American Soundcheck - The JAS Podcast

Rob Kroes, Professor Emeritus and former President of the European Association of American Studies, has been one of the leading scholars for more than 30 years on our negotiations of “America”. His recent work in the Journal of American Studies includes a study of the “Falling Man” photograph of 9-11 (November 2011) and “Musical America: Staging the USA to the Sounds of Music” (February 2014). In the 2014 JAS Lecture, Professor Kroes posits the interaction of the “Western” and the “Southern” in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, arguing that the portrayal of racism offers a glimpse of “realism” by a filmmaker noted for his presentation of fantasy.

The 2013 JAS Annual Lecture, given at BAAS 2013 on Thursday April 18th, is a fascinating insight into the ideals of John F. Kennedy as a Senator during the 1950’s. The lecture was given by Professor Anders Stephanson,  Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Professor of History at Columbia University. In this wide-ranging podcast, Professor  Stephanson challenges us to reconsider the relationship between John F. Kennedy and one of the most important issues of the post-1945 era: the collapse of European imperialism and the onset of decolonization. Kennedy’s approach to this matter, Stephanson argues, has to be considered from an intellectual standpoint. Rather than merely rejecting the claims of newly independent nation-states to forge their own position on the world stage, Kennedy took these processes seriously and recognised that, ultimately, the United States would need to be seen to be on the side of those seeking to assert their newly won freedom. As Stephanson’s lecture demonstrates, Kennedy’s engagement with this issue while in Congress throughout the 1950s sheds much needed new light on the relationship between JFK and decolonisation.

We are delighted to bring you the 2012 Journal of American Studies lecture recorded at the British Association of American Studies conference held in Manchester in April of this year. In this Podcast, Professor Joyce Chaplin’s plenary lecture sheds powerful and provocative light on her current scholarly endeavour - an epic work tracing global circumnavigation from the sixteenth century exploits of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan to contemporary global and digital GPS technologies as we embrace a planetary world increasingly experienced at our fingertips.  Powerfully mapping the death and glory struggles of early circumnavigators, Chaplin interrogates a wealth of debates integral to cutting edge developments in American Studies and which include competing and shifting definitions of transatlanticism and transnationalism as well as of globalisation and globalised studies more generally. An original tour de force, Chaplin’s interrogative interweaving of political, social, philosophical, geographical, cultural, scientific, and religious materials makes for a dramatic odyssey richly illuminating lives as lived on a planetary scale. Enjoy the Podcast free of charge below

Too often taken as given, “black homophobia” is a recent cultural construct requiring careful scrutiny. Perpetuating anti-black racism, the notion has spread beyond measure during the decade-long transatlantic campaign against homophobic hate lyrics, now known as “Stop Murder Music.” Ignoring a longer radical tradition of queer interracialism, white gay activists and journalists have repeatedly expressed their individual outrage, foreclosing multiracial collective solutions. This lecture argues that the direct-action techniques and righteous rhetorics inherited from early AIDS-era street theatre frequently disregard its most important lessons in leadership development, coalition-building, and empowerment, as well as those of the African-American civil rights movement.