JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy)

Two Prophecies

Peder Anker — Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Pending whose knowledge you seek and which rationality you chose, the history of uranium mining in Canada entails both pessimistic and optimistic perspectives. The miners believed in a rationality of prosperity at the expense of the existing First Nation lifestyles and beliefs. It’s a history of settler colonialism in which the process of conquer generated counter claims of defeat. The ongoing clash between claims and counter-claims, prophecies and counter-prophecies, traditional and scientific knowledge, mark the history of Canadian mining along with the larger history of nuclear industries and weaponry. And these stories are rarely resolved.

‘The American Non-Dream’

Elisa Sabbadin — Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200

This paper discusses the tropes of addiction and the grotesque body as William S. Burroughs’ paradigms for social control and subversion, further illustrating how they refer to the social, political, and economic context of the United States in the post-war decades. To do this, it highlights dynamics and images in Burroughs’ works which concern invasion, predation, and control. The author’s conceptions of the ‘junk pyramid,’ the ‘naked lunch,’ and the ‘soft machine’ illuminate his theories on oppression and parasitism.

The author bases his discussions on models of production and consumption which characterize post-war capitalism and all power systems and hierarchies. Opioids, or ‘junk,’ emerge as both mechanisms of social control and positive metaphors of free exchanges between the (grotesque) body, or the national body, and the Other, or the ‘non-American’ as they open the body to external infiltration. As a mechanism of disruption, junk represents the threat of subversion and transformation.

Burroughs’ narrative of resistance comes to include a struggle against the control of the human consciousness as well, as his ‘American non-dream’ theorizes a conspiracy of the media and language as control mechanisms. The concrete counter-cultural solutions proposed by Burroughs include spontaneity and experimentation in consciousness with such techniques as cut-ups, fold-ins, and collaborations. His proposition is to liberate consciousness and to eschew the predatory nature of social structures and hierarchies.

The Allegory of the Triple Goddess in Hereditary and Relic

Marta Miquel Baldellou — Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) and Natalie Erika James’s Relic (2020) are contemporary films which present significant intertextualities revolving around triads of female characters and draw particular attention to the figure of the older woman. This article aims to provide an analysis of aging femininities in these two films taking into consideration Robert Graves’s mythical archetype of the Triple Goddess, which refers to three distinct mythical figures—the Maiden, the Woman, and the Crone—that join in one single entity. Since the archetype of the Triple Goddess is paradigmatic of different mythical triads, from the Charites to the Gorgons, it will be taken as an allegory in order to interpret images of aging in these two films, as their female characters are portrayed as members of a triad as well as they also represent the same woman at different life stages along her aging process.

From Harlem with Love

Leonardo Cascão — Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200

The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955) is the result of the collaboration between the photographer Roy DeCarava and writer Langston Hughes. Both authors were Harlemites, DeCarava was born in Harlem and Langston Hughes made Harlem his home after moving from Missouri to New York City. This essay intends to explore the ways in which The Sweet Flypaper of Life depicts a representation of the neighbourhood of Harlem at a time when the Civil Rights Movement was just beginning. It will look at the power that DeCarava’s photographs and Hughes’ text have on creating a specific visuality of African American life, based on the Harlem community, rendering itself to be seen as a family album. The essay will firstly focus on contextualizing the creation and publication of The Sweet Flypaper of Life and afterwards offer a reading of the book using the family album metaphor as a form of agency in the acknowledgment of the African American community, focusing its representation in the aestheticization of beauty, thus distancing itself from the social and racial issues that were usually exposed.

Adriano Tedde, Marginalisation and Utopia in Paul Auster, Jim Jarmusch, and Tom Waits

Marco Petrelli — Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200