Hollywood screenwriter Robert Riskin was the head of the Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information during World War II. His role not only helped to shape the administrative and managerial strategy of the agency but also created a body of documentary film work that was arguably the most incisive of the entire war. And yet in most accounts of American propaganda production during the last sixty years, as well as specifically OWI conduct and development, Riskin's role has been confined to that of a functionary, a name that is only mentioned in cursory anecdotes. The aim of this article, therefore, is not only to foreground Riskin's contribution to the OWI, neglected though that is, but to argue that Riskin's documentary programme, Projections of America, was actually one of the most important, influential and substantive collections of propaganda made during the war.

African American writers often express great affection for barbecue, a food many describe as “scrumptious” – to use a term that recurs throughout Bobby Seale's cookbook, Barbeque'n with Bobby (1988) – and invest with a particular capacity to lend shape and coherence to the idea of the African Diaspora. In the writings of Ntozake Shange, Albert Murray, Alice Walker, and others, barbecue seems able to reunite black communities, to gather together people dispersed across the USA or even the world. This literary use of barbecue is epitomized by Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), the concluding pages of which make the food central to a rejuvenating Diasporic optimism that stands in sharp contrast to the novel's desolate opening description of Celie's sexual abuse. Having grown up in West Africa, Adam, offspring of Celie's rape, finally meets his mother at a barbecue held in the American South. The food provides a conversation opener, a point of contact that the estranged family badly need:

Everybody make a lot of miration over Tashi. People look at her and Adam's scars like that's they business. Say they never suspect African ladies could look so good. They make a fine couple. Speak a little funny, but us gitting use to it.

The American poet Susan Howe is perhaps the best-known of the generation of poets that came to attention under the banner of “language poetry.” Her work has been widely anthologized and it has drawn a considerable amount of critical commentary. The “language” label, like most such tags, was unpalatable to most of the poets who came under it. It did after all mask a diverse range of poets. But, even given such reservations, it was clear from the start that Howe's poetry was out of step with certain general tendencies within language poetry. We know from the correspondence that Ron Silliman was criticized by some language poets for including Howe in his influential 1986 anthology In the American Tree. In a 1985 letter to Howe, Silliman expresses his reading of the relation between her work and language poetry: I do think one of the most important aspects of this writing [i.e. language writing], from the perspective of literary history if nothing else, is that it is anti-romantic, anti-mystical and anti-lyric (tho there are exceptions …) And your writing does seem to me to be at odds with this larger tendency. How you work with this tension in your poetry seems to me one of its most compelling dimensions.

What we need, it seems to me, is a global sense of local, a global sense of place.

The Second World War continues to be an attractive subject for scholars and even more so for those writing for a general readership. One of the more traditional areas of focus has been the ‘Big Three’ – the alliance of the United States with Britain and the Soviet Union. Public interest in the three leaders – Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin – remains high, and their decisions continue to resonate in the post-Cold War era, as demonstrated by continued (and often ahistorical) references to the decisions made at the Yalta Conference. Consequently, while other aspects of Second World War historiography have pushed into new avenues of exploration, that which has looked at the Grand Alliance has followed fairly conventional lines – the new Soviet bloc materials have been trawled to answer old questions and using the frames of reference that developed during the Cold War. This has left much to be said about the nature of the relationship of the United States with its great allies and the dynamics and processes of that alliance, and overlooked full and rounded analysis of the role of that alliance as the instrument of Axis defeat.

Scholars have been debating what constitutes “the Southwest” for decades. Thirty years ago, geographer D. W. Meinig began his landmark study Southwest: Three Peoples in Geographical Change, 1600–1970 by stating: “The Southwest is a distinct place to the American mind but a somewhat blurred place on American maps.” For Meinig, the crucial determining factor in constituting the geographical parameters of his own study was the coincidence of Native American and Mexican American settlement patterns in Arizona, New Mexico and around El Paso, Texas. The watersheds of the Gila River in Arizona and the Rio Grande in New Mexico provide the focus of his study of the historical interaction of Indians, Mexican Americans and Anglos through the successive periods of Spanish colonialism, Mexican independence and American rule. The historical geographer Richard Francaviglia has challenged the relatively narrow focus of Meinig's study by calling for a more expansive consideration of the Greater Southwest, which, in addition to the core of Arizona and New Mexico, also includes parts of Colorado, Utah, Texas and the northern states of Mexico. He rationalizes, “The southwestern quadrant of North America is, above all, characterized by phenomenal physical and cultural diversity that regionalization tends to abstract or simplify. The more one tries to reduce this complexity, the smaller the Southwest becomes on one's mental map.”2

Each generation needs to rewrite literary history. And it may be that this generation needs to do it more than most, if only because the proliferation of schools and theories has turned what was once common critical ground into a battlefield. American books, among others, have become a site of struggle, and American writers have been among those caught in the criss-crossing searchlights of ethnic and gender studies, interdisciplinary investigations and studies of popular culture, language and communication. Just how far things have gone can be measured by the fact that every term in the phrase “history of American literature,” is now open to debate. The textuality of history and the historicity of the text have become the most contentious issues in contemporary criticism, while the question of nationhood, in particular, is under scrutiny. In a famous phrase, Walt Whitman described his work as a language experiment, an attempt to summon a nation into being through words. The slippery, plural nature of American identity and the bewildering contingencies of American history that drove Whitman to say this feed into the more challenging of the recent accounts of American writing.