This essay examines reactionary, countersubversive fictions produced in the context of two conspiracy theories in the United States: the Illuminati crisis (1798–1800) and Pizzagate (2016–17). The author suggests that both cases emblematize a pornotropic aesthetic, a racialized sadomasochism that recurs across United States culture. Building on the work of Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye, Jennifer Christine Nash, and others, this essay argues that observers should understand countersubversive political reaction as an aesthetic project, a pornotropic fantasy that distorts underlying conditions of racial subjection. In the context of a resurgent far right that describes its enemies as “cuckolds” and frequently deploys the tropes of highly racialized pornography, this essay suggests that we might find the deep origins of pornographic, reactionary paranoia in the eighteenth century. It suggests, moreover, that understanding and contesting the underlying conditions of racial subjection require that scholars consider the power of pornotropic, countersubversive aesthetics to bring pleasure, to move people, and to order the world.

This article examines 1960s student power debates at Tennessee universities. It makes three main arguments. First, student protests over in loco parentis restrictions fit into an emerging student demand for autonomy more broadly, even in a politically and culturally conservative state like Tennessee. Second, these student power debates complicate the 1960s movements declension narrative, since Tennessee student activism peaked in 1970. Third, though black and white students both demanded greater personal autonomy, continued racial inequities on and off Tennessee campuses rendered their experiences distinct.

In the early years of the Cold War, as universities expelled scholars with ties to the Communist Party, it became an article of faith among conservatives that the only targets of an ideological purge were people like themselves. William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, the most important exponent of this view, argued that “academic freedom” was a “superstition” designed to promote liberal indoctrination. Buckley's work tweaked, and mainstreamed, claims that a subversive conspiracy had overtaken the nation's schools and colleges. The correspondence the book generated demonstrates how attacks on academic freedom, and claims of victimhood, mobilized the postwar right.

This article compares the ways Michael Herr in Dispatches (1977) and Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger in Restrepo (2010) represent American soldiers in the context of military professionalization following the establishment of the AVF. These works are seminal landmarks of the grunt's-eye-view genre, but they produce the average soldier's subjectivity and identity very differently and, in turn, foster different relationships between their American audiences and this figure. Herr, I argue, represents the “grunts” of Vietnam as we all while Restrepo’s directors portray the Army platoon in Afghanistan as a collective who?. I show how the subtle aesthetic changes to documenting the average infantryman reflect and enforce the logics of professionalization as well as the intensifying distance between the American public and those who fight America's wars.

This essay offers close readings of films by the independent US directors Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant with a particular focus on their slow-paced representation of everyday life. Building on the work of Henri Lefebvre, the author proposes that so-called “slow cinema” can be read not simply as an aesthetic choice, but as an alternative and potentially oppositional rhythm in the era of fast capitalism.

In 2016, racist, patriarchal rhetoric dominated the political landscape of the United States. As a response, activist artist Richard Lou of Memphis, Tennessee created a video piece as part of his series ReCovering Memphis titled ReContexting Bodies. In the artwork, Lou performs whiteness by re-creating photographs and reciting words of historic Civil War leaders Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest and President of the Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis. With his racialized body, Lou confronts the foundations of white supremacy in the United States American South. ReContexting Bodies examines how two historic identities of southern masculinity shape contemporary biases.