American Studies

‘Data Imaginary’ is about the co-evolution of the literary and of data around the middle of the long nineteenth century. It argues that, during romanticism, US culture negotiated the outlines of the literary – what literature is, what literary value consists of, and what literature can do – in relation to the outlines of another representational project that was gaining sharper contours and a stronger foothold in public perception at the time: data. As the young nation was searching for a national literature of its own, data and data-driven practices formed an important foil, a conceptual resource to articulate the desire for a new, democratic literature.

Revisiting formative decades of US literary self-perception through the conceptual lens of data, this book rethinks the representative project of transcendentalism, the catalog poetry of Walt Whitman, the formal experimentation of abolitionist literature, and the evolution of American (literary) studies.

This volume of original essays presents an overview of Popular Culture Studies as an ever-growing branch of American Studies while also reflecting the critical debates driving the field toward a more nuanced approach to contemporary culture more generally. Thus, many of the essays included take fresh perspectives on Black American culture, feminism, multiculturalism, and queer studies, among others, but they also provide critical updates on the global impact of U.S. American popular culture.

If an understanding of U.S. Culture as Popular Culture in its national and international dimensions is one of the aims behind this publication, another is to conceive of cultural formations against the backdrop of shifting media environments. Placed alongside more traditional media such as literature and film, more recent phenomena including reality television, internet memes, and video games add considerable relevance to the critical appreciation of culture in the twenty-first century.

“Through the Bars of My Memory” investigates how prison experiences are remembered and constructed in 40 autobiographical prison texts published during the prison movement of the 1970s and 1980s. It explores how the autobiographers narratively construct their identities in the process of remembering their prison experiences and how the texts position themselves to the prison movement via these identity constructions.

The study demonstrates how the autobiographical texts negotiate the protagonist’s identity to be perceived as a legitimate voice in the prison movement and as a rightful subject of reform efforts thereby participating in the struggles raging over the future of the prison system during that time. The analysis focuses on the construction of collective identification, the negotiation of the label of perpetrator and the construction of victimhood, and the positioning towards rehabilitation through the construction of identity transformation processes.

Participation is a core value of the U.S.-American concept of the nation. The promise of participation encompasses full and equal access to participate in political, social, cultural, religious, and economic activities. At the same time, exclusion from social participation has been salient in the history of the U.S., and recently even a decline in participation alongside growing polarization can be observed. The notion of participation, however, is more comprehensive than such a narrow political perspective may suggest. Forms of literary production and reception can likewise be understood as social practices of participation.

This volume sheds light on how participation has been debated in contemporary Americanist scholarship. The papers included explore the idea of participation beyond its function as a political principle in a democratic nation-state, which will help to understand in more detail the diverse relationships between the literary, the cultural, and the political.

With surges of authoritarian movements in both Europe and the United States, political education is a prominent and urgent topic. Given the long-held assumption in the United States that political education is not only, perhaps not even primarily, about theories of governance but rather about practices, habits, and a way of living together – in other words: a phenomenon of culture – the scholarship collected in this volume looks at novels and essays, caricatures and comics, zines and TV series, podcasts and LPs to examine political issues their creators wanted to educate their audience about. These include, for instance, copyright law, trade unions and economic mechanisms, anti-racism, questions of leadership, and climate change.

What stands out is the relative insignificance of the nation state and perhaps democracy as useful frameworks; instead, the focus is on popular media, on contributing to building cultural memories, and frequently on pedagogy itself.