Occasional Papers

18
Playing for Keeps: The Diggers, Life-Acting and Guerrilla Theater in San Francisco’s Psychedelic ‘60s

by Sean Steele

The Diggers, a subversive subset of the broader American counterculture in San Francisco in the 1960s, stood for a unique form of anarchist theater. They presented a form of performance art they referred to as life-acting the game of freedom which was itself a form of what they dubbed guerrilla theater. Drawing on Hakim Bey’s concept of the temporary autonomous zone, Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, and Victor Turner’s idea of anti-structure, the essay examines the Diggers as a unique element within the American counterculture that deserves a critical reappraisal. Analysis of central Digger events and projects provides a view of their distinct perspective, one that critically engages with the politically motivated New Left (including the antiwar and Berkeley Free Speech movements) and spiritually motivated hippies (including unofficial leaders like Timothy Leary). The tactics of guerrilla theater were meant to reveal the contingency of social roles and encourage an anarchistic form of individual responsibility. Digger events provide strategies for subverting normative social structures while providing spaces for the exploration of alternate identities and community structures.

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17
Liquid Genealogy: Choice, Race, and Neoliberal Subjectivity in DNA Ancestry Advertising

by Emma Jacobs

How does commercial DNA ancestry testing navigate the apparently conflicting ideologies of individual freedom and genealogical determinism? By exploring the cultural politics of this vast and growing industry and analyzing video advertisements by 23andMe and Ancestry.com, two key figures emerge in these adverts: the unexpectedly “not-quite-white” individual and the maximally “mixed-race” individual. Represented as the “ideal” subjects of the genealogical quest, they are able to access and instrumentalize ancestral self-knowledge in a way that amplifies, rather than impinges on, their powers of personal and consumer agency. Through the cultural capital that stems from their range of “ethnic options” and their “post-authentic” claim to histories of injury, they appear as the masters of a fluid, all-purpose, commercially driven relationship to their own ancestral identity: a stance that the paper terms liquid genealogy, after Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity. However, this representation co-opts and romanticizes often-violent histories, leverages a depoliticized identity politics, and grossly misrepresents real-world race relations.

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16
Bob Dole and the Armenian Genocide. From Dr. K to Mr. Byrd

by Julien Zarifian

During his long political career, Bob Dole was a loyal friend of the Armenian American community and a consistent supporter of the recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the United States. His attachment to this cause stemmed from his special relationship with an Armenian American surgeon, Dr. Hampar Kelikian, who gave new meaning to Dole’s life after he returned from World War II severely handicapped. It led him to defend Armenia and the Armenian people in Congress and to fight for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the United States (which proved reluctant to antagonize Turkey, its NATO ally). In 1990, Dole and Armenian activists led a long and tough battle in the Senate to pass Senate Joint Resolution 212 (S. J. Res. 212), a resolution recognizing the Genocide. They faced strong opposition from Turkey, the Executive branch, and Robert Byrd, the President Pro Tempore of the Senate. The resolution was eventually rejected. This article analyzes Dole’s strong relationship with the Armenians and his struggle to obtain the recognition of the Genocide in Congress. It focuses on Dole and Byrd, and it discusses how the Senate operated, Congress-Executive relations, and the significance of lobbying.

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15
The Fulbright Experience of Visiting Scholars from Post-Communist China: A Qualitative Study and a Critical Evaluation

by Meirong Fu

This article presents a qualitative study of Chinese scholars’ Fulbright experiences in the United States and factors influencing the outcomes, based on interviews with 32 Chinese professors who were visiting Fulbright scholars during the period between 2001 and 2012. The purpose of the study is to shed some light on US public diplomacy programs to suggest improvements for their efficacy benefitting all parties concerned, and ultimately to further relations between the US and the rest of the world.

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14
Managing One’s Station: Robert Roberts and the Professionalizing of Domestic Service

by Carolyn R. Maibor

The so-called ‘servant problem’ was a frequent topic of both public and private conversation in the mid-nineteenth century in the United States. Letters and private journals as well as household guidebooks and periodicals are filled with complaints and advice on how to manage servants. Few contributors to the discussion, however, were servants themselves. Of the few who wrote publicly about their experiences, most were white and from middle-class backgrounds and therefore had a greater sense of security and freedom. Yet these writers have a remarkable predecessor who argues for professionalization as a solution back in 1827. That he was an African American man and possibly a former slave make his contribution particularly noteworthy, but so, too, should his methodical style of household management and clever, even subversive communication of his ideas.

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13
Having it all and “The Great White House” of Matcham in Henry James’s Last Novels

by Priscilla Roberts

This paper explores the significance of the mansion of Matcham in Henry James’s two final major novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1905). In many ways, these works represent variations on a theme, the first a tragedy, the second—especially if one accepts one classic definition of comedy as tragedy in which nobody dies—a comedy. In each, two impecunious lovers who cannot afford to marry each other encounter the possibility of massively improving their own lives by their ability to attract and charm the possessors of colossal American wealth. In each case, the fortunes involved prove a profound source of danger to their American owners and to those who would exploit them, distorting the lives of everyone involved. And in each story, the same exclusive English country house—dazzlingly charming, luxurious, even sybaritic, and ultimately sinister—is the fulcrum of the plot.

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12
Fay Chong and Andrew Chinn: Asian Masters of American Art

by James W. Ellis

Fay Chong and Andrew Chinn were Asian American artists who made major contributions to the two most important movements in American art between 1930 and 1960—Regionalism and Abstract Expressionism. Today, however, art historians and the general public have largely forgotten them. Chong and Chinn worked in close collaboration during the 1930s and 1940s and invented a new watercolor style: using Chinese ink painting techniques and evocative calligraphic poetry to portray everyday subjects from the Western United States.

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11
American Berlin Across the Last Century

by Joshua Parker

Over the past century, many studies have been devoted to American literature set in Europe and its capitals. Scholars including D. E. Barclay and E. Glaser-Schmidt, Hans-Jürgen Diller, Hanspeter Dörfel, Elisa Edwards, Peter Freese, Walter Kühnel, Henry Cord Meyer, Martin Meyer, Georg Schmundt-Thomas, and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz have focused on Germany’s image in the American imagination, either literary or from a general standpoint of comparative imagology. Yet despite a marked increase in American fiction treating Berlin since its first designation as Germany’s capital (and an overwhelming increase in the past twenty years), few studies have targeted Berlin itself as a setting or image in American literature and popular consciousness. Those which have are almost limited to Jörg Helbig’s very general collection Welcome to Berlin: Das Image Berlins in der englischprachigen Welt von 1700 bis heute and to Christine Gerhardt’s very specific “‘What was left of Berlin looked bleaker every day’: Berlin, Race, and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature.” This paper surveys trends in the development of American literature set in the German capital from around 1900 to the present.

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10
Rape as Spectator Sport and Creepshot Entertainment: Social Media and the Valorization of Lack of Consent

by Kelly Oliver

Lack of consent is valorized within popular culture to the point that sexual assault has become a spectator sport and creepshot entertainment on social media. Indeed, the valorization of nonconsensual sex has reached the extreme where sex with unconscious girls, especially accompanied by photographs as trophies, has become a goal of some boys and men.

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09
The American Century and Its Evangelical Christian Fiction Legacy

by Marisa Ronan

Marisa Ronan investigates how the ideology of the “American Century” became enmeshed in the emergence of a distinct evangelical Christian fiction genre. By positioning the End Times narrative within an identifiably American experience, evangelicals sought to locate America’s destiny within a biblically ordained narrative of American Exceptionalism that drew heavily upon the geopolitical developments of the time. The article explores the origins of the “American Century” as a concept, from its earliest appearance in Henry R. Luce’s 1941 editorial, to how it became, for evangelical writers and theologians, a useful entry point into the political sphere and a way to encode their writing with an ever increasing sense of urgency. In focusing on the writings of Frank Peretti, Tim LaHaye, and Jerry Jenkins, Ronan seeks to establish how the novels that found greatest popular success were those which were fully entrenched in the “American Century” narrative.

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07
Western History as (Post-)Colonial Studies?

by Brigitte Georgi-Findlay

In their annual meeting in February 2010, the historians in the German Association for American Studies included a section on “American History from the Perspective of Postcolonial Studies.” The issues addressed in their call for papers reminded me of the debates among Western historians around the writing of a “New Western History.” This paper, which was presented within that section in an earlier version, raises the question how American history has addressed and integrated concerns and changes of perspective that have also informed postcolonial studies. As I will try to show, the impulses that propelled Western history in recent years have not (at least not primarily) come from postcolonial theory but from issues within the field and within American culture. The question is whether historiography could profit from considering some of the theoretical issues within postcolonial studies, or rather: how can history and textual studies meet?

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06
Mark Twain’s Relevance Today

by Gary Scharnhorst (University of New Mexico)

From the earliest stage of his writing career, Mark Twain was more than a literary comedian. From the first, his humor had a satirical and sometimes even a bitter edge, and throughout his life he repeatedly ridiculed the foolishness and foibles of the “damned human race.” His humor was in fact the basis of his appeal across classes, races, and nationalities. His social satire is the basis of his relevance today. The secret of his success as a humorist, he insisted, was that everything he wrote “had a serious philosophy or truth as its basis. I would not write a humorous work merely to be funny.” If Twain was an American icon, he was also an iconoclast.

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05
“Making America”: On A New Literary History of America*

by Werner Sollors (Harvard University)

The number of people who have read a single literary history from cover to cover may be smaller than the number of literary histories that have been published. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such histories became popular, providing information about the lives, works, reception, and influence of single authors, facts that were strung together chronologically in the form of long narratives that employed a limited number of available story lines, such as growth or decline, a golden age, a transitional period or a renaissance, lonely figures and literary movements, avant-garde and epigonal works, major and emergent voices, or currents and eddies coming together to form a main stream. Such reference works have been less often read than consulted by students who wanted to catch a quick glimpse of authors, works, movements, or periods in their historical contexts.

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