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I termini «spartenza» e «restanza» non definiscono solo due esperienze complementari legate al fenomeno migratorio, partire e restare, ma evidenziano la comune identità giuridica del cd. «popolo di mezzo», sospeso tra fuga e stanzialità, tra diritti e status perduti ed altri non ancora acquisiti, che percepisce sé stesso comunque e ovunque «fuori luogo»: una «minorità giuridica» la cui denuncia emerge da una corposa letteratura popolare, i cd. «canti di spartenza» capaci di suscitare risposte dal basso e di superare lo stigma recuperando l’identità perduta.

Reseña del libro: Barrientos Márquez, María del Mar y Lozano Salado, Lola (eds.). Revolución y Diplomacia: el Trienio Liberal y América. Santiago de Chile, Ariadna, 2023, 166 pp. ISBN: 978-95-66095-92-7.

Con la llegada a América, decenas de animales fueron traídos a Europa como alimento, pero sobre todo como mascotas exóticas. Su presencia en jardines y cámaras de maravillas pronto despertó la curiosidad de científicos y artistas, que incluyeron estas nuevas especies en sus libros y cuadros. En el caso de los artistas, su representación estuvo fuertemente condicionada por la presencia previa o no de especies de la misma familia. Para mostrar las diferencias según el caso y la red de significados y usos otorgados en el arte a las distintas especies americanas, tomaremos los loros como ejemplo de una familia conocida desde la Antigüedad por los europeos y los armadillos como muestra de una familia desconocida en el Viejo Continente.

The essay analyzes the correspondence between the writer Cesare Pavese and the musician Antonio Chiuminatto. Chiuminatto, born in Rivarolo Canavese in 1904, moved to America as a child, returning to Italy, in Turin, only in 1925 to continue his musical studies at the «Giuseppe Verdi» Conservatory. To support his studies, Chiuminatto begins to give English lessons and, among his students, he meets Pavese. Upon Chiuminatto's return to America, the two began to write to each other, forging a solid friendship that would last until 1933 and would prove to be decisive for Pavese: thanks to his American friend, Pavese was in fact able to read books still completely unknown in Italy. The correspondence is particularly interesting because, in addition to providing an overall picture of Pavese's readings, it allows us to open interesting glimmers of the writer's other interests, such as his passion for American cinema and music, and above all it clearly reveals the enthusiasm, the continuous amazement with which Pavese discovered America, without ever really reaching it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The place naming strategies of Christopher Columbus and Giovanni da Verrazzano follow similar criteria: names that express religious devotion, names in honour of the financiers and protectors of their enterprises, names suggested by the characteristics of places, names linked to the personal domain, and so on. In particular those of Columbus aim to emphasise possession for the Spanish Crown, in those of Verrazzano there are references to the Florentine landscape. The study analyses analogies and differences, highlighting the symbolic power of naming as an act of discovery and appropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage. Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the early 1800s, changed her name to “Public Universal Friend,” refused to use pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led her own congregation in upstate New York. In the mid-nineteenth century, internationally famous Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman led an openly lesbian life, including a well-publicized “female marriage.” And in the late 1920s, Augustus Granville Dill was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter. These are just a few moments of queer stories that fill what we call U.S or American history. But what does it mean to queer American history? How might queering it move us to ask new and different questions about it, regardless of whether we write about intimacy, eros, sexuality or love? If early scholarship chronicled the exploits of queer-identified people over time for an audience already open to the history of sexuality, the contemporary methodological struggle is aiming to suggest ways in which queering history might aid us in thinking more critically about how conventions, ideals, norms and, above all, practices gain traction and resonance in our history writing. To queer history rather than just writing histories of queerly situated or queer-identified people is to draw on a wide array of conceptual tools—often from other disciplines—to lay bare common assumptions about the world in which our subjects lived. It means stepping away from the family album approach and adding new layers of complexity to a shared historical past. This essay, in the spirit of decades’ worth of scholarship that sees queer as much as a methodological intervention as an epithet, sketches out: the way queer history has been defined by academia and the issues and limits that emerged from research and scholarship; what it means to queer our common understanding of American history; where queer history gets its fuel, the archive, what it means to reconstruct and preserve the memory of discriminated and written off communities and individuals.

Cody Marrs, Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics of All Things. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. 148, ISBN: 9780192871725. Reviewedby Pilar Martínez Benedí

This article examines the concepts of historical accuracy and truthfulness of the setting in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) through an analysis of his representation and depiction of Padua, in particular of its University and Botanical Gardens (Orto Botanico). Though Hawthorne had not yet visited Italy at the time of publication, his description of Padua in the tale is vivid and full of apt references that embody the city. Overall, little critical attention has been devoted to the Padua setting of the short story. However, a study of Hawthorne’s rich and accurate references in the text reveals a somewhat obscure desire to convey his particularly deep knowledge of Italian literature, art, and history. Finally, a comparison between the Padua of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” with subsequent depictions of Italy in Hawthorne’s production, especially the Rome of The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1860), will highlight similarities and differences in the treatment of history and setting in his later works.

In the preamble to the Declaration of Independence “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” are described as being unalienable rights of people and moreover, they constitute the core of the American national ethos: ‘the American Dream’. Nevertheless, full access to the plenty of potentialities inherent in this rhetoric seems to have been denied to specific categories of people, thus resulting in an endorsement of exclusivity and discrimination, when actually it should have supported inclusivity and equal opportunities to every American citizen. Especially the notion of “liberty” has historically been influenced by many socially constructed categories in the US, notably race, religious belief, gender, and sexual orientation. Therefore, the connected conceits of ‘life’ and ‘the pursuit of happiness’ couldn’t help but be reshaped by those categorizations. This despicable state of things had such a profound impact on the life and works of many authors – especially on those who closely faced an unjust set of domination and discrimination due to their ethnicity and sexuality that they publicly condemned how suffocating and hypocritical American society still was in the twentieth century. Among them stands the influential African American writer James Baldwin, a figure in which one can really feel the struggle of being labelled as both African American and homosexual by the hypochondriac white society of the US. In his second novel entitled Giovanni’s Room (1956), Baldwin deeply explored the theme of the ‘quest for self-identity’ in connection with the theme of sexual orientation. Thus, the aim of this paper is to investigate how – and why – Baldwin makes use of Africanist, or Africanlike, characters (e.g., the Italian immigrant Giovanni) to explore topics that otherwise would have been taboo, which means homosexuality and even bisexuality in the American society of the 1950s. In particular, the analysis will rely on the seminal work of literary criticism Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), by Toni Morrison, who greatly examined the peculiar use of black characters in American literature for the first time.

In Casey Plett’s novel Little Fish (2018), the protagonist Wendy faces multiple lifechanging events at the same time: After her grandmother passes away, she finds out that her Mennonite grandfather might have been a trans woman and grapples with the way her family has narrativized him and remembers him. In the midst of this journey, her friend Sophie dies by suicide and Wendy is left to piece together Sophie’s past, navigate a present of mourning, and imagine a future without her. Building on theories of queer and trans temporalities, Kit Heyam’s recent work on trans histories, Susan Stryker’s Foucauldian reading of trans as a subjugated archive, and Margaret Middleton’s concept of ‘gaydar as epistemology,’ this paper explores how cisnormative narrations of transness and transitioning hold trans subjectivities in a constant temporal bind and, in turn, how Little Fish interrogates this bind through a (re-)narration of transgender pasts, presents, and futures. The temporal bind within cisnormative temporalities and narrations of transness is rooted in medicalization and pathologization and configures trans identity as a temporary phase on a linear transitioning path from a traumatic childhood in the past to the ‘curing’ of a ‘wrong body’ in the future. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that Little Fish is able to challenge the cisnormative narrative by desubjugating trans archives and utilizing specific, embodied knowledge of transness to come to an interpretation of the past that negates presupposed heterosexuality and cisnormativity, and instead opens the possibility for the complexity of queer and trans existence.

Justice Anthony Kennedy has ascertained a strand of jurisprudence articulated around the concept of “equal dignity”, enshrined in the equal protection clause and the promise of “liberty” guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. However, in their dissents, originalist justices have framed marriage equality as a way to shift the burden of discrimination onto religious conservatives who claim their right not to recognize LGBTQ+ citizens by invoking religious freedom (First Amendment) and direct democracy. Although it is early to determine whether the court will be poised to overturn key precedents, I would like to argue that the recent flux of religious domination has enabled Donald Trump to restore the moral uplift of the federal judiciary, which could potentially undermine Kennedy’s legacy. Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has equipped himself with all the tools to hold the leverage he needs to launch a moral crusade against women’s reproductive rights or transgender Americans by denying them equal protection against “sex” discrimination and gender-affirming care under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. By referring to Lawrence (2003), in dissent, I aim to explore the interpretive foundations of Justice Scalia’s opinion, which has paved the way for a possible path to accommodate Americans’ “sincerely held religious beliefs”. Similarly, in Masterpiece Cakeshop (2018), Kennedy’s failed attempt to draw a fine line between sexual orientation discrimination and religious freedom on narrow grounds has empowered conservative Christians to claim the right to ignore the symbolic value of same-sex marriages.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how older queer identities are represented in the contemporary American sitcom Grace and Frankie (2015 – 2022). By watching this TV show through the work on the depiction of sexuality in American family sitcoms provided by Tison Pugh in his book The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom (2018), this paper argues that different, unsung queer realities are starting to get more recognition in the U.S. television system. Grace and Frankie’s political statement of “being queer and in my 70s” and Pugh’s theoretical framework on the representation of queerness in U.S. television, are the tools this paper uses to analyze how a contemporary American comedy show deals with the intersection of age and sexuality.

This paper examines an important medieval manuscript now preserved in America at the Maria José Lafragua Library in Puebla, Mexico. Dating from the second half of the fourteenth century, this codex, which contains a breviary, can be considered the oldest medieval manuscript of European origin preserved in a Mexican public institution to date. Although the manuscript has been considered to be of French production on stylistic and ornamental grounds, further analysis of the liturgical content and the notes added to the calendar have shed light on where it was actually created and subsequently used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lorem Ipsum è un testo segnaposto utilizzato nel settore della tipografia e della stampa. Lorem Ipsum è considerato il testo segnaposto standard sin dal sedicesimo secolo, quando un anonimo tipografo prese una cassetta di caratteri e li assemblò per preparare un testo campione. È sopravvissuto non solo a più di cinque secoli, ma anche al passaggio alla videoimpaginazione, pervenendoci sostanzialmente inalterato. Fu reso popolare, negli anni ’60, con la diffusione dei fogli di caratteri trasferibili “Letraset”, che contenevano passaggi del Lorem Ipsum, e più recentemente da software di impaginazione come Aldus PageMaker, che includeva versioni del Lorem Ipsum.

The phenomenon of youth gangs -- which manifested itself significantly in America after the crisis of the 1930s -- has also spread to Europe and Italy in the following decades, arousing considerable attention among sociologists. The aim of this article is to briefly outline the social causes at the origin of this phenomenon and to investigate the account itself of youth gang, identifying the necessary and sufficient characteristics that the activities put in place by a group of boys must have in order to qualify as a gang. To this end, I analyse and compare the studies and positions of various sociologists -- not coeval -- such as Frederic M. Trasher, Albert K. Cohen and Franco Prina. The analysis induces to hypothesize for this complex phenomenon a multifactorial genesis that require a punctual case-by-case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to show how right-wing political evangelicalism in the United States shifted from the “high ideal” of realizing the Christian nation in America to the project of separate identity communities, immune from the evils of modernity. A turning point for the rise of an evangelical right is identified in the 1970s Supreme Court decision in Coit v. Green (1971), establishing that a private school practicing racial discrimination could not be eligible for tax exemption. Some evangelical leaders, accordingly, defended segregationist academies in the name of religious freedom. In the following years they found in the crusade against abortion a more suitable issue to unite all Christians. Demographic changes, however, made the idea that Christian America, albeit including Catholics, could constitute the country’s “moral majority” increasingly problematic. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, new visions of identity emerged. The final part of the essay focuses, in this perspective, on “neo-monastic” projects of building isolated Christian communities, and reads them as signs of a crisis in the Christian nation narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nuestro trabajo se detiene en el análisis de una serie de contribuciones en las que identificamos la labor filológica de Bartolomé Mitre (1821-1906): un político, militar, periodista e historiador argentino que combinó la función pública –llegó incluso a ser Presidente de la Nación– con los quehaceres intelectuales. Su enfoque profundizó la adopción de un punto de vista ideologizado y condenatorio respecto de las cualidades del hombre americano: apuntaba las insondables diferencias entre las “semi-civilizaciones” antecolombianas y las sociedades europeas, sostenía que la historia americana se circunscribía al territorio en el que se hallaba y denunciaba la impropiedad de las reconstrucciones filológicas que traían aparejados falaces derroteros migratorios. Si bien acuñó una noción absolutamente interesante como la de “ideología idiomática” (1894), al estudiar las lenguas americanas procuraba poner de manifiesto una idea sin ningún tipo de asidero científico en la actualidad: la precariedad de pensamiento del hombre originario de América, su “barbarie congénita” y sus penurias en materia de desarrollo cívico y moral.

Peter Viereck (1916-2006) is the acknowledged forerunner of the United States conservative movement that growed after WWII. Indeed, from 1940 onward, he made the case for a New Conservatism, charged with the implementation of classical and Christian ‘absolute moral laws’ and with the safeguard of the American tradition, based on civil liberties and humanitarian values. He considered conservatism to be at the centre of the political spectrum, between totalitarian ideologies as much as between statism and individualist atomism. This led Viereck to clash with the 1950s and 1960s right-wingers, who expelled him from the conservative camp. Also through the use of unpublished sources, this essay aims to reconstruct those noteworthy events in the history of the American political thought.

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En los primeros meses del año 2020, la Organización Mundial de la Salud le otorgó oficialmente categoría de pandemia global al Coronavirus, o COVID-19, un virus prácticamente desconocido para el común de las personas hasta apenas unos meses antes. Expandida a una vertiginosa velocidad hasta alcanzar cada rincón del planeta, la pandemia produjo profundos efectos en diferentes latitudes y en distintos aspectos de las interacciones humanas, incluyendo las relaciones cívico-militares. El hemisferio americano no estuvo ajeno a esa transformación, y su esfera política registró importantes impactos. En ese marco, el presente trabajo analiza la evolución de los roles militares en América y contempla las implicancias posibles para el futuro regional, en relación con los temas del control cívico-militar, la gobernanza democrática y el fortalecimiento institucional.

Countries have been organized as nations for over two centuries. This research starts from the concept of nation and its symbols that represent it, reflecting especially on national anthems. Our goal is to deconstruct the belligerent nationalism contained in the lyrics of the anthems of Europe and America, with the aim of promoting interculturality and the integration of peoples based on the universal values that unite us. We will construct a narrative of belligerent nationalism whose process goes from subjugation to independence, with violence against the invader being the predominant element.

CAÑAS DE PABLOS, Alberto, Los generales políticos en Europa y América. Centauros carismáticos bajo la luz de Napoleón, 1810-1870. Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 2022, 463 pp.

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.

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.

Ari Arister’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.

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.

Tra la fine del Cinquecento e la prima metà del Seicento si diffonde una produzione epica dedicata alla narrazione della scoperta e della conquista dell’America. Gli usi e i costumi delle popolazioni native nonché la natura rigogliosa quanto seducente di quei luoghi, incontaminati dalla civiltà, vengono resi noti ai lettori europei attraverso una serie di poemi oceanici, corrispondendo così al desiderio di conoscenza e di esotismo che caratterizza il XVII secolo. Per queste ragioni, l’epica americana, pur collaborando al consolidamento di stereotipi legati alle etnie, rappresenta bene lo spirito secentesco, animato da un ampio e ardimentoso progetto di rivoluzione in ogni campo del sapere.

This work intends to study the letters of Amerigo Vespucci inserting them into the life and the various family and political relationships that the Florentine has. In the third family letter, the discovery of a fourth continent is an established fact, without any particular precedent being invoked against Columbus; the same consciousness permeates the Mundus novus, while in the Letter to Piero Soderini Vespucci's supremacy would be limited to the fact that he landed in present-day Venezuela a year before Columbus, who for his part continued to believe until the end (or at least pretending to believe) that he had reached an appendage of Asia: a belief shared by the first family charter and which only disappeared with the Portuguese voyage of 1501-02. However, it was not the Mundus novus, but the Letter to Piero Soderini that provided the scientific update of Saint-Dié's Cosmographiae Introductio, in which the name of America was baptized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I would like to explore the creation and development of the powerful imaginaire that associates the presence of Dante and the Comedy to the furthest bounds of the world's South. Dante himself imagined the Antipodes as an immense ocean in which only one piece of land emerges, the island occupied by the very high Mount Purgatory, with Earthly Paradise at the top. The only character in the poem who sights this island before Dante's arrival is Ulysses, who is shipwrecked there. The first historical person who sails towards the Antipodes is Amerigo Vespucci. The man who explores and maps out the Straight of Magellan is Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa who, quoting Dante, has Ulysses found "New Spain", i.e. Latin America. It is in Patagonia that Bruce Chatwin will again find Dante's Ulysses in the twentieth century. Poets, from Coleridge to Kazantzakis, and above all to the Australian John Kinsella and New Zealand's Jan Kemp, go much further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her writing, Norma E. Cantú problematizes the dimensions of the autobiographical genre by way of placing it at the border between two nations. Border life-writing is constructed as collective, creative, and above all wounded by the colonial and Western experience. Far from exhibiting rage or mere nostalgia, Cantú claims for memory and historical inscription as the means to empower otherwise forgotten and colonized bodies and subjectivities. In so doing, she sets out new modalities of self-representation that aim at re-membering the racialized and gendered bodies at one and other side of the border. Through a display of border crossings and historical recollections, Cantú ultimately exhorts readers to delve into the border wound as though it were a threshold into a particular subjectivity. In analyzing three of her works, Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (2015), Cabañuelas, A Novel (2019), and Meditación Fronteriza: Poems of Love, Life, and Labor (2019), this essay seeks to establish bounds between Cantú’s autobiographical writing and feminist theories of mestizaje (Anzaldúa, 2012), performative self-representation and autobiographics (Gilmore, 1994), nomadism and mobile diversity (Braidotti, 2011), and third spaces (Bhabha, 1994), that will problematize and push the autobiographical genre to its very limits.

This essay analyzes Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) from the perspective of “ugly feelings” (Ngai 2005) such as disavowed mourning (Butler, 2004, xiv) or loneliness in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Following Butler’s contention of the hindered possibility for community in the recognition of US national vulnerability (2004), I will argue that Rankine’s work underscores the disparities in public recognition of grief and private care for Othered subjects’ pain. In particular, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely displays a series of physical and mental collective ailments in US citizens, such as medicalized depression, as Rankine attempts to bear witness to the institutionalized injustice and erasure of the violence exerted upon America’s precarious bodies, enacting a form of recognition, only if temporary, through the fragmented use of the narrative/lyric ‘I’.

The title character of E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971) is a graduate student in political history at Columbia University in the late sixties; he is also the son of fictional versions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were tried together for treason in1951 and executed in 1953. The time present of the novel is 1967, when Daniel’s long effort to relieve himself of the burden of memory is morphing into an obsession with figuring out guilt and thus distributing blame, for his own victimization as much as that of his parents. This essay argues that Daniel’s “trouble breathing” is a function of the utter and unvanquishable co-determination of the public and the private, household and nation-state, the socialist dream of equity and the ethical obligations of Judaism; that the interpretive strategies of Marx and Freud deliver superb insight into the over-wrought, over-determined family dramas of McCarthy-era Anti-Semitism and Abbie Hoffman’s Radical New Left; but that epistemological insight, even if it is as effectively domestic as it is socio-political, doesn’t mean release from ontological suffocation, especially not for Daniel. Cultural critique, however informed in its modern secularity by Judaic origins, doesn’t address all the matter in his heart. And it is Daniel’s ultimate embrace of the fiercest dimension of Chosenness, his ancestral ethos of suffering, including his grandmother’s bequeathing of the martyr’s pursuit of justification, that paradoxically drains his anguish, his anger, and his viciousness—with the help, in the book’s final spiraling turn between public and private, ethnos and ethos, of we readers who bear witness to the history written in Daniel’s Book.

The expression of fragility has always been a difficult and complex matter for African Americans, for the discourse of mainstream media is set up to sustain their fragility while at the same time misrecognizing it. Even though the black public sphere split off from the dominant public sphere after the Civil War to enable distinctive forms of expression, the “practiced habits” of which Coates speaks continued in the structures of the dominant discourse. My essay will analyze the structure of America’s indifference to fragility in three parts. In the first section, I will introduce a normative problematic that can track how the hegemonic public sphere uses the rhetoric of formal equality to subordinate and silence African Americans speech while it also opens a space for black speech to be heard rather than dismissed. I then will trace the silencing structures back to the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954, for this “progressive” decision provided a template for what can be said and cannot be said. The next second section examines how Ralph Ellison thematizes and revises the encounter between the black and dominant public spheres. In the last section of the essay, I analyze the ways that Ta-Nehisi Coates exposes the contemporary forms of these discursive structures.

This essay turns to the writing of William James in “A Word of Pure Experience” as a methodological framework for reading The Souls of Black Folk. While most readings of Souls emphasize the unfolding of black consciousness, or the mind, this essay brings the body into critical focus, specifically in tracing the ways in which Du Bois appeals to the plasticity of bodies—their ability to affect and to be affected—as a creative textual means of redressing racial strife and crisis. To this end, I argue that Souls both diagnoses what I am calling a “gothic” ontology of racial division (after James) and appeals to moments of vital affect which overspill and thus critically challenge the boundaries of such racial disjuncture endemic to modernity and race relations at the dawn of the twentieth century. My reading thus resituates Souls in a literary-philosophical genealogy running from James to Du Bois, yet one that emphasizes their convergence via James’s “radical empiricism” rather than his more familiar pragmatism. Keywords: James; Du Bois; Ontology; Affect; Racism; Radical empiricism.

The United States military has long been considered a proving ground for masculinity and encourages servicemembers to adopt a warrior mindset of bravery and toughness at the expense of vulnerability. Such a mindset often proves troublesome for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as it dissuades them from seeking care in the form of therapy. This article argues that contemporary recommendations to attune therapy to embrace military masculinity in an attempt to make it more appealing to veterans are misguided. Ernest Hemingway’s 1925 short story “Soldier’s Home” dramatizes how an appeal to normative forms of masculinity as an entry point to post-combat healing risks a rejection of care entirely if this type of masculinity is ever questioned. The substitution of a care-receiving process by a masculinity-affirming process that he cannot accept leaves protagonist Harold Krebs with no choice but to refuse it and flee his hometown after returning from service in World War I. To demonstrate alternative possibilities, the article then examines George Saunders’s “Home” (2013) and Toni Morrison’s Home (2012) as texts that explore how interrogations of military masculinity itself can contribute to the healing process. In both texts, the protagonists realize that manhood means more than protection and violence, which engenders an acceptance of care. While neither text offers a complete resolution by its end, they both gesture towards the necessity of changing perceptions of manhood fostered by the military. To conclude, the article references Walt Whitman’s Memoranda During the War as one historical precedent that demonstrates how certain types of vulnerability are acceptable and necessary, even during wartime.

En este artículo el objetivo principal es el de identificar aquellos principios que aproximan o alejan, dentro de la ética de las profesiones, algunos códigos deontológicos de traductores e intérpretes, disponibles en sus respectivos sitios web, de dos asociaciones hispanoamericanas (Colombia y México) y dos europeas (España e Italia). Para ello tendremos en cuenta el análisis de la profesión reflexionando sobre la ética en la traducción (Sánchez Trigo, 2020). De hecho, la ética profesional sirve para que los traductores se familiaricen, asuman y debatan sus implicaciones en sus relativas profesiones porque, con frecuencia, traductores e intérpretes se suelen enfrentar a problemas que van más allá de lo lingüístico.

Over the course of time, people have been told many lies concerning the Red Planet. Maybe the most renowned one dates back to the late 1880s, when, owing to an error in translation, scientists were led to believe in the existence of canals on its surface – canals instead of channels – which meant that Mars must be inhabited. More recently, in 1976, a lively discussion arose about the “face on Mars”, something that was spotted by the Viking 2 spacecraft in the region of Cydonia and was later dismissed as a mesa whose unusual shadows had cheated the eye. But the biggest lie of all was told in 1938, when a young actor (Orson Welles) decided to play a Halloween trick with the help of the then-rising medium – the radio. It was not really a lie in the strictest sense of the term. It was not a hoax or a fake, either – it was, in narratological terms, what is commonly called the suspension of disbelief pushed to its extreme. In this essay I am going to reconsider this event mainly in the light of two main conditions concerning lying, namely untruthfulness and the intention to deceive. Our specific case is further complicated by a third factor, that is the fact that somebody lies to someone who is believed to be listening in but who is not being addressed. I will also highlight the aftermath of this mass deception which, despite being followed by a number of disclaimers, actually overturned the utopian portrait of Martians, initiating a long literary and filmic theory of alien invasions.

Ressenya de: Javier Moreno Luzón, Centenariomanía: Conmemoraciones hispánicas y nacionalismo español, Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2021, 328 pàgines

The purpose of the essay is to identify and define the essential aspects represented by the exposure to and encounter with the American Other in Francesco Guccini’s literary and songwriting production. In particular, the analysis will focus on the relationship that the author has established during his decades-long artistic production with the American Other, represented by his long-lasting connection with the American culture. The article will analyze Guccini’s songs and works taken from his vast and variegated repertoire, from which his relationship with the Other and with the American Alterity is better highlighted, Hence, a clear understanding of how this link has substantially contributed to the formation of his personality and identity as a songwriter / poet emerges. Especially, the study will be conducted through an analytical reading which involves a textual analysis that focuses on the lexical choices that convey the image that the author has of the American Other.

La Celestina as a best-seller suggests interesting problems regarding its market distribution in America. This book and Escuela de la Celestina de Salas Barbadillo were recorded thirty six times in the lists of books sent to several Spanish American cities in the ships of the Carrera de Indias. These data make possible to get an overview of the «life» of this book from the late 16th century till mid-seven-teenth century in the Americas.

The article compares two versions of Miron Białoszewski’s American journal. The first one is censored, literarily elaborated and published officially in communist times, albeit posthumously. The other is a crude piece from Białoszewski’s Secret Diary. Both versions are analysed as attempts to come out in literature. In his American journal written in 1982, Białoszewski searched for a “third way” between communism and the Solidarity movement – namely, in the (homo)sexual liberation which he found in porn cinemas, darkrooms, and sex shops.

One of the key instruments in the commercial and financial order to understand the economic globalization of the Early Modern Age as a result of overseas expansion is undoubtedly that of the privileged trading companies. These develop in Europe, basically, from the creation in England and Holland, at the beginning of the 17th century, of those referring to the West and East Indies. In Spain, as in other countries, they would develop later, after different frustrated attempts. In this country, an ambitious project by an unknown author will arise in 1738 to create the «Royal Company of the West Indies» to replace the existing ones and the commercial institutions that control the Carrera de Indias. This article studies in detail its content (managers, organization, financing, budget, profit forecast, access to the slave trade, privileges, etc.), as well as the reports issued by the experts consulted in this regard, until reaching his final rejection.

Southern US literature and African American literature often speak about racialized and dismembered bodies swallowed by the earth and never retrieved; Nature, in these instances, is hostile and “white”, as even trees become problematic symbols of lynching practices. This essay, however, attempts to retrieve and re-signify the concepts of soil and plants by analyzing the relationship between Black bodies and Nature from an Ecoliterary and Ecotheological point of view. This examination especially focuses on West African beliefs and their role in the African American re-appropriation of natural, earthly spaces and instances of the afterlife. Ethnic resistance and spiritual-medical knowledge have been crucial to African American cultural liberation, and the essay highlights this by analyzing the traces of African spiritualism and syncretism in the works of a number of African American authors, namely Toni Morrison and Jesmyn Ward. The result of this re-appropriation is, as I argue, a vivifying, hopeful and ultimately political series of images and literary tropes that overturn mournful and chthonic narratives, resuming positive and life-bearing relationships between Black bodies and Nature.

While commonsense tells us that the 19th-century U.S. was obsessed with individual rights and individual success, there remains evidence that civic duty continued to be a significant component of national identity. In fact, we might say that the conflict between individual rights and civic duty organizes one of the most popular forms of literature in the antebellum U.S.: frontier fiction. In this article, I turn to James Hall’s The Pioneer and Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods. In these significant narratives, Hall and Bird expose the dangers of negative individualism on the frontier without the checks of civic duty and martial spirit. By closely attending to nineteenth-century politics, Indian policies, and military/militia history, I explore how the Indian-Hater narratives of James Hall and Robert M. Bird are anxious about men whose passion for vengeance and violence transform them into the very “savage” they are hunting and how this “degeneration” bars them from returning to civil society. In this article, I argue that Indian Haters, in the narratives of Bird and Hall, reflect the Whig’s anxieties about the nation. Even though these men provide service by removing Indians, in the process, they abandon the virtues and morals stereotypical of the frontier hero; that is, their emotions and their bloodlust overtake their sense of duty to the polity; such degeneration undermines the nation because it very closely resembles the threat posed by Indians. A close look at Bird and Hall reveals that both authors are attempting to document this irony. Bird and Hall show how the Indian Hater motif highlights the reality of white degeneration of wayward/emotional men without the safeguards of martial virtue and civic duty. Even though the Jacksonian anti-Indian thought celebrates these Indian Haters, literature confronts readers with the self-destructive nature of uncontained Indian Hating. I observe that these narratives do more than present the Indian Hater as a self-sacrificial hero but rather closely diagnose how a man can become lost in his passions and become an Other from society without civic constraints.