This issue opens with Christopher Phelps's groundbreaking essay examining “The Sexuality of Malcolm X.” He investigates the “controversy over whether Malcolm Little, who would become Malcolm X, had same-sexual encounters,” concluding that there is “strong indication that Malcolm Little did take part in sex acts with male counterparts.” In “American Monsters: Tabloid Media and the Satanic Panic, 1970–2000,” Sarah Hughes “analyzes the satanic panic, an episode of national hysteria that dominated the media throughout the 1980s.” As she incisively observes, “It involved hundreds of accusations that devil-worshipping paedophiles were operating America's white middle-class suburban daycare centers.” Coming to grips with an under-researched area related to an iconic figure, Christopher Sterba's “‘¿Quién es? ¿Quién es?’: Revisiting the Racial Context of the Billy the Kid Legend” investigates “the young Bonney's close contact with the Southwest's communities of color – New Mexico's Mescalero Apache Indians, African American soldiers, and Hispano farmers.” He unpacks layers of white racism to explain “why these communities have been ‘bleached’ out of popular representations of the young outlaw's story.”
For Daniel Vandersommers writing in “Narrating Animal History from the Crags: A Turn-of-the-Century Tale about Mountain Sheep, Resistance, and a Nation,” Rocky Mountain sheep are the radical protagonists of US history. He cuts across disciplinary boundaries to arrive at an indisputable truth: “It took years, at the dawn of the twentieth century, for the National Zoo to capture Rocky Mountain sheep.” “The split hooves and remarkable eyesight of bighorns made these animals virtually impossible to catch alive,” he observes only to confirm, “This is a story about a national government chasing sheep for the purpose of zoological display. This is also a story about the construction of knowledge, the ironies of conservation, and the building of the American West.” Catherine Flay effortlessly grapples with the intersections between literary, social, political and cultural contexts in “After the Counterculture: American Capitalism, Power, and Opposition in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon.” She interprets “Mason & Dixon as exemplary of Pynchon's reconsideration of the nature of power and potential opposition to it in response to the countercultural movement's failures and successes.” In “Race, Mobility, and Fantasy: Afromobiling in Tropical Florida,” Henry Knight Lozano offers a pioneering examination of “a popular tourist vehicle in early twentieth-century Florida: the Afromobile.” He maps the phenomenon of “Afromobiling” which began in the 1890s and “referred to the white tourist experience in South Florida of travelling in a wheelchair propelled by an African American hotel employee.” “Using promotional imagery and travel literature,” he demonstrates that the “vehicle's popularity related to its enactment of benign racial hierarchy and controlled black mobility.”
John David Smith's “‘Stern Champion of the Human Race, of Man as Human’: Alexander F. Chamberlain and Reform in the Age of Imperialism and Jim Crow” investigates the “broad and understudied contributions of pioneer American anthropologist Alexander Francis Chamberlain (1865–1914).” Writing of an earlier period in US history in “‘Undistinguished Destruction’: The Effects of Smallpox on British Emancipation Policy in the Revolutionary War,” Gary Sellick relies on “primary source material and research on smallpox to analyze the experiences of African Americans who actively sought freedom with the British during the Revolutionary War.” Sarah Thelen's “Mobilizing a Majority: Nixon's ‘Silent Majority’ Speech and the Domestic Debate over Vietnam” groundbreakingly examines the very real ways in which “President Richard M. Nixon and his staff intended his 3 November 1969 Address to the Nation on Vietnam to counteract the growing strength of the antiwar movement.” As she observes, “Its appeal to a ‘Silent Majority’ of Americans inspired an impressive outpouring of support, but this response owed more to White House planning than to public opinion.”
Ross Wilson's “The Museum of Safety: Responsibility, Awareness and Modernity in New York, 1908–1923” investigates “the construction, the development and the denouement of the Museum of Safety in New York during the early twentieth century.” He works to undo the damage caused by the fact that the “significance of this institution has been overlooked despite how its role and responsibilities in exhibiting safety devices and procedures to industry, workers and the public reflect important trends within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society.” In “Camera Men: Techno-Orientalism in Two Acts,” Daniel McKay argues that “during the years of Japan's ‘bubble’ economy, writers and artists in the United States became increasingly susceptible to ‘Japan-bashing,’ a discourse that objectified Japanese for their trade practices, overseas purchases, and tourist presence.” Working with “a range of cultural texts, from Truman Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's to Michael Crichton's novel Rising Sun,” he sheds powerful light on “how the trope of the camera-toting Japanese expatriate encapsulated the fears of the era.” The stark reality that the “war on terror poses particular challenges of representation” is the focus of Liam Kennedy's article, “The Elusive Enemy: Zero Dark Thirty and the American Worldview.” Working with the film Zero Dark Thirty he traces the ways in which the “film re-presents the aporia of representation that structures the production of the war on terror as a field of perceptible reality and reflects the geopolitical priorities of an American worldview.”
The print reviews section leads with a roundtable discussion of Hester Blum's important collection on nineteenth-century American literary studies, Turns of Event, which is discussed by a team of reviewers from the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA). The roundtable is followed by a group of four reviews on nineteenth-century literary topics and nine other reviews on subjects ranging from women in early America to US perspectives on the Spanish Civil War. The online reviews section opens with a penetrating review essay by Rachel Nolan entitled “The End of Bare Life?”. This is followed by a group of three reviews of books on cultural and literary representations of the American Gothic and eleven other reviews.
