Film has been an integral part of the propaganda war fought between the United States and North Korea over the past decade. The international controversy surrounding the Hollywood comedy The Interview in 2014 vividly demonstrated this and, in the process, drew attention to hidden dimensions of the US state security–entertainment complex in the early twenty-first century. Using the emails leaked courtesy of the Sony hack of late 2014, this article explores the Interview affair in detail, on the one hand revealing the close links between Sony executives and US foreign-policy advisers and on the other explaining the difficulties studios face when trying to balance commercial and political imperatives in a global market.

This essay examines an overlooked dimension of the American literary preoccupation with slavery since the 1970s – the mass-market genre of alternate histories of the Civil War that began to proliferate after the end of the civil rights movement. Focussing on the genre's unique blend of historical realism and counterfactual speculation, the essay argues that these novels turn to the Civil War in order to reevaluate the trajectory of US racial history and to reckon with the dramatic racial realignments of the post-civil rights period.

In modern life, we encounter stories of people with a frequency unfathomable even twenty years ago. In American culture, the lives of celebrities, in particular, have proven the dominant form of mainstream life-texts from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. Dynamic, volatile and open-ended, celebrity lives are useful for examining the renegotiation and revision of biographical narratives within culture over time. In this article, I will use the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to analyze a specific life-story's flow through culture. Focussing upon the intersections between multiple stories in a given historical moment, this article will demonstrate the revision such intersections prompt and the ways in which those revisions reverberate through subsequent scholarship. The article will argue that these narrative corruptions should be accounted for when we use stories of lives as a mode of cultural analysis.

Models – economic, mathematical, toys, manikins – are ubiquitous. This article probes one model, the Stettheimer doll's house, in order to understand all models better. The Stettheimers, three wealthy unmarried sisters living in New York in the early the twentieth century, attracted a remarkable melange of Camp artists and writers, identified by Arthur Danto as “the American Bloomsbury.” The Stettheimers were involved in many of New York's happenings, including the Harlem Renaissance and the innovative stage productions of Gertrude Stein. Androgyny, excess, racial mixing and theatricality flourished in the Stettheimer milieu. Carrie Stettheimer's doll's house, now housed in the Museum of the City of New York, captured this life. I consider this model for two related purposes. First, and more narrowly, I document the various effects this eccentric doll's house had on the artistic production of those in its vicinity, most notably on the novels of her sister Ettie and on the paintings both of her sister Florine and Marcel Duchamp. Second, I use the evidence of the doll's house's affect to discuss the agency of models in general.

This essay examines three “American” magazines published in mid-nineteenth-century London: the American Miscellany (1839–40), the Great Western (1842), and the American Magazine (1851–52). These magazines staged a fantasy of a unified, national and white American culture that regional print cultures and sectional tensions over slavery rendered impossible within the United States itself. They fashioned this fantasy through dialogue with Yankee comedy (an American form constructed through transatlantic circulation); through the theatricality, materiality and composite form of the magazine; and by transforming regional texts into national culture through transatlantic reprinting. Through histories of these magazines, this essay theorizes magazine reprinting as performance, arguing that performance theory helps to conceptualize transatlantic reprinting and its cultural work, and to understand why these magazines ultimately failed as organs of national culture. Additionally, it suggests that magazines published outside the United States illuminate the relationship between periodical circulation and the development of American nationhood in the antebellum era.

Portraits of sympathizers recur across American literature, from nineteenth-century narratives by Edward Everett Hale Jr., Loreta Velazquez, and Walt Whitman to Viet Thanh Nguyen's twenty-first-century novel. Together, their texts elucidate why this understudied trope remains provocative. Whereas nineteenth-century literature often imagines how sympathy fosters national cohesion, feeling for the enemy threatens such stability and prompts government efforts to regulate sentiment. Sympathizers may perform loyalty to claim the authority associated with white masculinity. Yet they also gain power by confessing to criminal sentiments. This figure thus embodies fantasies of rebellion, fears of national dissolution, and the state's affective power.

In the cinema of Joel and Ethan Coen, contemporary America is depicted as an incoherent space in which traditional beliefs constantly collide with the new world order. Shaped by the erosion of commonly accepted values and the ubiquitous presence of the media and advertisements, this hybrid America is a world of commerce, consumption, and economic plight. While its cities are plagued by segregation, outbursts of casual violence undermine the myth of an unspoiled life in the countryside. Illustrating postmodern culture's preference for the periphery versus the center, the movies of the Coen brothers find a glimmer of morality remaining on the margin of society. Unimposing and compassionate characters such as the pregnant small-town detective in Fargo or the naive yet brilliant protagonist of The Hudsucker Proxy personify an idealistic, innocent America that is about to be displaced by selfish greed. Focusing on Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and The Man Who Wasn't There, my essay argues that the Coens’ visual playfulness, and their tendency to mine various cinematic genres, serve to emphasize their scathing critique of the American victory narrative.

When the Rev. Pierce Connelly denounced Protestantism and converted to Catholicism in 1835, he inadvertently started a small newspaper war among the burgeoning religious press in America. While Catholic periodicals celebrated their newest addition in print, Protestant newspapermen were scandalized. They worried about how the clerical husband's conversion might affect his marital life should he pursue ordination in the Catholic Church. Soon, the Connellys dissolved their marriage in Rome and moved to England, where Pierce became a priest, and his wife Cornelia entered a convent. When, thirteen years later, Pierce reconverted and sued Cornelia “for the restoration of conjugal rights” in an English court, the case became an international sensation – with both British and American newspapers covering the developments and using the saga to comment on larger religious and political issues of their time. The two scandals demonstrate how the transatlantic press debated contested global concerns about the limits of religious freedom, the changing nature of marriage, church–state relations, and international law.

Situating Edith Wharton in the context of America's accelerating petro-culture, this essay argues that her novels critique a society that takes for granted high-volume, nonrenewable energy, and specifically revolutionary new kinds of energy: petroleum, natural gas, and the fossil-fueled power stations necessary for the large-scale, continuous production of electricity. Attention to the idiom of energy in The House of Mirth and its mirror text, The Custom of the Country, along with Ida Tarbell's History of Standard Oil and Theodore Roosevelt's conservationism, sheds new light on assumptions about moral agency, personal freedom, changing modes of thought, and the environment between 1880 and World War I. The essay shows how Wharton's allegorical treatment of Lily Bart and Undine Spragg anticipates the notion of externalities or consequences of industrial activities that affect outside parties but are not reflected in the cost of production.

In this paper we analyse one particular interaction: the development of a self-consciously “Eastern”-sounding music within Western pop music. We understand this in the context of several “journeys to the East”: some virtual (the interest in oriental religions, the adoption of Eastern musical forms) and some real (the journeys taken to the East by some musicians and by thousands of young people). We will consider, first, the milieu within which these changes took place, and then analyse the methods, scale and motivations of those Western artists who took inspiration from Eastern, mainly Indian, music in the 1960s and 1970s to create what became known as “raga rock.” Our aim is to demonstrate that these developments added up to a “neo-orientalism”: resembling the older, imperial orientalism in its tendency to simplify and romanticize the East, but different from it in the passionate sincerity of its admiration for certain Eastern forms, which were taken to the point of challenging dominant cultural and even political norms within the West.

To reconsider the affective turn in American literary studies, this essay reads Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), with reference to “Benito Cereno” (1855) and The Confidence-Man (1857), as an anti-affect story. By shedding light on silent characters in these works – Bartleby, Babo, and Black Guinea – it argues that Melville endeavors to adumbrate, not articulate, their private interiorities through language. Calling the inner recesses of his silent characters “secret emotions,” Melville probes into the boundaries between the effable and the ineffable by testing the limits of literary language. If “affect” refers to the kind of emotion that eludes signification through language, reading Melville in this manner encourages a reappraisal of the relationship between affect as a non-linguistic emotion and literature as a linguistic construct.

This article reassesses the so-called “Radical Right,” a political phenomenon that emerged in the early 1960s and was especially associated with a controversial conservative anticommunism. The article argues that the National Education Program (NEP), which was founded in Arkansas in 1943, made an important and unheralded contribution to the Radical Right and the consequential activism it stimulated in pockets of the South and Southwest. The article also, however, argues that the Radical Right ultimately made a less significant contribution to the subsequent resurgence of conservatism than has often been suggested. Conventional wisdom maintains that it aligned religious, economic, and racial concerns under the umbrella of anticommunism and thereby fostered a distinctly modern conservatism; the NEP demonstrates that these concerns were not as disparate or marginal prior to the 1960s as this narrative assumes. The Radical Right's fixation with communist subversion also often diluted efforts to promote conservative principles – the NEP became less focussed on advancing ideological principles during this period. After the mid-1950s, moreover, the declining legitimacy of McCarthyite politics outwith parts of the South and Southwest undermined the NEP's wider efforts, precipitated the organization's terminal decline, and ensured that the Radical Right created problems for the broader conservative movement.

This article sheds light on the stormy few months that James Schlesinger was CIA director. Schlesinger ranks as the least popular director in CIA history; indeed, he had to install a CCTV camera opposite his official portrait at Langley headquarters because of concerns it would be vandalized by disgruntled staff. Conventional wisdom dictates that he was disliked because he commissioned the “Family Jewels,” the notorious list of CIA dirty tricks which, when leaked in the mid-1970s, led to unprecedented public scrutiny of the agency. Using interviews with retired intelligence officers, spy memoirs, and recently declassified records, including Schlesinger's private papers, this article argues that the hatred went much deeper. A Nixon loyalist, Schlesinger was unpopular because he challenged the culture of the CIA and attempted to make the agency more of an obedient instrument of presidential power and policy. The so-called “Schlesinger Purge” – the controversial decision to fire nearly 7 percent of the CIA's workforce, especially from the Directorate of Operations – underscored this cultural attack. The speed and brutality of the change programme resulted in organizational miasma, leaving staff demoralized and with no means to fight back. The article also examines the consequences of the dislike toward him.

This article analyzes representations of the American West in The Nation magazine during the expansionist era of the 1870s. It traces an arc of growing anxiety regarding three central issues associated with western settlement and development: institutional scientific exploration, land policy, and Indian policy. Focussing primarily on the decade in which the magazine's peak circulation and, presumably, influence coincided with important developments regarding the aforementioned issues, the essay argues that The Nation’s coverage of the West, produced and circulated within a privileged and circumscribed social sphere and deeply inflected by the priorities of capital, provides counterpoint to widely shared optimism regarding the development of the region that stood as an emblem of the nation's future.

R. P.Warren's play about Huey Long, Proud Flesh (1937–39), is not a provisional draft of All the King's Men (1946) but a distinct work in its own right. Its conservative criticism of New Deal “common-man-ism” makes it unusual in the politicized literature of the 1930s. At the core of the play is a political symbolism of the flesh, which Warren derives from Shakespeare's representation of the Tudor doctrine of the king's two bodies. Governor Strong embodies the people through his second or immortal body, a dictatorial flesh that Warren resists by trying to articulate an existential “definition” of the self.

Beginning with Talal Asad's (2007) claim that torture is a hermeneutic, this article investigates the ongoing relationship between torture and the US university's primary ways of making meaning about racialized difference. The Stanford prison experiment is routinely referenced as a seminal study revealing why people engage in torture. Through a close reading of Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, the major account of the SPE, I raise concerns about how torture is used to enable moral development and to promote an understanding of difference as a “problem” to be managed by institutionalized diversity projects.

J. H. Wilkins, an African American railroad porter for the Pullman Company, was killed while on duty in April 1930. How he met his death has never been fully determined, but the Pullman Company's investigation file exposes the dangerous and racialized emotional terrain that porters navigated daily on their journeys across the US. By examining Wilkins's death, and the work of Pullman porters more broadly, this article makes the case that white control of black emotions in occupational and public spaces was a significant characteristic of the Jim Crow era, and demands further scholarly attention.

This paper examines the gendered aspects of consumer waste, dirt, and domestic mess in three early novels by Alison Lurie – Love and Friendship (1962), The Nowhere City (1965), and The War between the Tates (1974), set in 1969 – which I argue provide an incisive account of the transformation of gender relations over the course of the 1950s and 1960s. By focussing on the signifying potential of material objects in these texts, I seek to demonstrate Lurie's relevance to the “thingly turn” in literary criticism, to reignite interest in an author whose work has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, and to instigate a wider discussion of waste in her work as a whole, where it in fact proliferates. In broader terms, I hope to complicate existing scholarship on waste in literature (including my own in this area to date), which remains almost exclusively focussed on male authors.

The appropriation of Indigenous cultures has sparked multiple controversies in the United States over the past decade. This phenomenon is not new, however. This article examines New York Times reporting on Native American art and commodities to demonstrate how trends in consuming “Indian” products contributed to the assimilationist federal Indian policy of termination, between 1950 and 1970. In this period the consumption of items perceived as “Indian” shifted from an elite art collectors’ activity to a widespread fashion trend. Nevertheless, Times reporting shows that throughout this era shopping for “Indian” items subsumed Indigenous cultures into the imagined unity of a national American identity.