American Studies is a quarterly interdisciplinary journal sponsored by the Mid-America American Studies Association, the University of Kansas College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Department of American Studies, and KU Libraries.
American Studies (AMSJ) first appeared in 1959, and has 1,000 current subscribers. In 2005 it merged with American Studies International (ASI), and welcomes submissions with an international perspective. ASI, a journal for American Studies scholars outside the U.S., was published by the American Studies Department at George Washington University for over forty years. Beginning with Vol. 45 (2004), ASI ceased publication as an independent journal, and merged with AMSJ, with the agreement that AMSJ would devote at least one issue a year (or the equivalent) to transnational American Studies scholarship, international American Studies authors, and would maintain a significant showing of scholars outside the U.S. on its editorial board. The “On Teaching” forum, now on the AMSJ blog, originated as an ASI feature. With an editorial staff from a number of areas of study, the journal offers provocative perspectives on a variety of issues. Frequent special sections and special issues create a space for a broad discussion on a single topic. Articles on pedagogy inform the American Studies classroom. The book review section aims at keeping readers conversant with contemporary scholarship. This electronic edition provides free access to the back issues of the journal. The most recent three years are available via print subscription only.
Mission: American Studies encourages interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholarship in U.S. cultures and histories broadly defined. We welcome frameworks of comparative, international, and/or transnational perspectives. The journal is edited by Sherrie Tucker and Randal Maurice Jelks
Operating as usual
We were so excited to see AMSJ authors #LucyCaplan and #SharonVriendRobinette featured in this enriching documentary film 🎥 Marian Anderson | Voice of Freedom | American Experience | PBS
In 1925, 28-year-old Marian Anderson won a New York Philharmonic competition that drew national attention. But most singing opportunities in the U.S. remaine...
“In her music video “Songs to the Dark Virgin,” bass-baritone Derrell Acon transforms into a character inspired by “Noir.” Opening in soft focus, Acon adorns his body in a chunky diamond necklace, gray fabric and a red do-rag, moving gently as he sings the 1941 work composed by Florence Price, with text from Langston Hughes’ poem of the same name.”
Heartbeat Opera’s “Breathing Free” weaves music from Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” spirituals and works by Florence Price, Harry T. Burleigh and Anthony Davis.
#NormaCantu served as our guest co-editor of our Latinx Civil Rights Issue with Valerie Mendoza, wonderful interview
The 74-year-old writer on growing up in Laredo, Texas, and the three family deaths that changed her.
We want to congratulate our AMSJ author #SharonVriendRobinette for her invaluable contribution to this forthcoming documentary on #MarionAnderson from her article “Marian Anderson as Cold Warrior: African Americans, the U.S. Information Agency, and the Marketing of Democratic Capitalism” in issue Vol. 57 No. 4 (2019)
fronteristxs art collective Caption 1: #FreeThemAll action at the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center, July 17, 2020. fronteristxs, White Coats for Black and Indigenous LivesPhoto credit: mk (Monica Kennedy) “We are too close, too close to each other. Breathing the same air. We are trapped.” -Testimony from migrants in ICE detention1 What is protest when we cannot be with one another? [ 1,200 more word ]
https://amsj.blog/2020/11/01/our-resiliency-within-destruction-fronteristxs-artist-collective-and-the-politics-of-protest/
"The lives of incarcerated people and workers in these prisons, jails, and detention centers are being put in grave danger."
CFP from Addressing the Crisis Journal The journal Addressing the Crisis is accepting submissions for Volume 2. The theme is “Politics, Prosperity, and Peril: Pandemic Conjunctures.” Deadline for 2k word submissions is 12.14.20. Send submissions to [email protected]. We encourage submissions that focus on problems, solutions, and dialogues that our most recent as well as past pandemics and global health crises pose. [ 141 more words ]
https://amsj.blog/2020/10/30/cfp-addressing-the-crisis-journal-inspired-by-stuart-hall-deadline-12-14-20/
CFP from Addressing the Crisis Journal The journal Addressing the Crisis is accepting submissions for Volume 2. The theme is “Politics, Prosperity, and Peril: Pandemic Conjunctures.” Dead…
"Giving Form to Black and Brown" by Maurice Rafael Magaña
https://amsj.blog/2020/10/01/giving-form-to-black-and-brown/
“Artists help us envision and enact such liberatory antiracist horizons in the present—if we pay attention.”
"Indian Migrant Solidarities and Futures" by Debadrita Chakraborty.
https://amsj.blog/2020/09/15/indian-migrant-solidarities-and-futures/
The Indian migrant community is perhaps slowly coming to terms with what I am describing as its ‘complicity,’ thanks in large part to first and second generation Indian-Americans like Rahul Dubey, …
Our Shared Planet: The Environment IssueSpecial Issue of American StudiesGuest editors: Hee-Jung Joo (University of Manitoba), Pacharee Sudhinaraset (NYU)Call for Papers Deadline: August 31, 2020 For people of color, the future has never been a given. Whether through the policies and practices of state-sanctioned genocide, enslavement, internment, or forced relocation and migration, racialized communities have survived their worlds ending, over and over. [ 501 more words ]
https://amsj.blog/2020/07/21/2021-special-issue-call-for-papers-our-shared-planet-the-environment-issue/
Our Shared Planet: The Environment IssueSpecial Issue of American StudiesGuest editors: Hee-Jung Joo (University of Manitoba), Pacharee Sudhinaraset (NYU)Call for Papers Deadline: August 31, 2020 F…
by Ashon Crawley Art by Ashon Crawley."dancing in one spot" number 9, mixed media on canvas, 36" x 64" I can’t breathe. Announced again. Return. Repetition. Grief. And what is protest but a solicitation, a plea, a desire? And what is protest but an insistence that otherwise is not only able to be enacted but can materially emerge in, and thus against, the normative world? [ 1,029 more word ]
https://amsj.blog/2020/07/08/protest-prayer/
by Ashon Crawley
by Victor Betts Image: Justina Williams conducting genetics research1 We can agree, I think, that invisible things are not necessarily "not-there"; that a void may be empty, but is not a vacuum. In addition, certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with intentionality and purpose, like neighborhoods that are defined by the population held away from them. [ 1,087 more word ]
https://amsj.blog/2020/07/01/on-teaching-in-the-time-of-covid-19-imagining-futures-through-the-archives/
by Victor Betts
BOXCAR POLITICS: The Hobo in U.S. Culture and Literature, 1869–1956. By John Lennon. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2014. John Lennon’s insightful new work, Boxcar Politics, claims that “hoboing was not just a mode of travel” for U.S. transient workers in the years between the completion of the intercontinental railroad and the signing of the Federal Aid Highway Act, but a “distinct form of resistive politics” (2). [ 606 more words ]
https://amsj.blog/2016/05/16/book-review-boxcar-politics-the-hobo-in-u-s-culture-and-literature-1869-1956/
BOXCAR POLITICS: The Hobo in U.S. Culture and Literature, 1869–1956. By John Lennon. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2014. John Lennon’s insightful new work, Boxcar Politics, claims tha…
Similar to Mark Redondo Villegas’s confession in The Digital Moves the Real, I was at first hesitant to include more technology in my classroom. It is not just that many instructors think students already spend too many hours on social media—as teachers we often find social media to serve as a distraction from our work more than anything else. Nevertheless, initially out of pure necessity, I decided to make Tumblr—one of the fastest growing social media networks—an important space for class discussion. [ 760 more words ]
https://amsj.blog/2016/04/13/on-teaching-with-helis-sikk-expanding-the-classroom-and-strengthening-community-through-tumblr/
Similar to Mark Redondo Villegas’s confession in The Digital Moves the Real, I was at first hesitant to include more technology in my classroom. It is not just that many instructors think students …
American Studies Journal special issue honoring the 70th anniversary of Mendez v. Westminster (1947) Mendez v. Westminister (1947) desegregated California schools and was decided in the California federal courts. Gonzalo Mendez along with other Mexican American parents sued on behalf of their children challenging the status of separate Mexican schools in Orange County. The verdict in favor of the plaintiffs was the first ruling in the country against segregation. [ 325 more words ]
https://amsj.blog/2016/04/25/call-for-papers-american-studies-journal-special-issue-honoring-the-70th-anniversary-of-mendez-v-westminster-1947/
American Studies Journal special issue honoring the 70th anniversary of Mendez v. Westminster (1947) Mendez v. Westminister (1947) desegregated California schools and was decided in the California …
A WORLD MORE CONCRETE: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida. By N.D B. Connolly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2014. With its emphasis on Miami, Florida, this timely work is an important addition to a number of books focusing on the relationships between urban planning and African American communities throughout the twentieth century, among them June Thomas’s 1997 study of postwar Detroit, … [ 610 more words ]
https://amsj.blog/2015/12/15/book-review-a-world-more-concrete-real-estate-and-the-remaking-of-jim-crow-south-florida/
A WORLD MORE CONCRETE: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida. By N.D B. Connolly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2014. With its emphasis on Miami, Florida, this timely work …
BLACK SILENT MAJORITY: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment. By Michael Javen Fortner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2015. Black Silent Majority proffers an alternative explanation for the emergence of mass incarceration in the post–Civil Rights era. Refuting the consensus of the origins of mass incarceration, most popularly averred by legal scholar Michelle Alexander, that white backlash against the black freedom movement spurred mass incarceration, Fortner locates the agency of black New Yorkers in the passage of the 1973 Rockefeller Drug Laws, asserting, basically, that “black-on-black crime,” rather than a reformulated white supremacy, explains the rise of the carceral state. [ 1,018 more word ]
https://amsj.blog/2016/06/13/book-review-black-silent-majority-the-rockefeller-drug-laws-and-the-politics-of-punishment/
BLACK SILENT MAJORITY: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment. By Michael Javen Fortner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2015. Black Silent Majority proffers an al…
THE GREAT WHITE WAY: Race and the Broadway Musical. By Warren Hoffman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2014. Warren Hoffman enthusiastically admits his great love for the Broadway musical on page one of The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical. But despite this rather personal opening gambit, on page two Hoffman takes up critical lenses borrowed from whiteness studies and sets out to detail “the ways in which white identity has been shaped, protected, and upheld by this art form” (3). [ 597 more words ]
https://amsj.blog/2016/05/18/book-review-the-great-white-way-race-and-the-broadway-musical/
THE GREAT WHITE WAY: Race and the Broadway Musical. By Warren Hoffman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2014. Warren Hoffman enthusiastically admits his great love for the Broadway musi…
ON RACE AND MEDICINE: Insider Perspectives. Edited by Richard Garcia. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 2015. The fields of anthropology and sociology, in addition to health sciences, have problematized the topic of race and medicine extensively. The dubious history of medical practice towards non-white bodies has left deep impacts on the manner in which biomedicine still speaks, treats, and cares for individuals who are not white. [ 690 more words ]
https://amsj.blog/2016/07/18/book-review-on-race-and-medicine-insider-perspectives/
ON RACE AND MEDICINE: Insider Perspectives. Edited by Richard Garcia. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 2015. The fields of anthropology and sociology, in addition to health sciences, ha…
OKLAHOMO: Lessons in Unqueering America. By Carol Mason. 2015. Sally Kern is a six-term member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, and she does not like homosexuals. In fact, in 2008, Kern stated publicly that she considers homosexuality to be “the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam.” According to the Sooner lawmaker this is because “studies show that no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted more than, you know, a few decades. [ 572 more words ]
https://amsj.blog/2016/07/29/book-review-oklahomo-lessons-in-unqueering-america/
OKLAHOMO: Lessons in Unqueering America. By Carol Mason. 2015. Sally Kern is a six-term member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, and she does not like homosexuals. In fact, in 2008, …
MAKING CINELANDIA: American Films and Mexican Film Culture Before the Golden Age. By: Laura Isabel Serna. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2014. In the 1920s American films dominated Mexico’s cinemas creating the fear in its cultural elites that Mexico would become a cultural dependent of the United States. In Making Cinelandia American Films and Mexican Film Culture Before the Golden Age… [ 779 more words ]
https://amsj.blog/2016/06/30/book-review-making-cinelandia-american-films-and-mexican-film-culture-before-the-golden-age/
MAKING CINELANDIA: American Films and Mexican Film Culture Before the Golden Age. By: Laura Isabel Serna. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2014. In the 1920s American films dominated Mexico’s cin…
SELECTED LETTERS OF LANGSTON HUGHES. Edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel with Christa Fratantoro. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Publisher. 2015. Assembling a collection of correspondence can be as loose as what Richard Wright once said about anthology-making: get a pot of glue and a pair of sharp scissors, and cut and paste the works together. Or, the process can be exacting, following the model of Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, who crafted… [ 684 more words ]
https://amsj.blog/2017/09/25/book-review/
SELECTED LETTERS OF LANGSTON HUGHES. Edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel with Christa Fratantoro. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Publisher. 2015. Assembling a collection of correspondenc…
The Threat of Colin Kaepernick by: Thabiti Lewis (WSU Vancouver) “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”― James Baldwin Last week marked the 15th anniversary of 911, and America’s most popular sport, football, was supposed to showcase American patriotism. But the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, dampened the celebration as he continued his refusal to stand during the national anthem. [ 2,179 more words ]
https://amsj.blog/2016/09/22/the-threat-of-colin-kaepernick/
The Threat of Colin Kaepernick by: Thabiti Lewis (WSU Vancouver) “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”― James Baldwin Las…
MESSAGE FROM THE EDITORS (May 8, 2018) Dear readers and authors, We recognize that the journal has been tremendously behind in schedule. To those who have queried about your submissions with unsatisfactory response, we are terrible sorry. While we are not making up any excuses for our delays, we would like to assure you that we are working hard to streamline our response process and to catch up with a backlog of submissions. [ 607 more words ]
https://amsj.blog/2018/08/05/message-from-the-editors/
MESSAGE FROM THE EDITORS (May 8, 2018) Dear readers and authors, We recognize that the journal has been tremendously behind in schedule. To those who have queried about your submissions with unsati…
If you are interested in reviewing a book from the list below for the American Studies journal, please contact Elizabeth Wilhelm at [email protected]. Seriously, contact her now. We need reviewers and this is an amazing list of books! Brown Beauty by Laila Haidarali Activist New York by Steven H. Jaffe Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas [ 330 more words ]
https://amsj.blog/2017/09/28/this-weeks-top-ten-newest-books-available-for-review/
If you are interested in reviewing a book from the list below for the American Studies journal, please contact Elizabeth Wilhelm at [email protected]. Seriously, contact her now. We need reviewers a…
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