European Journal of American Culture - Volume 29, Issue 1, 2010

This article focuses on the themes of self and selfhood raised in the 2008 film Revolutionary Road and the 1961 novel of the same name. These texts, I suggest, demonstrate how American culture has been performing a double movement since World War II, simultaneously appealing to an essential, stable notion of the self while ingraining a sense of emptiness and incompleteness in individuals. Using Judith Butler's concept of performativity as its main theoretical framework, the article approaches Revolutionary Road from three angles. First, it explores the transformation of the American aesthetic by focusing on the setting in which the plot takes place the suburbs of New York in the 1950s. Second, the article investigates the sweeping changes that occurred in the workplace during this period, focusing mainly on the autonomous Marxists' concept of virtuosic and immaterial labour. Finally, the article considers Lacan's theory of desire as it relates to the domestic sphere. The article concludes by arguing that these texts represent a subtle revolution in American thought that encourages readers and audiences to embrace the performative nature of the self rather than attempting to satisfy what Cushman calls the empty self, which can never be satisfied.

In this article I suggest that Don DeLillo's 1988 novel about the assassination of J.F.K., Libra, may be read as an example of what the author, elsewhere in his corpus, labels latent history. Exploring this concept provides a framework for analysing both the metatextual dynamics of the novel, how it is situated in the discourse surrounding the event, and also of course the internal thematics of the novel, in particular its sleight of hand with regard to determinism, its astrological paranoia and its implications for cause and effect. I argue that the novel functions in a dialogic relationship with the official history of the case, the Warren Report, being a kind of fictional supplement to it. Indeed, I conclude by suggesting that the novel highlights the importance of stories to history, so that the voice of the fiction writer of Libra, DeLillo, overpowers that of the historian in the book, Nicholas Branch.

This article offers an interpretive reading of the Anglo-American folk music revival, from its post-war roots to the early 1960s. The nature and development of the revival, it argues, can be illuminated by the multifaceted concept of cosmopolitanism, a property rarely associated with such expressive forms. Through a study of the relationship between two folk music promoters, American Alan Lomax and Anglo-Scot Ewan MacColl, the article shows how folk, a genre associated with local or national identities, lent itself to transnational elaboration after World War II, and why that process in turn fostered tensions within the revival. These tensions, it concludes, transformed folk's cosmopolitanism and marginalized Lomax and MacColl; an appreciation of them throws new light on folk music and on the meaning of Bob Dylan's emergence from the revival in the early 1960s.

Calls for reform in the wake of the 1919 Chicago race riot came to centre on the perceived need for greater order and oversight in the relations between the black and white residents of the city. This article examines the city's official response to the racial violence of 1919, which took the form of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations and its 1922 report, The Negro in Chicago. Demand for the interracial commission emanated from both progressive reformers and official political channels but many among Chicago's African American population resisted the undemocratic and segregationist implications of such a deliberating body. I assess the nature of the political ideas animating the commission's membership and the intellectual sustenance provided by its primary researcher, Charles S. Johnson, and his mentor, Robert E. Park. I argue that the report not only institutionalized Jim Crow in 1920s Chicago but by giving official sanction to racial marking, it embedded racial categorizations in the newly emerging conceptions of citizenship in the modern city.