Journal articles: 'Mexican Americans – Race identity – Texas' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

These two fascinating articles seek to fill an important lacuna in the burgeoning literature on the legal construction of whiteness. While LatCrit theorists in the legal academy have urged civil rights scholars and race critics to transcend the “black-white paradigm” of U.S. race studies, the majority of legal histories of whiteness have focused on two sets of cases: trials in the southeastern United States in which local courts tried to draw the line between “white” and “negro”; and cases about immigration and naturalization in which Federal courts determined whether particular foreign immigrants were suitably “white” for citizenship. Likewise, although there have been several important social and cultural histories of Texas Mexicans and whiteness in the last fifteen years, they have not considered the legal realm. The time is ripe for attention to the legal history of Mexican Americans' civil rights struggles in Texas, especially as they illuminate the shifting racial identity of Mexican Americans in the Southwest.

Abstract:

In 1954, seventy-four years after the U.S. Supreme Court held that African Americans could not be banned from jury service by statute, and fifty-four years after it ruled that they could not be purposely excluded from venires due to their “race or color” through court, executive, or administrative action, the Court found that Pete Hernandez had been denied equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment. His constitutional rights were violated because of the de facto, systematic exclusion of Mexican Americans from the pool of potential jurors—and thus juries—in Jackson County, Texas.

Abstract:

Richard Rodriguez's autobiographical Hunger of Memory (1982) is assigned to Chicano-Chicana literature because the book tells a story of growing up the child of Mexican immigrants, but Rodriguez rejects the term Chicano for himself and denies that it is possible or desirable for Americans of Mexican descent to retain an identification with their culture of origin. Rodriguez has been widely criticized as a sellout to white bourgeois culture, but his life narrative shows that his rejection of Chicano identity is rooted in the class-and-race ideology of his Mexican parents and thus in the contradictions of Mexican history. Chicano-Chicana nationalism assumes a simple dichotomy between the proletarian mestizo or mestiza and the bourgeois white oppressor. Rodriguez's family history, however, points toward race and class divisions within the population of Mexican descent that call into question the monolithic conceptions of Chicano-Chicana identity on the basis of which Rodriguez has been attacked.

Abstract:

An examination of identity formation and its performative qualities or ways in which one enacts identity emerged as a result of a study of racially segregated cemeteries in a rural South Texas town, a practice that continues to dictate how burials are carried out, according to race. Fieldwork, archives, and pláticas, made visible the historical origins of funerary practices for the primary author—whose family lives in Nixon, Texas. Along with documenting funerary practices, this study explores the ways in which Pantoja Perez’s ancestors creatively camouflaged ethnicity to disidentify with their Mexican identity, in the context of an ideology of Americanization. It was found that cultural, as well as funerary practice veiled and protected Mexicans by class, thus not having to enact a racialized ethnicity while rejecting culture and language practices associated with being Mexican in public spaces.

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Abstract The 1846 American invasion of Mexico sparked an intensely nationalist response among members of Mexico's Liberal and Conservative intelligentsia. This paper documents and analyzes that nationalist reaction. To rally the nation to the cause, Mexican intellectuals constructed and presented to the Mexican masses frightful, negative caricatures and stereotypes of the invading Americans. An abject race of vile and perfidious usurpers, Anglo-Saxon invaders were, the intelligentsia warned, intent upon the spoliation of Mexico and the enslavement of her people. If not stopped by a vigorous prosecution of the war, they warned, the greedy and cruel heretics from the north would soon descend over the whole nation, raping Mexico's daughters along the way and desecrating her holy shrines. Disseminated through newspapers, political pamphlets and broadsides, it was against such caricatures that the allegedly positive features of the Mexican identity were defined and delineated. Against the dark and fiendish stereotypes of the Americans stood, in stark and powerful contrast, the moral and benevolent Mexicans. Where the American caricature evoked the dreadful image of a marauding, degenerate infidel, the Mexican portraiture called forth the equally evocative image of an upright, generous defender. While the Americans fought because of their greed, the Mexicans, it was maintained, resisted for the honour of their families, their Church and their motherland.

Abstract:

This article shows accounts of Norwegian immigrants and their encounter with various ethnic groups in America including Native Americans, African-Americans, Chinese, Irish, and Yankees in the period between 1840 and 1870. The article presents several regions in the United States, namely the Upper Midwest, Texas, and California. The use of primary source material including newspapers, guidebooks and letters provide good insights into thoughts and attitudes, and not the least prejudice, among this Old immigrant group toward the ethnic “Other.” The Norwegian immigrant group aimed at becoming good citizens through a negotiating process between the group, the dominant native-born American group and other ethnic groups in the United States. By characterizing several other ethnic groups based on race, Norwegian-Americans employed whiteness in a double negotiation, both tied to the creation of a Norwegian-American identity and in finding their place in the social hierarchy in America.

Abstract:

Immigration scholars largely focus on adaptation processes of immigrant groups, while race scholars focus on structural barriers nonwhite immigrants face. By comparing nonwhite immigrants with native-born Americans, we can better understand how racial logics affect the identification of racial minorities in the United States. Drawing on 153 interviews with Indian, Caribbean, Chinese, Filipino, and Mexican immigrants, and comparing their narratives to those of black native-born respondents, the authors find similar understandings of American identity across immigrant groups as well as barriers to recognition as American shared by immigrants and native-born blacks. Immigrant narratives continue to reify the United States as a white nation, thus leading to their exclusion by default.

Abstract:

Scholars have long debated the complicity of Southern white women after the Civil War in helping create a racialist and racist regional identity and denying or delaying civil rights for African Americans. These studies have largely focused on the activities of elite white women property owners, club members, and writers. Yet few scholars have examined college women's activities in this regard, particularly those of the eight public colleges for women established in the South between 1884 and 1908: Mississippi State College for Women (MSCW) (1884), Georgia State College for Women (1889), Winthrop College in South Carolina (1891), North Carolina College for Women (NCCW) (1891), Alabama College for Women (ACW) (1893), Texas State College for Women (TSCW) (1901), Florida State College for Women (FSCW) (1905), and Oklahoma College for Women (1908). Little studied today, these schools served as important centers of women's education in their states, collectively educating approximately 100,000 women before World War II and with combined enrollments exceeding that of the Seven Sisters schools for many years.

Abstract:

Death certificates are a means of assessing the racial classification of foreign-born Americans that is based neither on a set of formal racial identification criteria nor self-identification. Instead, local informants typically report the race of decedents. According to a sample of 1,884 records filed between 1859 and 1960, individuals born in China were progressively less likely to be identified by racial terms (e.g., white or yellow) and more likely to be identified by their country of origin (e.g., Chinese). The opposite is true for those born in Mexico or Puerto Rico, who are less likely over time to be identified as Mexican or Puerto Rican and more likely to be identified with a racial term—typically white. Most of the records analyzed are from southern states (n = 1,335), although an additional 548 records, primarily from Illinois and Ohio, are compared to the southern records. In some cases, white identity can serve as a mark of racial confusion, acting as a default or neutral identity rather than a mark of privilege. Conversely, it can represent a status that is actively striven for to provide freedom from discriminatory treatment. It serves primarily as the former for those born in China and the latter for those born in Mexico and Puerto Rico.

Abstract:

Recent work has called for sociologists to incorporate postcolonial theory into their toolkits to better understand the mechanics of race in the United States. The authors answer this call by showing how postcolonial and field theories can be bridged to explain how movements of the 1970s developed distinct visions of panethnicity. Drawing on published case studies, as well as a unique data set of pioneering “Asian American” and “Hispanic” movement magazines from the 1970s, the authors systematically compare how community leaders framed panethnic identities before they became widely institutionalized. The authors show that although Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans could have developed a panethnic narrative centered on American imperialism, it was Asian Americans who constructed a postcolonial panethnic politics. In contrast, “Hispanic” stakeholders of the 1970s framed panethnicity more conservatively and at times patriotically. The authors contend that the different visions of panethnicity reflect the distinct colonial and imperial history of Asians and Hispanics in the United States as well as the position of Asian American and Hispanic panethnic leaders within and across the racial fields of the 1970s. This study suggests that panethnicity as a mobilizing identity narrative is politically flexible and amenable to different visions of racial equality. Moreover, the authors show how postcolonialism and field theory can be further synthesized to advance the study of panethnicity.

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Abstract Abstract 4188 The frequency of minor blood group antigens has not been described among Hispanic blood donors. A retrospective cohort study was performed using the South Texas Blood and Tissue Center (STBTC) donor database, LifeTrak. Blood donors self-identified race and ethnicity. Caucasian and Hispanic donors were eligible. Donors who did not have minor antigen testing performed were not included. The STBTC has a high proportion of Hispanic blood donors (299047/779409, 38%), who are primarily of Mexican ancestry. Minor antigen testing was performed in 10% (74140/779409) of all donors; 8% (25394/299407) of Hispanic donors and 11% (42891/392074) of Caucasian donors. Hispanic donors were significantly more like to express blood type O Rh+ than Caucasian donors (13920/25394, 55% v 14947/74140, 35%; p<0.001). The frequency of ABO and RhD blood groups were similar to those reported previously in Caucasian and Hispanic donors (Garraty, et al. Transfusion, 2004). Of the minor antigens, expression of Rh E also differed significantly between Hispanic and Caucasian donors (4706/11744, 40% v 5416/19497, 28%; p<0.001). The prevalence of the other minor antigens were more similar and are reported in Figure 1. Complete Rh haplotypes were available in 8296 Caucasian donors and 7176 Hispanic donors. The haplotype RhDce differed significantly in 36% of Caucasians and 50% of Hispanics (3022/8296 v 3589/7176). The haplotype RhDce was previously reported as most common in African-Americans at 44% (Avent, et al. Blood, 2000). Haplotype RhDCE was found in 8% of Caucasians and 10% of Hispanics (660/8296 v 643/7176); haplotype RhDcE in 16% of Caucasians and 15% of Hispanics (1354/8296 v 1041/7176); and haplotype RhDCe was found in 39% of Caucasians and 27% of Hispanics (3260/8296 v 1903/7176). Differences exist in the frequency of minor blood group antigens among Caucasian and Hispanic blood donors in Southwest Texas. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Abstract:

Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003, £18.95). Pp. 248. ISBN 0 8223 3206.Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, £12.95). Pp. 322. ISBN 0 674 01118 X.Tetsuden Kashima, Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003, $35.00). Pp. 336. ISBN 0 295 98299 3.Gerald Early, This Is Where I Came in: Black America in the 1960s (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, Abraham Lincoln Lecture Series, 2003, £11. 50). Pp. 144. ISBN 0 80302 1823 0.Deborah Davis Jackson, Our Elders Lived It: American Indian Identity in the City (DeKalb, IL: University of Northern Illinois Press, 2002, $20.00). Pp. 191. ISBN 0 87580 591 4.Yen Le Espiritu, Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003, $21.95). Pp. 271. ISBN 0 520 23527 4.Elizabeth Boosahda, Arab-American Faces and Voices: The Origins of an Immigrant Community (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2003, £18.95). Pp. 288. ISBN 0 292 70919 6.John Kerry, patrician Massachusetts liberal, war hero, and yet dissident from the Vietnam era, vies for the 2004 presidency against George Bush, White House dynastic Republican, self-nominated caring conservative, and yet hard-edged ideologue. Notwithstanding Kerry's Catholicism, or his Jewish family line, both candidates hold sway as heirs to WASP cultural style bolstered by considerable personal fortunes. Howard Dean, New York MD and former Vermont governor, and like Kerry and Bush a Yale graduate, storms the early polls by his activist left-liberal agenda and Internet fundraising. John Edwards, North Carolina senator, personal injuries lawyer, and up-from-the-ranks millionaire, his father a textile factory worker and his mother a postal office employee, conducts a widely agreed good race for the Democratic Party nomination before joining the ticket as would-be Vice President. Had multiculturalism led to any shift of paradigm in connection with canonical whiteness? Or, to put matters more plainly, were not the front-runners once again executive white men, whatever their respective merits or social origins?

Abstract:

On the morning of September 11, 2001, New York City-based Community Relations Service (“CRS”) Regional Director Reinaldo Rivera was at a New Jersey summit on racial profiling. At 8:46 a.m., an American Airlines 767 crashed into the North Tower of New York City’s World Trade Center. Because Rivera was with the New Jersey state attorney general, he quickly learned of the attack. Rivera immediately called his staff members, who at that moment were traveling to Long Island, New York, for an unrelated case. Getting into Manhattan had already become difficult, so Rivera instructed his conciliators to remain on standby. At 9:03 a.m., another 767, United Airlines Flight 175, flew into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. September 11 initiated a new, fraught-filled era for the United States. For CRS, an agency within the United States Department of Justice, it was the beginning of a long-term immersion into conflict issues that involved discrimination and violence against those whose appearance led them to be targets of anti-terrorist hysteria or mis- placed backlash. Appropriately, in the days following 9/11, the federal government, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), concentrated on ferreting out the culprits of the heinous acts. However, the FBI discovered that Middle Eastern terrorists were responsible for the tragedies, and communities around the nation saw a surge of violence against people who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, requiring a response to protect those who were unfairly targeted. These outbreaks began as soon as September 12. Police in Illinois stopped 300 people from marching on a Chicago-area mosque. In Gary, Indiana, a masked gunman shot twenty-one times at a Yemeni- American gas station attendant. In Texas, a mosque was hit by six bullets. On September 15, a man who had been reported by an Applebee’s waiter as saying that he wanted to “shoot some rag heads” shot a Chevron gas station owner Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh-American. The man, Frank Roque, shot through his car window, and five bullets hit Sodhi, killing him instantly. Roque drove to a home he previously owned and had sold to an Afghan-American couple and fired on it. He then shot a Lebanese-American man. According to a police report, Roque said in reference to the 9/11 tragedy, “I [cannot] take this anymore. They killed my brothers and sisters.” Former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said, reflecting ten years later on the hate crimes that followed the attack on the World Trade Center, “The tragedy of September 11th should be remembered in the sense of making sure that we [do not] let our emotions run away in terms of trying to show our commitment and conviction about patriotism [and] loyalty.” The events created a new chapter in American race relations, one in which racial tensions and fear were higher than ever for Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, Sikhs, and others who could be targeted in anti-Islamic hysteria because of their physical appearance or dress. In 2011, a CBS–New York Times poll found that 78% agreed that Muslims, Arab-Americans, and immigrants from the Middle East are singled out unfairly by people in this country. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, this number stood at 90%. The same poll also found that one in three Americans think Muslim-Americans are more sympathetic to terrorists than other Americans. To address these misconceptions in the years following 9/11, CRS has done a significant amount of outreach, dispute resolution, and training to mitigate unfounded backlash against Arabs, Muslims, and Sikhs. Under CRS Director Freeman, the agency produced Sikh and Muslim cultural-competency trainings and two training videos: On Common Ground, which provides background on Sikhism and concerns about safety held by Sikhs in America; and The First Three to Five Seconds, which provides background on Muslims and information on their interactions with law enforcement. In 2009, President Obamas signed the Matthew Shepard-James Byrd Junior Hate Crimes Prevention Act. The Act explicitly gave CRS jurisdiction to respond to and prevent hate crimes. For the first time, CRS jurisdiction expanded beyond race. Specifically, CRS was now authorized to work on issues of religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability in addition to race, color, and national origin. When I became CRS Director in 2012, following the continued incidents of unfounded violence and prejudice against those perceived as sharing heritage with Middle Eastern terrorists, I directed the agency to update the trainings and launched an initiative for regional offices to conduct these Sikh and Muslim cultural-competency trainings. In the years following 9/11, controversy has continued over racial profiling of Arab, Muslim, and Sikh individuals. Owing to the nature of the attack, one particular area of ongoing concern is access to airplane flights. Director of Transportation Mineta recalled how the racial profiling he witnessed echoed his own experience as a Japanese-American citizen: [T]here were a lot of people saying, “[We are] not [going to] let Middle Easterners or Muslims on the planes.” And I thought about my own experience [during World War II] because people [could not] make the distinction between the people who were flying the airplanes that attacked Pearl Harbor and the people who were living in Washington, Oregon, and California, who looked like the people flying the airplanes. In response to this problem, CRS trained thousands of law enforcement and Transit Security Association employees on cultural professionalism in working with Arab, Muslim, and Sikh individuals. The work of addressing the profiling and mistreatment of Arab-Americans, Muslims, and Sikhs also spiked after the 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon. CRS conciliators again reached out to leaders throughout the country at mosques and gurdwaras to confront safety and security issues regarding houses of worship and concerns about backlash violence based on faith, nationality, and race. Since 9/11, CRS’s work on racial profiling continues to respond to increasing conflicts and tensions both within the United States and around the globe. In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, CRS adjusted its priorities and reallocated resources in the wake of the September 11 tragedy to address the needs of targeted communities and further intercultural understanding. CRS did so by increasing the religious awareness training provided to law enforcement and other agencies, and it committed more resources to working with Muslim and Sikh faith and advocacy organizations and people. This work was not originally envisioned when the 1964 Civil Rights Act created CRS. How- ever, this new focus reflects how the model of the African-American civil rights movement has inspired other efforts to attain equality and justice for minority groups in the United States. Just as the tragedy in Selma helped lead to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Oak Creek tragedy helped lead the FBI to update its hate crime categories. Former FBI Director James Comey articulated this idea best in his speech to the Anti-Defamation League, stating “do a better job of tracking and reporting hate crime to fully understand what is happening in our communities and how to stop it.” The Community Relations Service has evolved over time since its 1964 origins, and a substantial component has been the work in response to post 9/11 unfounded racial and religious violence.

Abstract:

BACKGROUND: Diffuse Large B Cell Lymphoma (DLBCL) is the most common and most aggressive subtype of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. (Blood PMID: 9166827) Despite significant advances, treatment survival remains heterogenous due to biologic differences and perhaps ethnic and racial disparities. Multiple epidemiological studies have evaluated racial differences, mainly comparing African Americans (AA) with Non-Hispanic (NH), showing AA patients have a 10-20% higher risk of death. (BMC PMID: 21073707, Leuk PMID: 22800091, Cancer PMID: 24048801) A recent study showed how socioeconomic factors also influence patient survival and this can be linked to racial differences as well. (Blood PMID: 24705494). Small sample studies have characterized DLBCL in Hispanics (HI) but no definite conclusions have been drawn. (ASH Blood 2018 132:4867, JCO 10.1200, Blood (2019) 134 (Supplement_1): 2916). The need of larger studies to characterize survival differences establishes the basis of our population-based analysis in Texas comparing DLBCL in HI vs NH. METHODS: This is a retrospective study of a cohort of patients diagnosed with lymphoma from the Texas Cancer Registry (TCR) database. Patients with DLBCL diagnosed from 2006 to 2016 were identified by the International Classification of Diseases for Oncology Third Edition (ICD-O-3) code list. Standard demographic variables collected include gender, race, ethnicity, birthplace, occupation, dates at diagnosis and death, primary payer at diagnosis, subtype of lymphoma, stage, type of treatment, poverty index, and vitality status among others. Categorical outcomes were summarized with frequencies and percentages and age (years) was the only continuously distributed outcome with the mean and standard deviation. The significance of variation in the distribution of categorical outcomes with ethnicity (HI, NH) was assessed with Fisher's Exact tests or Pearson's Chi-square tests as appropriate; age was assessed with T-tests or Wilcoxon tests as appropriate. Survival time was measured in years from date of primary diagnosis to date of death. Patients not coded as dead were considered censored on survival time at the date last seen. Survival distributions were described with Kaplan-Meier curves and significance of variation in median survival with ethnicity was assessed with log rank testing. At risk tables were computed based on the Kaplan-Meier estimate of the survival curve. All statistical testing was two-sided with a significance level of 5%. RESULTS: A total of 15,083 patients met inclusion criteria, with 3583 HI and 11500 NH diagnosed with DLBCL from 2006 to 2016. Demographic data was analyzed and compared between both groups, (Fig 1A). The median age of diagnosis was 61.7 on HI population and 65 on the NH. Among the HI population most of the patients were of Mexican origin (25%). HI have a higher percentage (24%) of non-insured or Medicaid than NH (8%) with a significant p value of &lt;0.001 and a statistically significant higher poverty index within HI with 54% living on a 20-100% poverty land. Staging was similar between both groups. Most of the patients, 46% of HI and 45% of NH, have a stage III-IV grade DLBCL. The NH population received more treatment with chemotherapy 4% compared to 2% of the HI group, but this difference was not statistically significant. Both groups received similar treatments with bone marrow transplant, or radiation. The median survival time was similar between HI and NH, 4.4 and 4.3 years respectively. Survival probability at 2, 5 and 10 years for HI was 0.59 (CI 0.576,0.611), 0.48 (CI 0.467, 0.506) and 0.301 (CI 0.265,0.34) respectively. For NH the survival probability was similar, 0.602 (CI 0.592,0.611), 0.473 (CI 0.463,0484) and 0.242 (CI 0.223,0.262) respectively (Fig 1B). The overall survival probability at 10 years did not show a statistically significant difference for HI vs NH (p-value 0.46) (Fig 1C). CONCLUSION. Despite demographic disparities between HI and NH, and statistically significant differences with more HI patients uninsured and a higher index of poverty land; there was no significant distinction in overall survival in patients with DLBCL. The findings suggest no impact of ethnicity to that regard. Disclosures Diaz Duque: ADCT Therapeutics: Research Funding; Molecular Templates: Research Funding; AstraZeneca: Research Funding; Hutchinson Pharmaceuticals: Research Funding; Seattle Genetics: Speakers Bureau; Verastem: Speakers Bureau; AbbVie: Speakers Bureau.

Abstract:

-Michael D. Olien, Edmund T. Gordon, Disparate Diasporas: Identity and politics in an African-Nicaraguan community.Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. xiv + 330 pp.-Donald Cosentino, Margarite Fernández Olmos ,Sacred possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. viii + 312 pp., Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (eds)-John P. Homiak, Lorna McDaniel, The big drum ritual of Carriacou: Praisesongs in rememory of flight. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. xiv + 198 pp.-Julian Gerstin, Gerdès Fleurant, Dancing spirits: Rhythms and rituals of Haitian Vodun, the Rada Rite. Westport CT: Greenwood, 1996. xvi + 240 pp.-Rose-Marie Chierici, Alex Stepick, Pride against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1998. x + 134 pp.-Rose-Marie Chierici, Flore Zéphir, Haitian immigrants in Black America: A sociological and sociolinguistic portrait. Westport CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1996. xvi + 180 pp.-Luis Martínez-Fernández, Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and temptation in Cuba. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. xxiv + 239 pp.-Jorge L. Giovannetti, My footsteps in Baraguá. Script and direction by Gloria Rolando. VHS, 53 minutes. Havana: Mundo Latino, 1996.-Gert Oostindie, Mona Rosendahl, Inside the revolution: Everyday life in socialist Cuba. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. x + 194 pp.-Frank Argote-Freyre, Lisa Brock ,Between race and empire: African-Americans and Cubans before the Cuban revolution. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. xii + 298 pp., Digna Castañeda Fuertes (eds)-José E. Cruz, Frances Negrón-Muntaner ,Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking colonialism and nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. x + 303 pp., Ramón Grosfoguel (eds)-Helen I. Safa, Félix V. Matos Rodríguez ,Puerto Rican Women's history: New perspectives. Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998. x + 262 pp., Linda C. Delgado (eds)-Arlene Torres, Jean P. Peterman, Telling their stories: Puerto Rican Women and abortion. Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1996. ix + 112 pp.-Trevor W. Purcell, Philip Sherlock ,The story of the Jamaican People. Kingston: Ian Randle; Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1998. xii + 434 pp., Hazel Bennett (eds)-Howard Fergus, Donald Harman Akenson, If the Irish ran the world: Montserrat, 1630-1730. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997. xii + 273 pp.-John S. Brierley, Lawrence S. Grossman, The political ecology of bananas: Contract farming, peasants, and agrarian change in the Eastern Caribbean. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xx + 268 pp.-Mindie Lazarus-Black, Jeannine M. Purdy, Common law and colonised peoples: Studies in Trinidad and Western Australia. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Dartmouth, 1997. xii + 309.-Stephen Slemon, Barbara Lalla, Defining Jamaican fiction: Marronage and the discourse of survival. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. xi + 224 pp.-Stephen Slemon, Renu Juneja, Caribbean transactions: West Indian culture in literature.-Sue N. Greene, Richard F. Patteson, Caribbean Passages: A critical perspective on new fiction from the West Indies. Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998. ix + 187 pp.-Harold Munneke, Ivelaw L. Griffith ,Democracy and human rights in the Caribbean. Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1997. vii + 278 pp., Betty N. Sedoc-Dahlberg (eds)-Francisco E. Thoumi, Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith, Drugs and security in the Caribbean: Sovereignty under seige. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1997. xx + 295 pp.-Michiel Baud, Eric Paul Roorda, The dictator next door: The good neighbor policy and the Trujillo regime in the Dominican republic, 1930-1945. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1998. xii + 337 pp.-Peter Mason, Wim Klooster, The Dutch in the Americas 1600-1800. Providence RI: The John Carter Brown Library, 1997. xviii + 101 pp.-David R. Watters, Aad H. Versteeg ,The archaeology of Aruba: The Tanki Flip site. Oranjestad; Archaeological Museum Aruba, 1997. 518 pp., Stéphen Rostain (eds)

Abstract:

Abstract Using data from the 2008–2016 American Community Survey, we compare the racial identification responses of the Mexican-origin population residing in California to their counterparts in Texas, the two states with the largest and most established Mexican-origin populations. We draw on existing theory and research in order to derive a theoretical account of state-level historical mechanisms that are likely to lead to varying patterns of racial identification within the two states and a set of propositions predicting the nature of this variation. Results indicate that the Mexican-origin population in Texas is substantially more likely to claim White racial identification than their counterparts in California, even after accounting for factors related to racial identity formation. Further analysis indicates that this result is robust and buffets the notion that the historical development of the racial context in Texas has engendered a present-day context in which “Whiteness” carries a distinctive social value, relative to California’s ethnoracial context, and that this social value is reflected in the ways in which individuals of Mexican origin respond to race questions on U.S. Census surveys.

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Abstract This article argues that historical narrative has held a significant role in Mexican American identity formation and civil rights activism by examining the way Mexican Americans in the 1930s and 1940s used history to claim full citizenship status in Texas. In particular, it centers on how George I. Sánchez (1906–1972), a scholar of Latin American education, revised historical narrative by weaving history and foreign policy together through a pragmatic lens. To educators and federal officials, Sánchez used this revisionist history to advocate for Mexican Americans, insisting that the Good Neighbor policy presented the United States with the chance to translate into reality the democratic ideals long professed in the American historical imagination. The example of Sánchez also prompts us to reexamine the historiography in our present day: How do we define the tradition and trajectory of Mexican American intellectual thought in U.S. history? This article posits that when Sánchez and other Mexican Americans thought about their community’s collective identity and civil rights issues through history, they were contributing to a longer conversation driven by questions about identity formation and equality that first emerged at the end of the U.S. War with Mexico in 1848. These questions remain salient in the present, indicating the need for a historiographic examination that will change how we imagine the tradition of intellectual thought in the United States.

Abstract:

Abstract The discourse on the opening of a bilingual university along the Texas-Mexico border leads us to propose a theory of ‘converse racialization’ through which the local Spanish is being progressively ‘unmarked’ and disassociated from the language practice of Mexican Americans. Converse racialization, as the equal and opposite co-constituting underside of racialization, shifts the directionality of semiotic indexes away from a particular ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ (including whiteness) and produces an apparent state of ‘unmarkedness’. We argue that the process of ‘unmarking’ Spanish has social, economic, and racializing consequences. Specifically, the language-as-resource discourse obscures and rearticulates the ‘deficiency perspective’ that continues to perpetuate structural inequalities that Latinxs in the border face. (Racialization, higher education, critical race theory, bilingualism, neoliberalism)*

Abstract:

It has been observed that most American TV media has taken on a format that seems to concern itself primarily with White, middle to high-income family situations. Even though the United States of America has a Latino population that reaches 17% (approximately 55 million Latinos—with Mexican Americans making up 63% of that number) and growing (Krogstad 2016), we still see a tremendous lack of Latino characters in American television. This leaves millions of Americans with no substantial representations that they can relate to, or form an identity off of. Instead, Latinos are forced into believing they are not important enough to merit TV roles and perhaps not really be American at all. This research was a content analysis of 79 scripted shows that aired through 2011-2015 to determine how often Latinos came out and how they were portrayed. Results showed that they appeared an average of six minutes on screen and they were generally depicted as criminals. Additionally, four focus group interviews were conducted, and participants also responded that shows tend to stereotype minorities while they showed White characters as authority figures. Both content analysis and focus group interviews found that Latinos lack strong representation in American television.

Abstract:

In the HBO series The Sopranos, Tony and his friends use “prosthetic memories” to anchor their ethnic and criminal identities. Prosthetic memories were theorised by Alison Landsberg in her book Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. She argues that prosthetic memories are memories acquired through the mass media and do not come from a person’s lived experience in any sense (Landsberg 20). In this article, I will outline how The Sopranos television show and its characters interact with prosthetic memories. Extending Christopher Kocela’s work on The Sopranos and white ethnicities, I will show how characters use prosthetic memories to define their ethnicity while the show itself knowingly plays with this to provide comedic and critical commentary about the influence of gangster stereotypes. According to Landsberg, prosthetic memories are powerful memories of historical events or narratives that an individual was not present for. They are typically formed at the "interface between a personal and historical narrative about the past at an experiential site such as a movie theatre or museum" (2). It is at such a moment that a person can suture themselves into a larger history. Consequently, these memories do not just enhance an individual’s apprehension of a historical event. Rather, they create a deeply felt personal memory of a past event through which they did not live (Landsberg 4). Prosthetic memories are largely made available through the technologies of mass culture such as film, television and experiential places like museums. Their accessibility helps to differentiate them from other cultural strategies for passing on memories to future generations. Other strategies have typically been rooted in the cultural or racial status of an individual (Landsberg 22). In addition, Landsberg asserts that the successfulness of mnemotechnic rituals like the Jewish Passover Seder is dependent on ethnicity (26). Similarly, Walter Benn Michaels concludes that these rituals can only be effective if the individual has “some prior assumption of identity between you and them and this assumption is often racial” (680). Contrastingly, the perpetuation of prosthetic memories through mass media makes them widely accessible across racial lines. According to Landsberg, they are not “naturally- ethnically, racially or biologically- one’s intended inheritance” (26). Prosthetic memories introduce the possibility that memories can be acquired by anyone. The technologies of mass culture make these memories portable and as such, challenges the assumption that memory is “in anyway essential or organically grounded or the private property of a specific ethnic or racial group” (27). In The Sopranos, most characters are third or fourth generation Italian immigrants. Much like for many ‘real’ Italian migrants, time has severed familial connections to their homeland (see Landsberg 49-55). Landsberg suggests that immigrants initially became Americanised in order to escape persecution and being labelled as “other” (51). This meant that ethnically exclusive mnemotechnic rituals were not preserved for subsequent generations of immigrants. In order to sustain an ethnic identity, immigrants (and the characters in The Sopranos) have been forced to turn to more accessible tools like prosthetic memories. Christopher Kocela’s analysis of Italian-Americanness in The Sopranos, argues that characters maintain an Italian American ethnicity while still racially identifying as white. According to Colin Webster “white ethnicity” can be best exemplified through the long tradition of European immigration to America (295). With the influx of immigrants, there was a codification of the idea that “some whites are ‘whiter’ than others” (Webster 297). European working-class immigrants struggled to be afforded the same white “privileges” and membership to the white race. Instead, they were defined as being members of “other” white ethnicities. Roediger argued that such a denial of whiteness pushed European immigrants to insist on their own whiteness by defining themselves against other ethnic minorities like African Americans (8). Between 1890 and 1945, eventual assimilation saw white ethnicities become “fully white” (Roediger 8). Webster argues that: “In this sense, whiteness is nearly always salvageable in a way that black, Mexican, Asian, and Native American ethnicity is not (sic)” (Webster 297). In a similar vein, Kocela suggests that the assimilated characters in The Sopranos benefit from their white racial status while still maintaining an Italian ethnicity. This celebration of ethnic difference by Tony and his friends can serve as a smokescreen for the silent maintenance of whiteness (Kocela 14). Kocela suggests that the show critiques these types of responses that characters have to their ethnicity, stating that "we do not learn from The Sopranos the language of ethnic sons deprived of their Italian godfathers, but the language of racial misrecognition spoken by sons whose lost white fathers were never really their own" (16).Kocela’s article provides a useful discussion about the relationship that characters in The Sopranos have with their ethnicity. This article extends this discussion by showing how prosthetic memories and characters’ understanding of mass media are a crucial element in how such ethnic identities are formed. This will lead to a discussion about how The Sopranos comments on and treats these adopted stereotypes. “What do poor Italian-immigrants have to do with you?”: How Characters Interact with Prosthetic MemoriesCharacters in The Sopranos heavily rely upon stereotypes from gangster films to perform their version of Italian Americanness. A reliance on prosthetic memories from such films leads to the manifestation of violence being intertwined with the characters’ ethnic identities. Brian Faucette has discussed the inherent link between violence and gangster films from the 1930s-60s. He claims that “it was violence that enabled the upward mobility of these figures” (76). It is almost impossible to separate violence from the gangster films referenced in The Sopranos. As such, violence becomes part of the ritualistic ways prosthetic memories are created. This is evident in the pilot episode of The Sopranos when Christopher performs his first hit (kill). In the scene, he shoots rival gang member, Emil, in the back of the head at Satriales Pork Store. Before the hit, the pair are standing close together in front of a pinboard collage of “classic” Italian movie gangsters. As they both walk away in opposite directions the camera pulls out diagonally to follow Christopher. Throughout the duration of the shot, the collage is always placed behind Christopher. Finally, when the pan stops, Christopher is positioned in the foreground, with the collage behind him to the right. The placement of the collage gives it a front row seat to the ensuing murder while serving as a kind of script for it. It is not enough for Christopher to simply kill Emil, rather it is important that it is done in the presence of his idols in order to ensure his enhanced identification with them. Moreover, for Christopher, being an Italian American gangster and violence are inseparable. He must perform acts of extreme violence in order to suture himself into a larger, stereotypical narrative, that equates Italian-Americanness with the mafia. Through Landsberg’s theory, it is possible to see the intertwined relationship between performances of Italian-Americanness and violence. To enact their version of Italian-Americanism, characters follow the script of masculine-violence inherent to gangster films. As well as tools to perform Italian American identities, prosthetic memories can be used by characters to deny their whiteness. Kocela argues that Tony can deny or affirm his whiteness, depending on the situation. According to Kocela, Tony’s economic success is intrinsically linked to his racial status as a white man (16). However, this is not a view shared by characters in the show. In the episode From Where to Eternity Dr. Melfi asks Tony how he justifies his criminal lifestyle: Tony: When America opened the floodgates and let all us Italians in, what do you think they were doing it for? ... The Carnegies and the Rockefellers, they needed worker bees and there we were. But some of us didn't want to swarm around their hive and lose who we were. We wanted to stay Italian and preserve the things that meant something to us: honor, and family, and loyalty. ... Now we weren't educated like the Americans, but we had the balls to take what we wanted. And those other f*cks, the J.P. Morgans, they were crooks and killers too, but that was the business, right? The American way.Dr. Melfi: That might all be true. But what do poor Italian immigrants have to do with you and what happens every morning when you step out of bed?Kocela describes Tony’s response as a “textbook recitation of the two-family myth of Italian-American identity in which criminal activities are justified in a need to resist assimilation” (28). It is evident that for Tony, being Italian American is defined by being ethnically different. To admit that whiteness contributes to his economic success would undermine the justification he gives for his criminal lifestyle and his self-perceived status as an Italian American. Despite this, Melfi’s statement rings true. The experience of “poor Italian immigrants” does not affect Tony’s daily lifestyle. Characters in The Sopranos do not face the same oppression and discrimination as first-generation migrants (Kocela 28). After decades of assimilation, Tony and his friends turn to the narratives of discrimination and ethnic difference present in gangster films. This is exemplified through Tony’s identification with Vito Corleone from The Godfather. Vito exemplifies Tony’s notion of Italian Americanism. He was a poor immigrant that turned to criminality to protect the Italian-American community and their way of life. Vito is also connected to Italy in a way that Tony admires. When Paulie asks Tony what his favourite scene from The Godfather is he responds with: Don Ciccio’s Villa, when Vito goes back to Sicily, the crickets, the great old house. Maybe it’s because I’m going over there, ya know? Gangster films and representations of Italian-Americanness often deliberately differentiate Italian families from “regular” white people (D’Acierno 566). According to D’Acierno, gangster narratives often involve two types of Italian families, one that has been left powerless by its assimilation to American culture and another that has resisted this through organised crime (D’Acierno 567). Tony and his friends tap into these narratives in their attempt to create prosthetic memories that differentiate their ethnicity and ultimately draw attention away from the whiteness which silently benefits them.The “inauthenticity” of these prosthetic memories is probably most pronounced in the episode Commendatori when Tony, Christopher and Paulie visit Italy. The trip shatters the expectations that the characters had of their homeland and sheds light on some of their delusions about what it means to be Italian. Paulie expects to love Italy and be greeted with open arms by the locals. Unfortunately, he dislikes it all because it is too foreign for him. At the banquet, Paulie finds the authentic Italian octopus uneatable and instead orders “spaghetti and gravy.” He is also unable to use the bathrooms because he is so used to American toilets. When at a local café he tries to initiate conversation with some local men using broken Italian. Even though they hear him, the group ignores him. Despite all this Paulie, pretends that it was a great trip:Big puss*: So how was it?Paulie: Fabulous, I felt right at home… I feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t been … especially any Italian. The prosthetic memories that defined these characters’ perceptions of Italy are based on the American media’s portrayal of Italy. Commendatori thus exposes the differences between what is “authentically Italian” and the prosthetic memories about Italy generated by American gangster films. By the end of the episode it has become clear that these “inauthentic” prosthetic memories have forged an entirely different, hybrid ethnic identity.“Louis Brasi sleeps with the fishes”: How The Sopranos Treats Prosthetic MemoriesIntertextuality is an important way through which the audience can understand how The Sopranos treats prosthetic memories. The prosthetic memories generated by characters in The Sopranos are heavily based on stereotypes of Italian Americans. Papaleo states that the Italian stereotype is “composed of overreactions: after bowing, smiling and being funny, the Italian loses control” (93). Mafia films are crucial in defining the identity of Tony and his friends, and David Pattie suggests that they are a “symbolic framework within which Tony, Paulie, Christopher and Silvio attempt to find meaning and justification for their lives” (137). In a similar way, the audience is invited to use these same films as a frame for watching The Sopranos itself. Mafia stereotypes are one of the dominant ways that depict Italian Americans on screen. According to Larke-Walsh, this has perpetuated the belief that crime and Italian-Americanness are synonymous with each other (226). The show is obsessively referential and relies on the viewer’s knowledge of these films for much of its effect. Pattie describes how such use of intertextuality can be explained: "[there are] two ways of looking at self-referential programs: one in which readings of other media texts can be contained first of all within the film or program in which they occur; and a more covert type of referential work, which relies almost exclusively on the audience’s detailed, constantly-updated cultural intelligence" (137). The Sopranos operates on both levels as references that are simultaneously textual and meta-textual. This is evident through the way the show treats The Godfather films. They are by far the most frequently mentioned ones (Golden 95). According to Chris Messenger, the central link between the two is the acknowledgement that “America itself has been totally colonised by The Godfather” (Messenger 95). The Godfather is an urtext that frames how audiences are invited to view the show. As such, The Sopranos invites the viewer to use the Godfather as a lens to uncover extra layers of meaning. For example, The Sopranos uses the misguided ways in which its characters have taken on stereotypes from The Godfather as a source of humour. The series plays on the fact that characters will allow prosthetic memories derived from gangster films to dictate their behaviour. In the pilot episode, Christopher calls “Big puss*” Bonpensiero to help him dispose of a body. Christopher informs puss* that it’s his plan to leave the body at a garbage stop to be discovered by the rival Czechoslovakians. Christopher hoped this would emulate the “Luca Brasi situation” from The Godfather and intimidate the Czechoslovakians. When he explains this to puss*, they have the following exchange. puss*: The Kolar uncle is gonna find a kid dead on one of his bins and get on our f*ckin’ business… no way!Christopher: Louis Brasi sleeps with the fishes.puss*: Luca Brasi… Luca! There are differences Christopher… okay… from the Luca Brasi situation and this. Look, the Kolar’s know a kid is dead, it hardens their position... plus now the cops are lookin’ for a f*ckin’ murderer!To members of the audience who are familiar with The Godfather, it immediately becomes clear that Christopher is comically misguided. In the Godfather, Luca Brasi was murdered because he was caught trying to infiltrate a powerful rival organisation. Fish wrapped in his bullet-proof vest were then sent back to the Corleones in order to notify them that their plan had been foiled (“Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes”). The “Luca Brasi situation” was a calculated and strategic move whereas Christopher’s situation amounts to a seemingly random, unauthorised killing. This sequence in The Sopranos uses this comparison for comedic effect and plays on the stereotype that all Italian Americans are mafioso and that all mafia behaviour is interchangeable. The symbolic language of the “Luca Brasi” scene is contrasted with explicit shots of a slumped, lifeless body. These shots are a source of macabre humour. The audience is invited to laugh at the contrast between the subtle, thoughtful nature of the Luca Brasi situation and the brash violence of Christopher’s own predicament. Through this comedic situation, The Sopranos critiques Christopher’s aspiration to be a godfather-esque gangster by showing his incompetence. Christopher’s misreading of the situation is further emphasised by his mistakenly referring to Luca Brasi as “Louis”. After puss* says: “There are differences… from the Luca Brasi situation and this”, the dialogue pauses and the scene cuts to an immediate close up of Emil’s body falling to the side. This illustrates that part of the joke is that characters are willing to allow prosthetic memories derived from gangster films to dictate their behaviour, no matter how inappropriate. Therefore, Christopher is willing to refer to a scene from the Godfather that fails to account for the context of a situation without even consulting the knowledge of Big puss*. This leads to a larger critique of the ways in which films like The Godfather are presented as a script for all Italian Americans to follow. Nevertheless, The Sopranos still has a role in perpetuating these same stereotypes. Tomasulo has argued that "despite its use of postclassical generic, narrative aesthetic devices, and its creation by an Italian American, The Sopranos relies heavily on demeaning tropes of ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender" (206). This results in a perpetuation of negative stereotypes about working class Italian Americans that affirm old Hollywood clichés. While The Sopranos has tried to transcend this through complex characterisation, irony and universalisation, Tomasulo asserts that most audiences “take The Sopranos as straight - that is a raw unvarnished anthropology of Americans of Italian descent” (206). The origin of characters’ anti-social personalities seems to stem directly from their ethnicity and their being Italian appears to constitute an explanation for their behaviour. In his article Kocela discusses the complicated relationship that characters have with their white ethnicity. Through an application of Landsberg’s theory it is possible to understand how these ethnicities are initially formed and how they continue to circulate. In response to assimilation, characters in The Sopranos have turned to mass media to generate prosthetic memories of their ethnic heritage. These memories generally originate in classic gangster films. They are used by characters in The Sopranos to deny their whiteness and justify their criminality. The Sopranos itself comments on the complex ways that characters interpret gangster film stereotypes for both comedic and critical commentary. In the epilogue of her book, Landsberg asks: “How can we be sure the politics inspired by prosthetic memories are progressive and ethical?” Prosthetic memories generated by gangster texts are almost inherently problematic. Scholars have criticised the hyper-aggressive masculinity and regressive gender roles that are rampant throughout the genre (Larke-Walsh 226). For Tony and his friends, these problematic gender politics have helped justify their criminal lifestyle and valorised violence as part of ethnic performance. Similarly, these stereotypes are not always circulated critically and are at times perpetuated for audience enjoyment. AcknowledgmentI would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Michelle Phillipov for providing constructive feedback on earlier drafts. References“Commendatori.” The Sopranos: The Complete Second Season. Writ. David Chase. Dir. Tim Van Patten. HBO, 2000. DVD.Coppola, Francis, and Mario Puzo. The Godfather. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Video, 1972.“D-Girl.” The Sopranos: The Complete Second Season. Writ. Todd A. Kessler. Dir. Allen Coulter. HBO, 2000. DVD.D'Acierno, Pellegrino. “Cinema Paradiso.” The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts. New York: Garland, 1999. 563-690.Faucette, Brian. "Interrogations of Masculinity: Violence and the Retro-Gangster Cycle of the 60s." Atenea 28.1 (2008): 75-85.“From Where to Eternity.” The Sopranos: The Complete Second Season. Writ. Michael Imperioli. Dir. Henry Bronchtein. HBO, 2000. DVD. Golden, Cameron. "You're Annette Bening? Dreams and Hollywood Subtext in The Sopranos." Lavery, David. Reading The Sopranos: Hit TV from H.B.O. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006. 91-103.Kocela, Christopher. "Unmade Men: The Sopranos after Whiteness." Postmodern Culture 15.2 (2005). <http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.105/15.2kocela.html>.Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memories: The Transformation of American Rememberance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.Messenger, Christopher. Godfather and American Culture: How the Corleones Became Our Gang. New York: State University of New York Press, 2002.Michaels, Walter Ben. "Race into Culture: A Critical Geneology of Cultural Identity." Critical Inquiry 18.4 (1992): 655-85.Larke-Walsh, George. Screening the Mafia: Masculinity, Ethnicity and Mobsters from The Godfather to The Sopranos. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010.Papaleo, Joseph. "Ethnic Images and Ethnic Fate: The Media Image of Italian Americans." Ethnic Images in American Film and Television (1978): 44-95.Pattie, David. "Mobbed Up: The Sopranos and the Modern Gangster Film." Lavery, David. This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos. New York: Wallflower Press, 2002. 137-152.Roediger, D.R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 2007. Thorburn, D. "The Sopranos." In The Essential H.B.O Reader, eds. G. Edgerton and J. Jones. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008. 61-70.Tomasulo, Frank. "The Guinea as Tragic Hero: The Complex Representation of Italian Americans." In The Essential Sopranos Reader, eds. David Lavery, Douglas Howard, and Paul Levinson. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2011. 196-207.“The Sopranos.” The Sopranos: The Complete First Season. Writ. David Chase. Dir. David Chase. HBO, 1999. DVD. “Walk like a Man.” The Sopranos: The Complete Sixth Season. Writ. Terence Winter. Dir. Terence Winter. HBO, 2007. DVD. Webster, Colin. "Marginalized White Ethnicity, Race and Crime." Theoretical Criminology 12 (2008): 293-312.

Abstract:

Background: Race/ethnic disparities in stroke recurrence have persisted in the last decade in the USA. These disparities are often attributed to ethnic differences in risk factor prevalence and socioeconomic status. Methods: Incident ischemic stroke (IS) cases were ascertained in the Brain Attack Surveillance in Corpus Christi (BASIC) study, in Texas, USA in 2000-2011. Cases validated by stroke physicians were followed until death or a maximum of 5 years to determine 5-year cumulative stroke recurrence risk. Multivariable regression analyses and effect decomposition analyses (EDA) were used to examine the degree to which ethnic disparities are explained by education and biological risk factors. Results: There were 3,184 incident IS cases and 340 recurrent strokes (see Table). The ethnic difference in 5-year recurrence rate was 4.4% (p=0.004) greater in Mexican Americans (MA) than non-Hispanic whites (NHW). The age- and sex-adjusted hazard ratio (HR) of 1.43 (95%CI: 1.13, 1.79) comparing MA to NHW was attenuated after adjustment for education (HR=1.35, 95%CI: 0.91, 2.00), and further adjustment for biological factors (HR=1.28, 95%CI: 0.85, 1.92). EDA revealed that 57% of the recurrence risk disparity was due to differential associations (HR) between observed risk factors and recurrence (see Table). The remaining 43% was due to ethnic differences in risk factor prevalence. Conclusions: Ethnic differences in the strength of the associations between risk factors and recurrence, most notably education, diabetes, atrial fibrillation and hypertension explained 57% of the recurrence risk disparity. Further investigation of why some risk factors are more strongly associated with stroke recurrence in one ethnic group compared with others could yield valuable information on ethnic-specific stroke pathogenesis and secondary prevention strategies.

Abstract:

At the turn of the twentieth century, social theories developed in both the U.S. and Europe suggested that those at the top, or those most well endowed with good genetics, would stay that way, while those with poor genetics had little hope of changing their circ*mstances. Degeneration theory, as this concept was called when it took root in the United States from the late 1890s, before it had evolved to formally become eugenics in the 1910s, and beyond. While eugenics offices opened in Berlin in 1905, in England in 1907-08, and in the United States in 1910, there were many forms of it, including degeneration theory. What bound all the theories together was the notion of biology and heredity. Westerns like Martyrs of the Alamo became a vehicle to explore these concerns because they inundated everyday Americans with illustrations of national identity. Films like these often mixed fantasy with ideology. This is clearly evident in W. Christy Cabanne’s anti-Mexican sentiment in Martyrs of the Alamo. Examining Cabanne’s film through the lens of degeneracy theory provides a greater understanding of American social concerns in the 1910s. These concerns, characterized by xenophobic depictions of immigrants, particularly Mexicans, culminated in the linking of immigrant bodies and disease with heredity and genetics, namely through theories of degeneration . Cabanne’s Martyrs of the Alamo suggests, through the reproduction of the conflict surrounding the Alamo Mission, that the alternative to “race suicide” is a fantasy of American heroism, collectivism, and cultural exclusion. (SS and TZCS)

Abstract:

Introduction One of the ways in which ‘country’ is made to work discursively is in ‘country music’ – defining a genre and sensibility in music production, marketing and consumption. This article seeks to excavate one small niche in the historical geography of country music to explore exactly how discursive antecedents emerged, and crucially, how images associated with ‘country’ surfaced and travelled internationally via one of the new ‘global’ media of the first half of the twentieth century – sheet music. My central arguments are twofold: first, that alongside aural qualities and lyrical content, the visual elements of sheet music were important and thus far have been under-acknowledged. Sheet music diffused the imagery connecting ‘country’ to music, to particular landscapes, and masculinities. In the literature on country music much emphasis has been placed on film, radio and television (Tichi; Peterson). Yet, sheet music was for several decades the most common way people bought personal copies of songs they liked and intended to play at home on piano, guitar or ukulele. This was particularly the case in Australia – geographically distant, and rarely included in international tours by American country music stars. Sheet music is thus a rich text to reveal the historical contours of ‘country’. My second and related argument is that that the possibilities for the globalising of ‘country’ were first explored in music. The idea of transnational discourses associated with ‘country’ and ‘rurality’ is relatively new (Cloke et al; Gorman-Murray et al; McCarthy), but in music we see early evidence of a globalising discourse of ‘country’ well ahead of the time period usually analysed. Accordingly, my focus is on the sheet music of country songs in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century and on how visual representations hybridised travelling themes to create a new vernacular ‘country’ in Australia. Creating ‘Country’ Music Country music, as its name suggests, is perceived as the music of rural areas, “defined in contrast to metropolitan norms” (Smith 301). However, the ‘naturalness’ of associations between country music and rurality belies a history of urban capitalism and the refinement of deliberate methods of marketing music through associated visual imagery. Early groups wore suits and dressed for urban audiences – but then altered appearances later, on the insistence of urban record companies, to emphasise rurality and cowboy heritage. Post-1950, ‘country’ came to replace ‘folk’ music as a marketing label, as the latter was considered to have too many communistic references (Hemphill 5), and the ethnic mixing of earlier folk styles was conveniently forgotten in the marketing of ‘country’ music as distinct from African American ‘race’ and ‘r and b’ music. Now an industry of its own with multinational headquarters in Nashville, country music is a ‘cash cow’ for entertainment corporations, with lower average production costs, considerable profit margins, and marketing advantages that stem from tropes of working class identity and ‘rural’ honesty (see Lewis; Arango). Another of country music’s associations is with American geography – and an imagined heartland in the colonial frontier of the American West. Slippages between ‘country’ and ‘western’ in music, film and dress enhance this. But historical fictions are masked: ‘purists’ argue that western dress and music have nothing to do with ‘country’ (see truewesternmusic.com), while recognition of the Spanish-Mexican, Native American and Hawaiian origins of ‘cowboy’ mythology is meagre (George-Warren and Freedman). Similarly, the highly international diffusion and adaptation of country music as it rose to prominence in the 1940s is frequently downplayed (Connell and Gibson), as are the destructive elements of colonialism and dispossession of indigenous peoples in frontier America (though Johnny Cash’s 1964 album The Ballads Of The American Indian: Bitter Tears was an exception). Adding to the above is the way ‘country’ operates discursively in music as a means to construct particular masculinities. Again, linked to rural imagery and the American frontier, the dominant masculinity is of rugged men wrestling nature, negotiating hardships and the pressures of family life. Country music valorises ‘heroic masculinities’ (Holt and Thompson), with echoes of earlier cowboy identities reverberating into contemporary performance through dress style, lyrical content and marketing imagery. The men of country music mythology live an isolated existence, working hard to earn an income for dependent families. Their music speaks to the triumph of hard work, honest values (meaning in this context a musical style, and lyrical concerns that are ‘down to earth’, ‘straightforward’ and ‘without pretence’) and physical strength, in spite of neglect from national governments and uncaring urban leaders. Country music has often come to be associated with conservative politics, heteronormativity, and whiteness (Gibson and Davidson), echoing the wider politics of ‘country’ – it is no coincidence, for example, that the slogan for the 2008 Republican National Convention in America was ‘country first’. And yet, throughout its history, country music has also enabled more diverse gender performances to emerge – from those emphasising (or bemoaning) domesticity; assertive femininity; creative negotiation of ‘country’ norms by gay men; and ‘alternative’ culture (captured in the marketing tag, ‘alt.country’); to those acknowledging white male victimhood, criminality (‘the outlaw’), vulnerability and cruelty (see Johnson; McCusker and Pecknold; Saucier). Despite dominant tropes of ‘honesty’, country music is far from transparent, standing for certain values and identities, and yet enabling the construction of diverse and contradictory others. Historical analysis is therefore required to trace the emergence of ‘country’ in music, as it travelled beyond America. A Note on Sheet Music as Media Source Sheet music was one of the main modes of distribution of music from the 1930s through to the 1950s – a formative period in which an eclectic group of otherwise distinct ‘hillbilly’ and ‘folk’ styles moved into a single genre identity, and after which vinyl singles and LP records with picture covers dominated. Sheet music was prevalent in everyday life: beyond radio, a hit song was one that was widely purchased as sheet music, while pianos and sheet music collections (stored in a piece of furniture called a ‘music canterbury’) in family homes were commonplace. Sheet music is in many respects preferable to recorded music as a form of evidence for historical analysis of country music. Picture LP covers did not arrive until the late 1950s (by which time rock and roll had surpassed country music). Until then, 78 rpm shellac discs, the main form of pre-recorded music, featured generic brown paper sleeves from the individual record companies, or city retail stores. Also, while radio was clearly central to the consumption of music in this period, it obviously also lacked the pictorial element that sheet music could provide. Sheet music bridged the music and printing industries – the latter already well-equipped with colour printing, graphic design and marketing tools. Sheet music was often literally crammed with information, providing the researcher with musical notation, lyrics, cover art and embedded advertisem*nts – aural and visual texts combined. These multiple dimensions of sheet music proved useful here, for clues to the context of the music/media industries and geography of distribution (for instance, in addresses for publishers and sheet music retail shops). Moreover, most sheet music of the time used rich, sometimes exaggerated, images to convince passing shoppers to buy songs that they had possibly never heard. As sheet music required caricature rather than detail or historical accuracy, it enabled fantasy without distraction. In terms of representations of ‘country’, then, sheet music is perhaps even more evocative than film or television. Hundreds of sheet music items were collected for this research over several years, through deliberate searching (for instance, in library archives and specialist sheet music stores) and with some serendipity (for instance, when buying second hand sheet music in charity shops or garage sales). The collected material is probably not representative of all music available at the time – it is as much a specialised personal collection as a comprehensive survey. However, at least some material from all the major Australian country music performers of the time were found, and the resulting collection appears to be several times larger than that held currently by the National Library of Australia (from which some entries were sourced). All examples here are of songs written by, or cover art designed for Australian country music performers. For brevity’s sake, the following analysis of the sheet music follows a crudely chronological framework. Country Music in Australia Before ‘Country’ Country music did not ‘arrive’ in Australia from America as a fully-finished genre category; nor was Australia at the time without rural mythology or its own folk music traditions. Associations between Australian national identity, rurality and popular culture were entrenched in a period of intense creativity and renewed national pride in the decades prior to and after Federation in 1901. This period saw an outpouring of art, poetry, music and writing in new nationalist idiom, rooted in ‘the bush’ (though drawing heavily on Celtic expressions), and celebrating themes of mateship, rural adversity and ‘battlers’. By the turn of the twentieth century, such myths, invoked through memory and nostalgia, had already been popularised. Australia had a fully-established system of colonies, capital cities and state governments, and was highly urbanised. Yet the poetry, folk music and art, invariably set in rural locales, looked back to the early 1800s, romanticising bush characters and frontier events. The ‘bush ballad’ was a central and recurring motif, one that commentators have argued was distinctly, and essentially ‘Australian’ (Watson; Smith). Sheet music from this early period reflects the nationalistic, bush-orientated popular culture of the time: iconic Australian fauna and flora are prominent, and Australian folk culture is emphasised as ‘native’ (being the first era of cultural expressions from Australian-born residents). Pioneer life and achievements are celebrated. ‘Along the road to Gundagai’, for instance, was about an iconic Australian country town and depicted sheep droving along rustic trails with overhanging eucalypts. Male figures are either absent, or are depicted in situ as lone drovers in the archetypal ‘shepherd’ image, behind their flocks of sheep (Figure 1). Figure 1: No. 1 Magpie Ballads – The Pioneer (c1900) and Along the road to Gundagai (1923). Further colonial ruralities developed in Australia from the 1910s to 1940s, when agrarian values grew in the promotion of Australian agricultural exports. Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’ to industrialisation, and governments promoted rural development and inland migration. It was a period in which rural lifestyles were seen as superior to those in the crowded inner city, and government strategies sought to create a landed proletariat through post-war land settlement and farm allotment schemes. National security was said to rely on populating the inland with those of European descent, developing rural industries, and breeding a healthier and yet compliant population (Dufty), from which armies of war-ready men could be recruited in times of conflict. Popular culture served these national interests, and thus during these decades, when ‘hillbilly’ and other North American music forms were imported, they were transformed, adapted and reworked (as in other places such as Canada – see Lehr). There were definite parallels in the frontier narratives of the United States (Whiteoak), and several local adaptations followed: Tex Morton became Australia’s ‘Yodelling boundary rider’ and Gordon Parsons became ‘Australia’s yodelling bushman’. American songs were re-recorded and performed, and new original songs written with Australian lyrics, titles and themes. Visual imagery in sheet music built upon earlier folk/bush frontier themes to re-cast Australian pastoralism in a more settled, modernist and nationalist aesthetic; farms were places for the production of a robust nation. Where male figures were present on sheet music covers in the early twentieth century, they became more prominent in this period, and wore Akubras (Figure 2). The lyrics to John Ashe’s Growin’ the Golden Fleece (1952) exemplify this mix of Australian frontier imagery, new pastoralist/nationalist rhetoric, and the importation of American cowboy masculinity: Go west and take up sheep, man, North Queensland is the shot But if you don’t get rich, man, you’re sure to get dry rot Oh! Growin’ the golden fleece, battlin’ a-way out west Is bound to break your flamin’ heart, or else expand your chest… We westerners are handy, we can’t afford to crack Not while the whole darn’d country is riding on our back Figure 2: Eric Tutin’s Shearers’ Jamboree (1946). As in America, country music struck a chord because it emerged “at a point in history when the project of the creation and settlement of a new society was underway but had been neither completed nor abandoned” (Dyer 33). Governments pressed on with the colonial project of inland expansion in Australia, despite the theft of indigenous country this entailed, and popular culture such as music became a means to normalise and naturalise the process. Again, mutations of American western imagery, and particular iconic male figures were important, as in Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail (Figure 3): Wagon wheels are rolling on, and the days seem mighty long Clouds of heat-dust in the air, bawling cattle everywhere They’re on the overlander trail Where only sheer determination will prevail Men of Aussie with a job to do, they’ll stick and drive the cattle through And though they sweat they know they surely must Keep on the trail that winds a-head thro’ heat and dust All sons of Aussie and they will not fail. Sheet music depicted silhouetted men in cowboy hats on horses (either riding solo or in small groups), riding into sunsets or before looming mountain ranges. Music – an important part of popular culture in the 1940s – furthered the colonial project of invading, securing and transforming the Australian interior by normalising its agendas and providing it with heroic male characters, stirring tales and catchy tunes. Figure 3: ‘Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail and Smoky Dawson’s The Overlander’s Song (1946). ‘Country Music’ Becomes a (Globalised) Genre Further growth in Australian country music followed waves of popularity in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, and was heavily influenced by new cross-media publicity opportunities. Radio shows expanded, and western TV shows such as Bonanza and On the Range fuelled a ‘golden age’. Australian performers such as Slim Dusty and Smokey Dawson rose to fame (see Fitzgerald and Hayward) in an era when rural-urban migration peaked. Sheet music reflected the further diffusion and adoption of American visual imagery: where male figures were present on sheet music covers, they became more prominent than before and wore Stetsons. Some were depicted as chiselled-faced but simple men, with plain clothing and square jaws. Others began to more enthusiastically embrace cowboy looks, with bandana neckerchiefs, rawhide waistcoats, embellished and harnessed tall shaft boots, pipe-edged western shirts with wide collars, smile pockets, snap fasteners and shotgun cuffs, and fringed leather jackets (Figure 4). Landscapes altered further too: cacti replaced eucalypts, and iconic ‘western’ imagery of dusty towns, deserts, mesas and buttes appeared (Figure 5). Any semblance of folk music’s appeal to rustic authenticity was jettisoned in favour of showmanship, as cowboy personas were constructed to maximise cinematic appeal. Figure 4: Al Dexter’s Pistol Packin’ Mama (1943) and Reg Lindsay’s (1954) Country and Western Song Album. Figure 5: Tim McNamara’s Hitching Post (1948) and Smoky Dawson’s Golden West Album (1951). Far from slavish mimicry of American culture, however, hybridisations were common. According to Australian music historian Graeme Smith (300): “Australian place names appear, seeking the same mythological resonance that American localisation evoked: hobos became bagmen […] cowboys become boundary riders.” Thus alongside reproductions of the musical notations of American songs by Lefty Frizzel, Roy Carter and Jimmie Rodgers were songs with localised themes by new Australian stars such as Reg Lindsay and Smoky Dawson: My curlyheaded buckaroo, My home way out back, and On the Murray Valley. On the cover of The square dance by the billabong (Figure 6) – the title of which itself was a conjunction of archetypal ‘country’ images from both America and Australia – a background of eucalypts and windmills frames dancers in classic 1940s western (American) garb. In the case of Tex Morton’s Beautiful Queensland (Figure 7), itself mutated from W. Lee O’Daniel’s Beautiful Texas (c1945), the sheet music instructed those playing the music that the ‘names of other states may be substituted for Queensland’. ‘Country’ music had become an established genre, with normative values, standardised images and themes and yet constituted a stylistic formula with enough polysemy to enable local adaptations and variations. Figure 6: The Square dance by the billabong, Vernon Lisle, 1951. Figure 7: Beautiful Queensland, Tex Morton, c1945 source: http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vn1793930. Conclusions In country music images of place and masculinity combine. In music, frontier landscapes are populated by rugged men living ‘on the range’ in neo-colonial attempts to tame the land and convert it to productive uses. This article has considered only one media – sheet music – in only one country (Australia) and in only one time period (1900-1950s). There is much more to say than was possible here about country music, place and gender – particularly recently, since ‘country’ has fragmented into several niches, and marketing of country music via cable television and the internet has ensued (see McCusker and Pecknold). My purpose here has been instead to explore the early origins of ‘country’ mythology in popular culture, through a media source rarely analysed. Images associated with ‘country’ travelled internationally via sheet music, immensely popular in the 1930s and 1940s before the advent of television. The visual elements of sheet music contributed to the popularisation and standardisation of genre expectations and appearances, and yet these too travelled and were adapted and varied in places like Australia which had their own colonial histories and folk music heritages. Evidenced here is how combinations of geographical and gender imagery embraced imported American cowboy imagery and adapted it to local markets and concerns. Australia saw itself as a modern rural utopia with export aspirations and a desire to secure permanence through taming and populating its inland. Sheet music reflected all this. So too, sheet music reveals the historical contours of ‘country’ as a transnational discourse – and the extent to which ‘country’ brought with it a clearly defined set of normative values, a somewhat exaggerated cowboy masculinity, and a remarkable capacity to be moulded to local circ*mstances. Well before later and more supposedly ‘global’ media such as the internet and television, the humble printed sheet of notated music was steadily shaping ‘country’ imagery, and an emergent international geography of cultural flows. References Arango, Tim. “Cashville USA.” Fortune, Jan 29, 2007. Sept 3, 2008, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/01/22/8397980/index.htm. Cloke, Paul, Marsden, Terry and Mooney, Patrick, eds. Handbook of Rural Studies, London: Sage, 2006. Connell, John and Gibson, Chris. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place, London: Routledge, 2003. Dufty, Rae. Rethinking the politics of distribution: the geographies and governmentalities of housing assistance in rural New South Wales, Australia, PhD thesis, UNSW, 2008. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture, London: Routledge, 1997. George-Warren, Holly and Freedman, Michelle. How the West was Worn: a History of Western Wear, New York: Abrams, 2000. Fitzgerald, Jon and Hayward, Phil. “At the confluence: Slim Dusty and Australian country music.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. Phil Hayward. Gympie: Australian Institute of Country Music Press, 2003. 29-54. Gibson, Chris and Davidson, Deborah. “Tamworth, Australia’s ‘country music capital’: place marketing, rural narratives and resident reactions.” Journal of Rural Studies 20 (2004): 387-404. Gorman-Murray, Andrew, Darian-Smith, Kate and Gibson, Chris. “Scaling the rural: reflections on rural cultural studies.” Australian Humanities Review 45 (2008): in press. Hemphill, Paul. The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Holt, Douglas B. and Thompson, Craig J. “Man-of-action heroes: the pursuit of heroic masculinity in everyday consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2004). Johnson, Corey W. “‘The first step is the two-step’: hegemonic masculinity and dancing in a country western gay bar.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 18 (2004): 445-464. Lehr, John C. “‘Texas (When I die)’: national identity and images of place in Canadian country music broadcasts.” The Canadian Geographer 27 (1983): 361-370. Lewis, George H. “Lap dancer or hillbilly deluxe? The cultural construction of modern country music.” Journal of Popular Culture, 31 (1997): 163-173. McCarthy, James. “Rural geography: globalizing the countryside.” Progress in Human Geography 32 (2008): 132-137. McCusker, Kristine M. and Pecknold, Diane. Eds. A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music. UP of Mississippi, 2004. Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Saucier, Karen A. “Healers and heartbreakers: images of women and men in country music.” Journal of Popular Culture 20 (1986): 147-166. Smith, Graeme. “Australian country music and the hillbilly yodel.” Popular Music 13 (1994): 297-311. Tichi, Cecelia. Readin’ Country Music. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. truewesternmusic.com “True western music.”, Sept 3, 2008, http://truewesternmusic.com/. Watson, Eric. Country Music in Australia. Sydney: Rodeo Publications, 1984. Whiteoak, John. “Two frontiers: early cowboy music and Australian popular culture.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. P. Hayward. Gympie: AICMP: 2003. 1-28.

Abstract:

Pat Buchanan’s infamous speech to the 1992 Republican convention (Buchanan), has often been understood as a defining moment in the US culture wars (Hartman). The speech’s central claim that “there is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America” oriented around the idea that the US was a nation divided between two opposing values systems. On one side were Democrat defenders of “abortion on demand” and “hom*osexual rights” and on the other those who, like then Republican presidential candidate George Bush, stood by the “Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which this nation was built.”Buchanan’s speech helped popularise the idea that the US was riven by fundamental cultural divides, an idea that became a media staple but was hotly contested by scholars.The year before Buchanan’s speech, James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America advanced a “culture wars thesis” based in claims of a growing “political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding” (Hunter 42). Hunter cited increasing polarisation in debates on “abortion, child care, funding for the arts, affirmative action and quotas, gay rights, values in public education, or multiculturalism” (Hunter 42) and claimed that the defining religious divides in the US were no longer between religions but within them. In the intense scholarly debate that followed its publication, as Irene Taviss Thomson has summarised, little empirical evidence emerged of any real divide.Yet this lack of empirical evidence does not mean that talk of culture wars can be easily dismissed. The culture wars, as I have argued elsewhere (Davis), were and are a media product designed to sharpen social divides for electoral gain. No doubt because of the usefulness of this product, culture wars discourse remains a persistent feature of public debate across the west. The symbolic discourse that positions the culture wars and its supposedly intractable differences as real, I argue, deserves consideration in its own right.In what follows, I analyse the use of culture wars discourse in two defining documents. The first, Pat Buchanan’s 1992 “culture wars” speech, reputedly put the culture wars front and centre of US politics. The second, Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos’s 2016 article in Breitbart News, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” (Bokhari and Yiannopoulos), sought to define its moment by affirming the arrival of a new political movement, the “alt-right”, as a force in US politics. With its homage to Buchanan and written in the belief that “politics is downstream from culture” the article sought to position the alt-right as an inheritor of Buchanan’s legacy and to mark a new defining moment in an ongoing culture war.This self-referential framing, I argue, belies deep differences between Buchanan’s rhetoric and that of Bokhari and Yiannopoulos. Buchanan’s defence of American values, while spectacularly adversarial, is at base democratic, whereas, despite its culturalist posturing, one project of “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” is to reinstate biological notions of race and gender difference in the political agenda.Culture Wars ThenBuchanan’s speech came after decades of sniping. The emergence of the “counterculture” of the 1960s helped create a basis for the idea that US politics was defined by an irreducible clash of values (Thomson). Buchanan played a direct role in fostering such divides. As he famously wrote in a 1971 memo to then President Richard Nixon in which he suggested exploiting racial divides, if we “cut … the country in half, my view is that we would have far the larger half.” But the language of Buchanan’s 1992 speech, while incendiary, is nevertheless democratic in its emphasis on delineating rival political platforms. Much culture wars discourse focuses on the embodied politics of gender, sexuality and race. A principal target of Buchanan’s speech was abortion, which since the Roe versus Wade judgement of 1973 that legalised part-term abortion in the US has been a defining culture wars issue. At the “top” of Democrat candidate Bill Clinton’s agenda, Buchanan claimed, is “unrestricted abortion on demand.” Buchanan singled out Hillary Clinton for special attack:friends, this is radical feminism. The agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America–abortion on demand … hom*osexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat … is not the kind of change America wants.Buchanan then pledges to support George Bush, who had beaten him for the Republican nomination, and Bush’s stance “against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.” He also supports Bush on “right-to-life, and for voluntary prayer in the public schools.” Buchanan’s language here references essentialist ideas of morality and contrasts them against the supposed immorality of his opponents but is ultimately predicated in the democratic languages of law-making and rights and the adversarial language of electoral politics. Through these contrasts the speech builds to its famous centrepiece:my friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.Buchanan, here, sharpens and maps the contrasts he has been working with onto differences in identity. Politics, here, is not about the distribution of resources but is about identity, values and a commensurate difference in belief systems. On one side are righteous Americans, on the other a culture of immorality that threatens the proper religious basis of the nation. Notably, the speech makes no direct mention of race. It instead uses code. Evoking the LA riots that took place earlier that year, Buchanan sides with the troopers who broke up the riots.they walked up a dark street, where the mob had looted and burned every building but one, a convalescent home for the aged. The mob was heading in, to ransack and loot the apartments of the terrified old men and women. When the troopers arrived, M-16s at the ready, the mob threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated. It had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, backed by courage … and as they took back the streets of LA, block by block, so we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country. God bless you, and God bless America.Unsaid here is that the “mob” were black and reacting against the injustice of the beating of a black man, Rodney King, by police. The implication is that to “take back our culture … take back our country” is to vanquish the restive black enemy within. By using code Buchanan is able to avoid possible charges of racism, positioning the rioters not as racially different but as culturally different; their deficit is not genetic but patriotic.Culture Wars NowSince the 1990s culture wars discourse has become entrenched as a media staple. Supposedly intractable values divides between “conservatives” and “liberals” play out incessantly across a conservative media sphere that spans outlets (Fox News), platforms (Breitbart News), broadcasters (Rush Limbaugh), and commentators such as Ann Coulter, in debate over issues ranging from gun control, LGBTQI rights, American history and sex education and prayer in schools. This discourse, crystalised in divisive terms such as “cultural Marxist,” “social justice warrior” and “snowflake”, is increasingly generated by online bulletin boards such as the 4chan/pol/(politically incorrect) and /b/-Random boards, which function as a crucible for trolling and meme-making (Phillips) that routinely targets minorities, women and especially feminists. As Angela Nagle has said (24), Gamergate, the 2014 episode in which female game reviewers and designers critical of sexism in the gaming industry were targeted with organised trolling, played a pivotal role in “uniting different online groups and spreading the tactics of chan culture to the broad online right.” Other conduits for extremist discourse to the mainstream include sites such as the white supremacist Daily Stormer, alt-right sites, and “men’s rights” sites such as Return of Kings. The self-described aim of this discourse, as the white nationalist Jared Swift has said, has been to move the “Overton window” of what constitutes acceptable public discourse far to the right (in Daniels).The emergence of this diverse conservative media sphere provided opportunities for new celebrities willing to parse older forms of culture wars discourse with new forms of online extremism and to announce themselves as ringmasters of whatever circus might result. One such person is Milo Yiannopoulos. Quick to read the opportunities in Gamergate, he announced himself a sudden convert to the gaming cause (which he had previously dismissed) and helped turn the controversy into a rallying point for a nascent alt-right (Yiannopoulos). In 2014 Yiannopoulos was recruited by Breitbart News as a senior editor. Breitbart’s founder, Andrew Breitbart, is perhaps most famous for his dictum that “politics is downstream from culture”, an apt motto for a culture war.In 2016 Yiannopoulos, working with Bokhari, another Breitbart staffer, published, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right”, which, written with Andrew Breitbart’s dictum in mind, sought to announce the radicalism of a new antiestablishment conservative political force and yet to make it palatable for a mainstream audience. The article claims the “paleoconservative movement that rallied around the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan” as one of the origins of the alt-right. Donald Trump is praised as “perhaps the first truly cultural candidate for President since Buchanan.” The rest, they argue, is little more than harmless online mischief. The alt-right, they claim, is a fun-loving “movement born out of the youthful, subversive, underground edges of the internet,” made up of people who are “dangerously bright.” Similarly, the “manosphere” of “men’s rights” sites, infamous for misogyny, are praised as “one of the alt-right’s most distinctive constituencies” and positioned as harmless alongside an endorsem*nt of masculinist author Jack Donovan’s “wistful” laments for “the loss of manliness that accompanies modern, globalized societies.” Mass trolling and the harassment of opponents by “the alt-right’s meme team” is characterised as “undeniably hysterical” and justifiable in pursuit of lulz.The sexism and racism found on bulletin boards such as 4 chan, for Bokhari and Yiannopoulos, is no less harmless. Young people, they claim, are drawn to the alt right not because of ideology but because “it seems fresh, daring and funny” contrasted against the “authoritarian instincts of the progressive left. With no personal memories or experience of racism, they “have trouble believing it’s actually real … they don’t believe that the memes they post on/pol/ are actually racist. In fact, they know they’re not—they do it because it gets a reaction.”For all these efforts to style the alt-right as mere carnivalesque paleoconservatism, though, there is a fundamental difference between Buchanan’s speech and “An Establishment Conservative’s guide to the Alt-Right.” Certainly, Bokhari and Yiannopoulos hit the same culture wars touchstones as Buchanan: race, sexuality and gender issues. But whereas Buchanan’s speech instances the “new racism” (Ansell) in its use of code to avoid charges of biological racism, Yiannopoulos and Bokhari are more direct. The article presents as an exemplary instance of how to fight a culture war but epitomises a new turn in the culture wars from culture to biologism. The alt-right is positioned as unashamedly Eurocentric and having little to do with racism. Yiannopoulos and Bokhari also seek to distance the alt-right from the “Stormfront set” and “1488ers” (“1488” is code for neo-Nazi). Yet even as they do so, they embrace “human biodiversity” ideology (biological racism), ethnic separatism and the building of walls to keep different racial groups apart. “An Establishment Conservative’s guide to the alt-right” was written in secret consultation with leading white supremacist figures (Bernstein) and namechecks the openly white supremacist Richard Spencer who is given credit for helping found “the media empire of the modern-day alternative right.”Spencer has argued that “Race is something between a breed and an actual species” and a process of “peaceful ethnic cleansing” should take place by which non-white Americans leave (Nagle 59). He is an admirer of the Italian ‘superfascist’ and notorious racist Julius Evola, who Yiannopoulos and Bokhari also namecheck. They also excuse race hate sites such as VDARE and American Renaissance as home to “an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another.” It is mere happenstance, according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, that the “natural conservatives” drawn to the alt-right are “mostly white, mostly male middle-American radicals, who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic.” Yet as they also say,while eschewing bigotry on a personal level, the movement is frightened by the prospect of demographic displacement represented by immigration. Border walls are a much safer option. The alt-right’s intellectuals would also argue that culture is inseparable from race. The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved.“Demographic displacement” here is code for “white genocide” a meme assiduously promoted over many years by the US white supremacist Bob Whitaker, now deceased, who believed that immigration, interracial marriage, and multiculturalism dilute white influence and will drive the white population to extinction (Daniels). The idea that “culture is inseparable from race” and that “some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved” echo white supremacist calls for a white “ethno-state.”“An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” also namechecks so-called “neoreactionaries” such as Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, who according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari regard egalitarianism as an affront to “every piece of research on hereditary intelligence” and see liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism as having “no better a historical track record than monarchy.” Land and Yarvin, according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, offer a welcome vision of the conservative future:asking people to see each other as human beings rather than members of a demographic in-group, meanwhile, ignored every piece of research on tribal psychology … these were the first shoots of a new conservative ideology—one that many were waiting for.Culture Wars FuturesAs the culture wars have turned biological so they have become entrenched ever more firmly in mainstream politics. The “new conservative ideology” Yiannopoulos and Bokhari mention reeks of much older forms of conservative ideology currently being taken up in the US and elsewhere, based in naturalised gender hierarchies and racialised difference. This return to the past is fast becoming institutionalised. One of the stakes in the bitter 2018 dispute over the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court was the prospect that Kavanaugh’s vote will create a conservative majority in the court that will enable the revisiting of a talismanic moment in the culture wars by overturning the Roe versus Wade judgement. Alt-right calls for a white ethno-state find an analogue in political attacks on asylum seekers, the reinforcement of racialised differential citizenship regimes around the globe, the building of walls to keep out criminalised Others, and anti-Islamic immigration measures. The mainstreaming of hate can be seen in the willingness of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate and as president to retweet the white supremacist tweets of @WhiteGenocideTM, his hesitation to repudiate a campaign endorsem*nt by Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, his retweeting of bogus black crime statistics, his accusations that illegal Mexican immigrants are criminals, drug dealers and rapists, and his anti-Islamic immigration stance. It can be seen, too, in the recent electoral successes of white nationalist parties across Europe.For all their embrace of Eurocentrism and “the preservation of western culture” the alt-right revisiting of issues of race and gender in terms that seek to reinstate biological hierarchy undermines the Enlightenment ethics of equality and universalism that underpin western human rights conventions and democratic processes. The “Overton window” of acceptable public debate has moved far to the right and long taboo forms of race and gender-based hate have returned to the public agenda. Buchanan’s 1992 Republican convention speech, by contrast, for all its incendiary rhetoric, toxic hom*ophobia, sneering anti-feminism, and coded racism, somehow manages to look like a relic from a kinder, gentler age.ReferencesAnsell, Amy Elizabeth. New Right, New Racism: Race and Reaction in the United States and Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.Bernstein, Joseph. “Here’s How Breitbart and Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas into the Mainstream.” BuzzFeed News, 10 May 2017. 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism>.Bokhari, Allum, and Milo Yiannopoulos. “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” Breitbart, 29 Mar. 2016. 4 Dec. 2018 <http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/>.Buchanan, Pat. “1992 Republican National Convention Speech.” Patrick J. Buchanan - Official Website, 17 Aug. 1992. 4 Dec. 2018 <http://buchanan.org/blog/1992-republican-national-convention-speech-148>.Daniels, Jessie. “Twitter and White Supremacy, A Love Story.” Dame Magazine, 19 Oct. 2017. 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.damemagazine.com/2017/10/19/twitter-and-white-supremacy-love-story/>.Davis, Mark. “Neoliberalism, the Culture Wars and Public Policy.” Australian Public Policy: Progressive Ideas in the Neoliberal Ascendency. Eds. Chris Miller and Lionel Orchard. Policy Press, 2014. 27–42.Hartman, Andrew. A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. University of Chicago Press, 2015.Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Control the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics in America. Basic Books, 1991.Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Zero Books, 2017.Phillips, Whitney. This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. MIT Press, 2015.Thomson, Irene Taviss. Culture Wars and Enduring American Dilemmas. University of Michigan Press, 2010.Yiannopoulos, Milo. “Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart.” Breitbart, 1 Sep. 2014. 4 Dec. 2018 <http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/09/01/lying-greedy-promiscuous-feminist-bullies-are-tearing-the-video-game-industry-apart/>.

Abstract:

In a media saturated world, doodles have recently received the kind of attention usually reserved for coverage of racy extra marital affairs, corrupt governance, and product malfunction. Former British Prime Minister Blair’s private doodling at a World Economic Forum meeting in 2005 raised suspicions that he, according to one keen graphologist, struggled “to maintain control in a confusing world," which infers he was attempting to cohere a scattershot, fragmentary series of events (Spiegel). However, placid-faced Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who sat nearby, actually scrawled the doodles. In this case, perhaps the scrawls mimicked the ambience in the room: Gates might have been ‘tuning’–registering the ‘white noise’ of the participants, letting his unconscious dictate doodles as a way to cope with the dissonance trekking in with the officialspeak. The doodles may have documented and registered the space between words, acting like deposits from his gestalt.Sometimes the most intriguing doodles co-exist with printed texts. This includes common vernacular graffiti that lines public and private books and magazines. Such graffiti exposes tensions in the role of readers as well as horror vacui: a fear of unused, empty space. Yet, school children fingering fresh pages and stiff book spines for the first few times often consider their book pages as sanctioned, discreet, and inviolable. The book is an object of financial and cultural investment, or imbued both with mystique and ideologies. Yet, in the e-book era, the old-fashioned, physical page is a relic of sorts, a holdover from coarse papyrus culled from wetland sage, linking us to the First Dynasty in Egypt. Some might consider the page as a vessel for typography, a mere framing device for text. The margins may reflect a perimeter of nothingness, an invisible borderland that doodles render visible by inhabiting them. Perhaps the margins are a bare landscape, like unmarred flat sand in a black and white panchromatic photo with unique tonal signature and distinct grain. Perhaps the margins are a mute locality, a space where words have evaporated, or a yet-to-be-explored environment, or an ambient field. Then comes the doodle, an icon of vernacular art.As a modern folklorist, I have studied and explored vernacular art at length, especially forms that may challenge and fissure aesthetic, cultural, and social mores, even within my own field. For instance, I contend that Grandma Prisbrey’s “Bottle Village,” featuring millions of artfully arranged pencils, bottles, and dolls culled from dumps in Southern California, is a syncretic culturescape with underlying feminist symbolism, not merely the product of trauma and hoarding (Ensminger). Recently, I flew to Oregon to deliver a paper on Mexican-American gravesite traditions. In a quest for increased multicultural tolerance, I argued that inexpensive dimestore objects left on Catholic immigrant graves do not represent a messy landscape of trinkets but unique spiritual environments with links to customs 3,000 years old. For me, doodles represent a variation on graffiti-style art with cultural antecedents stretching back throughout history, ranging from ancient scrawls on Greek ruins to contemporary park benches (with chiseled names, dates, and symbols), public bathroom latrinalia, and spray can aerosol art, including ‘bombing’ and ‘tagging’ hailed as “Spectacular Vernaculars” by Russell Potter (1995). Noted folklorist Alan Dundes mused on the meaning of latrinalia in Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia (1966), which has inspired pop culture books and web pages for the preservation and discussion of such art (see for instance, www.itsallinthehead.com/gallery1.html). Older texts such as Classic American Graffiti by Allen Walker Read (1935), originally intended for “students of linguistics, folk-lore, abnormal psychology,” reveal the field’s longstanding interest in marginal, crude, and profane graffiti.Yet, to my knowledge, a monograph on doodles has yet to be published by a folklorist, perhaps because the art form is reconsidered too idiosyncratic, too private, the difference between jots and doodles too blurry for a taxonomy and not the domain of identifiable folk groups. In addition, the doodles in texts often remain hidden until single readers encounter them. No broad public interaction is likely, unless a library text circulates freely, which may not occur after doodles are discovered. In essence, the books become tainted, infected goods. Whereas latrinalia speaks openly and irreverently, doodles feature a different scale and audience.Doodles in texts may represent a kind of speaking from the ‘margin’s margins,’ revealing the reader-cum-writer’s idiosyncratic, self-meaningful, and stylised hieroglyphics from the ambient margins of one’s consciousness set forth in the ambient margins of the page. The original page itself is an ambient territory that allows the meaning of the text to take effect. When those liminal spaces (both between and betwixt, in which the rules of page format, design, style, and typography are abandoned) are altered by the presence of doodles, the formerly blank, surplus, and soft spaces of the page offer messages coterminous with the text, often allowing readers to speak, however haphazardly and unconsciously, with and against the triggering text. The bleached whiteness can become a crowded milieu in the hands of a reader re-scripting the ambient territory. If the book is borrowed, then the margins are also an intimate negotiation with shared or public space. The cryptic residue of the doodler now resides, waiting, for the city of eyes.Throughout history, both admired artists and Presidents regularly doodled. Famed Italian Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi avoided strenuous studying by doodling in his books (Van Cleave 44). Both sides of the American political spectrum have produced plentiful inky depictions as well: roughshod Democratic President Johnson drew flags and pagodas; former Hollywood fantasy fulfiller turned politician Republican President Reagan’s specialty was western themes, recalling tropes both from his actor period and his duration acting as President; meanwhile, former law student turned current President, Barack Obama, has sketched members of Congress and the Senate for charity auctions. These doodles are rich fodder for both psychologists and cross-discipline analysts that propose theories regarding the automatic writing and self-styled miniature pictures of civic leaders. Doodles allow graphologists to navigate and determine the internal, cognitive fabric of the maker. To critics, they exist as mere trifles and offer nothing more than an iota of insight; doodles are not uncanny offerings from the recesses of memory, like bite-sized Rorschach tests, but simply sloppy scrawls of the bored.Ambient music theory may shed some light. Timothy Morton argues that Brian Eno designed to make music that evoked “space whose quality had become minimally significant” and “deconstruct the opposition … between figure and ground.” In fact, doodles may yield the same attributes as well. After a doodle is inserted into texts, the typography loses its primacy. There is a merging of the horizons. The text of the author can conflate with the text of the reader in an uneasy dance of meaning: the page becomes an interface revealing a landscape of signs and symbols with multiple intelligences–one manufactured and condoned, the other vernacular and unsanctioned. A fixed end or beginning between the two no longer exists. The ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page. The blank spaces keep inviting responses. An emergent discourse is always in waiting, always threatening to overspill the text’s intended meaning. In fact, the doodles may carry more weight than the intended text: the hierarchy between authorship and readership may topple.Resistant reading may take shape during these bouts. The doodle is an invasion and signals the geography of disruption, even when innocuous. It is a leveling tool. As doodlers place it alongside official discourse, they move away from positions of passivity, being mere consumers, and claim their own autonomy and agency. The space becomes co-determinant as boundaries are blurred. The destiny of the original text’s meaning is deferred. The habitus of the reader becomes embodied in the scrawl, and the next reader must negotiate and navigate the cultural capital of this new author. As such, the doodle constitutes an alternative authority and economy of meaning within the text.Recent studies indicate doodling, often regarded as behavior that announces a person’s boredom and withdrawal, is actually a very special tool to prevent memory loss. Jackie Andrade, an expert from the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, maintains that doodling actually “offsets the effects of selective memory blockade,” which yields a surprising result (quoted in “Doodling Gets”). Doodlers exhibit 29% more memory recall than those who passively listen, frozen in an unequal bond with the speaker/lecturer. Students that doodle actually retain more information and are likely more productive due to their active listening. They adeptly absorb information while students who stare patiently or daydream falter.Furthermore, in a 2006 paper, Andrew Kear argues that “doodling is a way in which students, consciously or not, stake a claim of personal agency and challenge some the values inherent in the education system” (2). As a teacher concerned with the engagement of students, he asked for three classes to submit their doodles. Letting them submit any two-dimensional graphic or text made during a class (even if made from body fluid), he soon discovered examples of “acts of resistance” in “student-initiated effort[s] to carve out a sense of place within the educational institution” (6). Not simply an ennui-prone teenager or a proto-surrealist trying to render some automatic writing from the fringes of cognition, a student doodling may represent contested space both in terms of the page itself and the ambience of the environment. The doodle indicates tension, and according to Kear, reflects students reclaiming “their own self-recognized voice” (6).In a widely referenced 1966 article (known as the “doodle” article) intended to describe the paragraph organisational styles of different cultures, Robert Kaplan used five doodles to investigate a writer’s thought patterns, which are rooted in cultural values. Now considered rather problematic by some critics after being adopted by educators for teacher-training materials, Kaplan’s doodles-as-models suggest, “English speakers develop their ideas in a linear, hierarchal fashion and ‘Orientals’ in a non-liner, spiral fashion…” (Severino 45). In turn, when used as pedagogical tools, these graphics, intentionally or not, may lead an “ethnocentric, assimilationist stance” (45). In this case, doodles likely shape the discourse of English as Second Language instruction. Doodles also represent a unique kind of “finger trace,” not unlike prints from the tips of a person’s fingers and snowflakes. Such symbol systems might be used for “a means of lightweight authentication,” according to Christopher Varenhorst of MIT (1). Doodles, he posits, can be used as “passdoodles"–a means by which a program can “quickly identify users.” They are singular expressions that are quirky and hard to duplicate; thus, doodles could serve as substitute methods of verifying people who desire devices that can safeguard their privacy without users having to rely on an ever-increasing number of passwords. Doodles may represent one such key. For many years, psychologists and psychiatrists have used doodles as therapeutic tools in their treatment of children that have endured hardship, ailments, and assault. They may indicate conditions, explain various symptoms and pathologies, and reveal patterns that otherwise may go unnoticed. For instance, doodles may “reflect a specific physical illness and point to family stress, accidents, difficult sibling relationships, and trauma” (Lowe 307). Lowe reports that children who create a doodle featuring their own caricature on the far side of the page, distant from an image of parent figures on the same page, may be experiencing detachment, while the portrayal of a father figure with “jagged teeth” may indicate a menace. What may be difficult to investigate in a doctor’s office conversation or clinical overview may, in fact, be gleaned from “the evaluation of a child’s spontaneous doodle” (307). So, if children are suffering physically or psychologically and unable to express themselves in a fully conscious and articulate way, doodles may reveal their “self-concept” and how they feel about their bodies; therefore, such creative and descriptive inroads are important diagnostic tools (307). Austrian born researcher Erich Guttman and his cohort Walter MacLay both pioneered art therapy in England during the mid-twentieth century. They posited doodles might offer some insight into the condition of schizophrenics. Guttman was intrigued by both the paintings associated with the Surrealist movement and the pioneering, much-debated work of Sigmund Freud too. Although Guttman mostly studied professionally trained artists who suffered from delusions and other conditions, he also collected a variety of art from patients, including those undergoing mescaline therapy, which alters a person’s consciousness. In a stroke of luck, they were able to convince a newspaper editor at the Evening Standard to provide them over 9,000 doodles that were provided by readers for a contest, each coded with the person’s name, age, and occupation. This invaluable data let the academicians compare the work of those hospitalised with the larger population. Their results, released in 1938, contain several key declarations and remain significant contributions to the field. Subsequently, Francis Reitman recounted them in his own book Psychotic Art: Doodles “release the censor of the conscious mind,” allowing a person to “relax, which to creative people was indispensable to production.”No appropriate descriptive terminology could be agreed upon.“Doodles are not communications,” for the meaning is only apparent when analysed individually.Doodles are “self-meaningful.” (37) Doodles, the authors also established, could be divided into this taxonomy: “stereotypy, ornamental details, movements, figures, faces and animals” or those “depicting scenes, medley, and mixtures” (37). The authors also noted that practitioners from the Jungian school of psychology often used “spontaneously produced drawings” that were quite “doodle-like in nature” in their own discussions (37). As a modern folklorist, I venture that doodles offer rich potential for our discipline as well. At this stage, I am offering a series of dictums, especially in regards to doodles that are commonly found adjacent to text in books and magazines, notebooks and journals, that may be expanded upon and investigated further. Doodles allow the reader to repopulate the text with ideogram-like expressions that are highly personalised, even inscrutable, like ambient sounds.Doodles re-purpose the text. The text no longer is unidirectional. The text becomes a point of convergence between writer and reader. The doodling allows for such a conversation, bilateral flow, or “talking back” to the text.Doodles reveal a secret language–informal codes that hearken back to the “lively, spontaneous, and charged with feeling” works of child art or naïve art that Victor Sanua discusses as being replaced in a child’s later years by art that is “stilted, formal, and conforming” (62).Doodling animates blank margins, the dead space of the text adjacent to the script, making such places ripe for spontaneous, fertile, and exploratory markings.Doodling reveals a democratic, participatory ethos. No text is too sacred, no narrative too inviolable. Anything can be reworked by the intimate graffiti of the reader. The authority of the book is not fixed; readers negotiate and form a second intelligence imprinted over the top of the original text, blurring modes of power.Doodles reveal liminal moments. Since the reader in unmonitored, he or she can express thoughts that may be considered marginal or taboo by the next reader. The original subject of the book itself does not restrict the reader. Thus, within the margins of the page, a brief suspension of boundaries and borders, authority and power, occurs. The reader hides in anonymity, free to reroute the meaning of the book. Doodling may convey a reader’s infantalism. Every book can become a picture book. This art can be the route returning a reader to the ambience of childhood.Doodling may constitute Illuminated/Painted Texts in reverse, commemorating the significance of the object in hitherto unexpected forms and revealing the reader’s codex. William Blake adorned his own poems by illuminating the skin/page that held his living verse; common readers may do so too, in naïve, nomadic, and primitive forms. Doodling demarcates tension zones, yielding social-historical insights into eras while offering psychological glimpses and displaying aesthetic values of readers-cum-writers.Doodling reveals margins as inter-zones, replete with psychogeography. While the typography is sanctioned, legitimate, normalised, and official discourse (“chartered” and “manacled,” to hijack lines from William Blake), the margins are a vernacular depository, a terminus, allowing readers a sense of agency and autonomy. The doodled page becomes a visible reminder and signifier: all pages are potentially “contested” spaces. Whereas graffiti often allows a writer to hide anonymously in the light in a city besieged by multiple conflicting texts, doodles allow a reader-cum-writer’s imprint to live in the cocoon of a formerly fossilised text, waiting for the light. Upon being opened, the book, now a chimera, truly breathes. Further exploration and analysis should likely consider several issues. What truly constitutes and shapes the role of agent and reader? Is the reader an agent all the time, or only when offering resistant readings through doodles? How is a doodler’s agency mediated by the author or the format of texts in forms that I have to map? Lastly, if, as I have argued, the ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page, what occurs in the age of digital or e-books? Will these platforms signal an age of acquiescence to manufactured products or signal era of vernacular responses, somehow hitched to html code and PDF file infiltration? Will bytes totally replace type soon in the future, shaping unforeseen actions by doodlers? Attached Figures Figure One presents the intimate graffiti of my grandfather, found in the 1907 edition of his McGuffey’s Eclectic Spelling Book. The depiction is simple, even crude, revealing a figure found on the adjacent page to Lesson 248, “Of Characters Used in Punctuation,” which lists the perfunctory functions of commas, semicolons, periods, and so forth. This doodle may offset the routine, rote, and rather humdrum memorisation of such grammatical tools. The smiling figure may embody and signify joy on an otherwise machine-made bare page, a space where my grandfather illustrated his desires (to lighten a mood, to ease dissatisfaction?). Historians Joe Austin and Michael Willard examine how youth have been historically left without legitimate spaces in which to live out their autonomy outside of adult surveillance. For instance, graffiti often found on walls and trains may reflect a sad reality: young people are pushed to appropriate “nomadic, temporary, abandoned, illegal, or otherwise unwatched spaces within the landscape” (14). Indeed, book graffiti, like the graffiti found on surfaces throughout cities, may offer youth a sense of appropriation, authorship, agency, and autonomy: they take the page of the book, commit their writing or illustration to the page, discover some freedom, and feel temporarily independent even while they are young and disempowered. Figure Two depicts the doodles of experimental filmmaker Jim Fetterley (Animal Charm productions) during his tenure as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1990s. His two doodles flank the text of “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, regarded by most readers as an autobiographical poem that addresses her own suicide attempts. The story of Lazarus is grounded in the Biblical story of John Lazarus of Bethany, who was resurrected from the dead. The poem also alludes to the Holocaust (“Nazi Lampshades”), the folklore surrounding cats (“And like the cat I have nine times to die”), and impending omens of death (“eye pits “ … “sour breath”). The lower doodle seems to signify a motorised tank-like machine, replete with a furnace or engine compartment on top that bellows smoke. Such ominous images, saturated with potential cartoon-like violence, may link to the World War II references in the poem. Meanwhile, the upper doodle seems to be curiously insect-like, and Fetterley’s name can be found within the illustration, just like Plath’s poem is self-reflexive and addresses her own plight. Most viewers might find the image a bit more lighthearted than the poem, a caricature of something biomorphic and surreal, but not very lethal. Again, perhaps this is a counter-message to the weight of the poem, a way to balance the mood and tone, or it may well represent the larval-like apparition that haunts the very thoughts of Plath in the poem: the impending disease of her mind, as understood by the wary reader. References Austin, Joe, and Michael Willard. “Introduction: Angels of History, Demons of Culture.” Eds. Joe Austion and Michael Willard. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. New York: NYU Press, 1998. “Doodling Gets Its Due: Those Tiny Artworks May Aid Memory.” World Science 2 March 2009. 15 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.world-science.net/othernews/090302_doodle›. Dundes, Alan. “Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia.” Papers of the Kroeber Anthropological Society 34: 91-105. Ensminger, David. “All Bottle Up: Reinterpreting the Culturescape of Grandma Prisbey.” Adironack Review 9.3 (Fall 2008). ‹http://adirondackreview.homestead.com/ensminger2.html›. Kear, Andrew. “Drawings in the Margins: Doodling in Class an Act of Reclamation.” Graduate Student Conference. University of Toronto, 2006. ‹http://gradstudentconference.oise.utoronto.ca/documents/185/Drawing%20in%20the%20Margins.doc›. Lowe, Sheila R. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Handwriting Analysis. New York: Alpha Books, 1999. Morton, Timothy. “‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ as an Ambient Poem; a Study of Dialectical Image; with Some Remarks on Coleridge and Wordsworth.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2001). 6 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/morton/morton.html›. Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York, 1995. Read, Allen Walker. Classic American Graffiti: Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America. Waukesha, Wisconsin: Maledicta Press, 1997. Reitman, Francis. Psychotic Art. London: Routledge, 1999. Sanua, Victor. “The World of Mystery and Wonder of the Schizophrenic Patient.” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 8 (1961): 62-65. Severino, Carol. “The ‘Doodles’ in Context: Qualifying Claims about Contrastive Rhetoric.” The Writing Center Journal 14.1 (Fall 1993): 44-62. Van Cleave, Claire. Master Drawings of the Italian Rennaissance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007. Varenhost, Christopher. Passdoodles: A Lightweight Authentication Method. Research Science Institute. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004.

Abstract:

Introduction‘Dream’ has been researched across numerous fields in its multiplicity within both a physical and emotional capacity. For Pagel et al., there is no fixed definition of what ‘dream’ is or are. However, in an advertising context, ’dream’ is the idealised version of our desires, re-visualised in real life (Coombes and Batchelor 103). It could be said that for countless consumers, advertising imagery has elicited dreams of living the perfect life and procuring material pleasures (Manca et al.; Hood). Goodis asserts, “advertising doesn’t always mirror how people are acting but how they are dreaming, in a sense what we are doing is wrapping up your emotions and selling them back to you” (qtd. in Back and Quaade 65). One component of this notion of ‘dream’ in advertising is captured by wishful images of the face and body in their ‘perfect form’ presented in a field of other beauty ideals. For our purposes, ‘dream’ is a “philosophical concept” (Pagel et al. 14) by which dreams are a series of aspirations and desires that consumers internalise, while at the same time, find difficult to achieve. ‘Dream’, then, will be used to critically explore how the beauty and advertising industries collectively employ ethnic ambiguity in addition to other tactics and strategies to sell us dream-like visions of idealised beauty. Forever Dreaming: The Introduction of Ethnic AmbiguityWe can link dreams to beauty as both areas of analysis contain many cultural interpretations and can be deconstructed to reveal different meanings (Sontag). In many ways, beauty is another dream and Sontag notes that the concept of beauty is often linked to certain physical traits that an individual possesses. These physical traits are capitalised upon by product marketing by which Hood claims, aims to enhance one, or even more, of them. For example, lipstick is not marketed as simply as a mixture of wax and pigment but rather a way to “obtain beauty, find romance or gain confidence” (7). As a result, global beauty brands can find long term marketing success through meaningful product marketing. This long-term marketing success relies on influencing human behaviour and perceptions. As a result of meaningful marketing, consumers may find themselves driven to purchase implicit qualities in products advertised to reflect their dreams (Hood).Following the 1980s, this version of meaningful marketing has become a driving purpose for advertising agencies around the globe (Steel). Advertising agencies rely on deeper human insights, identifying latent desires to create a brief that must ultimately sell a dream (Steel). The ideal strategy needs to define something that will build brand loyalty and encourage consumers to have a symbiotic relationship connecting their dreams with the product being sold. As Hood argues, “advertising consists of selling not just things but also dreams”. While this concept is one that “some see as inherently damning”, it is also inherently necessary (7). We understand that people are emotional beings, investing in the artefacts they build, obtain or use with significance “beyond merely utilitarian” (7). For these reasons, beauty advertisers act as the purveyors of dreams in the form of physical perfection as an articulation of consumer’s own aspirations of beauty.These aspirations of dream beauty are a direct representation of our thoughts and feelings. As such, it should be noted that we as consumers are often encouraged to draw inspiration from imagery that is often times seen as ethnically ambiguous. “Ethnic ambiguity” is the absence of any one prominent ethnic or racial feature that is easily discernible to one specific group (Garcia 234; Harrison et al.). An example of this ethnic ambiguity can be seen in marketing campaigns by high end makeup artist and her eponymous range of cosmetics, Charlotte Tilbury. Most notably, in a 2015 launch for her “Makeup Wardrobe”, Tilbury’s makeup palettes boasted 10 aspirational ‘looks’ and personas that could be achieved simply through purchase. The images of women featured on a figurative ‘wheel of fortune’ digital display used to market products online. This digital ‘wheel of fortune’ comprised of ethnically ambiguous models against descriptive persona’s such as “The Dolce Vita” and “The Glamour Muse”. These kinds of digital marketing tools required consumers to make a decision based on what their dream ‘look’ is through an ethnically ambiguous lens and from here are guided to purchase their desired aesthetic. Like Charlotte Tilbury, the beauty industry has seen a growing body of cosmetic brands that employ ethnic ambiguity to sell dreams of hom*ogenised beauty. We will see the ways in which modern day beauty brands, such as Kylie Jenner Cosmetics and Fenty Beauty have come to adopt ethnic ambiguity or embrace entire ethnic and racial groups in order to expand their consumer influence.Aspirational Ambiguity: Dreams of DisempowermentSince the early 2000s, beauty advertising has seen a prominent rise in the use of ethnically ambiguous models. Some see this as an effort to answer the global desire for diversity and inclusion. However, the notion that beauty standards transcend racial boundaries and is inclusive, is simply another form of appropriating and fetishising ethnicity (R. Sengupta). In many ways, these manufactured dream-like versions of beauty have evolved to reach wider markets, in the hope that consumers will be emboldened to both embrace their racial heritage, and at the same time conform to hom*ogenised standards of beauty (Frith et al.; Harrison et al.).In this bid to diversify and extend consumer reach, there are three prominent reasons why ethnically ambiguous models are more likely to be featured over models whose African, Indigenous, and/or Asian heritage is more prominent. Firstly, ethnically ambiguous models do not seem to conform to a particular notion of what is considered beautiful. For many decades, popular culture has been saturated with images of thin, of young, of narrow noses and hips, of blonde, blue eyes, and Caucasian hair textures (Harrison et al.; Hunter; Saraswati). These Westernised beauty ideals have been historically shaped through years of colonial influence, grounded in an imbalance of power and imposed to create a culture of dominance and oppression (Saraswati). Secondly, ethnic models are featured to convey “the sense of the ‘exotic’, and their ‘otherness’ acts to normalise and entrench the dominant ideal of white beauty” (qtd. in Redmond 175). ‘Otherness’ can be defined as the opposite of the majority, in Westernised society this ‘other’ can mean “people who are other than white, male, able bodied, heterosexual” (qtd. in Graycar 74). This ‘otherness’ showcased by ethnically ambiguous models draws viewers in. Physical features that were possessed by one specific ethnic group such as African, Asian, Latinx or Indigenous peoples have now become blended and are no longer confined to one race. Additionally, ethnically ambiguous models enable white consumers to dream about an exotic local or lifestyle, while at the same time providing ethnic audiences a way to see themselves.Finally, it is undeniable that ethnically ambiguous and mixed-race models have become desirable due to a historical preference for light skin (Saraswati). The visual references of light-skinned beauty epitomise a colonial dream and this standardisation has been transferred to indigenous peoples, or ethnic minorities in Western countries. According to Harrison et al, “marketers use mixed-race representations as cultural currency by mythologising mixed-race bodies as the new beauty standard” to represent a racial bridge, “tailored to ameliorate perceived racial divides” (503). Therefore, ethnically ambiguous models have an assumed advantage over their racially dominant counterparts, because they appear to straddle various racial boundaries. They are constructed to embody whomever, from wherever and whenever, fetishising their roleplay for the industry, when it pleases. This further exoticises multi-racial beauty models and renders them a commodified fantasy for many consumers alike. The continued commodification of ethnic ambiguity is problematic as it exploits models with distinctly mixed-race heritage to continue to sell images of white-washed beauty (Solomon et al.). An argument could be made that scarcity contributes to mixed-race models’ value, and therefore the total number of advertising opportunities that are offered to mixed-race models remains limited. To date, numerous studies highlight a limited use of racially diverse models within the beauty industry and does not reflect the growing global body of diverse consumers with purchasing power (Wasylkiw et al.; Redmond; Johnson; Jung and Lee; Frith et al.). In fact, prior to globalisation, Yan and Bissell claim that “each culture had a unique standard of attractiveness, derived from traditional views about beauty as well as the physical features of the people” (197) and over time the construction of dream beauty is characterised using Western features combined with exoticised traits of indigenous ethnic groups. Akinro and Mbunyuza-Memani claim that this “trend of normalising white or 'western' feminine looks as the standard of beauty” has pervaded a number of these indigenous cultures, eventually disseminated through the media as the ultimate goal (308). It can also be argued that the “growing inclusion of mixed-race models in ads is driven less by the motivation to portray diversity and driven more by pragmatism,” and in a more practical sense has implications for the “financial future of the advertised brands and the advertising industry as a whole” (Harrison et al. 513). As a result, uses of mixed-race models “are rather understood as palatable responses within dominant white culture to racial and ethnic minority populations growing in … cultural prominence” (513) in a tokenistic bid to sell a dream of unified beauty.The Dream Girl: Normalisation of Mixed-RaceIn 2017, an article in CNN’s Style section highlighted the growing number of mixed-race models in Japan’s fashion and beauty industry as a modern-day phenomenon from Japan’s interlocking history with the United States (Chung and Ogura). These beauty and fashion influencers refer to themselves as hafu, an exclusionary term that historically represented an “othered” minority of mixed-race heritage in Japanese society signalling complex and troubled interactions with majority Japanese (Oshima). The complications once associated with the term ‘hafu’ are now being reclaimed by bi-racial beauty and fashion models and as such, these models are beginning to defy categorisation and, in some ways, national identity because of their chameleon-like qualities. However, while there is an increasing use of mixed-race Japanese models, everyday mixed-race women are regularly excluded within general society; which highlights the incongruent nature of ‘half’ identity. And yet there is an increasing preference and demand from fashion and beauty outlets to feature them in Japanese and Western popular culture (Harrison et al.; Chung and Ogura). Numéro Tokyo’s editorial director Sayumi Gunji, estimated that almost 30-40 per cent of runway models in present day Japan, identify as either bi-racial mixed-race or multi-racial (Chung and Ogura).Gunji claims:"Almost all top models in the their 20s are hafu, especially the top models of popular fashion magazines ... . [In] the Japanese media and market, a foreigner's flawless looks aren't as readily accepted -- they feel a little distant. But biracial models, who are taller, have bigger eyes, higher noses [and] Barbie-doll-like looks, are admired because they are dreamy looking but not totally different from the Japanese. That's the key to their popularity," she adds. (Qtd. in Chung and Ogura)The "dreamy look" that Gunji describes is attributed to a historical preference toward light skin and a kind of willingness and sensuality, that once, only white models could be seen to tout (Frith et al. 58). Frith et al. and O’Barr discuss that beauty in Japanese advertising mirrors “the way women are portrayed in advertising in the West” (qtd. in Frith et al. 58). The emergence of hafu in Japanese beauty advertising sees these two worlds, a mixture of doll-like and sensual beauty, converging to create a dream-like standard for Japanese consumers. The growing presence of Japanese-American models such as Kiko Mizuhara and Jun Hasegawa are both a direct example of the unattainable ‘dreamy look’ that pervades the Japanese beauty industry. Given this ongoing trend of mixed-race models in beauty advertising, a recent article on Refinery29 talks about the significance of how mixed-race models are disassembling their once marginalised status.A. Sengupta writes:In contrast to passing, in which mixedness was marginalized and hidden, visibly multiracial models now feature prominently in affirmative sites of social norms. Multiracial looks are normalized, and, by extension, mixed identity is validated. There’s no cohesive social movement behind it, but it’s a quiet sea change that’s come with broadened beauty standards and the slow dismantling of social hierarchies.Another example of the normalisation in multi-racial identity is Adwoa Aboah, a mixed-race British model and feminist activist who has been featured on the covers of numerous fashion publications and on runways worldwide. In British Vogue’s December 2017 issue, titled “Great BRITAIN”, Adwoa Aboah achieved front cover status, alongside her image featured other politically powerful names, perhaps suggesting that Aboah represents not only the changing face of a historically white publication but as an embodiment of an increasingly diverse consumer landscape. Not only is she seen as both as a voice for those disenfranchised by the industry, by which she is employed, but as a symbol of new dreams. To conclude this section, it seems the evolution of advertising’s inclusion of multi-racial models reveals a progressive step change for the beauty industry. However, relying simply on the faces of ethnically ambiguous talent has become a covert way to fulfil consumer’s desire for diversity without wholly dismantling the destructive hierarchies of white dominance. Over this time however, new beauty creations have entered the market and with it two modern day icons.Architecting Black Beauty through the American DreamAccording to Kiick, the conception of the ‘American Dream’ is born out of a desire to “seek out a more advantageous existence than the current situation” (qtd. in Manca et al. 84). As a result of diligent hard work, Americans were rewarded with an opportunity for a better life (Manca et al.). Kylie Jenner’s entry into the beauty space seemed like a natural move for the then eighteen-year-old; it was a new-age representation of the ‘American Dream’ (Robehmed 2018). In less than five years, Jenner has created Kylie Cosmetics, a beauty empire that has since amassed a global consumer base, helping her earn billionaire status. A more critical investigation into Jenner’s performance however illustrates that her eponymous range of beauty products sells dreams which have been appropriated from black culture (Phelps). The term cultural appropriation refers to the way dominant cultures “adopt and adapt certain aspects of another’s culture and make it their own” (qtd. in Han 9). In Jenner’s case, her connection to ethnic Armenian roots through her sisters Kourtney, Kim, and Khloe Kardashian have significantly influenced her expression of ‘othered’ culture and moreover ethnic beauty ideals such as curvier body shapes and textured hair. Jenner’s beauty advertisem*nts have epitomised what it means to be black in America, cherry picking racialised features of black women (namely their lips, hips/buttocks and afro-braided hairstyles) and rearticulated them through a white lens. The omission of the ‘black experience’ in her promotion of product is problematic for three reasons. Firstly, representing groups or people without invitation enables room for systemic stereotyping (Han). Secondly, this stereotyping can lead to continued marginalisation of minority cultures (Kulchyski). And finally, the over exaggeration of physical attributes, such as Jenner’s lips, hips and buttocks, reinforces her complicity in exoticising and fetishising the “other”. As a result, consumers of social media beauty advertising may pay less attention to cultural appropriation if they are already unaware that the beauty imagery they consume is based on the exploitation of black culture.Another perspective on Jenner’s use of black culture is in large part due to her cultural appreciation of black beauty. This meaning behind Jenner’s cultural appreciation can be attributed to the inherent value placed on another person’s culture, in the recognition of the positive qualities and the celebration of all aspects of that culture (Han). This is evidenced by her recent addition of cosmetic products for darker complexions (Brown). However, Jenner’s supposed fascination with black culture may be in large part due to the environment in which she was nurtured (Phelps). As Phelps reveals, “consider the cultural significance of the Kardashian family, and the various ways in which the Kardashian women, who are tremendously wealthy and present as white, have integrated elements of black culture as seemingly “natural” in their public bodily performances” (9). Although the Kardashian-Jenner family have faced public backlash for their collective appropriation they have acquired a tremendous “capital gain in terms of celebrity staying power and hyper-visibility” (Phelps 9). Despite the negative attention, Kylie Jenner’s expression of black culture has resurfaced the very issues that had once been historically deemed insignificant. In spite of Jenner’s cultural appropriation of black beauty, her promotion through Kylie Cosmetics continues to sell dreams of idealised beauty through the white lens.In comparison, Rihanna Fenty’s cosmetic empire has been touted as a celebration of diversity and inclusion for modern-age beauty. Unlike Kylie Cosmetics, Fenty’s eponymous brand has become popular for its broader message of inclusivity across both skin tone, body shape and gender. Upon her product release, Fenty Beauty acknowledged a growing body of diverse consumers and as a direct response to feature models of diverse skin tones, cultural background and racial heritage. Perhaps more importantly, Fenty Beauty’s challenge to the ongoing debate around diversity and inclusion has been in stark contrast to Kylie Jenner’s ongoing appropriation of black culture. Images featured at the first brand and product launch of Fenty Beauty and in present day advertising, show South Sudanese model Duckie Thot and hijab-wearing model Halima Aden as central characters within the Fenty narrative, illustrating that inclusion need not remain ambiguous and diversity need not be appropriated. Fenty’s initial product line up included ninety products, but most notably, the Pro Filt’r foundation caused the most publicity. Since its introduction in 2017, the foundation collection contained range of 40 (now 50) inclusive foundation shades, 13 of these shades were designed to cater for much darker complexions, an industry first (Walters). As a result of the brand’s inclusion of diverse product shades and models, Fenty Beauty has been shown to push boundaries within the beauty industry and the social media landscape (Walters). Capitalising on all races and expanding beauty ideals, Fenty’s showcase of beauty subscribes to the notion that for women everywhere in the world, their dreams can and do come true. In conclusion, Fenty Beauty has played a critical role in re-educating global consumers about diversity in beauty (Walters) but perhaps more importantly Rihanna, by definition, has become a true embodiment of the ‘American Dream’.Conclusion: Future Dreams in BeautyIt is undeniable that beauty advertising has remained complicit in selling unattainable dreams to consumers. In the context of ‘dream’ as a philosophical concept, it is more important than ever to ensure our dreams are mirrored, not as an ambiguous body of consumers, but as diverse and unique individuals. Changemakers in the industry such as Fenty Beauty are challenging this status quo and beauty advertising in general will have to evolve their strategy in a bid to answer to an increasingly globalised market. It must be reinforced however, that while “beauty companies and advertisers work effectively to reach a growingly multicultural market, scholars have a responsibility to assess the ramifications that accompany such change,” (Harrison et al. 518). If advertising’s role is to mirror consumers’ dreams then, our roles as dreamers have never been so important. ReferencesAkinro, Ngozi, and Lindani Mbunyuza-Memani. "Black Is Not Beautiful: Persistent Messages and the Globalization of 'White' Beauty in African Women’s Magazines." 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Abstract:

In recent years, the US television landscape has been flooded with reboots, remakes, and revivals of “classic” nineties television series, such as Full/er House (1987-1995, 2016-present), Will & Grace (1998-2006, 2017-present), Roseanne (1988-1977, 2018), and Charmed (1998-2006, 2018-present). The term “reboot” is often used as a catchall for different kinds of revivals and remakes. “Remakes” are derivations or reimaginings of known properties with new characters, cast, and stories (Loock; Lavigne). “Revivals” bring back an existing property in the form of a continuation with the same cast and/or setting. “Revivals” and “remakes” both seek to capitalise on nostalgia for a specific notion of the past and access the (presumed) existing audience of the earlier series (Mittell; Rebecca Williams; Johnson).Reboots operate around two key pleasures. First, there is the pleasure of revisiting and/or reimagining characters that are “known” to audiences. Whether continuations or remakes, reboots are invested in the audience’s desire to see familiar characters. Second, there is the desire to “fix” and/or recuperate an earlier series. Some reboots, such as the Charmed remake attempt to recuperate the whiteness of the original series, whereas others such as Gilmore Girls: A Life in the Year (2017) set out to fix the ending of the original series by giving audiences a new “official” conclusion.The Roseanne reboot is invested in both these pleasures. It reunites the original cast for a short-lived, but impactful nine-episode tenth season. There is pleasure in seeing Roseanne (Roseanne Barr), Dan (John Goodman), Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), Becky (Lecy Goranson [seasons one to six, ten], Sarah Chalke [seasons six to nine]), Darlene (Sara Gilbert), and DJ (Michael Fishman) back in the Conner house with the same well-worn couch and afghan. The (attempted) recuperation is of author-star Barr, whose recent politics are in stark contrast to the working-class second-wave feminist politics of her nineties’ persona. This article is particularly interested in the second pleasure, because both the original series and the reboot situate the voice of Barr as central to the series’ narrative and politics.Despite achieving the highest ratings of any US sitcom in the past three years (O’Connell), on 29 May 2018, ABC announced that it was cancelling the Roseanne reboot. This decision came about in the wake of a racist tweet, where Barr compared a black woman (high-ranking Obama aide Valerie Jarrett) to an ape. Barr’s tweet and the cancellation of Roseanne, highlight the limits of nostalgia and Roseanne/Barr’s particular brand of white feminism. While whiteness and a lack of racial awareness are (and always have been) at the centre of Barr’s performance of feminism, the political landscape has shifted since the 1990s, with the rise of third and fourth-wave feminisms and intersectional activism. As such in the contemporary landscape, there is the expectation that white feminist figures take on and endorse anti-racist stances.This article argues that the reboot’s attempt to capitalise on nineties nostalgia exposes the limits of Roseanne/Barr’s feminism, as well as the limits of nostalgia. The feminist legacy of nineties-era Roseanne cannot and does not recuperate Barr’s star-persona. Also, the reboot and its subsequent cancellation highlight how the feminism of the series is embodied by Barr and her whiteness. This article will situate Roseanne and Barr within a feminist tradition on US television, before exploring how the reboot operates and circulates differently to the original series.From Roseanne (1988-1997) to Roseanne (2018)In its original form, Roseanne holds the distinction of being one of the most highly discussed and canonised feminist-leaning television series of all time, alongside The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), Cagney and Lacey (1981-1988), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2004). Roseanne also enabled and informed many popular feminist-leaning contemporary series, including Girls (2012-2017), Mom (2013-present), Better Things (2016-present), and Dietland (2018). Although it may seem anachronistic today, Roseanne and Barr helped define what it means to be a feminist and speak feminist politics on US television.Roseanne depicts the lives of the Conner family, headed by parents Roseanne and Dan. They live in the fictional blue-collar town of Lanford, Illinois with their three children Becky, Darlene, and DJ. Both Roseanne and Dan experience precarious employment and embark on numerous (mostly failed) business ventures throughout the series’ run. The reboot catches up with the Conner family in 2018, after Roseanne has experienced a health scare and single mom Darlene has moved into her parents’ house with her two children Harris (Emma Kenney) and Mark (Ames McNamara). In the new season, Roseanne and Dan’s children are experiencing similar working conditions to their parents in the 1990s. Becky works at a Mexican restaurant and is eager to act as surrogate mother to earn $50,000, Darlene is recently unemployed and looking for work, and DJ has just returned from military service.A stated objective of reviving Roseanne was to address the contentious US political landscape after the election of President Donald J. Trump (VanDerWerff). Barr is a vocal supporter of President Trump, as is her character in the reboot. The election plays a key role in the new season’s premise. The first episode of season 10 establishes that the titular Roseanne has not spoken to her sister Jackie (who is a Hillary Clinton supporter) in over a year. In both its nineties and 2018 incarnations, Roseanne makes apparent the extent to which feminist politics are indebted to and spoken through the author-star. The series is based on a character that Barr created and is grounded in her life experience. Barr and her character Roseanne are icons of nineties televisual feminism. While the other members of the Conner family are richly drawn and compelling, Roseanne is the centre of the series. It is her voice and perspective that drives the series and gives it its political resonance. Roseanne’s power in the text is authorised by Barr’s stardom. As Melissa Williams writes: “For nearly a decade, Barr was one of the most powerful women in Hollywood” (180).In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Roseanne (and Barr) represented a new kind of feminist voice on US television, which at that stage (and still today) was dominated by middle-class women. Unlike Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore), Claire Huxtable (Phylicia Rashad), or Murphy Brown (Candice Bergen), Roseanne did not have a stable job and her family’s economic situation was often precarious. Roseanne/Barr adopted and used a feminism of personality popularised on television by Mary Tyler Moore and Lucille Ball. Unlike her foremothers, though, Roseanne/Barr was not slender, feminine, or interested in being likeable to men. Roseanne did not choose to work outside of the home, which marked her as different from many of US television’s other second-wave feminists and/or mothers. As Rachael Horowitz writes: “Roseanne’s feminism was for women who have to work because bills must get paid, who assert their role as head of the house despite the degrading work they often do during the day to pay for their kids’ food and clothes” (9).According to Kathleen Rowe, Barr is part of a long line of “female grotesques” whose defining features are excess and looseness (2-3). Rowe links Barr’s fatness or physical excess with her refusal to shut up and subversive speech. The feminism of Roseanne is contained within and expressed through Barr’s unruly white body (and voice). Barr’s unruliness and her unwillingness to follow the social conventions of politeness and decorum are tied to her (perceived) feminist politics.Understandings of Barr’s stardom, however, have shifted considerably in the years since the publication of Rowe’s analysis. While Barr is still “unruly,” her unruliness is no longer located in her body (which has been transformed to meet more conventional standards of western beauty), but rather in her Twitter presence, which is pro-Israel, pro-Trump, and anti-immigration. As Roxane Gay writes of the reboot: “Whatever charm and intelligence she [Barr] brought to the first nine seasons of her show, a show I very much loved, are absolutely absent in her current persona, particularly as it manifests on Twitter.”Feminist Voice and Stardom on US TVRoseanne performs what Julie D’Acci calls “explicit general feminism,” which is defined by “dialogue and scenes that straightforwardly addressed discrimination against women in both public and private spheres, stories structured around topical feminist causes, and the use of unequivocal feminist language and slogans” (147). However, the feminist politics of Roseanne and Barr are (and never were) straightforward or uncomplicated.Studies of feminism on US television have primarily focused on comedies that feature female television stars who function as advocates for feminism and women’s issues (Spigel; Rabinovitz; D’Acci). Much of the critical discussion of feminist voice in US female-led television identifies the feminist intervention as taking place at the level of performance (Dow; Spigel; Spangler). Comedic series such as I Love Lucy (1951-1957), Murphy Brown (1988-1998, 2018-present), and Grace Under Fire (1993-1998), and dramatic series’, such as Cagney and Lacey and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, privilege the articulation of feminist ideas through performance and character.Roseanne is not a series that derives its comedy from a clash of different perspectives or a series where politics are debated and explored in a nuanced a complex way. Roseanne promotes a distinct singular perspective – that of Roseanne Barr. In seasons one to nine, the character Roseanne is rarely persuaded to think differently about an issue or situation or depicted as “wrong.” The series centres Roseanne’s pain and distress when Becky elopes with Mark (Glenn Quinn), or when Jackie is abused by her boyfriend Fisher (Matt Roth), or when Darlene accidently gets pregnant. Although those storylines are about other characters, Roseanne’s emotions are central. Roseanne/Barr’s perspective (as fictional character and media personality) informs the narrative, sensibility, and tone. Roseanne is not designed to contain multiple perspectives.Roseanne is acutely aware of its place in the history of feminist voice and representations of women on US television. Television is central to the series’ articulation of feminism and feminist voice. In season seven episode “All About Rosey,” the series breaks the fourth wall (as it does many times throughout its run), taking the audience behind the scenes where some of US television’s most well-known (and traditional) mothers are cleaning the Conner’s kitchen. June Cleaver (Barbara Billingsley) from Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963), Joan Nash (Pat Crowley) from Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1965-1967), Ruth Martin (June Lockhart) from Lassie (1958-1964), Norma Arnold (Alley Mills) from The Wonder Years (1988-1993), and Louise Jefferson (Isabel Sanford) from The Jeffersons (1975-1985) at first sit in judgment of Barr and her character Roseanne, claiming she presents “wrong image” for a TV mother. However, Roseanne/Barr eventually wins over the TV mothers, declaring “the important thing is on my show, I’m the boss and father knows squat” (7.19). It is in contrast to more traditional television mothers that Roseanne/Barr’s feminist voice comes into focus.In the ninth and final season of Roseanne’s initial run, the series (arguably) becomes a parody of its former self. By this point in the series, “Barr was seen as the sole cause of the show’s demise, as a woman who was ‘imploding,’ ‘losing the plot,’ or ‘out of control’” (White 234). White argues that depicting the working-class Conners’ social and economic ascension to upper-class diminishes the distinction between Barr and her character (243). White writes that in the series’ finale, the “line between performer and character is irrevocably blurred; it is unclear whether the voice we are hearing is that of Roseanne Conner or Roseanne Barr” (244). This blurring between Roseanne and Barr becomes particularly contentious in season 10.Rebooting Roseanne: Season 10Season 10 redacts and erases most of the events of season nine, which itself was a fantasy, as revealed in the season nine finale. As such, the reboot is not a simple continuation, because in the season nine finale it is revealed that Dan suffered a fatal heart attack a year earlier. The final monologue (delivered in voice-over by Barr) “reveals” that Roseanne has been writing and editing her experiences into a digestible story. The “Conners winning the lottery” storyline that dominated season nine was imagined by Roseanne as an elaborate coping strategy after Dan’s death. Yet in the season 10 reboot, Dan is revealed to be alive, as is Darlene and David’s (Johnny Galecki) daughter Harris, who was born during the events of season nine.The limits of Roseanne/Barr’s feminism within the contemporary political landscape come into focus around issues of race. This is partly because the incident that incited ABC to cancel the reboot of Roseanne was racially motivated, and partly because Roseanne/Barr’s feminism has always relied on whiteness. Between 1997 and 2018, Barr’s unruliness has become less associated with empowering working-class women and more with railing against minorities and immigrants. In redacting and erasing the events of season nine, the reboot attempts to step back the conflation between Roseanne and Barr with little success.In the first episode of season 10, “Twenty Years to Life”, Roseanne is positioned as the loud-mouthed victim of circ*mstance and systemic inequality – similar to her nineties-persona. Yet in 2018, Roseanne mocks same things that nineties’ Roseanne took seriously, including collective action, community building, and labour conditions. Roseanne claims: “It is not my fault that I just happen to be a charismatic person that’s right about everything” (10.01). Here, the series attempts to make light of a now-outdated understanding of Barr’s persona, but it comes off as tone-deaf and lacking self-awareness.Roseanne has bigoted tendencies in both the 1990s and in 2018, but the political resonance of those tendencies and their relationships to feminisms and nostalgia differs greatly from the original series to the reboot. This is best illustrated by comparing season seven episode “White Men Can’t Kiss” and season 10 episode “Go Cubs.” In the former, Roseanne is appalled that she may have raised a racist son and insists DJ must kiss his black classmate Geena (Rae’Ven Larrymore Kelly) in the school play. Towards the end of this episode, Geena’s father comes by the restaurant where Roseanne and Jackie are closing up. When the tall black man knocks on the locked door, Roseanne refuses to let him inside. She appears visibly afraid. Once Roseanne knows he is Geena’s father, she lets him in and he confronts her about her racist attitude. Roseanne (and the audience) is forced to sit in the discomfort of having her bigotry exposed. While there are no material consequences for Roseanne or DJ’s racism, within the context of the less intersectional 1990s, this interaction does not call into question Roseanne or Barr’s feminist credentials.In season 10, Roseanne tackles similar issues around race, ignorance, and bigotry, but it plays out very differently. In the reboot’s seventh episode, Roseanne suspects her Muslim refugee neighbours Fatima (Anne Bedian) and Samir (Alain Washnevky) are terrorists. Although Roseanne is proven wrong, she is not forced to reckon with her bigotry. Instead, she is positioned as a “hero” later in the episode, when she berates a supermarket cashier for her racist treatment of Fatima. Given what audiences know about Barr’s off-screen politics, this does not counteract the impression of racism, but compounds it. It also highlights the whiteness of the politics embodied by Roseanne/Barr both on-screen and off. Although these are two very different racial configurations (anti-blackness and Islamophobia), these episodes underline the shifting reception and resonance of the feminism Roseanne/Barr embodies.ConclusionIn June 2018, shortly after the cancellation of the Roseanne reboot, ABC announced that it was developing a spin-off without Barr called The Conners (2018-present). In the spin-off Roseanne is dead and her family is dealing with life after Roseanne/Roseanne (Crucchiola). Here, Roseanne suffers the same fate as Dan in season nine (she dies off-screen), but now it is Barr who is fictionally buried. While The Conners attempts to rewrite the story of the Conner family by rejecting Barr’s racist views and removing her financial and creative stake in their stories, Barr cannot be erased or redacted from Roseanne or the story of the Conner family, because it is her story.The reboot and its cancellation illuminate how Barr and Roseanne’s feminist voice has not evolved past its white second-wave roots. The feminism of Roseanne is embodied by Barr in all her unruliness and whiteness. Roseanne/Barr/Roseanne has not taken on the third and fourth-wave critiques of second-wave feminisms, which emphasise the limits of white feminisms. The failure of the Roseanne reboot reveals that the pleasure and nostalgia of seeing the Conner family back together is not enough. Ultimately, Roseanne is without intersectionality, and thus cannot (and should not) be recognised as feminist in the contemporary political landscape.ReferencesBetter Things. Cr. Pamela Adlon and Louis C.K. 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Jeff Franklin, Warner Bros. Television, 1987-1995.Fuller House. Cr. Jeff Franklin. Warner Horizon Television, 2016 to present.Gay, Roxane. “The ‘Roseanne’ Reboot Is Funny. I’m Not Going to Keep Watching.” New York Times, 29 Mar. 2018. 2 Dec. 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/opinion/roseanne-reboot-trump.html>.Gilmore Girls: A Life in the Year. Cr. Amy Sherman-Palladino. Netflix, 2017.Girls. Cr. Lena Dunham. Apatow Productions, 2012-2017.Grace under Fire. Cr. Chuck Lorre. Carsey-Werner, 1993-1998.Horowitz, Rachael. “Mary, Roseanne, and Carrie: Television and Fictional Feminism.” Michigan Journal of History 2.2 (2005). 24 Sep. 2018 <https://michiganjournalhistory.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/horowitz_rachel.pdf>.I Love Lucy. Desilu Productions, 1951-1957.Jeffersons, The. Cr. Don Nicholl, Michael Ross, and Bernie West. 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Abstract:

What began as a simple request for a book by one of my former students, at times, has not been so simple. The student, whom I refer to as Carla (name changed), hoped to read about characters similar to herself and her friends. As a teacher, I have often tried to hook my students on reading by presenting books with characters to which they can relate. These books can help increase their overall knowledge of the world, open their minds to multiple realities and variations of the human experience and provide scenarios in which they can live vicariously. Carla’s request was a bit more complicated than I had imagined. As a “Deaf” student who attended a state school for the Deaf and who viewed herself as a member of a linguistic cultural minority, she expected to read a book with characters who used American Sign Language and who participated as members within the Deaf Community. She did not want to read didactic books about deafness but wanted books with unpredictable plots and believable characters. Having graduated from a teacher-preparation program in Deaf Education, I had read numerous books about deafness. While memoirs and biographical selections had been relatively easy to acquire and were on my bookshelf, I had not once read any fictional books for adolescents that included a deaf character. (I refer to ‘Deaf’ as representing individuals who identify in a linguistic, cultural minority group. The term ‘deaf’ is used as a more generic term given to individuals with some degree of hearing loss. In other articles, ‘deaf’ has been used pejoratively or in connection to a view by those who believe one without the sense of hearing is inferior or lacking. I do not believe or wish to imply that. ) As a High School teacher with so many additional work responsibilities outside of classroom teaching, finding fictional books with deaf characters was somewhat of a challenge. Nevertheless, after some research I was able to recommend a book that I thought would be a good summer read. Nancy Butts’ Cheshire Moon (1992) is charming book about thirteen-year-old Miranda who is saddened by her cousin’s death and furious at her parents' insistence that she speak rather than sign. The plot turns slightly mystical when the teens begin having similar dreams under the “Cheshire moon”. Yet, the story is about Miranda, a deaf girl, who struggles with communication. Without her cousin, the only member of her family who was fluent in sign language, communication is difficult and embarrassing. Miranda feels isolated, alienated, and unsure of herself. Because of the main character’s age, the book was not the best recommendation for a high school student; however, when Carla finished Cheshire Moon, she asked for another book with Deaf characters. Problem & Purpose Historically, authors have used deafness as a literary device to relay various messages about the struggles of humankind and elicit sympathy from readers (Batson & Bergman; Bergman; Burns; Krentz; Panara; Taylor, "Deaf Characters" I, II, III; Schwartz; Wilding-Diaz). In recent decades, however, the general public’s awareness of and perhaps interest in deaf people has risen along with that of our increasingly multicultural world. Educational legislation has increased awareness of the deaf as has news coverage of Gallaudet University protests. In addition, Deaf people have benefited from advances in communicative technology, such as Video Relay (VRS) and instant messaging pagers, more coordinated interpreting services and an increase in awareness of American Sign Language. Authors are incorporating more deaf characters than they did in the past. However, this increase does not necessarily translate to an increase in understanding of the deaf, nor does it translate to the most accurate, respectably, well-rounded characterization of the deaf (Pajka-West, "Perceptions"). Acquiring fictional books that include deaf characters can be time-consuming and challenging for teachers and librarians. The research examining deaf characters in fiction is extremely limited (Burns; Guella; Krentz; Wilding-Diaz). The most recent articles predominately focus on children’s literature — specifically picture books (Bailes; Brittain). Despite decades of research affirming culturally authentic children’s literature and the merits of multicultural literature, a coexisting body of research reveals the lack of culturally authentic texts (Applebee; Campbell & Wirtenberg; Ernest; Larrick; Sherriff; Taxel). Moreover, children’s books with deaf characters are used as informational depictions of deaf individuals (Bockmiller, 1980). Readers of such resource books, typically parents, teachers and their students, gain information about deafness and individuals with “disabilities” (Bockmiller, 1980; Civiletto & Schirmer, 2000). If an important purpose for deaf characters in fiction is educational and informational, then there is a need for the characters to be presented as realistic models of deaf people. If not, the readers of such fiction gain inaccurate information about deafness including reinforced negative stereotypes, as can occur in any other literature portraying cultural minorities (Pajka-West, "Perceptions"). Similar to authors’ informational depictions, writers also reveal societal understanding of groups of people through their fiction (Banfield & Wilson; Panara; Rudman). Literature has often stigmatized minority culture individuals based upon race, ethnicity, disability, gender and/or sexual orientation. While readers might recognize the negative depictions and dismiss them as harmless stereotypes, these portrayals could become a part of the unconscious of members of our society. If books continually reinforce stereotypical depictions of deaf people, individuals belonging to the group might be typecast and discouraged into a limited way of being. As an educator, I want all of my students to have unlimited opportunities for the future, not disadvantaged by stereotypes. The Study For my doctoral dissertation, I examined six contemporary adolescent literature books with deaf characters. The research methodology for this study required book selection, reader sample selection, instrument creation, book analysis, questionnaire creation, and data analysis. My research questions included: 1) Are deaf characters being presented as culturally Deaf characters or as pathologically deaf and disabled; 2) Do these readers favor deaf authors over hearing ones? If so, why; and, 3) How do deaf and hearing adult readers perceive deaf characters in adolescent literature? The Sample The book sample included 102 possible books for the study ranging from adolescent to adult selections. I selected books that were recognized as suitable for middle school or high school readers based upon the reading and interest levels established by publishers. The books also had to include main characters who are deaf and deaf characters who are human. The books selected were all realistic fiction, available to the public, and published or reissued for publication within the last fifteen years. The six books that were selected included: Nick’s Secret by C. Blatchford; A Maiden’s Grave by J. Deaver; Of Sound Mind by J. Ferris; Deaf Child Crossing by M. Matlin; Apple Is My Sign by M. Riskind; and Finding Abby by V. Scott. For the first part of my study, I analyzed these texts using the Adolescent Literature Content Analysis Check-off Form (ALCAC) which includes both pathological and cultural perspective statements derived from Deaf Studies, Disability Studies and Queer Theory. The participant sample included adult readers who fit within three categories: those who identified as deaf, those who were familiar with or had been acquaintances with deaf individuals, and those who were unfamiliar having never associated with deaf individuals. Each participant completed a Reader-Response Survey which included ten main questions derived from Deaf Studies and Schwartz’ ‘Criteria for Analyzing Books about Deafness’. The survey included both dichotomous and open-ended questions. Research Questions & Methodology Are deaf characters being presented as culturally Deaf or as pathologically deaf and disabled? In previous articles, scholars have stated that most books with deaf characters include a pathological perspective; yet, few studies actually exist to conclude this assertion. In my study, I analyzed six books to determine whether they supported the cultural or the pathological perspective of deafness. The goal was not to exclusively label a text either/or but to highlight the distinct perspectives to illuminate a discussion regarding a deaf character. As before mentioned, the ALCAC instrument incorporates relevant theories and prior research findings in reference to the portrayals of deaf characters and was developed to specifically analyze adolescent literature with deaf characters. Despite the historical research regarding deaf characters and due to the increased awareness of deaf people and American Sign Language, my initial assumption was that the authors of the six adolescent books would present their deaf characters as more culturally ‘Deaf’. This was confirmed for the majority of the books. I believed that an outsider, such as a hearing writer, could carry out an adequate portrayal of a culture other than his own. In the past, scholars did not believe this was the case; however, the results from my study demonstrated that the majority of the hearing authors presented the cultural perspective model. Initially shocking, the majority of deaf authors incorporated the pathological perspective model. I offer three possible reasons why these deaf authors included more pathological perspective statements while the hearing authors include more cultural perspective statements: First, the deaf authors have grown up deaf and perhaps experienced more scenarios similar to those presented from the pathological perspective model. Even if the deaf authors live more culturally Deaf lifestyles today, authors include their experiences growing up in their writing. Second, there are less deaf characters in the books written by deaf authors and more characters and more character variety in the books written by the hearing authors. When there are fewer deaf characters interacting with other deaf characters, these characters tend to interact with more hearing characters who are less likely to be aware of the cultural perspective. And third, with decreased populations of culturally Deaf born to culturally Deaf individuals, it seems consistent that it may be more difficult to obtain a book from a Deaf of Deaf author. Similarly, if we consider the Deaf person’s first language is American Sign Language, Deaf authors may be spending more time composing stories and poetry in American Sign Language and less time focusing upon English. This possible lack of interest may make the number of ‘Deaf of Deaf’ authors, or culturally Deaf individuals raised by culturally Deaf parents, who pursue and are successful publishing a book in adolescent literature low. At least in adolescent literature, deaf characters, as many other minority group characters, are being included in texts to show young people our increasingly multicultural world. Adolescent literature readers can now become aware of a range of deaf characters, including characters who use American Sign Language, who attend residential schools for the Deaf, and even who have Deaf families. Do the readers favor deaf authors over hearing ones? A significant part of my research was based upon the perceptions of adult readers of adolescent literature with deaf characters. I selected participants from a criterion sampling and divided them into three groups: 1. Adults who had attended either a special program for the deaf or a residential school for the deaf, used American Sign Language, and identified themselves as deaf were considered for the deaf category of the study; 2. Adults who were friends, family members, co-workers or professionals in fields connected with individuals who identify themselves as deaf were considered for the familiar category of the study; and, 3. hearing adults who were not aware of the everyday experiences of deaf people and who had not taken a sign language class, worked with or lived with a deaf person were considered for the unfamiliar category of the study. Nine participants were selected for each group totaling 27 participants (one participant from each of the groups withdrew before completion, leaving eight participants from each of the groups to complete the study). To elicit the perspectives of the participants, I developed a Reader Response survey which was modeled after Schwartz’s ‘Criteria for Analyzing Books about Deafness’. I assumed that the participants from Deaf and Familiar groups would prefer the books written by the deaf authors while the unfamiliar participants would act more as a control group. This was not confirmed through the data. In fact, the Deaf participants along with the participants as a whole preferred the books written by the hearing authors as better describing their perceptions of realistic deaf people, for presenting deaf characters adequately and realistically, and for the hearing authors’ portrayals of deaf characters matching with their perceptions of deaf people. In general, the Deaf participants were more critical of the deaf authors while the familiar participants, although as a group preferred the books by the hearing authors, were more critical of the hearing authors. Participants throughout all three groups mentioned their preference for a spectrum of deaf characters. The books used in this study that were written by hearing authors included a variety of characters. For example, Riskind’s Apple Is My Sign includes numerous deaf students at a school for the deaf and the main character living within a deaf family; Deaver’s A Maiden’s Grave includes deaf characters from a variety of backgrounds attending a residential school for the deaf and only a few hearing characters; and Ferris’ Of Sound Mind includes two deaf families with two CODA or hearing teens. The books written by the deaf authors in this study include only a few deaf characters. For example, Matlin’s Deaf Child Crossing includes two deaf girls surrounded by hearing characters; Scott’s Finding Abby includes more minor deaf characters but readers learn about these characters from the hearing character’s perspective. For instance, the character Jared uses sign language and attends a residential school for the deaf but readers learn this information from his hearing mother talking about him, not from the deaf character’s words. Readers know that he communicates through sign language because we are told that he does; however, the only communication readers are shown is a wave from the child; and, Blatchford’s Nick’s Secret includes only one deaf character. With the fewer deaf characters it is nearly impossible for the various ways of being deaf to be included in the book. Thus, the preference for the books by the hearing authors is more likely connected to the preference for a variety of deaf people represented. How do readers perceive deaf characters? Participants commented on fourteen main and secondary characters. Their perceptions of these characters fall into six categories: the “normal” curious kid such as the characters Harry (Apple Is My Sign), Jeremy (Of Sound Mind) and Jared (Finding Abby); the egocentric spoiled brat such as Palma (Of Sound Mind) and Megan (Deaf Child Crossing); the advocate such as Harry’s mother (Apple Is My Sign) and Susan (A Maiden’s Grave); those dependent upon the majority culture such as Palma (Of Sound Mind) and Lizzie (Deaf Child Crossing); those isolated such as Melissa (Finding Abby), Ben (Of Sound Mind), Nick (Nick’s Secret) and Thomas (Of Sound Mind); and, those searching for their identities such as Melanie (A Maiden’s Grave) and Abby (Finding Abby). Overall, participants commented more frequently about the deaf characters in the books by the hearing authors (A Maiden’s Grave; Of Sound Mind; Apple Is My Sign) and made more positive comments about the culturally Deaf male characters, particularly Ben Roper, Jeremy and Thomas of Of Sound Mind, and Harry of Apple Is My Sign. Themes such as the characters being dependent and isolated from others did arise. For example, Palma in Of Sound Mind insists that her hearing son act as her personal interpreter so that she can avoid other hearing people. Examples to demonstrate the isolation some of the deaf characters experience include Nick of Nick’s Secret being the only deaf character in his story and Ben Roper of Of Sound Mind being the only deaf employee in his workplace. While these can certainly be read as negative situations the characters experience, isolation is a reality that resonates in some deaf people’s experiences. With communicative technology and more individuals fluent in American Sign Language, some deaf individuals may decide to associate more with individuals in the larger culture. One must interpret purposeful isolation such as Ben Roper’s (Of Sound Mind) case, working in a location that provides him with the best employment opportunities, differently than Melissa Black’s (Finding Abby) isolating feelings of being left out of family dinner discussions. Similarly, variations in characterization including the egocentric, spoiled brat and those searching for their identities are common themes in adolescent literature with or without deaf characters being included. Positive examples of deaf characters including the roles of the advocate such as Susan (A Maiden’s Grave) and Harry’s mother (Apple Is My Sign), along with descriptions of regular everyday deaf kids increases the varieties of deaf characters. As previously stated, my study included an analysis based on literary theory and prior research. At that time, unless the author explicitly told readers in a foreword or a letter to readers, I had no way of truly knowing why the deaf character was included and why the author made such decisions. This uncertainty of the author’s decisions changed for me in 2007 with the establishment of my educational blog. Beginning to Blog When I started my educational blog Deaf Characters in Adolescent Literature in February 2007, I did not plan to become a blogger nor did I have any plans for my blog. I simply opened a Blogger account and added a list of 106 books with deaf characters that was connected to my research. Once I started blogging on a regular basis, I discovered an active audience who not only read what I wrote but who truly cared about my research. Blogging had become a way for me to keep my research current; since my blog was about deaf characters in adolescent literature, it became an advocacy tool that called attention to authors and books that were not widely publicized; and, it enabled me to become part of a cyber community made up of other bloggers and readers. After a few months of blogging on a weekly basis, I began to feel a sense of obligation to research and post my findings. While continuing to post to my blog, I have acquired more information about my research topic and even received advance reader copies prior to the books’ publication dates. This enables me to discuss the most current books. It also enables my readers to learn about such books. My blog acts as free advertisem*nt for the publishing companies and authors. I currently have 195 contemporary books with deaf characters and over 36 author and professional interviews. While the most rewarding aspect of blogging is connecting with readers, there have been some major highlights in the process. As I stated, I had no way of knowing why the deaf character was included in the books until I began interviewing the authors. I had hoped that the hearing authors of books with deaf characters would portray their characters realistically but I had not realized the authors’ personal connections to actual deaf people. For instance, Delia Ray, Singing Hands, wrote about a Deaf preacher and his family. Her book was based on her grandfather who was a Deaf preacher and leading pioneer in the Deaf Community. Ray is not the only hearing author who has a personal connection to deaf people. Other examples include: Jean Ferris, Of Sound Mind, who earned a degree in Speech Pathology and Audiology. Ferris’ book includes only two hearing characters, the majority are Deaf. All of her characters are also fluent in American Sign Language; Jodi Cutler Del Dottore, Rally Caps, who includes a deaf character named Luca who uses a cochlear implant. Luca is based on Cutler Del Dottore’s son, Jordan, who also has a cochlear implant; finally, Jacqueline Woodson, Feathers, grew up in a community that included deaf people who did not use sign language. As an adult, she met members of the Deaf Community and began learning American Sign Language herself. Woodson introduces readers to Sean who is attractive, funny, and intelligent. In my study, I noted that all of the deaf characters where not diverse based upon race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status (Pajka-West, "Perceptions"). Sean is the first Deaf American-African character in adolescent literature who uses sign language to communicate. Another main highlight is finding Deaf authors who do not receive the mainstream press that other authors might receive. For example, Ann Clare LeZotte, T4, introduces readers to main character Paula Becker, a thirteen year old deaf girl who uses sign language and lipreading to communicate. Through verse, we learn of Paula’s life in Germany during Hitler’s time as she goes into hiding since individuals with physical and mental disabilities were being executed under the orders of Hitler’s Tiergartenstrasse 4 (T4). One additional highlight is that I learn about insider tips and am then able to share this information with my blog readers. In one instance I began corresponding with Marvel Comic’s David Mack, the creator of Echo, a multilingual, biracial, Deaf comic book character who debuted in Daredevil and later The New Avengers. In comics, it is Marvel who owns the character; while Echo was created for Daredevil by Mack, she later appears in The New Avengers. In March 2008, discussion boards were buzzing since issue #39 would include original creator, Mack, among other artists. To make it less complicated for those who do not follow comics, the issue was about whether or not Echo had become a skrull, an alien who takes over the body of the character. This was frightening news since potentially Echo could become a hearing skrull. I just did not believe that Mack would let that happen. My students and I held numerous discussions about the implications of Marvel’s decisions and finally I sent Mack an email. While he could not reveal the details of the issue, he did assure me that my students and I would be pleased. I’m sure there was a collective sigh from readers once his email was published on the blog. Final Thoughts While there have been pejorative depictions of the deaf in literature, the portrayals of deaf characters in adolescent literature have become much more realistic in the last decade. Authors have personal connections with actual deaf individuals which lend to the descriptions of their deaf characters; they are conducting more detailed research to develop their deaf characters; and, they appear to be much more aware of the Deaf Community than they were in the past. A unique benefit of the genre is that authors of adolescent literature often give the impression of being more available to the readers of their books. Authors often participate in open dialogues with their fans through social networking sites or discussion boards on their own websites. After posting interviews with the authors on my blog, I refer readers to the author’s on site whether it through personal blogs, websites, Facebook or Twitter pages. While hearing authors’ portrayals now include a spectrum of deaf characters, we must encourage Deaf and Hard of Hearing writers to include more deaf characters in their works. Consider again my student Carla and her longing to find books with deaf characters. Deaf characters in fiction act as role models for young adults. A positive portrayal of deaf characters benefits deaf adolescents whether or not they see themselves as biologically deaf or culturally deaf. Only through on-going publishing, more realistic and positive representations of the deaf will occur. References Bailes, C.N. "Mandy: A Critical Look at the Portrayal of a Deaf Character in Children’s Literature." Multicultural Perspectives 4.4 (2002): 3-9. Batson, T. "The Deaf Person in Fiction: From Sainthood to Rorschach Blot." Interracial Books for Children Bulletin 11.1-2 (1980): 16-18. Batson, T., and E. Bergman. Angels and Outcasts: An Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press (1985). Bergman, E. "Literature, Fictional characters in." In J.V. Van Cleve (ed.), Gallaudet Encyclopedia of Deaf People & Deafness. Vol. 2. Washington, D.C.: McGraw Hill, 1987. 172-176. Brittain, I. "An Examination into the Portrayal of Deaf Characters and Deaf Issues in Picture Books for Children." Disability Studies Quarterly 24.1 (Winter 2004). 24 Apr. 2005 < http://www.dsq-sds.org >. Burns, D.J. An Annotated Checklist of Fictional Works Which Contain Deaf Characters. Unpublished master’s thesis. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University,1950. Campbell, P., and J. Wirtenberg. How Books Influence Children: What the Research Shows. Interracial Books for Children Bulletin 11.6 (1980): 3-6. Civiletto, C.L., and B.R. Schirmer. "Literature with Characters Who Are Deaf." The Dragon Lode 19.1 (Fall 2000): 46-49. Guella, B. "Short Stories with Deaf Fictional Characters." American Annals of the Deaf 128.1 (1983): 25-33. Krentz, C. "Exploring the 'Hearing Line': Deafness, Laughter, and Mark Twain." In S. L. Snyder, B. J. Brueggemann, and R. Garland-Thomson, eds., Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002. 234-247. Larrick, N. "The All-White World of Children's Books. Saturday Review 11 (1965): 63-85. Pajka-West, S. “The Perceptions of Deaf Characters in Adolescent Literature”. The ALAN Review 34.3 (Summer 2007): 39-45. ———. "The Portrayals and Perceptions of Deaf Characters in Adolescent Literature." Ph.D. dissertation. University of Virginia, 2007. ———. "Interview with Deaf Author Ann Clare LeZotte about T4, Her Forthcoming Book Told in Verse." Deaf Characters in Adolescent Literature, 5 Aug. 2008. < http://pajka.blogspot.com/ 2008/08/interview-with-deaf-author-ann-clare.html >.———. "Interview with Delia Ray, Author of Singing Hands." Deaf Characters in Adolescent Literature, 23 Aug. 2007. < http://pajka.blogspot.com/ 2007/08/interview-with-delia-ray-author-of.html >.———. "Interview with Jacqueline Woodson, author of Feathers." Deaf Characters in Adolescent Literature, 29 Sep. 2007. < http://pajka.blogspot.com/ 2007/09/interview-with-jacqueline-woodson.html >. ———. "Interview with Jodi Cutler Del Dottore, author of Rally Caps." Deaf Characters in Adolescent Literature, 13 Aug. 2007. < http://pajka.blogspot.com/ 2007/08/interview-with-jodi-cutler-del-dottore.html >. Panara, R. "Deaf Characters in Fiction and Drama." The Deaf American 24.5 (1972): 3-8. Schwartz, A.V. "Books Mirror Society: A Study of Children’s Materials." Interracial Books for Children Bulletin 11.1-2 (1980): 19-24. Sherriff, A. The Portrayal of Mexican American Females in Realistic Picture Books (1998-2004). University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: 2005. Taxel, J. "The Black Experience in Children's Fiction: Controversies Surrounding Award Winning Books." Curriculum Inquiry 16 (1986): 245-281. Taylor, G.M. "Deaf Characters in Short Stories: A Selective Bibliography. The Deaf American 26.9 (1974): 6-8. ———. "Deaf Characters in Short Stories: A Selective Bibliography II." The Deaf American 28.11 (1976): 13-16.———. "Deaf Characters in Short Stories: A Selective Bibliography III." The Deaf American 29.2 (1976): 27-28. Wilding-Diaz, M.M. Deaf Characters in Children’s Books: How Are They Portrayed? Unpublished master’s thesis. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 1993.———. "Deaf Characters in Children’s Books: How Are They Perceived?" In Gallaudet University College for Continuing Education and B.D. Snider (eds.), Journal: Post Milan ASL & English Literacy: Issues, Trends & Research Conference Proceedings, 20-22 Oct. 1993.Adolescent Fiction Books Blatchford, C. Nick’s Secret. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner, 2000. Deaver, J. A Maiden’s Grave. New York: Signet, 1996. Ferris, J. Of Sound Mind. New York: Sunburst, 2004. Matlin, M. Deaf Child Crossing. New York: Aladdin Paperbacks, 2004. Riskind, M. Apple Is My Sign. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Scott, V. Finding Abby. Hillsboro, OR: Butte, 2000.

Abstract:

We take as our subject what many would deem a waste of good celluloid: the degraded cultural form of the stoner film. Stoner films plot the experiences of the wasted (those intoxicated on marijuana) as they exhibit wastefulness—excessiveness, improvidence, decay—on a number of fronts. Stoners waste time in constantly hunting for pot and in failing to pursue more productive activity whilst wasted. Stoners waste their minds, both literally, if we believe contested studies that indicate marijuana smoking kills brains cells, and figuratively, in rendering themselves cognitively impaired. Stoners waste their bodies through the dangerous practice of smoking and through the tendency toward physical inertia. Stoners waste money on marijuana firstly, but also on such sophom*oric accoutrements as the stoner film itself. Stoners lay waste to convention in excessively seeking pleasure and in dressing and acting outrageously. And stoners, if the scatological humour of so many stoner films is any index, are preoccupied with bodily waste. Stoners, we argue here, waste whiteness as well. As the likes of Jesse and Chester (Dude, Where’s My Car?), Wayne and Garth (Wayne’s World), Bill and Ted (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) and Jay and Silent Bob (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) make clear, whiteness looms large in stoner films. Yet the genre, we argue, disavows its own whiteness, in favour of a post-white hybridity that lavishly squanders white privilege. For all its focus on whiteness, filmic wastedness has always been an ethnically diverse and ambiguous category. The genre’s origins in the work of Cheech Marin, a Chicano, and Tommy Chong, a Chinese-European Canadian, have been buttressed in this regard by many African American contributions to the stoner oeuvre, including How High, Half Baked and Friday, as well as by Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and its Korean-American and Indian-American protagonists. Cheech and Chong initiated the genre with the release of Up in Smoke in 1978. A host of films have followed featuring protagonists who spend much of their time smoking and seeking marijuana (or—in the case of stoner films such as Dude, Where’s My Car? released during the height of the War on Drugs—acting stoned without ever being seen to get stoned). Inspired in part by the 1938 anti-marijuana film Reefer Madness, and the unintended humour such propaganda films begat amongst marijuana smokers, stoner films are comedies that satirise both marijuana culture and its prohibition. Self-consciously slapstick, the stoner genre excludes more serious films about drugs, from Easy Rider to Shaft, as well as films such as The Wizard of Oz, Yellow Submarine, the Muppet movies, and others popular amongst marijuana smokers because of surreal content. Likewise, a host of films that include secondary stoner characters, such as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Wooderson in Dazed and Confused, are commonly excluded from the genre on the grounds that the stoner film, first and foremost, celebrates stonerism, that is “serious commitment to smoking and acquiring marijuana as a lifestyle choice.” (Meltzer). Often taking the form of the “buddy film,” stoner flicks generally feature male leads and frequently exhibit a decidedly masculinist orientation, with women, for the most part reduced to little more than the object of the white male gaze.The plot, such as it is, of the typical stoner film concerns the search for marijuana (or an accessory, such as junk food) and the improbable misadventures that ensue. While frequently represented as resourceful and energetic in their quest for marijuana, filmic stoners otherwise exhibit ambivalent attitudes toward enterprise that involves significant effort. Typically represented as happy and peaceable, filmic stoners rarely engage in conflict beyond regular clashes with authority figures determined to enforce anti-drug laws, and other measures that stoners take to be infringements upon happiness. While Hollywood’s stoners thus share a sense of entitlement to pleasure, they do not otherwise exhibit a coherent ideological orthodoxy beyond a certain libertarian and relativistic open-mindedness. More likely to take inspiration from comic book heroes than Aldous Huxley or Timothy Leary, stoners are most often portrayed as ‘dazed and confused,’ and could be said to waste the intellectual tradition of mind expansion that Leary represents. That stoner films are, at times, misunderstood to be quintessentially white is hardly suprising. As a social construct that creates, maintains and legitimates white domination, whiteness manifests, as one of its most defining features, an ability to swallow up difference and to insist upon, at critical junctures, a universal subjectivity that disallows for difference (hooks 167). Such universalising not only sanctions co-optation of ethnic cultural expression, it also functions to mask whiteness’s existence, thus reinforcing its very power. Whiteness, as Richard Dyer argues, is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It obfuscates itself and its relationship to the particular traits it is said to embody—disinterest, prudence, temperance, rationality, bodily restraint, industriousness (3). Whiteness is thus constructed as neither an ethnic nor racial particularity, but rather the transcendence of such positionality (Wiegman 139). While non-whites are raced, to be white is to be “just human” and thus to possess the power to “claim to speak for the commonality of humanity” whilst denying the accrual of any particular racial privilege (Dyer 2). In refuting its own advantages—which are so wide ranging (from preferential treatment in housing loans, to the freedom to fail without fear of reflecting badly on other whites) that they are, like whiteness itself, both assumed and unproblematic—whiteness instantiates individualism, allowing whites to believe that their successes are in no way the outcome of systematic racial advantage, but rather the product of individual toil (McIntosh; Lipsitz). An examination of the 1978 stoner film Up in Smoke suggests that whatever the ethnic ambiguity of the figure of the stoner, the genre of the stoner film is all about the wasting of whiteness. Up in Smoke opens with two alternating domestic scenes. We first encounter Pedro De Pacas (Cheech Marin) in a cluttered and shadowy room as his siblings romp affectionately upon his back, waking him from his slumber on the couch. Pedro rises, stepping into a bowl of cereal on the floor. He stumbles to the bathroom, where, sleepy and disoriented, he urinates into the laundry hamper. The chaos of Pedro’s disrupted sleep is followed in the film by a more metaphoric awakening as Anthony Stoner (Tommy Chong) determines to leave home. The scene takes place in a far more orderly, light and lavish room. The space’s overpowering whiteness is breached only by the figure of Anthony and his unruly black hair, bushy black beard, and loud Hawaiian shirt, which vibrates with colour against the white walls, white furnishings and white curtains. We watch as Anthony, behind an elaborate bar, prepares a banana protein shake, impassively ignoring his parents, both clothed in all-white, as they clutch martini glasses and berate their son for his lack of ambition. Arnold Stoner [father]: Son, your mother and me would like for you to cozy up to the Finkelstein boy. He's a bright kid, and, uh... he's going to military school, and remember, he was an Eagle Scout. Tempest Stoner [mother]: Arnold…Arnold Stoner: [shouts over/to his wife] Will you shut up? We’re not going to have a family brawl!Tempest Stoner: [continues talking as her husband shouts]…. Retard.Arnold Stoner: [to Anthony] We've put up with a hell of a lot.[Anthony starts blender] Can this wait? ... Build your goddamn muscles, huh? You know, you could build your muscles picking strawberries.You know, bend and scoop... like the Mexicans. sh*t, maybe I could get you a job with United Fruit. I got a buddy with United Fruit. ... Get you started. Start with strawberries, you might work your way up to these goddamn bananas! When, boy? When...are you going to get your act together?Anthony: [Burps]Tempest Stoner: Gross.Arnold Stoner: Oh, good God Almighty me. I think he's the Antichrist. Anthony, I want to talk to you. [Anthony gathers his smoothie supplements and begins to walk out of the room.] Now, listen! Don't walk away from me when I'm talking to you! You get a goddamn job before sundown, or we're shipping you off to military school with that goddamn Finkelstein sh*t kid! Son of a bitch!The whiteness of Anthony’s parents is signified so pervasively and so strikingly in this scene—in their improbable white outfits and in the room’s insufferably white décor—that we come to understand it as causative. The rage and racism of Mr. Stoner’s tirade, the scene suggests, is a product of whiteness itself. Given that whiteness achieves and maintains its domination via both ubiquity and invisibility, what Up in Smoke accomplishes in this scene is notable. Arnold Stoner’s tortured syntax (“that goddamn Finkelstein sh*t kid”) works to “mak[e] whiteness strange” (Dyer 4), while the scene’s exaggerated staging delineates whiteness as “a particular – even peculiar – identity, rather than a presumed norm” (Roediger, Colored White 21). The belligerence of the senior Stoners toward not only their son and each other, but the world at large, in turn, functions to render whiteness intrinsically ruthless and destructive. Anthony’s parents, in all their whiteness, enact David Roediger’s assertion that “it is not merely that ‘Whiteness’s is oppressive and false; it is that ‘Whiteness’s is nothing but oppressive and false” (Toward the Abolition 13).Anthony speaks not a word during the scene. He communicates only by belching and giving his parents the finger as he leaves the room and the home. This departure is significant in that it marks the moment when Anthony, hereafter known only as “Man,” flees the world of whiteness. He winds up taking refuge in the multi-hued world of stonerism, as embodied in the scene that follows, which features Pedro emerging from his home to interact with his Chicano neighbours and to lovingly inspect his car. As a lowrider, a customised vehicle that “begin[s] with the abandoned materials of one tradition (that of mainstream America), … [and is] … then transformed and recycled . . . into new and fresh objects of art which are distinctly Chicano,” Pedro’s car serves as a symbol of the cultural hybridisation that Man is about to undergo (quoted in Ondine 141).As Man’s muteness in the presence of his parents suggests, his racial status seems tentative from the start. Within the world of whiteness, Man is the subaltern, silenced and denigrated, finding voice only after he befriends Pedro. Even as the film identifies Man as white through his parental lineage, it renders indeterminate its own assertion, destabilising any such fixed or naturalised schema of identity. When Man is first introduced to Pedro’s band as their newest member, James, the band’s African American bass player, looks at Man, dressed in the uniform of the band, and asks: “Hey Pedro, where’s the white dude you said was playing the drums?” Clearly, from James’s point of view, the room contains no white dudes, just stoners. Man’s presumed whiteness becomes one of the film’s countless gags, the provocative ambiguity of the casting of a Chinese-European to play a white part underscored in the film by the equally implausible matter of age. Man, according to the film’s narrative, is a high school student; Chong was forty when the film was released. Like his age, Man’s whiteness is never a good fit. That Man ultimately winds up sleeping on the very couch upon which we first encounter Pedro suggests how radical and final the break with his dubious white past is. The “Mexicans” whom his father would mock as fit only for abject labour are amongst those whom Man comes to consider his closest companions. In departing his parents’ white world, and embracing Pedro’s dilapidated, barrio-based world of wastedness, Man traces the geographies narrated by George Lipsitz in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. Historically, Lipsitz argues, the development of affluent white space (the suburbs) was made possible by the disintegration of African American, Chicano and other minority neighbourhoods disadvantaged by federal, state, and corporate housing, employment, health care, urban renewal, and education policies that favoured whites over non-whites. In this sense, Man’s flight from his parents’ home is a retreat from whiteness itself, and from the advantages that whiteness conveys. In choosing the ramshackle, non-white world of stonerism, Man performs an act of racial treachery. Whiteness, Lipsitz contends, has “cash value,” and “is invested in, like property, but it is also a means of accumulating property and keeping it from others,” which allows for “intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations” (vii-viii). Man’s disavowal of the privileges of whiteness is a reckless refusal to accept this racial birthright. Whiteness is thus wasted upon Man because Man wastes his whiteness. Given the centrality of prudence and restraint to hegemonic constructions of whiteness, Man’s willingness to squander the “valuable asset” that is his white inheritance is especially treasonous (Harris 1713). Man is the prodigal son of whiteness, a profligate who pours down the drain “the wages of whiteness” that his forbearers have spent generations accruing and protecting (Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness). His waste not only offends the core values which whiteness is said to comprise, it also denigrates whiteness itself by illuminating the excess of white privilege, as well as the unarticulated excess of meanings that hover around whiteness to create the illusion of transcendence and infinite variety. Man’s performance, like all bad performances of whiteness, “disrupt[s] implicit understandings of what it means to be white” (Hartigan 46). The spectre of seeing white domination go ‘up in smoke’—via wasting, as opposed to hoarding, white privilege—amounts to racial treason, and helps not only to explicate why whites in the film find stonerism so menacing, but also to explain the paradox of “pot [making] the people who don’t smoke it even more paranoid than the people who do” (Patterson). While Tommy Chong’s droll assertion that "what makes us so dangerous is that we're harmless" ridicules such paranoia, it ultimately fails to account for the politics of subversive squandering of white privilege that characterise the stoner film (“Biographies”). Stoners in Up in Smoke, as in most other stoner films, are marked as non-white, through association with ethnic Others, through their rejection of mainstream ideas about work and achievement, and/or through their lack of bodily restraint in relentlessly seeking pleasure, in dressing outrageously, and in refusing to abide conventional grooming habits. Significantly, the non-white status of the stoner is both voluntary and deliberate. While stonerism embraces its own non-whiteness, its Otherness is not signified, primarily, through racial cross-dressing of the sort Eric Lott detects in Elvis, but rather through race-mixing. Stoner collectivity practices an inclusivity that defies America’s historic practice of racial and ethnic segregation (Lott 248). Stonerism further reveals its unwillingness to abide constrictive American whiteness in a scene in which Pedro and Man, both US-born Americans, are deported. The pair are rounded up along with Pedro’s extended family in a raid initiated when Pedro’s cousin “narcs” on himself to la migra (the Immigration and Naturalization Service) in order to get free transport for his extended family to his wedding in Tijuana. Pedro and Man return to the US as unwitting tricksters, bringing back to the US more marijuana than has ever crossed the Mexican-US border at one time, fusing the relationship between transnationalism and wastedness. The disrespect that stoners exhibit for pregnable US borders contests presumed Chicano powerlessness in the face of white force and further affronts whiteness, which historically has mobilised itself most virulently at the threat of alien incursion. Transgression here is wilful and playful; stoners intend to offend normative values and taste through their actions, their dress, and non-white associations as part of the project of forging a new hybridised, transnational subjectivity that threatens to lay waste to whiteness’s purity and privilege. Stoners invite the scrutiny of white authority with their outrageous attire and ethnically diverse composition, turning the “inevitability of surveillance” (Borrie 87) into an opportunity to enact their own wastedness—their wasted privilege, their wasted youth, their wasted potential—before a gaze that is ultimately confounded and threatened by the chaotic hybridity with which it is faced (Hebdige 26). By perpetually displaying his/her wasted Otherness, the stoner makes of him/herself a “freak,” a label cops use derisively throughout Up in Smoke to denote the wasted without realising that stoners define themselves in precisely such terms, and, by doing so, obstruct whiteness’s assertion of universal subjectivity. Pedro’s cousin Strawberry (Tom Skerritt), a pot dealer, enacts freakishness by exhibiting a large facial birthmark and by suffering from Vietnam-induced Post Traumatic Stress disorder. A freak in every sense of the word, Strawberry is denied white status by virtue of physical and mental defect. But Strawberry, as a stoner, ultimately wants whiteness even less than it wants him. The defects that deny him membership in the exclusive “club” that is whiteness prove less significant than the choice he makes to defect from the ranks of whiteness and join with Man in the decision to waste his whiteness wantonly (“Editorial”). Stoner masculinity is represented as similarly freakish and defective. While white authority forcefully frustrates the attempts of Pedro and Man to “score” marijuana, the duo’s efforts to “score” sexually are thwarted by their own in/action. More often than not, wastedness produces impotence in Up in Smoke, either literally or figuratively, wherein the confusion and misadventures that attend pot-smoking interrupt foreplay. The film’s only ostensible sex scene is unconsummated, a wasted opportunity for whiteness to reproduce itself when Man sleeps through his girlfriend’s frenzied discussion of sex. During the course of Up in Smoke, Man dresses as a woman while hitchhiking, Pedro mistakes Man for a woman, Man sits on Pedro’s lap when they scramble to change seats whilst being pulled over by the police, Man suggests that Pedro has a “small dick,” Pedro reports liking “manly breasts,” and Pedro—unable to urinate in the presence of Sgt. Stedenko—tells his penis that if it does not perform, he will “put [it] back in the closet.” Such attenuations of the lead characters’ masculinity climax in the penultimate scene, in which Pedro, backed by his band, performs “Earache My Eye,” a song he has just composed backstage, whilst adorned in pink tutu, garter belt, tassle pasties, sequined opera mask and Mickey Mouse ears: My momma talkin’ to me tryin’ to tell me how to liveBut I don't listen to her cause my head is like a sieveMy daddy he disowned me cause I wear my sister's clothesHe caught me in the bathroom with a pair of pantyhoseMy basketball coach he done kicked me off the teamFor wearing high heeled sneakers and acting like a queen“Earache My Eye” corroborates the Othered natured of stonerism by marking stoners, already designated as non-white, as non-straight. In a classic iteration of a bad gender performance, the scene rejects both whiteness and its hegemonic partners-in-crime, heterosexuality and normative masculinity (Butler 26). Here stoners waste not only their whiteness, but also their white masculinity. Whiteness, and its dependence upon “intersection … [with] interlocking axes [of power such as] gender … [and] sexuality,” is “outed” in this scene (Shome 368). So, too, is it enfeebled. In rendering masculinity freakish and defective, the film threatens whiteness at its core. For if whiteness can not depend upon normative masculinity for its reproduction, then, like Man’s racial birthright, it is wasted. The stoner’s embodiment of freakishness further works to emphasise wasted whiteness by exposing just how hysterical whiteness’s defense of its own normativity can be. Up in Smoke frequently inflates not only the effects of marijuana, but also the eccentricities of those who smoke it, a strategy which means that much of the film’s humour turns on satirising hegemonic stereotypes of marijuana smokers. Equally, Cheech Marin’s exaggerated “slapstick, one-dimensional [portrayal] of [a] Chicano character” works to render ridiculous the very stereotypes his character incarnates (List 183). While the film deconstructs processes of social construction, it also makes extensive use of counter-stereotyping in its depictions of characters marked as white. The result is that whiteness’s “illusion of [its] own infinite variety” is contested and the lie of whiteness as non-raced is exposed, helping to explain the stoner’s decision to waste his/her whiteness (Dyer 12; 2). In Up in Smoke whiteness is the colour of straightness. Straights, who are willing neither to smoke pot nor to tolerate the smoking of pot by others/Others, are so comprehensively marked as white in the film that whiteness and straightness become isomorphic. As a result, the same stereotypes are mobilised in representing whiteness and straightness: incompetence, belligerence, hypocrisy, meanspiritedness, and paranoia, qualities that are all the more oppressive because virtually all whites/straights in the film occupy positions of authority. Anthony’s spectacularly white parents, as we have seen, are bigoted and dominating. Their whiteness is further impugned by alcohol, which fuels Mr. Stoner’s fury and Mrs. Stoner’s unintelligibility. That the senior Stoners are drunk before noon works, of course, to expose the hypocrisy of those who would indict marijuana use while ignoring the social damage alcohol can produce. Their inebriation (revealed as chronic in the DVD’s outtake scenes) takes on further significance when it is configured as a decidedly white attribute. Throughout the film, only characters marked as white consume alcohol—most notably, the judge who is discovered to be drinking vodka whist adjudicating drug charges against Pedro and Man—therefore dislodging whiteness’s self-construction as temperate, and suggesting just how wasted whiteness is. While stonerism is represented as pacific, drunkenness is of a piece with white/straight bellicosity. In Up in Smoke, whites/straights crave confrontation and discord, especially the angry, uptight, and vainglorious narcotics cop Sgt. Stedenko (Stacey Keech) who inhabits so many of the film’s counter-stereotypes. While a trio of white cops roughly apprehend and search a carload of innocent nuns in a manner that Man describes as “cold blooded,” Stedenko, unawares in the foreground, gives an interview about his plans for what he hopes will be the biggest border drug bust in US history: “[Reporter:] Do you expect to see any violence here today? [Sgt. Stedenko:] I certainly hope so.” Stedenko’s desire to act violently against stoners echoes mythologies of white regeneration in the Old West, wherein whiteness refurbished itself through violent attacks on Native Americans, whose wasteful cultures failed to make “civilised” use of western lands (Slotkin 565).White aggression is relentlessly depicted in the film, with one important exception: the instance of the stoned straight. Perhaps no other trope is as defining of the genre, as is the scene wherein a straight person accidentally becomes stoned. Up in Smoke offers several examples, most notably the scene in which a motorcycle cop pulls over Pedro and Man as they drive a van belonging to Pedro’s Uncle Chuey. In a plot twist requiring a degree of willing suspension of disbelief that even wasted audiences might find a stretch, the exterior shell of the van, unbeknownst to Pedro and Man, is made entirely of marijuana which has started to smoulder around the exhaust pipe. The cop, who becomes intoxicated whilst walking through the fumes, does not hassle Pedro and Man, as expected, but instead asks for a bite of their hot dog and then departs happily, instructing the duo to “have a nice day.” In declining, or perhaps simply forgetting, to exercise his authority, the cop demonstrates the regenerative potential not of violent whiteness but rather of hybrid wastedness. Marijuana here is transformative, morphing straight consciousness into stoner consciousness and, in the process, discharging all the uptight, mean-spirited, unnecessary, and hence wasteful baggage of whiteness along the way. While such a utopian potential for pot is both upheld and satirised in the film, the scene amounts to far more than an inconsequential generic gag, in that it argues for the disavowal of whiteness via the assumption of the voluntary Otherness that is stonerism. Whiteness, the scene suggests, can be cast off, discarded, wasted and thus surmounted. Whites, for want of a better phrase, simply need to ‘just say no’ to whiteness in order to excrete the brutality that is its necessary affliction and inevitable result. While Up in Smoke laudably offers a powerful refusal to horde the assets of whiteness, the film fails to acknowledge that ‘just saying no’ is, indeed, one of whiteness’s exclusive privileges, since whites and only whites possess the liberty to refuse the advantages whiteness bestows. Non-whites possess no analogical ability to jettison the social constructions to which they are subjected, to refuse the power of dominant classes to define their subjectivity. Neither does the film confront the fact that Man nor any other of Up in Smoke’s white freaks are disallowed from re-embracing their whiteness, and its attendant value, at any time. However inchoate the film’s challenge to racial privilege, Up in Smoke’s celebration of the subversive pleasures of wasting whiteness offers a tentative, if bleary, first step toward ‘the abolition of whiteness.’ Its utopian vision of a post-white hybridised subjectivity, however dazed and confused, is worthy of far more serious contemplation than the film, taken at face value, might seem to suggest. Perhaps Up in Smoke is a stoner film that should also be viewed while sober. ReferencesBill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Dir. Stephen Herek. Orion Pictures Corporation, 1989.“Biographies”. 10 June 2010 ‹http://www.cheechandchongfans.com/biography.html›. Borrie, Lee. "Wild Ones: Containment Culture and 1950s Youth Rebellion”. Diss. University of Canterbury, 2007.Butler, Judith. "Critically Queer”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1.1 (1993): 17-32.Chavoya, C. Ondine. “Customized Hybrids: The Art of Ruben Ortiz Torres and Lowriding in Southern California”. CR: The New Centennial Review 4.2 (2004): 141-84.Clerks. Dir. Kevin Smith. Miramax Films, 1994. Dazed and Confused. Dir. Richard Linklater. Cineplex Odeon Films, 1993. Dude, Where’s My Car? Dir. Danny Leiner. Twentieth Century Fox, 2000.Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture. London: Routledge, 1997.“Editorial: Abolish the White Race—By Any Means Necessary”. Race Traitor 1 (1993). 9 June 2010 ‹http://racetraitor.org/abolish.html›.Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Dir. Amy Heckerling. Universal Pictures, 1982.Friday. Dir. F. Gary Gray. New Line Cinema, 1995.Half Baked. Dir. Tamra Davis. Universal Pictures, 1998.Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Dir. Danny Leiner. New Line Cinema, 2004.Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness as Property”. Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 1707-1791. Hartigan, John Jr. “Objectifying ‘Poor Whites and ‘White Trash’ in Detroit”. White Trash: Race and Class in America. Eds. Matt Wray, and Annalee Newitz. NY: Routledge, 1997. 41-56.Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979.hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.How High. Dir. Jesse Dylan. Universal Pictures, 2001.Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit fromIdentity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2006. List, Christine. "Self-Directed Stereotyping in the Films of Cheech Marin”. Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance. Ed. Chon A. Noriega. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. 183-94.Lott, Eric. “Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness”. The Cultural Studies Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 1999. 241-55.McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. 10 June 2010 ‹http://www.case.edu/president/aaction/UnpackingTheKnapsack.pdf›.Meltzer, Marisa. “Leisure and Innocence: The Eternal Appeal of the Stoner Movie”. Slate 26 June 2007. 10 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.slate.com/id/2168931›.Toni Morrison. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.Patterson, John. “High and Mighty”. The Guardian 7 June 2008. 10 June 2010 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/jun/07/2›.Roediger, David. Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Rev. ed. London: Verso Books, 1999.———. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Class and Politics. London: Verso Books, 1994.Shome, Raka. “Outing Whiteness”. Critical Studies in Media Communication 17.3 (2000): 366-71.Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1973.Up in Smoke. Dir. Lou Adler. Paramount Pictures, 1978.Wayne’s World. Dir. Penelope Spheeris. Paramount Pictures, 1992.Wiegman, Robyn. “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity”. boundary 2 26.3 (1999): 115-50.

Abstract:

All history of this area and the general talk and all of that is that 1973 was a turning point and the Aquarius Festival is credited with having turned this region around in so many ways, but I think that is a myth ... and I have to honour the truth; and the truth is that old Dicke Donelly came and did a Welcome to Country the night before the festival. (Joseph in Joseph and Hanley)In 1973 the Australian Union of Students (AUS) held the Aquarius Arts and Lifestyle Festival in a small, rural New South Wales town called Nimbin. The festival was seen as the peak expression of Australian counterculture and is attributed to creating the “Rainbow Region”, an area with a concentration of alternative life stylers in Northern NSW (Derrett 28). While the Aquarius Festival is recognised as a founding historical and countercultural event, the unique and important relationships established with Indigenous people at this time are generally less well known. This article investigates claims that the 1973 Aquarius Festival was “the first event in Australian history that sought permission for the use of the land from the Traditional Owners” (Joseph and Hanley). The diverse international, national and local conditions that coalesced at the Aquarius Festival suggest a fertile environment was created for reconciliatory bonds to develop. Often dismissed as a “tree hugging, soap dodging movement,” the counterculture was radically politicised having sprung from the 1960s social revolutions when the world witnessed mass demonstrations that confronted war, racism, sexism and capitalism. Primarily a youth movement, it was characterised by flamboyant dress, music, drugs and mass gatherings with universities forming the epicentre and white, middle class youth leading the charge. As their ideals of changing the world were frustrated by lack of systematic change, many decided to disengage and a migration to rural settings occurred (Jacob; Munro-Clarke; Newton). In the search for alternatives, the counterculture assimilated many spiritual practices, such as Eastern traditions and mysticism, which were previously obscure to the Western world. This practice of spiritual syncretism can be represented as a direct resistance to the hegemony of the dominant Western culture (Stell). As the new counterculture developed, its progression from urban to rural settings was driven by philosophies imbued with a desire to reconnect with and protect the natural world while simultaneously rejecting the dominant conservative order. A recurring feature of this countercultural ‘back to the land’ migration was not only an empathetic awareness of the injustices of colonial past, but also a genuine desire to learn from the Indigenous people of the land. Indigenous people were generally perceived as genuine opposers of Westernisation, inherently spiritual, ecological, tribal and communal, thus encompassing the primary values to which the counterculture was aspiring (Smith). Cultures converged. One, a youth culture rebelling from its parent culture; the other, ancient cultures reeling from the historical conquest by the youths’ own ancestors. Such cultural intersections are rich with complex scenarios and politics. As a result, often naïve, but well-intended relations were established with Native Americans, various South American Indigenous peoples, New Zealand Maori and, as this article demonstrates, the Original People of Australia (Smith; Newton; Barr-Melej; Zolov). The 1960s protest era fostered the formation of groups aiming to address a variety of issues, and at times many supported each other. Jennifer Clarke says it was the Civil Rights movement that provided the first models of dissent by formulating a “method, ideology and language of protest” as African Americans stood up and shouted prior to other movements (2). The issue of racial empowerment was not lost on Australia’s Indigenous population. Clarke writes that during the 1960s, encouraged by events overseas and buoyed by national organisation, Aborigines “slowly embarked on a political awakening, demanded freedom from the trappings of colonialism and responded to the effects of oppression at worst and neglect at best” (4). Activism of the 1960s had the “profoundly productive effect of providing Aborigines with the confidence to assert their racial identity” (159). Many Indigenous youth were compelled by the zeitgeist to address their people’s issues, fulfilling Charlie Perkins’s intentions of inspiring in Indigenous peoples a will to resist (Perkins). Enjoying new freedoms of movement out of missions, due to the 1967 Constitutional change and the practical implementation of the assimilation policy, up to 32,000 Indigenous youth moved to Redfern, Sydney between 1967 and 1972 (Foley, “An Evening With”). Gary Foley reports that a dynamic new Black Power Movement emerged but the important difference between this new younger group and the older Indigenous leaders of the day was the diverse range of contemporary influences. Taking its mantra from the Black Panther movement in America, though having more in common with the equivalent Native American Red Power movement, the Black Power Movement acknowledged many other international struggles for independence as equally inspiring (Foley, “An Evening”). People joined together for grassroots resistance, formed anti-hierarchical collectives and established solidarities between varied groups who previously would have had little to do with each other. The 1973 Aquarius Festival was directly aligned with “back to the land” philosophies. The intention was to provide a place and a reason for gathering to “facilitate exchanges on survival techniques” and to experience “living in harmony with the natural environment.” without being destructive to the land (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Early documents in the archives, however, reveal no apparent interest in Australia’s Indigenous people, referring more to “silken Arabian tents, mediaeval banners, circus, jugglers and clowns, peace pipes, maypole and magic circles” (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Obliterated from the social landscape and minimally referred to in the Australian education system, Indigenous people were “off the radar” to the majority mindset, and the Australian counterculture similarly was slow to appreciate Indigenous culture. Like mainstream Australia, the local counterculture movement largely perceived the “race” issue as something occurring in other countries, igniting the phrase “in your own backyard” which became a catchcry of Indigenous activists (Foley, “Whiteness and Blackness”) With no mention of any Indigenous interest, it seems likely that the decision to engage grew from the emerging climate of Indigenous activism in Australia. Frustrated by student protestors who seemed oblivious to local racial issues, focusing instead on popular international injustices, Indigenous activists accused them of hypocrisy. Aquarius Festival directors, found themselves open to similar accusations when public announcements elicited a range of responses. Once committed to the location of Nimbin, directors Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen began a tour of Australian universities to promote the upcoming event. While at the annual conference of AUS in January 1973 at Monash University, Dunstan met Indigenous activist Gary Foley: Gary witnessed the presentation of Johnny Allen and myself at the Aquarius Foundation session and our jubilation that we had agreement from the village residents to not only allow, but also to collaborate in the production of the Festival. After our presentation which won unanimous support, it was Gary who confronted me with the question “have you asked permission from local Aboriginal folk?” This threw me into confusion because we had seen no Aboriginals in Nimbin. (Dunstan, e-mail) Such a challenge came at a time when the historical climate was etched with political activism, not only within the student movement, but more importantly with Indigenous activists’ recent demonstrations, such as the installation in 1972 of the Tent Embassy in Canberra. As representatives of the counterculture movement, which was characterised by its inclinations towards consciousness-raising, AUS organisers were ethically obliged to respond appropriately to the questions about Indigenous permission and involvement in the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. In addition to this political pressure, organisers in Nimbin began hearing stories of the area being cursed or taboo for women. This most likely originated from the tradition of Nimbin Rocks, a rocky outcrop one kilometre from Nimbin, as a place where only certain men could go. Jennifer Hoff explains that many major rock formations were immensely sacred places and were treated with great caution and respect. Only a few Elders and custodians could visit these places and many such locations were also forbidden for women. Ceremonies were conducted at places like Nimbin Rocks to ensure the wellbeing of all tribespeople. Stories of the Nimbin curse began to spread and most likely captivated a counterculture interested in mysticism. As organisers had hoped that news of the festival would spread on the “lips of the counterculture,” they were alarmed to hear how “fast the bad news of this curse was travelling” (Dunstan, e-mail). A diplomatic issue escalated with further challenges from the Black Power community when organisers discovered that word had spread to Sydney’s Indigenous community in Redfern. Organisers faced a hostile reaction to their alleged cultural insensitivity and were plagued by negative publicity with accusations the AUS were “violating sacred ground” (Janice Newton 62). Faced with such bad press, Dunstan was determined to repair what was becoming a public relations disaster. It seemed once prompted to the path, a sense of moral responsibility prevailed amongst the organisers and they took the unprecedented step of reaching out to Australia’s Indigenous people. Dunstan claimed that an expedition was made to the local Woodenbong mission to consult with Elder, Uncle Lyle Roberts. To connect with local people required crossing the great social divide present in that era of Australia’s history. Amy Nethery described how from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, a “system of reserves, missions and other institutions isolated, confined and controlled Aboriginal people” (9). She explains that the people were incarcerated as a solution to perceived social problems. For Foley, “the widespread genocidal activity of early “settlement” gave way to a policy of containment” (Foley, “Australia and the Holocaust”). Conditions on missions were notoriously bad with alcoholism, extreme poverty, violence, serious health issues and depression common. Of particular concern to mission administrators was the perceived need to keep Indigenous people separate from the non-indigenous population. Dunstan described the mission he visited as having “bad vibes.” He found it difficult to communicate with the elderly man, and was not sure if he understood Dunstan’s quest, as his “responses came as disjointed raves about Jesus and saving grace” (Dunstan, e-mail). Uncle Lyle, he claimed, did not respond affirmatively or negatively to the suggestion that Nimbin was cursed, and so Dunstan left assuming it was not true. Other organisers began to believe the curse and worried that female festival goers might get sick or worse, die. This interpretation reflected, as Vanessa Bible argues, a general Eurocentric misunderstanding of the relationship of Indigenous peoples with the land. Paul Joseph admits they were naïve whites coming into a place with very little understanding, “we didn’t know if we needed a witch doctor or what we needed but we knew we needed something from the Aborigines to lift the spell!”(Joseph and Hanley). Joseph, one of the first “hippies” who moved to the area, had joined forces with AUS organisers. He said, “it just felt right” to get Indigenous involvement and recounted how organisers made another trip to Woodenbong Mission to find Dickee (Richard) Donnelly, a Song Man, who was very happy to be invited. Whether the curse was valid or not it proved to be productive in further instigating respectful action. Perhaps feeling out of their depth, the organisers initiated another strategy to engage with Australian Indigenous people. A call out was sent through the AUS network to diversify the cultural input and it was recommended they engage the services of South African artist, Bauxhau Stone. Timing aligned well as in 1972 Australia had voted in a new Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. Whitlam brought about significant political changes, many in response to socialist protests that left a buoyancy in the air for the counterculturalist movement. He made prodigious political changes in support of Indigenous people, including creating the Aboriginal Arts Board as part of the Australian Council of the Arts (ACA). As the ACA were already funding activities for the Aquarius Festival, organisers were successful in gaining two additional grants specifically for Indigenous participation (Farnham). As a result We were able to hire […] representatives, a couple of Kalahari bushmen. ‘Cause we were so dumb, we didn’t think we could speak to the black people, you know what I mean, we thought we would be rejected, or whatever, so for us to really reach out, we needed somebody black to go and talk to them, or so we thought, and it was remarkable. This one Bau, a remarkable fellow really, great artist, great character, he went all over Australia. He went to Pitjantjatjara, Yirrkala and we arranged buses and tents when they got here. We had a very large contingent of Aboriginal people come to the Aquarius Festival, thanks to Whitlam. (Joseph in Joseph and Henley) It was under the aegis of these government grants that Bauxhau Stone conducted his work. Stone embodied a nexus of contemporary issues. Acutely aware of the international movement for racial equality and its relevance to Australia, where conditions were “really appalling”, Stone set out to transform Australian race relations by engaging with the alternative arts movement (Stone). While his white Australian contemporaries may have been unaccustomed to dealing with the Indigenous racial issue, Stone was actively engaged and thus well suited to act as a cultural envoy for the Aquarius Festival. He visited several local missions, inviting people to attend and notifying them of ceremonies being conducted by respected Elders. Nimbin was then the site of the Aquarius Lifestyle and Celebration Festival, a two week gathering of alternative cultures, technologies and youth. It innovatively demonstrated its diversity of influences, attracted people from all over the world and was the first time that the general public really witnessed Australia’s counterculture (Derrett 224). As markers of cultural life, counterculture festivals of the 1960s and 1970s were as iconic as the era itself and many around the world drew on the unique Indigenous heritage of their settings in some form or another (Partridge; Perone; Broadley and Jones; Zolov). The social phenomenon of coming together to experience, celebrate and foster a sense of unity was triggered by protests, music and a simple, yet deep desire to reconnect with each other. Festivals provided an environment where the negative social pressures of race, gender, class and mores (such as clothes) were suspended and held the potential “for personal and social transformation” (St John 167). With the expressed intent to “take matters into our own hands” and try to develop alternative, innovative ways of doing things with collective participation, the Aquarius Festival thus became an optimal space for reinvigorating ancient and Indigenous ways (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). With philosophies that venerated collectivism, tribalism, connecting with the earth, and the use of ritual, the Indigenous presence at the Aquarius Festival gave attendees the opportunity to experience these values. To connect authentically with Nimbin’s landscape, forming bonds with the Traditional Owners was essential. Participants were very fortunate to have the presence of the last known initiated men of the area, Uncle Lyle Roberts and Uncle Dickee Donnely. These Elders represented the last vestiges of an ancient culture and conducted innovative ceremonies, song, teachings and created a sacred fire for the new youth they encountered in their land. They welcomed the young people and were very happy for their presence, believing it represented a revolutionary shift (Wedd; King; John Roberts; Cecil Roberts). Images 1 and 2: Ceremony and talks conducted at the Aquarius Festival (people unknown). Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Paul White. The festival thus provided an important platform for the regeneration of cultural and spiritual practices. John Roberts, nephew of Uncle Lyle, recalled being surprised by the reaction of festival participants to his uncle: “He was happy and then he started to sing. And my God … I couldn’t get near him! There was this big ring of hippies around him. They were about twenty deep!” Sharing to an enthusiastic, captive audience had a positive effect and gave the non-indigenous a direct Indigenous encounter (Cecil Roberts; King; Oshlak). Estimates of the number of Indigenous people in attendance vary, with the main organisers suggesting 800 to 1000 and participants suggesting 200 to 400 (Stone; Wedd; Oshlak: Joseph; King; Cecil Roberts). As the Festival lasted over a two week period, many came and left within that time and estimates are at best reliant on memory, engagement and perspectives. With an estimated total attendance at the Festival between 5000 and 10,000, either number of Indigenous attendees is symbolic and a significant symbolic statistic for Indigenous and non-indigenous to be together on mutual ground in Australia in 1973. Images 3-5: Performers from Yirrkala Dance Group, brought to the festival by Stone with funding from the Federal Government. Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Dr Ian Cameron. For Indigenous people, the event provided an important occasion to reconnect with their own people, to share their culture with enthusiastic recipients, as well as the chance to experience diverse aspects of the counterculture. Though the northern NSW region has a history of diverse cultural migration of Italian and Indian families, the majority of non-indigenous and Indigenous people had limited interaction with cosmopolitan influences (Kijas 20). Thus Nimbin was a conservative region and many Christianised Indigenous people were also conservative in their outlook. The Aquarius Festival changed that as the Indigenous people experienced the wide-ranging cultural elements of the alternative movement. The festival epitomised countercultural tendencies towards flamboyant fashion and hairstyles, architectural design, fantastical art, circus performance, Asian clothes and religious products, vegetarian food and nudity. Exposure to this bohemian culture would have surely led to “mind expansion and consciousness raising,” explicit aims adhered to by the movement (Roszak). Performers and participants from Africa, America and India also gave attending Indigenous Australians the opportunity to interact with non-European cultures. Many people interviewed for this paper indicated that Indigenous people’s reception of this festival experience was joyous. For Australia’s early counterculture, interest in Indigenous Australia was limited and for organisers of the AUS Aquarius Festival, it was not originally on the agenda. The counterculture in the USA and New Zealand had already started to engage with their Indigenous people some years earlier. However due to the Aquarius Festival’s origins in the student movement and its solidarities with the international Indigenous activist movement, they were forced to shift their priorities. The coincidental selection of a significant spiritual location at Nimbin to hold the festival brought up additional challenges and countercultural intrigue with mystical powers and a desire to connect authentically to the land, further prompted action. Essentially, it was the voices of empowered Indigenous activists, like Gary Foley, which in fact triggered the reaching out to Indigenous involvement. While the counterculture organisers were ultimately receptive and did act with unprecedented respect, credit must be given to Indigenous activists. The activist’s role is to trigger action and challenge thinking and in this case, it was ultimately productive. Therefore the Indigenous people were not merely passive recipients of beneficiary goodwill, but active instigators of appropriate cultural exchange. After the 1973 festival many attendees decided to stay in Nimbin to purchase land collectively and a community was born. Relationships established with local Indigenous people developed further. Upon visiting Nimbin now, one will see a vibrant visual display of Indigenous and psychedelic themed art, a central park with an open fire tended by local custodians and other Indigenous community members, an Aboriginal Centre whose rent is paid for by local shopkeepers, and various expressions of a fusion of counterculture and Indigenous art, music and dance. While it appears that reconciliation became the aspiration for mainstream society in the 1990s, Nimbin’s early counterculture history had Indigenous reconciliation at its very foundation. The efforts made by organisers of the 1973 Aquarius Festival stand as one of very few examples in Australian history where non-indigenous Australians have respectfully sought to learn from Indigenous people and to assimilate their cultural practices. It also stands as an example for the world, of reconciliation, based on hippie ideals of peace and love. They encouraged the hippies moving up here, even when they came out for Aquarius, old Uncle Lyle and Richard Donnelly, they came out and they blessed the mob out here, it was like the hairy people had come back, with the Nimbin, cause the Nimbynji is the little hairy people, so the hairy people came back (Jerome). References Barr-Melej, Patrick. “Siloísmo and the Self in Allende’s Chile: Youth, 'Total Revolution,' and the Roots of the Humanist Movement.” Hispanic American Historical Review 86.4 (Nov. 2006): 747-784. Bible, Vanessa. Aquarius Rising: Terania Creek and the Australian Forest Protest Movement. BA (Honours) Thesis. University of New England, Armidale, 2010. Broadley, Colin, and Judith Jones, eds. Nambassa: A New Direction. Auckland: Reed, 1979. Bryant, Gordon M. Parliament of Australia. Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. 1 May 1973. Australian Union of Students. Records of the AUS, 1934-1991. National Library of Australia MS ACC GB 1992.0505. Cameron, Ian. “Aquarius Festival Photographs.” 1973. Clarke, Jennifer. Aborigines and Activism: Race, Aborigines and the Coming of the Sixties to Australia. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2008. Derrett, Ross. Regional Festivals: Nourishing Community Resilience: The Nature and Role of Cultural Festivals in Northern Rivers NSW Communities. PhD Thesis. Southern Cross University, Lismore, 2008. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Survival Festival May 1973.” 1 Aug. 1972. Pamphlet. MS 6945/1. Nimbin Aquarius Festival Archives. National Library of Australia, Canberra. ---. E-mail to author, 11 July 2012. ---. “The Aquarius Festival.” Aquarius Rainbow Region. n.d. Farnham, Ken. Acting Executive Officer, Aboriginal Council for the Arts. 19 June 1973. Letter. MS ACC GB 1992.0505. Australian Union of Students. Records of the AUS, 1934-1991. National Library of Australia, Canberra. Foley, Gary. “Australia and the Holocaust: A Koori Perspective (1997).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_8.html›. ---. “Whiteness and Blackness in the Koori Struggle for Self-Determination (1999).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_9.html›. ---. “Black Power in Redfern 1968-1972 (2001).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_1.html›. ---. “An Evening with Legendary Aboriginal Activist Gary Foley.” Conference Session. Marxism 2012 “Revolution in the Air”, Melbourne, Mar. 2012. Hoff, Jennifer. Bundjalung Jugun: Bundjalung Country. Lismore: Richmond River Historical Society, 2006. Jacob, Jeffrey. New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-Land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable Future. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1997. Jerome, Burri. Interview. 31 July 2012. Joseph, Paul. Interview. 7 Aug. 2012. Joseph, Paul, and Brendan ‘Mookx’ Hanley. Interview by Rob Willis. 14 Aug. 2010. Audiofile, Session 2 of 3. nla.oh-vn4978025. Rob Willis Folklore Collection. National Library of Australia, Canberra. Kijas, Johanna, Caravans and Communes: Stories of Settling in the Tweed 1970s & 1980s. Murwillumbah: Tweed Shire Council, 2011. King, Vivienne (Aunty Viv). Interview. 1 Aug. 2012. Munro-Clarke, Margaret. Communes of Rural Australia: The Movement Since 1970. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1986. Nethery, Amy. “Aboriginal Reserves: ‘A Modern-Day Concentration Camp’: Using History to Make Sense of Australian Immigration Detention Centres.” Does History Matter? Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand. Eds. Klaus Neumann and Gwenda Tavan. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2009. 4. Newton, Janice. “Aborigines, Tribes and the Counterculture.” Social Analysis 23 (1988): 53-71. Newton, John. 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Abstract:

For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud plotted along rival national and ideological lines, and relayed televisually as soap opera across the planet. In Miami, apparitions of the Virgin Mary were reported after Elián’s arrival; adherents of Afro-Cuban santería similarly regarded Elián as divinely touched. In Cuba, Elián’s “kidnapping” briefly reinvigorated a torpid revolutionary project. He was hailed by Fidel Castro as the symbolic descendant of José Martí and Che Guevara, and of the patriotic rigour they embodied. Cubans massed to demand his return. In the U.S.A., Elián’s case was arbitrated at every level of the juridical system. The “Save Elián” campaign generated widespread debate about godless versus godly family values, the contours of the American Dream, and consumerist excess. By the end of 2000 Elián had generated the second largest volume of TV news coverage to that date in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O. J. Simpson case (Fasulo). After Fidel Castro, and perhaps the geriatric music ensemble manufactured by Ry Cooder, the Buena Vista Social Club, Elián became the most famous Cuban of our era. Elián also emerged as the unlikeliest of popular-cultural icons, the focus and subject of cyber-sites, books, films, talk-back radio programs, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, a South Park episode, poetry, songs, t-shirts, posters, newspaper editorials in dozens of languages, demonstrations, speeches, political cartoons, letters, legal writs, U.S. Congress records, opinion polls, prayers, and, on both sides of the Florida Strait, museums consecrated in his memory. Confronted by Elián’s extraordinary renown and historical impact, John Carlos Rowe suggests that the Elián story confirms the need for a post-national and transdisciplinary American Studies, one whose practitioners “will have to be attentive to the strange intersections of politics, law, mass media, popular folklore, literary rhetoric, history, and economics that allow such events to be understood.” (204). I share Rowe’s reading of Elián’s story and the clear challenges it presents to analysis of “America,” to which I would add “Cuba” as well. But Elián’s story is also significant for the ways it challenges critical understandings of fame and its construction. No longer, to paraphrase Leo Braudy (566), definable as an accidental hostage of the mass-mediated eye, Elián’s fame has no certain relation to the child at its discursive centre. Elián’s story is not about an individuated, conscious, performing, desiring, and ambivalently rewarded ego. Elián was never what P. David Marshall calls “part of the public sphere, essentially an actor or, … a player” in it (19). The living/breathing Elián is absent from what I call the virtualizing drives that famously reproduced him. As a result of this virtualization, while one Elián now attends school in Cuba, many other Eliáns continue to populate myriad popular-cultural texts and to proliferate away from the states that tried to contain him. According to Jerry Everard, “States are above all cultural artefacts” that emerge, virtually, “as information produced by and through practices of signification,” as bits, bites, networks, and flows (7). All of us, he claims, reside in “virtual states,” in “legal fictions” based on the elusive and contested capacity to generate national identities in an imaginary bounded space (152). Cuba, the origin of Elián, is a virtual case in point. To augment Nicole Stenger’s definition of cyberspace, Cuba, like “Cyberspace, is like Oz — it is, we get there, but it has no location” (53). As a no-place, Cuba emerges in signifying terms as an illusion with the potential to produce and host Cubanness, as well as rival ideals of nation that can be accessed intact, at will, and ready for ideological deployment. Crude dichotomies of antagonism — Cuba/U.S.A., home/exile, democracy/communism, freedom/tyranny, North/South, godlessness/blessedness, consumption/want — characterize the hegemonic struggle over the Cuban nowhere. Split and splintered, hypersensitive and labyrinthine, guarded and hysterical, and always active elsewhere, the Cuban cultural artefact — an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56) — very much conforms to the logics that guide the appeal, and danger, of cyberspace. Cuba occupies an inexhaustible “ontological time … that can be reintegrated at any time” (Stenger 55), but it is always haunted by the prospect of ontological stalling and proliferation. The cyber-like struggle over reintegration, of course, evokes the Elián González affair, which began on 25 November 1999, when five-year old Elián set foot on U.S. soil, and ended on 28 June 2000, when Elián, age six, returned to Cuba with his father. Elián left one Cuba and found himself in another Cuba, in the U.S.A., each national claimant asserting virtuously that its other was a no-place and therefore illegitimate. For many exiles, Elián’s arrival in Miami confirmed that Castro’s Cuba is on the point of collapse and hence on the virtual verge of reintegration into the democratic fold as determined by the true upholders of the nation, the exile community. It was also argued that Elián’s biological father could never be the boy’s true father because he was a mere emasculated puppet of Castro himself. The Cuban state, then, had forfeited its claims to generate and host Cubanness. Succoured by this logic, the “Save Elián” campaign began, with organizations like the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) bankrolling protests, leaflet and poster production, and official “Elián” websites, providing financial assistance to and arranging employment for some of Elián’s Miami relatives, lobbying the U.S. Congress and the Florida legislature, and contributing funds to the legal challenges on behalf of Elián at state and federal levels. (Founded in 1981, the CANF is the largest and most powerful Cuban exile organization, and one that regards itself as the virtual government-in-waiting. CANF emerged with the backing of the Reagan administration and the C.I.A. as a “private sector initiative” to support U.S. efforts against its long-time ideological adversary across the Florida Strait [Arboleya 224-5].) While the “Save Elián” campaign failed, the result of a Cuban American misreading of public opinion and overestimation of the community’s lobbying power with the Clinton administration, the struggle continues in cyberspace. CANF.net.org registers its central role in this intense period with silence; but many of the “Save Elián” websites constructed after November 1999 continue to function as sad memento moris of Elián’s shipwreck in U.S. virtual space. (The CANF website does provide links to articles and opinion pieces about Elián from the U.S. media, but its own editorializing on the Elián affair has disappeared. Two keys to this silence were the election of George W. Bush, and the events of 11 Sep. 2001, which have enabled a revision of the Elián saga as a mere temporary setback on the Cuban-exile historical horizon. Indeed, since 9/11, the CANF website has altered the terms of its campaign against Castro, posting photos of Castro with Arab leaders and implicating him in a world-wide web of terrorism. Elián’s return to Cuba may thus be viewed retrospectively as an act that galvanized Cuban-exile support for the Republican Party and their disdain for the Democratic rival, and this support became pivotal in the Republican electoral victory in Florida and in the U.S.A. as a whole.) For many months after Elián’s return to Cuba, the official Liberty for Elián site, established in April 2000, was urging visitors to make a donation, volunteer for the Save Elián taskforce, send email petitions, and “invite a friend to help Elián.” (Since I last accessed “Liberty for Elián” in March 2004 it has become a gambling site.) Another site, Elian’s Home Page, still implores visitors to pray for Elián. Some of the links no longer function, and imperatives to “Click here” lead to that dead zone called “URL not found on this server.” A similar stalling of the exile aspirations invested in Elián is evident on most remaining Elián websites, official and unofficial, the latter including The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez, which exhorts “Cuban Exiles! Now You Can Save Elián!” In these sites, a U.S. resident Elián lives on as an archival curiosity, a sign of pathos, and a reminder of what was, for a time, a Cuban-exile PR disaster. If such cybersites confirm the shipwrecked coordinates of Elián’s fame, the “Save Elián” campaign also provided a focus for unrestrained criticism of the Cuban exile community’s imbrication in U.S. foreign policy initiatives and its embrace of American Dream logics. Within weeks of Elián’s arrival in Florida, cyberspace was hosting myriad Eliáns on sites unbeholden to Cuban-U.S. antagonisms, thus consolidating Elián’s function as a disputed icon of virtualized celebrity and focus for parody. A sense of this carnivalesque proliferation can be gained from the many doctored versions of the now iconic photograph of Elián’s seizure by the INS. Still posted, the jpegs and flashes — Elián and Michael Jackson, Elián and Homer Simpson, Elián and Darth Vader, among others (these and other doctored versions are archived on Hypercenter.com) — confirm the extraordinary domestication of Elián in local pop-cultural terms that also resonate as parodies of U.S. consumerist and voyeuristic excess. Indeed, the parodic responses to Elián’s fame set the virtual tone in cyberspace where ostensibly serious sites can themselves be approached as send ups. One example is Lois Rodden’s Astrodatabank, which, since early 2000, has asked visitors to assist in interpreting Elián’s astrological chart in order to confirm whether or not he will remain in the U.S.A. To this end the site provides Elián’s astro-biography and birth chart — a Sagittarius with a Virgo moon, Elián’s planetary alignments form a bucket — and conveys such information as “To the people of Little Havana [Miami], Elian has achieved mystical status as a ‘miracle child.’” (An aside: Elián and I share the same birthday.) Elián’s virtual reputation for divinely sanctioned “blessedness” within a Cuban exile-meets-American Dream typology provided Tom Tomorrow with the target in his 31 January 2000, cartoon, This Modern World, on Salon.com. Here, six-year old Arkansas resident Allen Consalis loses his mother on the New York subway. His relatives decide to take care of him since “New York has much more to offer him than Arkansas! I mean get real!” A custody battle ensues in which Allan’s heavily Arkansas-accented father requires translation, and the case inspires heated debate: “can we really condemn him to a life in Arkansas?” The cartoon ends with the relatives tempting Allan with the delights offered by the Disney Store, a sign of Elián’s contested insertion into an American Dreamscape that not only promises an endless supply of consumer goods but provides a purportedly safe venue for the alternative Cuban nation. The illusory virtuality of that nation also animates a futuristic scenario, written in Spanish by Camilo Hernández, and circulated via email in May 2000. In this text, Elián sparks a corporate battle between Firestone and Goodyear to claim credit for his inner-tubed survival. Cuban Americans regard Elián as the Messiah come to lead them to the promised land. His ability to walk on water is scientifically tested: he sinks and has to be rescued again. In the ensuing custody battle, Cuban state-run demonstrations allow mothers of lesbians and of children who fail maths to have their say on Elián. Andrew Lloyd Weber wins awards for “Elián the Musical,” and for the film version, Madonna plays the role of the dolphin that saved Elián. Laws are enacted to punish people who mispronounce “Elián” but these do not help Elián’s family. All legal avenues exhausted, the entire exile community moves to Canada, and then to North Dakota where a full-scale replica of Cuba has been built. Visa problems spark another migration; the exiles are welcomed by Israel, thus inspiring a new Intifada that impels their return to the U.S.A. Things settle down by 2014, when Elián, his wife and daughter celebrate his 21st birthday as guests of the Kennedys. The text ends in 2062, when the great-great-grandson of Ry Cooder encounters an elderly Elián in Wyoming, thus providing Elián with his second fifteen minutes of fame. Hernández’s text confirms the impatience with which the Cuban-exile community was regarded by other U.S. Latino sectors, and exemplifies the loss of control over Elián experienced by both sides in the righteous Cuban “moral crusade” to save or repatriate Elián (Fernández xv). (Many Chicanos, for example, were angered at Cuban-exile arguments that Elián should remain in the U.S.A. when, in 1999 alone, 8,000 Mexican children were repatriated to Mexico (Ramos 126), statistical confirmation of the favored status that Cubans enjoy, and Mexicans do not, vis-à-vis U.S. immigration policy. Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon and Camilo Hernández’s email text are part of what I call the “What-if?” sub-genre of Elián representations. Another example is “If Elián Gonzalez was Jewish,” archived on Lori’s Mishmash Humor page, in which Eliat Ginsburg is rescued after floating on a giant matzoh in the Florida Strait, and his Florida relatives fight to prevent his return to Israel, where “he had no freedom, no rights, no tennis lessons”.) Nonetheless, that “moral crusade” has continued in the Cuban state. During the custody battle, Elián was virtualized into a hero of national sovereignty, an embodied fix for a revolutionary project in strain due to the U.S. embargo, the collapse of Soviet socialism, and the symbolic threat posed by the virtual Cuban nation-in-waiting in Florida. Indeed, for the Castro regime, the exile wing of the national family is virtual precisely because it conveniently overlooks two facts: the continued survival of the Cuban state itself; and the exile community’s forty-plus-year slide into permanent U.S. residency as one migrant sector among many. Such rhetoric has not faded since Elián’s return. On December 5, 2003, Castro visited Cárdenas for Elián’s tenth birthday celebration and a quick tour of the Museo a la batalla de ideas (Museum for the Battle of Ideas), the museum dedicated to Elián’s “victory” over U.S. imperialism and opened by Castro on July 14, 2001. At Elián’s school Castro gave a speech in which he recalled the struggle to save “that little boy, whose absence caused everyone, and the whole people of Cuba, so much sorrow and such determination to struggle.” The conflation of Cuban state rhetoric and an Elián mnemonic in Cárdenas is repeated in Havana’s “Plaza de Elián,” or more formally Tribuna Anti-imperialista José Martí, where a statue of José Martí, the nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist, holds Elián in his arms while pointing to Florida. Meanwhile, in Little Havana, Miami, a sun-faded set of photographs and hand-painted signs, which insist God will save Elián yet, hang along the front fence of the house — now also a museum and site of pilgrimage — where Elián once lived in a state of siege. While Elián’s centrality in a struggle between virtuality and virtue continues on both sides of the Florida Strait, the Cuban nowhere could not contain Elián. During his U.S. sojourn many commentators noted that his travails were relayed in serial fashion to an international audience that also claimed intimate knowledge of the boy. Coming after the O.J. Simpson saga and the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the Elián story confirmed journalist Rick Kushman’s identification of a ceaseless, restless U.S. media attention shift from one story to the next, generating an “übercoverage” that engulfs the country “in mini-hysteria” (Calvert 107). But In Elián’s case, the voyeuristic media-machine attained unprecedented intensity because it met and worked with the virtualities of the Cuban nowhere, part of it in the U.S.A. Thus, a transnational surfeit of Elián-narrative options was guaranteed for participants, audiences and commentators alike, wherever they resided. In Cuba, Elián was hailed as the child-hero of the Revolution. In Miami he was a savior sent by God, the proof supplied by the dolphins that saved him from sharks, and the Virgins who appeared in Little Havana after his arrival (De La Torre 3-5). Along the U.S.A.-Mexico border in 2000, Elián’s name was given to hundreds of Mexican babies whose parents thought the gesture would guarantee their sons a U.S. future. Day by day, Elián’s story was propelled across the globe by melodramatic plot devices familiar to viewers of soap opera: doubtful paternities; familial crimes; identity secrets and their revelation; conflicts of good over evil; the reuniting of long-lost relatives; and the operations of chance and its attendant “hand of Destiny, arcane and vaguely supernatural, transcending probability of doubt” (Welsh 22). Those devices were also favored by the amateur author, whose narratives confirm that the delirious parameters of cyberspace are easily matched in the worldly text. In Michael John’s self-published “history,” Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez, Elián is cast as the victim of a conspiracy traceable back to the hydra-headed monster of Castro-Clinton and the world media: “Elian’s case was MANIPULATED to achieve THEIR OVER-ALL AGENDA. Only time will bear that out” (143). His book is now out of print, and the last time I looked (August 2004) one copy was being offered on Amazon.com for US$186.30 (original price, $9.95). Guyana-born, Canadian-resident Frank Senauth’s eccentric novel, A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez, joins his other ventures into vanity publishing: To Save the Titanic from Disaster I and II; To Save Flight 608 From Disaster; A Wish to Die – A Will to Live; A Time to Live, A Time to Die; and A Day of Terror: The Sagas of 11th September, 2001. In A Cry for Help, Rachel, a white witch and student of writing, travels back in time in order to save Elián’s mother and her fellow travelers from drowning in the Florida Strait. As Senauth says, “I was only able to write this dramatic story because of my gift for seeing things as they really are and sharing my mystic imagination with you the public” (25). As such texts confirm, Elián González is an aberrant addition to the traditional U.S.-sponsored celebrity roll-call. He had no ontological capacity to take advantage of, intervene in, comment on, or be known outside, the parallel narrative universe into which he was cast and remade. He was cast adrift as a mere proper name that impelled numerous authors to supply the boy with the biography he purportedly lacked. Resident of an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56), Elián was battled over by virtualized national rivals, mass-mediated, and laid bare for endless signification. Even before his return to Cuba, one commentator noted that Elián had been consumed, denied corporeality, and condemned to “live out his life in hyper-space” (Buzachero). That space includes the infamous episode of South Park from May 2000, in which Kenny, simulating Elián, is killed off as per the show’s episodic protocols. Symptomatic of Elián’s narrative dispersal, the Kenny-Elián simulation keeps on living and dying whenever the episode is re-broadcast on TV sets across the world. Appropriated and relocated to strange and estranging narrative terrain, one Elián now lives out his multiple existences in the Cuban-U.S. “atmosphere in history,” and the Elián icon continues to proliferate virtually anywhere. References Arboleya, Jesús. The Cuban Counter-Revolution. Trans. Rafael Betancourt. Research in International Studies, Latin America Series no. 33. Athens, OH: Ohio Center for International Studies, 2000. Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Buzachero, Chris. “Elian Gonzalez in Hyper-Space.” Ctheory.net 24 May 2000. 19 Aug. 2004: http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=222>. Calvert, Clay. Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture. Boulder: Westview, 2000. 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Victoria, Canada: Trafford, 2000. Stenger, Nicole. “Mind Is a Leaking Rainbow.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991. 49-58. Welsh, Alexander. George Eliot and Blackmail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Allatson, Paul. "The Virtualization of Elián González." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>. APA Style Allatson, P. (Nov. 2004) "The Virtualization of Elián González," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>.