European Journal of American Culture - Volume 34, Issue 1, 2015

Modern historiography emphasizes the importance of black nationalism in an ongoing ‘long’ civil rights movement, particularly during the Garvey and Black Power eras in the 1920s and 1960s. While not as prominent as these movements, this article shows that nationalism did not disappear during the 1930s. This is demonstrated by a case-study of the Harlem Labor Union (HLU), a black-only protest group formed out of remnants of the Garvey movement in 1935. Accused of being racketeers by opponents, this article finds that the HLU gained a hearing among the wider Harlem community through their willingness to rail against racist practices of white-dominated trade unions and to take the fight for jobs ‘onto the street’. A defining characteristic of the HLU was its fierce rejection of the interracial unionism espoused by newly vocal pro-union leaders, but the group achieved only patchy results on their own. Some attempts were made in later years to participate in broader protest coalitions. The fractious interactions with other organizations that resulted highlighted broader difficulties sustaining coordinated protests against discrimination in employment in this period. Consequently, the HLU’s story problematizes the ‘long’ thesis’ argument that black protest underwent a successful shift to the left during the New Deal era.

This article traces the relationship among three ubiquitous critical terms and the ostensibly disparate concepts they encompass: containment, intervention and the male gaze. Though these terms became prevalent late in the twentieth century, when they began to pervade ‘literary theory’, my article demonstrates how James Baldwin’s 1956 novel, Giovanni’s Room, proleptically lays the ground work for the interplay among these concepts and how Baldwin remained preoccupied both avant la lettre and throughout his career, as a novelist, critic and polemicist, with many of the questions that late twentieth-century-intellectuals, literary theorists, feminist critics addressed, including Salman Rushdie, Fredric Jameson, Laura Mulvey, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Cornel West and John Gaddis. In providing a context for the evolution of these preoccupations, this argument also highlights some of Baldwin’s formative influences and connections among such contemporaries of his as Norman Mailer, Wilhelm Reich and Lionel Trilling.

American Beauty (Mendes, 1999) was an outstanding commercial and critical success at the turn of the millennium, generating considerable media and eventually scholarly attention. In the various critical approaches to the film, some attention has been given to its portrayal of erotic fantasy, yet a related element that has not been dealt with, though occasionally noted, is its conspicuous depictions of, and references to, physical autoeroticism. Observing a certain uneasiness towards discussions of the subject, this article argues that the foregrounding of masturbation, far from being incidental prurience, reflected and consolidated a significant cultural movement. While in part it was an outgrowth of a liberalization of discourses around sex, a closer examination of American Beauty in its cultural–historical context reveals its connection to important neo-liberal changes in the concept of the individual self and its relationship to society. Indeed, it is associated within the film itself to changes in labour economic and familial relations around that time which inform the United States today. Neither denouncing nor promoting the portrayal of masturbation, the article ultimately seeks to demonstrate the utility and significance of bringing the discussion of embodied forms of autoerotic pleasure more thoroughly into cultural analysis.

Vigilantism is a recurring theme in superhero narratives where, objectively speaking, all superheroes are vigilantes. Nevertheless, the fictional nature of superheroes allows one to contemplate the ideological grey area and connotations of vigilante. This article will focus on three specific ‘human’ superheroes who display a strong brand identity in order to examine the theme of vigilantism in connection with brand identity and brand management so as to display the oscillating power struggle between individual and the collective, between the private corporate sector and government power. Drawing on the position of power from which one speaks or is prompted to speak, as advocated by Michel Foucault, as well as the practices of brand management and postmodern marketing as advocated by Adam Arvidsson, this article views vigilantism as occupying an ideological grey area due to the brand presence of the superheroes, thus displaying a convoluted relationship between a brand governing authority and a government authority. The question at hand is whether the character wants to be perceived as a vigilante due to a context he has set, or is deemed as such, because a different authority cannot infiltrate said context so as to control and conform him to the opposite effect.

Twenty-first-century Fiction: A Critical Introduction, Peter Boxall (2013) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 282 pp., (pbk) £15.99; ISBN-13: 9780521187299 (hbk) £45

The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia, Matthew Delmont (2012) Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, xi, 294 pp., ISBN: 9780520272088 (pbk) $29.95