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This essay argues that Charles Bon in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936) embodies a fluidity that confronts the hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality on which colonialism and neocolonialism depend for coherence and meaning. The biracial, sexually fluid Bon and his contradictory depiction by competing narrators reveal entwined colonialisms in the United States South that complicate the divide between the colonial and neo-colonial periods employed in linear surface narratives: Bon is portrayed as living multiple stories of colonialism simultaneously in the novel. With an awareness of the narrators' divergent colonial mindsets, I show how Faulkner uses Bon's métissage, or blending of cultural, racial, and sexual categories, to confront the resilient colonial mentalities that persist in the twentieth-century American South through imagining an alternative: the acceptance of this fluidity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on U.S-based award winning author Saul Bellow. It states that he remains one of the most decorated and acclaimed novelist and recipient of several awards including Nobel Prize for Literature, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award. It mentions that he has written novels of contemplation and mediated reflection.

An essay is presented that examines 19th century American dwarf entertainer Charles Stratton, also known as General Tom Thumb, as a freak body politic. Topics covered include his role as the slave child Tom Tit in H. J. Conway's stage adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel "Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp," how he may be regarded as a corporeal metaphor of the U.S., and assumptions about 19th-century U.S. freak shows, and Stratton's embodiment of the Yankee Doodle character.

The article discusses the history of higher education and urban development in South Side Chicago, Illinois, focusing on how the University of Chicago (U of C) has impacted the political economy and built environment of its surrounding neighborhoods. Other topics include how urban development impacted minority communities in Chicago, the purchase and relocation of the Checkerboard Lounge by U of C in 2003, and a discussion of how the government oversees the for-profit sides of universities.

The article discusses the role that the racial identity of whites in the U.S. played in the country's social structure from the end of World War II through the early 21st century, including in regard to whites' alleged reluctance to give up their social position of privilege. An overview of the social conditions of U.S. minorities, including in regard to the alleged capitalist exploitation of minority communities and affirmative action programs, is provided.

An essay is presented which discusses the relationship between the social psychology of Americans and zombie apocalypses in American popular culture during the early 21st century, including in regard to the impact of the latter have on American government policy discourse. The metaphorical and symbolic aspects of zombies in U.S. popular culture, including their representation of a societal breakdown, are discussed.

The article discusses the individual and family resilience, social conditions and psychology of migrant farmworkers in the U.S., within a particular focus on Mexican and Latin American agricultural workers. An overview of the social conditions of immigrant children, including their education, child care and their tendency to be enrolled in different schools each year, is provided. An overview of the health of immigrant farmworkers and their families, including in comparison to the rest of the U.S. population and their level of stress, is also provided.

An essay is presented concerning U.S. showman and businessman P.T. Barnum and American literary modernism. The article discusses what the author calls the emerging visual culture in the U.S. at the conclusion of the 19th century, the concepts of spectacle and attention, and the urban culture of the U.S. at the end of the 19th century. The article also examines the relationship between popular entertainment and literary aesthetics.

An essay is presented which concerns the work of the author Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth, particularly as it concerns moral aspects of commitment and duty as perceived in the U.S. in the 19th century. Topics include critical responses to Southworth and her depiction of manias and instabilities that the author identifies as "moral insanities." Perspectives on feminism, marriage, and the social conditions of women in Southworth's novels are mentioned.

The article discusses the work of the poet Allen Ginsberg, focusing on apparitions such as the character Moloch in the poem "Howl" and emphasizing their significance in U.S. cultural and social history. According to the author, the lasting influence of radicalism is a theme in Ginsberg's work. Topics include the influence of the book "Gods' Man: A Novel in Woodcuts," by Lynd Ward on Ginsberg, Old Left political perspectives, Marxism, and the depiction of family histories in poetry.

The essay discusses the philosophical, social, and political nature of the popular U.S. television series "True Blood," particularly comparing the show's depiction of vampires and humans with the presidency of U.S. President Barack Obama. It addresses the depiction of the struggle for recognition and civil rights by the show's vampires, the show's relationship to the fear of outsiders, and the boundaries of humanity.

The article discusses the notions of security and securitization in the context of the housing of U.S. racial minorities. Topics include the role of minorities as consumers of mortgages, the incarceration of minorities in the U.S., and the role of security in the neoliberal ideology that the author attributes to former U.S. President George W. Bush. Also addressed are the racialization of the body in modern politics, the ideological relation between personhood and property, and the creation of supermax prisons that isolate prisoners in the U.S.

An essay is presented that discusses the notion of the American Dream in light of the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis beginning in 2007. It focuses on the short story "The Romance of Magno Rubio," by Carlos Bulosan, noting its Filipino protagonist and a theatrical adaptation of the story. The notion of illiteracy in the story is analyzed in light of the purported ignorance of minority holders of subprime mortgages.

A literary criticism of the autobiographical essays of the late Dakota Sioux Native American author Zitkala-Ša entitled "Impressions of an Indian Childhood," "School Days of an Indian Girl," and "An Indian Teacher Among the Indians," is presented. It discusses the language of contagion as a means of interpreting the Native American experience within U.S. culture. According to the article, the essays were published in the U.S. periodical "The Atlantic Monthly" in the early 1900s.

From the late-nineteenth through the early decades of the twentieth century, women in the United States played important roles in the conservation and preservation of wildlife, as well as in environmental activism that fostered clean air, water, and food in our nation's urban centers. This article examines the contributions of women of different classes and races to these environmental struggles. It not only synthesizes the findings of previous environmental histories, but also focuses more attention on the ways environmental contamination affected the lives of women of color and their struggles against environmental racism. In this way, an environmental justice lens is used to excavate and reclaim the history of our ecofeminist predecessors to better ensure that the visions and voices of marginalized peoples do not remain hidden from history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented discussing the dynamics between the general perception and the empirical reality of adolescence as a life-stage in U.S. society. The author points out how the general social perception of adolescence is one of generational conflict and rebellion. Contrasts are then made highlighting how social research cannot find any empirical evidence supporting this ideological construction. An overview of 20th-century social attitudes towards teens in the U.S. is then given.

In this article the author discusses ways in which the struggle for social equality by Chicanos in the U.S. and Palestinians in Israel share similarities due to issues such as racism, colonialism, and imperialism. It presents a historical overview of how U.S. and British imperialism have lead to social oppression against Chicano and Palestinian peoples, argues that the history of the U.S. has been based on the idea of promoting the interests of white citizens above minority groups, and provides an outline to Chicanos, Latinos, and Mexicanos on how to approach social liberation. It also presents several photographs related to border crossing issues such as immigration demonstrations, deportation, and the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

The article presents an examination of the reaction that conservatives in the United States had to the election of U.S. President Barack Obama. It responds to the article "Of Teachable Moments and Specters of Race" by Kevin Gaines in the same issue and asserts that religion, as well as race, was a central factor in the far right's response to President Obama's election. It examines the 2008 election in light of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and explores the religious and racial tones that accompany anti-Muslim attitudes. Additionally, it discusses the global popularity of U.S. President Barack Obama.

The article discusses political and social agendas related to demographic diversity in the U.S. An overview of the history of racial prejudice and discrimination in American history is presented, and the changes made to laws and policies during the civil rights era of the mid-20th century are noted. Some of these changes focused on righting the wrongs of groups which had previously been discriminated against, such as African Americans. A resulting dilemma is discussed, centered on the idea that officially delimiting a group of people on racial grounds, in order to benefit them, can actually perpetuate segregation. The dilution of the ideal of diversity, to the point where it has no unambiguous meaning, is also analyzed in this context.

This article examines the activism of working-class Italian immigrant women anarchists in the United States as a window into the world of early-twentieth-century transnational feminism. Emerging from a diasporic, multiethnic network of labor radicals, the women in this movement did not seek inclusion within the modern nation-state; nor did they rely on established trade unions or cross-class alliances. Instead, they created autonomous spaces for working-class and poor women to articulate their particular struggles and embody l'emancipazione della donna (women's emancipation). Together, they asked a question that formed the heart of their politics: "Why does the pleasure of some have to create misery for many?" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article, part of a special issue devoted to religion and secularism, discusses the 19th-century origins of the secular-religious divide in U.S. society, by examining the Protestant-led movement for temperance and prohibition. The moral campaign to stigmatize and criminalize the sale and consumption of alcohol is compared with the 20th-century modernist-fundamentalist controversy over the teaching of evolution, noting that during the earlier movement, American Protestantism was not characterized by a liberal-conservative split. The political marginalization of fundamentalist Christians in the 20th century is discussed up to their reemergence as the Christian right in the early 1980s.

An introduction is presented to a set of articles on the theme of sociocultural movements which blur the boundaries between the secular and the religious in the U.S.

This article presents an exploration into the publication history of the novel "Sanctuary" by William Faulkner, its adaptation into the film "The Story of Temple Drake," and its context within the policies of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) and other groups concerning film content and decency policies. The policies of the MPPDA in the 1930s under the leadership of Will H. Hays are discussed, noting the harsh negative reception of the work due to its graphic subject mater. The industry's reactions to the work are outlined as well as their reflections on the larger social attitudes of the era.

In an era of waning public funding and growing assumptions within the academy that gender has been integrated into curricula, Women's Studies Programs work under the monitoring eye of a corporate model of budget-slicing, bureaucratic, audit-culture accountability. Programs come under increasing assault on the grounds of obsolescence and cost-effectiveness. This article documents the institutional setting of a Women's Studies Program under threat and traces how program faculty have attempted to counter antifeminist obsolescence and individualist rhetoric, using as an example the struggle over institutional sexual harassment policy and its successor at the authors' state university. In participating in re-writing policy, the authors discovered possibilities and blockades in professors' and students' attempts to position the Program as more than a curricular remedy. We reveal the limitations of valuing departments solely on quantitative grounds and insist that feminist work in transforming academic culture is far from complete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the song "The Blues for Emmett Till," the earliest extant song about the racial lynching of Emmett Till on August 28, 1955. Details are given describing the cultural and literary response to the crime by the African American and white community. Accounts are provided contextualizing the composition of the song by Aaron Kramer and Clyde Appleton in the months that followed. Analysis is offered discussing how the song's text reflects the social outrage which surrounded the incident.

This article presents an examination into the intersection of World War I and African American Civil Rights literature. Details are given outlining how African American authors appropriated the cause of the war toward the advocacy of their community. Accounts are given describing how social activists directly used the rationale of military service as a justification for African American rights and recognition. Further analysis is given regarding the literature of the postwar period, including that of the Harlem Renaissance. The particular use of the lynching narrative as a trope is addressed in depth.

The article discusses the social history of the carceral state from the New Deal and Great Society eras to the contemporary period. The philosophy and use of prisons within the U.S. justice system is discussed in-depth throughout the 20th-century, with cursory references to earlier models. The prison administration paradigms adopted throughout the period are examined, highlighting the active large-scale involvement of federal bureaucracy and its damage to the sociological structures of certain at-risk populations. Comments are given suggesting that such systems will not easily be dismantled due to the complex power relationships invested within it.

The article presents an exploration into the political and cultural themes of beauty and economic status in the novel "Salome of the Tenements," by Anzia Yezierska. The character of Sonya Vrunsky and her reflected desires of self-expression are highlighted and examined as a metaphor for Jewish-American relations in the early 20th century. The author suggests that Yezierska advocates the contributions of immigrant culture to American society.

The article presents a literary criticism of the story "Cavanelle," by Kate Chopin regarding its challenging of social gender stereotypes and its publication in the late 19th-century periodical "The American Jewess." The journal's particularly Jewish interest base is discussed and Chopin's thematic and ideological likemindedness, despite not being Jewish, is analyzed.

Focuses on the implications of postcolonialism in the United States. Imitation of European culture by the Americans; Views of philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville on postcolonialism; Reproducibility and availability as key concepts behind Las Vegas; Display of American exuberance and extravagance in costly hotel renovations.

Presents the author's proposals, correspondence and editorials related to the arts and society. Proposal to Luis Humberto Mota Enciso of Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara about a course in the art and technology of modern communications media; Editorials in local Washington state newspapers about nature and society, criminal behavior and decline of America's quality of life.

Discusses the popularity of erotic violence in antebellum America, as shown in Richard P. Robinson's trial for his alleged murder of prostitute Helen Jewett in April 1836. Feminist interpretations of sexual murders; Emergent cultural constructions of male and female sexuality; Tension of American society in the 1830s over the fear that women could be unregulated, sexual, independent beings.