At the end of the nineteenth century, the modern safety bicycle and the cultures that surrounded it were global in scale. In tracing the use and adoption of the bicycle in the South, this article reveals the ways in which the everyday experiences of local culture intersected with the world. It argues that the subjectivity of riding a bicycle transformed the ways in which white southerners experienced, thought of, and imagined their region. The article contributes to two shifts in southern studies and the historiography of the New South. It brings recent discussions of the South in the world to the level of the everyday by tracing the experiences of a new technological mobility and its social and cultural worlds. In demonstrating the ways white southerners took up cycling culture, it also integrates the region into the global trends of mass culture that move beyond histories of popular culture in the New South focussed mostly on the region's relationship to the nation.

This essay studies United States Marxist perspectives on China during US radicalism's decline in the mid-1970s. By the late 1960s, China's apparent synthesis of socialist and nationalist traditions inspired US Marxists to theorize a Chinese-led united front against American imperialism. However, China's opening up to the West in 1972 revealed US Marxists’ differing frameworks for understanding socialism and national liberation. Partly because of the confusion that followed, Marxist internationalism soon lost its intellectual weight on the US far left. Using archived Marxist periodicals from 1973 to 1979, I trace how this happened and what it meant for revolutionaries’ opposition to American empire.

The article explores the politics of memory surrounding the Vietnam Women's Memorial Foundation (VWMF) – the grassroots organization that led the campaign to establish the Vietnam Women's Memorial in Washington, DC. Drawing on archival material, public statements, and interviews with members of the group, it demonstrates that the organization used the ambivalences and anxieties surrounding the Vietnam War's remembrance to argue for the commemoration of women who served during the war. The VWMF portrayed those women as heroines of compassion – similar to men in terms of courage and selflessness, but different because of their benignity and benevolence. However, the VWMF's depiction of women's compassion was informed by national loyalties and sentiments; it acknowledged Vietnamese civilians only as objects of American goodwill, and failed to engage with ethical questions concerning American intervention in Vietnam. By drawing attention to women's dedication and compassion, the organization carried out a symbolic rehabilitation of American actions in Vietnam. It contributed to solidifying the dominant mode of representing the Vietnam War through the lens of American military sacrifice and fostered an understanding of the Vietnam War as an American national event.

Peter Bogdanovich's masterpiece The Last Picture Show (1971) remains a highly influential example of 1970s New Hollywood filmmaking. Yet it has largely escaped the sustained critical attention enjoyed by many of its contemporaries. This article seeks to revisit the status of the film and its critical reputation. Amongst the critics who have appraised this unique film, opinion is split. On the one hand, it remains an influential example of the “post-western” impulse in the American New Wave. On the other hand, it has been critically maligned as a “nostalgia film.” This article revisits these perspectives and argues that a holistic understanding of the inner dynamics of the film must necessarily take both perspectives into account. It examines how these dynamics are organized around a central formal tension between the cinematic codes of the western and those of social realism. Finally, it argues that the pejorative critical categorization of The Last Picture Show as a “nostalgia film” does not adequately grasp its rich, complex and contradictory affects. Instead, it proposes that the sense of loss, nostalgia and disappointment that Bogdanovich articulates can be read as an expression of that confrontation between “Desire” and the “Real” that the Marxian critic Fredric Jameson theorized was central to the “political unconscious.”

From the mid-1890s to the present day, cars have been fetishized as animal in US automotive culture. This began with automotive periodical Horseless Age, which, in positing the car as a substitute for the horse, decried the material limitations of the “outdated” animal whilst at the same time seeking to coopt its symbolic value. In the first US road trip novels of the 1910s automobiles are described figuratively as animals, simultaneously evoking the horse while symbolically killing it. Examining the intertwined material and symbolic relations between humans, animals, and machines at the dawn of the motor age elucidates the necropolitical position of animals in automotive culture – of the horse in horsepower.

In September 1991 Walt Disney's legal representatives in Israel sued prolific Israeli cartoonist Dudu Geva for using the figure of Donald Duck without permission. The case, which worked its way to the Israeli Supreme Court, sparked a broader conversation in Israel about the place of American cultural icons and idioms in Israeli life. While existing treatments emphasize Jewish Israeli optimism with American influence on their lives, the article demonstrates that some Jewish Israelis had a conflicted relationship with American hegemony, even as their state enjoyed unparalleled privilege under American patronage.

In this article I examine the editing and publishing of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man by Albert Erskine. Over the course of the piece, I deploy letters, drafts, and other material drawn from both Ellison's archive in the Library of Congress and Erskine's own archive at the University of Virginia to unpack how Erskine, as a white editor at a powerful international publishing house, conceived of his role in shepherding to market and marketing what he saw as a major literary work by an African American author.

The Scopes trial has long been interpreted through claims about science and religion and about individual rights and liberties. This article recovers a different debate about the trial's political history that emerged in the later 1920s and resonated down the twentieth century. Here the trial figured as a fraught national circus, which raised difficult questions about the relationship between media spectacle and cultural conflict in the United States. The trial's circus dynamics intensified the conflicts it staged without ever actually resolving them; this trap was then perceived and negotiated in different ways by contemporary liberals, conservatives, socialists, and far-right activists.

This article argues that in Bleeding Edge, Pynchon moves from an oppositional schema in which the world is divided into “elect” and “preterite” populations towards one that is concerned with implication and complicity. The article uses Michael Rothberg's The Implicated Subject (2019) as the basis for analysis, and notably his argument that to be implicated in wrongdoing often involves a kind of structural blindness towards suffering elsewhere. In the case of Bleeding Edge, the protagonist, Maxine Tarnow, is implicated in the violence committed in order to secure the hegemony of neoliberalism. The article describes Maxine's gradual recognition of her own blindness, and hence of her implication in the harms perpetrated in the name of neoliberalism. It begins by noting that her experience of neoliberalism is one of process and of immaterial exchange. The second part of the article argues that the introduction of Nicholas Windust shows how neoliberalism may be an experience of rupture or trauma for those outside the developed world. Finally, with the 9/11 attacks on New York, the same violence rebounds against its source; the attacks therefore act as the final stage in Maxine's increasing awareness of her own implication.

This paper argues that Brown's sleepwalkers in Edgar Huntly offer us an early figuration for the problems inherent in the phenomenon we now refer to as “populism.” Both populism and sleepwalking function through paradoxical and incongruent forms of expression that appear incoherent. The most prominent explanations that account for this paradoxical form of expression rely on an analysis of the breakdown of discourse. However, this paper argues that the incongruous form of expression is rooted in the reconfiguration of the social arrangements that enable Clithero and Edgar to advance socially but also places them in proximity to social crises. The contradictions of this position of social mobility are the source of the contradictions of the expression of sleepwalking. In depicting a world that makes social identity precarious, Brown offers us an explanation for how such paradoxical modes of expression are rooted in unstable resolutions of post-revolutionary society.

Studies of the development of vegetarianism in the United States between the Civil War and World War I emphasize the distinctly American character the movement assumed during this period. They take a top-down prescriptive perspective that emphasizes celebrated advocates of a meatless diet such as William Metcalfe, Sylvester Graham, Bronson Alcott, and J. H. Kellogg, ignoring the often humdrum reality of this food choice. This article instead examines what it meant to live a vegetarian life from the bottom up, during an era when American foodways were being transformed by growing global interconnectedness resulting from advances in technology, science, transportation, and communications, bound up with American imperialism. It takes as its starting point the voluminous correspondence and other archival material associated with Benjamin Smith Lyman (1835–1920), a lifelong vegetarian and the author of Vegetarian Diet and Dishes (1917), and an eloquent, idiosyncratic, yet overlooked spokesperson for this practice. Lyman was an eminent, widely traveled mining geologist who over the course of a fifty-year career carried out surveys in the United States, Canada, India, the Philippines, and Japan, where he remained from 1873 to 1881. His activities and writings draw attention to the cosmopolitan dimensions of the cultivation, procurement, preparation, and consumption of foodstuffs suitable to a vegetarian diet, many introduced from Asia to the United States through the efforts of governmental agencies and immigrants.

This essay examines the narrative and representational tactics of Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016). Rather than read this book solely in terms of its findings, this essay argues that Desmond attempts to stylistically embody the relationship between market culture, eviction, and the political delegitimation of the poor. Evicted also reworks the sociological “community study” by refashioning literary templates from writers such as Jacob Riis, Charles Dickens, Jane Jacobs, and Hannah Arendt. By fusing such debts together, Evicted powerfully connects its account of eviction's toll on the broader but too often overlooked relationship between poverty and citizenship.