Configuring America: Iconic Figures, Visuality, and the American Identity - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841506354 ISBN 13: 9781841506357

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Elvis Presley. Marilyn Monroe. LeBron James. Like many cultural figures who hail from the United States, they are known all over the world. ConFiguring America provides a series of incisive essays that analyse a wide range of such figures: those who embody America's tendency to produce celebrities and iconic personalities with global reach.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Klaus Rieser is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Graz, where Michael Fuchs teaches American literature and Michael Phillips is a lecturer in English.

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Configuring America

Iconic Figures, Visuality, and the American Identity

By Klaus Rieser, Michael Fuchs, Michael Phillips

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-635-7

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Introduction: Theorizing Iconic Figures Klaus Rieser, 
Part I : Icons and the Struggle over Meaning, 
Chapter 1: 'Just Like You', But Not Like Us: Staging National Belonging, Multiracial Femininity, and Collective Memory in the American Girl Family Karina Eileraas, 
Chapter 2: Behind the Brown Mask: Joe Louis' Face and the Construction of Racial Mythologies Marcy S. Sacks, 
Chapter 3: LeBron James and the Web of Discourse: Iconic Sports Figures and Semantic Struggles Michael Fuchs & Michael Phillips, 
PART II : Appropriating Iconic Figures, 
Chapter 4: O Superman: The Many Faces of the Man of Steel Bradley Bailey, 
Chapter 5: Thirty Are Better Than One: Marilyn Monroe and the Performance of Americanness Susanne Hamscha, 
Chapter 6: Queering Cowboys, Queering Futurity: The Re/Construction of American Cowboy Masculinity Leopold Lippert, 
Chapter 7: Iconizing Radical Change: How Gary Cooper Led Poland to Freedom Jolanta Szymkowska-Bartyzel, 
PART III : The Mutability and Abstraction of Iconic Figures, 
Chapter 8: The Embodiment of a Nation: The Iconicity of Uncle Sam and the Construction of a Conflicted National Identity Louis J. Kern, 
Chapter 9: Lois Lane: The Making of a Girl Reporter Peter Lee, 
Chapter 10: War in Four Colors: The Battle between Superman and Captain America for America's Hearts and Minds during World War II B. Keith Murphy, 
Chapter 11: Myth and Materiality: The Duality of Grace Kelly Ana Salzberg, 
Chapter 12: 'Its Own Special Attraction': Meditations on Martyrdom and the Iconicity of Civil Rights Widows Brenda Tindal, 
Contributors, 

CHAPTER 1

PART I

Icons and the Struggle over Meaning

'Just Like You', But Not Like Us: Staging National Belonging, Multiracial Femininity, and Collective Memory in the American Girl Family Karina Eileraas

Re-Membering Race and Representation

Several months ago, my daughter burst in from preschool, eager to fill me in on her day's activities. 'I created my color in class today!' she said, as she explained how she and her classmates had mixed pots of acrylic paint to approximate their skin colors. 'Look, here it is!' she shouted and lovingly described all of the 'ingredients' that had contributed to her unique concoction. 'A blend of fawn, mahogany, snowflake, and cinnamon!' My daughter felt that she had engaged in something revolutionary on that day: a proud swirling and re-mixing of paints, cultural heritages, and 'races', boldly conceived. Hungry for more details about this early experiment in claiming an identity, I asked, 'How did you know when you had created exactly the right color, and when to stop mixing?' 'Because, look,' she replied, holding her arm up to the painting, 'this color looks just like me!'

By applying herself so diligently to the task of creatively approximating her skin color, my daughter had learned both everything and nothing at all about 'race' and the challenges of its representation. After all, race is nearly impossible to define. Popular understandings shift in relation to diverse cultural, scientific, and political objectives, transforming race into one of the 'most contradictory and violent ideas' (Guillaumin 1972: 183) of our time. While I celebrate my daughter's delight in the act of claiming an identity, I am troubled by the social and pedagogical imperatives that encourage her to equate skin color with racial or ethnic identity. Because our identities are always forged in negotiation with, rather than outside, representation, the understandings of race that circulate in collective memory have a profound impact on subjectivity. They shape the parameters of what one imagines as 'possible' at the level of identity: all that one is and might become.

Navigating the relationship between image and identity is a particularly fraught endeavor for people of color in the post-9/11 global political landscape, where individual efforts to articulate diverse racial, ethnic, and religious perspectives collide with state initiatives to regulate the visibility of 'difference' in the public sphere. In July 2010, this intersection provoked intense debate in Arizona, where SB1070 proposed racial profiling of those perceived to have questionable trajectories of 'belonging' to the United States. Although SB1070 was ultimately overturned, similar attempts to legislate the public appearance of ethnic, racial, and religious 'difference' are in effect or underway throughout Europe and the Middle East, including a controversial ban on the niqab in France.

To challenge conventional mappings of the relationship between image and identity, it is imperative to ask why individuals and institutions remain invested in conventional racial categories in lieu of more nuanced models of identity and affiliation. How are categories of racial, ethnic, and national belonging imagined, performed, and resisted within popular culture? This chapter will explore racial and national identification as sites of collective memory and epistemic violence, and as openings onto the political possibilities of fantasy. I will focus on the American Girl brand of dolls, launched by Pleasant Rowland in 1985. As cultural icons, American Girl dolls shape popular fictions of femininity, difference, and national belonging, 'fixing' them within collective memory. To evaluate American Girl's contribution to ongoing conversations about racial identification and classification in the United States, I will analyze visual artifacts (websites, catalogues, and retail displays) from American Girl's line of customized dolls, the Just Like You (JLY) collection (renamed My American Girl in 2011), which I find especially pernicious because it reinforces lingering cultural equations between race and skin color.

'Race' Re-Mixed: Histories, Debates, Definitions, and Evolutions

Although often presumed self-evident, race is constituted as such only in relation to a complex and shifting web of fantasies, anxieties, and desires. Especially in light of human genome sequencing efforts that reveal more heterogeneity within, rather than across, conventional racial groupings, 'race', as Orlando Patterson highlights, is most productively conceived as an artifact: 'something we invent: partly imposed on us, partly what we select and choose' (quoted in PBS 1997: par. 21). 'Race' nonetheless begets material consequences and contributes to historically specific patterns of discrimination and domination (McLaren 1997: 303). Whereas colonial processes of racialization tended to inferiorize 'Others' to justify exploitation, contemporary racist discourse frames difference relative to a putative 'threat' in a transnational frame, emphasizing the '"irreducible alterity" of those who must be expelled from the body of a nation that cannot assimilate them' (Lionnet 2008: 1505).

The racialized meanings grafted onto one's skin have complicated histories and potentially shattering effects for subjectivity (Fanon 1967: 112). The conflation of race with skin color confers invisibility on entire populations, precluding equitable citizenship. Historically, racial classification efforts have governed legal rights, the allocation of resources, and vital decisions about 'who shall live and who shall die' (Omi & Winant 1994: 54). Taxonomic ambitions...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1841506354
• ISBN 13: 9781841506357
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 302
• Herausgeber: Rieser Klaus, Phillips Michael W., Fuchs Michael
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland