This article explores how Jesmyn Ward's novel Salvage the Bones and Kara Walker's visual essay After the Deluge can be read through the concept of Giorgio Agamben's “bare life” in order to explore the complexities of representing bodies that have been stripped of their political significance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Walker and Ward both situate Katrina within a longer lineage of representation of African American life extending back to slavery, prompting wider debate about the conceptual frameworks that we use in order to describe rupturing incidents that are connected to structural forms of persecution.

If C. L. R. James could later reflect in Beyond a Boundary that before arriving in Britain, “about Britain, I was a strange compound of knowledge and ignorance,” then the same was fundamentally true about his relation to American society before his arrival there in 1938. This article will begin with discussion of the attraction of America for black West Indians, including George Padmore, in the era of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as the young James's own love of jazz and American literature. The complexities of the young James's “anti-Americanism” will be also explored, before we explore how James's turn to both Marxism and pan-Africanism after 1934 led to a new appreciation of both the power of the American working class and a new understanding of how a revolutionary solution might be found to the “Negro Question,” the question of the systematic racism towards black people in America. The article will conclude with discussion of James's 1938 work A History of Negro Revolt, in particular its Marxist analysis of the history of American slavery and its abolition during the American Civil War, as well as the strengths and limitations of Garveyism as a social movement.

This article explores the Beatles’ invasion of America as a moment of cultural globalization. Paying attention to the political economy underpinning the Beatles’ success, the international hybridity at the heart of their cultural work, and the diverse ways in which Americans interpreted the Beatles, the article argues that the band was a primary vector of pop culture's increasing globality in the 1960s. More broadly, the article argues that the Beatles’ trajectory reveals that cultural globalization cannot be understood as a process either of homogenization or of creolization. Rather, the Beatles represented an increasingly unified and commodified culture that simultaneously served to reproduce cultural differences when different social formations projected their own meanings onto the hybridized group. The article therefore provides new perspectives on the historical significance of the iconic band and on the intersections between global and domestic cultural history in the 1960s, as well as suggesting a new framework for thinking about both the history and the contradictions of cultural globalization.

While ethnic rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks in the film West Side Story has long figured as a point of scholarly concern, we argue the musical's main conflict is not between the two gangs, but rather that of youth versus adult authority. Engaging in a close analysis of the dances choreographed by Jerome Robbins, we contend that the gangs' enmity against each other is subsumed by their collective struggle to reject the socially prescribed roles of adults and children in Cold War America, which fetishized childhood innocence. Robbins's complex representations of youthful play participated in defining a “youth counterculture.”

In 1951, the CIA secretly funded the creation of an ostensibly private group of US citizens called the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME). Pro-Arab and anti-Zionist in orientation, AFME was repeatedly attacked by pro-Israel groups before seeing its links to the CIA exposed by investigative journalists in 1967. Drawing on recent scholarship about “state–private networks” and the cultural history of US–Middle East relations, this article examines the origins of AFME, its characteristic values and relations with the CIA, and the reasons for the decline of its influence vis-à-vis the emergent “Israel lobby.”

The idea of jazz as “America's classical music” has become a powerful way of defining the music, asserting its national and artistic value, and shaping its scholarly study. The present article provides a history of this idea through a close analysis of its primary theorist and most visible spokesperson, Dr. Billy Taylor. It argues that the idea was not a neoclassical and conservative product of the 1980s, but had important roots in the Black Arts imperatives of the later 1960s and early 1970s. It suggests that Taylor initially made the idea work inventively and productively in a variety of contexts, especially through his community arts project Jazzmobile, but that these contexts diverged as his public profile was stretched thin across and beyond the United States. The idea's disintegration into clichéd ubiquity in the mid-1980s then provides a critical perspective on the idea of the “jazz renaissance,” and an opportunity to consider the role of the jazz ambassador in the context of debates about African American intellectuals.

This article examines Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead in dialogue with her speculative reflection upon Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology to read the novel as a radically ambivalent text which exposes an aporia at the core of the Reverend Ames's Christian ethics. This ambivalence appears in the way that Ames's version of his own family history works assiduously to expiate the perceived violence done to ethics by his grandfather's support for abolitionist violence while remaining haunted by the thought that in the unforgiving context of Bleeding Kansas simply to insist upon an absolute distinction between violence on the one hand and ethics and law on the other may be irreconcilable with the workings of good faith and the ends of justice. Reinterpreting Ames's narrative in the light of Jacques Derrida's reflection on the paradoxical structure of ethical responsibility, the article argues that the violence done to Ames's ethical reflection by the memory of the grandfather, John Brown, and the excluded black body reveals the agonistic location of the ethics of abolitionist history between two kinds of violence on the uncertain border between justice and law which defines the ground of every genuinely ethical decision.

This article identifies the humble beard as a device used in twenty-first-century American literature to examine the contemporary condition of American masculinity. Drawing on readings from key writers of post-9/11 fiction, such as John Updike, Moshin Hamid, and Don DeLillo, the article calls for the need to move on from the reductive rendering of the beard as an irrefutable representation of Otherness to see the beard as a device used to explore the construction of masculinities in relation to key issues such as racialization, sexuality and the queering of the Other, and nationhood in the globalized and globalizing arena of the United States. Reading Amy Waldman's nuanced engagement with the beard in The Submission (2011) alongside key works on hegemonic masculinity, whiteness, and globalized masculinities, the article underlines the power of the beard in the contradictions and complexities of a changing American masculinity now performed beyond the physical borders of “the nation” on the global stage.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s a number of British “scholarship boys” traveled to America sponsored by British and American foundations. Their experiences in the United States qualify and complicate existing narratives about upwardly mobile meritocrats. First, Americans regarded these figures in a manner that helped alter their view of themselves. Distinctions that mattered in Britain became less significant in America, though scholarship boys remained shrewd enough to penetrate the veneer of a superficial egalitarianism. National identity became a marker that sidelined residual anxieties about social hierarchy. Second, American prosperity affected the bias against consumerism shared by many British intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century. As professionals supported by government or educational institutions, these visitors differentiated themselves from those in the private sector, which pursued other goals. America exposed scholarship boys to a system that assimilated consumerism without sacrificing professionalism and a commitment to social progress.