<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><rss version="0.92">
<channel>
<title>European Journal of American Studies</title>
<link>http://ejas.revues.org</link>
<description>European journal of American studies. Revue électronique. La revue publie chaque année un numéro thématique et un numéro réunissant des articles issus de diverses disciplines et portant sur divers aspects des études américaines.</description>
<language>fr</language>


<item>
<title>From Rage to Rap and Prison to Print:</title>
<link>http://ejas.revues.org/document7651.html</link>
<description>
1. Introduction By the late 1980s, while thousands of former gang members were either dead or incarcerated, their legacy and the gang subculture was being celebrated and commodified through gangsta rap music and videos, film and fashion. In the early 1990s this lucrative cultural trend sparked interest from potential authors and publishers. Such literary attention was partially fuelled by a public fascination with life in the ghettos following the 1992 Los Angeles (LA) riots, resulting in a new trend of gang memoirs emerging in the US. Their content centered on contemporary street gang life in the ghettos and barrios, offering graphic tales of violent confrontation and territorial belonging. They were written by former gang members, both African American and Latino. The majority were set in LA, the city dubbed the gang capital of America.  Three of the most successful and influential of these gang memoirs form case studies in this article. Sanyika Shakur’s  Monster: The [...]
</description>
<author>
(Josephine Metcalf )</author>
</item>
<item>
<title>Contemporary Hollywood Crime Film and the New Individualism </title>
<link>http://ejas.revues.org/document7650.html</link>
<description>
 This article focuses on contemporary Hollywood films  Silver City  (2004),  The Constant Gardener  (2005) and  The Departed  (2006) in order to examine the intersection of the cultural discourse of the New Individualism, characterized by the helplessness and anxiety of the subject in the face of social change, with the generic conventions of the crime film. It explores the ways in which such conventions as crosscutting and suspense, the victim-hero of the thriller, or the trope of self-assertion through escape from the social space both articulate the New Individualism discourse and are transformed under its influence. </description>
<author>
(Luis M. García-Mainar )</author>
</item>
<item>
<title>T. Tsimpouki on M. Boyden’s  Predicting the Past, The Paradoxes of American Literary History </title>
<link>http://ejas.revues.org/document7631.html</link>
<description>
Boyden, Michael.  Predicting the Past, The paradoxes of American Literary History.  Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009. pp. 215.  In recent years Michael Boyden’s research interests have focused on literary history and canon formation as well as on multilingualism and translation in literature. Boyden has masterfully combined these threads in his new book-length study of American literary history and of the paradoxes of its institutional formation. As the title seeks to convey,  Predicting the Past  is about how the present form of American literary history can be used to reconstruct the theorizing constructs in the discipline’s past. One does so, Boyden argues, by taking into account the paradoxical dynamic of American literary history, which is what ensures the maintenance of the discipline by the institutionalization of its negation.  The author’s thesis becomes clear in the book’s introduction: unlike previous disciplinary historians who attempted to offer definitive [...]
</description>
<author>
</author>
</item>
<item>
<title>H. Raphael-Hernandez on A. D. Nieves and L. M. Alexander’s  “We Shall Independent Be”: African American Place Making …</title>
<link>http://ejas.revues.org/document7632.html</link>
<description>
Angel David Nieves and Leslie M. Alexander.   Eds.  “We Shall Independent Be”: African American Place Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States . Boulder: UP of Colorado, 2008. xvi + pp. 538. In their collection of essays, Angel David Nieves and Leslie M. Alexander offer a space to twenty contributors who explore the history of the African American search and struggle to claim particular public places in the United States that were necessary for African American survival and transformation. The essays range from the antebellum United States to present time, covering diverse terrains such as urban and suburban places to swamps and forests. Scholars in history, architecture, women’s studies, Black theology, and city planning explore locations such as burial grounds, courtrooms, schools, churches, and street cars. Despite their incredible diversity of locations, historical periods, and scholarly approaches, most of the essays are connected because of their [...]
</description>
<author>
</author>
</item>
<item>
<title>Yiorgos Kalogeras on H. Raphael-Hernandez’s  The Utopian Aesthetics of Three African American Women (Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Judie Dash).  </title>
<link>http://ejas.revues.org/document7633.html</link>
<description>
Heike Raphael-Hernandez.  The Utopian Aesthetics of Three African American Women (Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Judie Dash). The Principles of Hope.  The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. Viii + pp. 173. Dr Heike Raphael-Hernandez’s book focuses on a close reading of two novels and a movie script. It also discusses briefly several other novels by African American women writers who have published their work since the 1960s. Many among these writers are already considered as major voices and their work has garnered literary prizes, and very enthusiastic critical attention. As Raphael-Hernandez herself points out these writers represent several generations and, therefore, cannot be categorized by age group.  The three artists discussed extensively in the individual chapters are mentioned on the title of the book. The novels analyzed are  Beloved ,  Bailey’s Café  and the script is  Daughters of the Dust . The book consists of five chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. Dr [...]
</description>
<author>
</author>
</item>
<item>
<title>Are Immigrants Disloyal? The Case of Mexicans in the U.S. </title>
<link>http://ejas.revues.org/document7629.html</link>
<description>
 This article analyzes the concept of political loyalty in the context of mass migration flows to the U.S. After exploring the evolving notion of political loyalty, it provides a brief historical background of concerns about the political disloyalty of immigrants in the U.S. Based on a review of current literature and surveys, the case of Mexican immigrants as the biggest immigration group is then analyzed in more detail. It is argued that even though immigrants from Mexico are at times accused of potential disloyalty, they can be considered quite loyal, depending on the selected indicators of loyalty used. This paradox is explained by the expansive use of the notion of political loyalty by modern-day U.S. Nativists. The conclusion argues for a more inclusive concept of political loyalty, which would be better suited for the present-day era of large-scale trans-border movements. 1. Introduction 2. A Definition of Political Loyalty  3. Loyalty Concerns and Immigration in the U.S. Context 4. Case Study: Review of loyalty concerns related to immigrants from Mexico  4.1 Allegations of disloyalty 4.2 Basic characteristics of immigrants from Mexico 4.3 Measuring the loyalty of Mexican immigrants 5. Conclusion: Loyalty Concerns and Immigration </description>
<author>
(Krystof Kozak )</author>
</item>
<item>
<title>Herbert Hoover and the Organization of the American Relief Effort in Poland (1919-1923)</title>
<link>http://ejas.revues.org/document7627.html</link>
<description>
 Poland, recreated after the armistice of 1918, was confronted at its rebirth with four very severe challenges: welding together the separate sections of the dissected country, which for many decades had been under the rule of Prussia-Germany, Austria and Russia; creating a functioning administration and military force for the country; ensuring the recovery of agriculture, which, during World War I, had seriously declined; and restarting industries destroyed or closed during foreign military occupation.  Even under the valuable leadership of the first Prime Minister of the new Polish Republic Ignacy Paderewski and Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the Poles could not accomplish the goal of rebuilding a strong Poland without outside help. The American Relief Administration (ARA), founded and led by Herbert Hoover, offered their help.  The ARA, with its food aid and provision of economic assistance and expertise, played an important role in bringing about stability in the newly independent state of Poland.  This paper examines the many steps Herbert Hoover had to take to arrange food relief in Poland and will outline the organization of the ARA, including the establishment of the Polish relief organization and the introduction of young Polish-American women, called the Grey Samaritans, into the field. </description>
<author>
(Matthew Lloyd Adams )</author>
</item>
<item>
<title>Washington-Miami-Havana 1999-2009: Towards the End of a  Ménage à Trois  ?</title>
<link>http://ejas.revues.org/document7623.html</link>
<description>
 Although comparatively recent immigrants and a very small group of hardly more than 1.3 million, Cuban Americans have been very influential in Washington’s confrontational policy toward Cuba over the past thirty years. While the end of the Cold War should have undermined the rationale for the embargo, they maintained a hard line on Cuba and proved quite convincing in their arguments with both the Clinton and the George W. Bush Administrations. This piece focuses on the past decade and will explore Washington’s continuing hard line toward Cuba as well as the serious challenges this posture is facing today. Increasing pressure from competing powerful lobbies to end the embargo, a growing uneasiness in Congress with the policy’s failure, a severe split within the Republican party over the issue, and a declining radicalism among younger Cuban Americans and more recent Cuban immigrants, all tend to signal a change in Washington’s Cuban policy in the near future, and with it a redefinition of Cuban American influence.  </description>
<author>
(Isabelle Vagnoux )</author>
</item>
<item>
<title>S. Toner on Gelphi, Feaver and Reifler’s  Paying the Human Costs of War </title>
<link>http://ejas.revues.org/document7625.html</link>
<description>
Christopher Gelphi, Peter D. Feaver and Jason Reifler.  Paying the Human Costs of War: American Public Opinion &#38; Casualties in Military Conflicts . New Haven: Princeton University Press, 2009. 280 pp. ISBN 978-0691139081 In one of their less astute observations the authors of  Paying the Human Costs of War  suggest ‘that the United States does not go to war often’ (67). While war and public opinion is a notoriously difficult subject to study, few countries offer as great an opportunity to study the topic as the United States. Despite their dismay at the apparent paucity of foreign military engagements to examine, Christopher Gelphi, Peter Feaver and Jason Reifler have made an interesting and sometimes controversial contribution to the literature on military casualties and public opinion. In examining the way in which the US public structures its attitudes toward war and military casualties, they found that it was the interactive effect of prospective judgements about the [...]
</description>
<author>
</author>
</item>
<item>
<title>J.M. Gratale on Tore T. Petersen’s  Richard Nixon, Great Britain and the Anglo-American Alignment in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula </title>
<link>http://ejas.revues.org/document7626.html</link>
<description>
Tore T. Petersen.  Richard Nixon, Great Britain and the Anglo-American Alignment in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula: Making Allies out of Clients . Sussex Academic Press, 2009.  172pp.  978-1-84519-277-8. Since the events of 9-11 there has been a sizeable quantity of books published on American foreign policy in broad terms, as well as more focused studies on contemporary developments in southwest Asia, more commonly referred to as the Middle East. Many of these volumes are highly politicized, being either scathingly critical of the Bush administration or unswervingly supportive of that administration’s policies part and parcel of the ‘War on Terror.’  There are, however, some exceptional studies that have both a critical and an insightful approach to the complexities of the making of U.S. foreign policy. Walter L. Hixon’s  The Myth of American Diplomacy , Stephen M. Walt’s  Taming American Power , and Andrew J. Bacevich’s  The New American Militarism  are [...]
</description>
<author>
</author>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
