those prisoners, the responses of penal, state and federal authorities to the proliferation of prison mosques, and the way in which imprisoned Black Muslims' campaign for freedom of religious expression established the legal groundwork for the prisoners' rights movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s. This research presents the prison as a locus of black protest and the African American prisoner as an important, but largely overlooked, actor within the black freedom struggle. It calls upon historians to recognize the importance of the prison as both a site and a symbol of black resistance during the post-World War II period.

L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was an instant success when it was published in 1900. Baum's quirky and imaginative tale of the girl from Kansas and her friends was complemented by W. W. Denslow's accomplished illustrations to produce the best-selling children's story of the 1900 Christmas season. After years of failed endeavors, the book brought Frank Baum personal prosperity. It also launched a long-lived and highly successful series of children's books based on the Oz theme. There were theatrical and cinematic productions as well, the most famous of which was MGM's 1939 film The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland. Indeed, the film eventually came to displace the original Oz tale as the work to which imitators referred. But the books, and especially the first book, continue to have a popular presence among lovers of Oz.

Social scientists collected many, many American Indian autobiographies during the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, autobiographies of Apaches, Navajos, Hopis, Zunis, Papagos, Kiowas, Sioux, a Kwakiutl, autobiographies of shamans, shepherds, hunters, farmers, men, and women. Many of these are now moldering in the dark reaches of forgotten file cabinets, but a remarkable number were published, and for this we must be grateful. These narratives are to us a legacy, affording us some sense of what it means to see the world and the self according to ancient habits of mind.

In November 2000, I was sitting in my study in Jaffa, a mixed Arab-Jewish town just south of Tel Aviv, leafing through the latest issue of Critical Inquiry. This was a few weeks into the renewed outbreak of violence in Israel/Palestine, an outbreak that with a single stroke cancelled out the laboriously earned achievements of the Oslo peace accords, claimed the lives of thousands, and all but shattered the hopes of peace activists on both sides. Jaffa itself was transformed overnight, its delicate tissue of Jewish-Arab coexistence torn by Arab riots, Jewish vigilantes, and brutal police intervention. I was therefore looking forward to the momentary escape offered by the American journal that had just arrived in the mail.

This essay examines contrasting but complementary narrative and filmic representations of the Guadeloupean resistance to Napoleon's attempt to reimpose a slavery regime in the French colonies. This underrepresented and under-analyzed event, one of landmark importance in the Caribbean tradition of rebellion and self-liberation, focuses our attention more closely on the extended arc of liberatory acts – inscribed in a variety of locations but always espousing the same goal – that mark the identitarian activities of Caribbean slaves almost from the inception of the colonial moment to the act of emancipation. In a large sense, the resistance to Napoleon's invading forces, although ultimately doomed to failure in Guadeloupe, emerged from and was shaped by the specificities of social, economic, and political structures that transformed Guadeloupe during this critical period, and was driven by principles of liberation and self-emancipation emerging from the path adopted by Guadeloupe's governor, Victor Hugues, and the various communities over which he presided. Resistance in Guadeloupe was a fight to preserve a way of life. Analyzing this resistance compels us to acknowledge individual and collective expressions of the idea and practice of freedom that were originally erased by those charged with constructing the colonial script, and draws attention to the still-marginal inscription of these events in contemporary culture.

It is no secret that natural history museums strive to be archives of life, a common task grown more fraught in recent decades because of the crisis of biodiversity, the extinction of roughly 60,000 species per year. “Bio-informatics” has been a buzzword in the natural history literature of the twenty-first century, which recommends the digitization of museum collections such that global information sharing can keep scientists up to date about species loss. Some curators resent the emphasis upon information technology as the key to the continuing relevance of their collections, arguing, for instance, that “museums are the cornerstone of an object-oriented approach to the natural world.” The question of what durability means for natural history, and by extension for both “nature” and “history,” breaks around what counts as most lifelike: information or object, technology or bone. Los Angeles is a rich setting for the consideration of these questions, both because it is the world capital of the entertainment industry and because it hosts the world's largest archive of Pleistocene fossils, preserved in the asphaltum sinks that formed atop the Salt Lake Oil Field, itself the largest urban oil reserve. What petroleum means to evolving definitions of life, and thus to nature and history, has long been on display at the La Brea tar pits. What is not on display, namely micro-organisms grown up in the region's petroleum sludge, may be the saviors of our current geologic epoch and key to the renewal of the tired natural history concept.

Between 1953 and 1961 Myles Horton's Highlander Folk School developed the Citizenship Education Program (CEP) beginning in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Within the program from 1957 onwards Septima Clark and Bernice Robinson developed Citizenship Schools centered on literacy classes. By slowly developing local leaders, like Esau Jenkins, the CEP evolved as an educational framework for social mobilization, which was later used by the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. In the summer of 1961, since the Folk School faced closure by Tennessee state authorities, Highlander transferred the CEP to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Between 1961 and 1970, hundreds of civil rights activists from across the South attended the SCLC's Citizenship School teacher training courses at the Dorchester Center near Savannah in south-east Georgia. Moreover, in the mid-1960s the Southwide Voter Education Project enabled civil rights activists from across the region to study the political organization that the CEP had spawned in Charleston county as a model for their own community work. Given its widespread influence, the CEP's work was a vital aspect of the Civil Rights Movement itself and constituted Highlander's chief contribution to it.

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has long been recognised as one of the most influential of modern American institutions. Indeed, for some scholars at least, the relationship between the Council and the federal government has been a troubling one. A private group that is exclusive and unrepresentative in membership, funded by large corporations and foundations, highly secretive about its operations, and ensconced in the centres of state power, raises serious issues of principle for a democracy. At its crudest, the question is who “controls” whom, the state or the unofficial group? Allowing for a more complex relationship between an official policy elite and outside advisors, just what are the points of convergence or divergence between these “internal” and “external” bureaucrats, as Chadwick F. Alger has called them? Such issues draw attention to the nature of the state itself, and, whatever the proper role of the CFR in the American system of government, its existence provides an opportunity to examine a number of major ideas about power and the state.

From 1968 to 1975, Lew Alcindor/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar traveled a turbulent personal path toward self-discovery. His journey had profound implications for the larger cultural landscape of race, sport, politics, and religion. As he became professional basketball's chief superstar, he was framed by the press as sullen and solitary, and he served as the villain in a media-driven storyline informed by popular prejudices. Yet for many African Americans and other progressive fans, he exemplified the ideals that made black power uplifting and affirmative, rather than threatening. His conversion to Islam and his name change further shaped new cultural and political territory for the black athlete. It highlighted a personal struggle within Abdul-Jabbar – he sought a kind of personal freedom, even as he revealed a tendency to subsume himself before strong authority figures. He nevertheless stood, in this period, as the nation's most prominent face of classical Islam. His religious conversion further distanced him from much of the American public, but over time he presented an effective, progressive narrative about the place of Islam in American life.

Literary criticism has debated the usefulness of the trauma paradigm found in much post-9/11 fiction. Where critiqued, trauma is sometimes understood as a domesticating concept by which the events of 9/11 are incorporated into sentimental, familial dramas and romances with no purchase on the international significance of the terrorist attacks and the US's response to them; or, the concept of trauma is understood critically as the means by which the boundaries of a nation or “homeland” self-perceived as violated and victimized may be shored up, rendered impermeable – if that were possible. A counterversion of trauma argues its potential as an affective means of bridging the divide between a wounded US and global suffering. Understood in this way, the concept of trauma becomes the means by which the significance of 9/11 could be deterritorialized. While these versions of trauma, found in academic theory and literary practice, invoke the spatial – the domestic sphere, the homeland, the global – they tend to focus on the time of trauma rather than on the imbrication of the temporal and the spatial. If, instead, 9/11 trauma could be more productively defined as the puncturing of national fantasies of an inviolable and innocent homeland, fantasies which themselves rest on the (failed) repression of foundational violence in the colonial and settler creation of that homeland, and on subsequent notions of American exceptionalism at home and, in the exercise of foreign policy, abroad, then the traumatic can be spatialized. In other words, understood in relation to fantasy, trauma illuminates the terroritalization and deterritorialization of American history. After working through various examples of post-9/11 fiction to demonstrate parochial renditions of trauma and trauma's unrealized global resonances, this article turns to Cormac McCarthy's 9/11 allegory The Road for the way in which its spaces, places and territories are marked by inextricable traumas of the past and present – and therefore for the way in which it models trauma's relation to national fantasy.

Lionel Trilling once observed that there are certain individuals who contain the “ yes ” and “ no ” of their culture, whose personal ambivalences become paradigmatic. This would seem to be an apt description of a man whose first novel was published twenty-five years ago, a man whose career has described a neat and telling parabola and whose contradictions go to the heart of an issue which dominated the political and cultural life of mid-century America: James Baldwin. And it is perhaps not inappropriate to seize the occasion of this anniversary and of the publication of his new novel, Just Above My Head, to attempt a summation of a writer, once an articulate spokesman for black revolt, now living an expatriate existence in southern France.

To date, Baldwin has written six novels: Go Tell it on the Mountain (1954), Giovanni's Room (1956), Another Country (1962), Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), Just Above My Head (1979); four books of essays: The Fire Next Time (1963), Nobody Knows My Name (1964), Notes of a Native Son (1964), No Name in the Street (1972); two plays: Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964), Amen Corner (1968); and one book of short stories: Going to Meet the Man (1965). Born in Harlem in 1924, he left in 1948 for France, driven out by despair of the racial situation. He returned in 1957 and in the heady days of the Civil Rights movement found himself a principal spokesman — his polemical essay, The Fire Next Time, appearing at a crucial moment in black/white relations. Outflanked by the events of the late sixties, he retreated again to Europe. His more recent novels have failed to spark the popular or critical interest of his earlier work.

Interest in the historical phenomenon of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American black nationalism has been inspired by the revival of nationalist modes of thought among blacks since the 1950s. Because the placing of post-Second World War Pan-Africanism or the American Black Power movement within a historical context has been seen as an urgent task, the search for a coherent tradition has carried with it the danger of distortions in the historical treatment of the earlier movements. “Traditional” nineteenth-century black nationalism was essentially a conservative movement advocating racial self-improvement through the “civilizing” influence of Anglo-Saxon values, particularly Christianity. Taking black nationalism to mean the assertion of group identity for political purposes (which need not be separatist), its nature clearly changed during the period 1914–1929 as the nature of the American black community changed. For the first time in American history there existed a sizeable number of black intellectuals and a literate audience for them; the rapid growth in the number of black newspapers and magazines reflected these facts. These intellectuals were responsive to new ideas like socialism, yet the transformation of black nationalist thought during this period did not constitute a complete break with the past. This essay attempts to illustrate continuities with the nineteenth century along with those elements of radicalism that presaged modern black nationalism.

Two discontinuities between modern and “traditional” black nationalism constitute essential reference points for the analysis of black nationalist thought during this period. The first relates to who is perceived as being the principal agent or vanguard of the nationalist movement.