The New Americanist Volume One / Number One Fall 2018 American Studies Center University of Warsaw Editor Matthew Chambers Editorial Team Agnieszka Kotwasinska Karolina Krasuska Advisory Board Paulina Ambrozy, Adam Mickiewicz University Caren Kaplan, UC Davis Charlotte Beyer, University of Gloucestershire Laleh Khalili, SOAS University of London Christopher Breu, Illinois State University Alex Lubin, University of New Mexico Lori Emerson, University of Colorado Boulder Josephine Metcalf, University of Hull Keith P. Feldman, UC Berkeley Małgorzata Myk, University of Łódź Dominika Ferens, University of Wroclaw Andrew Pepper, Queen’s University Belfast Pawel Frelik, Maria Curie Sklodowska Benjamin Railton, Fitchburg State University University Caroline Rody, University of Virginia Steffen Hantke,Sogang University Laurence Roth, Susquehanna University Christina Heatherton, Barnard College David Schmid, SUNY Buffalo Tim Jelfs, University of Groningen Jonathan Silverman, UMass Lowell Reece Jones, University of Hawaii Roberto Tejada, University of Houston Daniel Kane, University of Sussex Marek Wilczynski, University of Gdansk Amy Kaplan, University of Pennsylvania Richard Yarborough, UCLA Design Rafal Benedek and Filip Zagórski, Type2 Typesetting Andrzej Zawadzki Printer Sowa Sp. z o.o ISSN 2545-3556 Copyright @ American Studies Center, Warsaw 2018 The New Americanist American Studies Center Al. Niepodległości 22 02-653 Warsaw POLAND [email protected] newamericanist.com Submissions The New Americanist is an interdisciplinary journal publishing scholarly work on the United States and the Americas broadly considered. We are especially interested in work which includes a global perspective, introduces new critical approaches, and proposes theoretical frameworks to the study of the US. We welcome contributions from scholars from around the world and across the humanities and the social sciences. If you are interested in contributing, please submit a 350-word abstract and 200-word biographical note to [email protected]. Completed articles of a 6000-8000 word length based on accepted abstracts will be subjected to peer review. The New Americanist comes out twice yearly in association with the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. Please submit previously unpublished work only. All submissions will be subject to a double-blind peer review. The New Americanist is always seeking book reviews and commentary. Please contact us if you are interested in contributing. Printed in 200 copies TABLE OF CONTENTS 5 Editor’s Introduction 9 Alessandro Porco The Life and Art of Mary Parks Washington 51 Elspeth Iralu Transnational American Studies as Contrapuntal Methodology 71 Rikki Bettinger “Exceedingly Neat and Clean”: Household Management in North Atlantic Women’s Travel Writings, 1800-1850 97 Ryan Crawford Moby-Dick, American Studies, and the Aesthetic Education of Man 123 Maarten Arnoldus (Do Not) Read the Comments: Mr. Robot and the Limits of Critique in an Age of Narrative Excess 149 Christina Riley How the Women’s March Happened, Or, Adventures in Digital and Material Feminist Solidarity 175 “Americanists in Unexpected Places”: An Interview with George Blaustein, author of Nightmare Envy and Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction 187 Book reviews 225 Contributors 227 American Studies Center Report: Jack Halberstam Editor’s Introduction I. The New Americanist is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal which, in association with the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw, publishes scholarly work on the United States and the Americas broadly considered. The journal continues a tradition at the American Studies Center of promoting international scholarship previ- ously under the titles American Studies (1983–2005) and The Americanist (2006–2014). The New Americanist, then, is a relaunch of a long-running ASC institution. We would like to thank ASC director Gregorz Kość for initiating and sponsoring this venture and William Glass for giving us our initial bearings. A special mention goes to Karolina Krasuska for all the otherwise uncredited guidance and feedback. We would also like to thank our wonderful advisory board for their time and assistance, as well as their commitment to this fledgling endeav- our. In particular, we would like to acknowledge David Schmid, Laleh Khalili, and Benjamin Railton for helping us get the ball rolling. II. The New Americanist will be released biannually–in the fall and spring– and in addition to peer-reviewed scholarship, will publish book reviews, interviews, updates on significant ASC events, and other short features. The New AmericanisT 01/2018 6 Beginning with our third issue (Fall 2019), we will periodically run special feature sections with the first being “Hobgoblins of Fantasy: American Fantasy Fiction in Theory” guest edited by James Gifford and Orion Kidder. We commit ourselves to the highest standard in publication ethics. The New Americanist publishes only original scholarship which has been subject to double-blind peer review. We have a strict policy against plagia- rism and defamation, and we seek editorial best practices, including fair editing, avoiding conflicts of interest, and the assurance of confidentiality for submitted work. III. Our first issue contains a great variety of topics, but one question does return at moments: what is it we say we do, when we say we do American Studies? Our interview with George Blaustein, the author of Nightmare Envy & Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction (2018), goes some distance in attempting to answer that question histor- ically and in our present circumstances. Ryan Crawford’s “Moby‑Dick, American Studies and the Aesthetic Education of Man,” which focuses on the history of the book’s reception, touches on some similar concerns raised in the interview: in particular, their own various attitudes for the lost significance of F.O. Matthiessen’sAmerican Renaissance and the role of an ideological nationalism at the heart of the early disciplinary devel- opment of American Studies. But rather than settle the question of what we are doing, The New Americanist aims to point that question outward as a productive challenge. This issue, then, opens with Alessandro Porco who, quoting Nathaniel Mackey, argues for the importance of “discrepant engagement,” or the “het- erogeneity and mix” which works against “totalizing paradigms.” In Porco’s “The Life and Art of Mary Parks Washington,” an exhaustively researched but highly readable essay, he recovers the career of a vital African American artist marginalized by more standard accounts of Black Mountain College or the Black Arts Movement, in both of which she was involved. Elspeth Iralu argues for a similar conceptualization for transnational American Studies, using Edward Said’s notion of contrapuntalism, setting together four texts by Lisa Lowe, Keith Feldman, Alex Lubin, and Vijay Prishad, to challenge self-contented conceptualizations of what is possible for the discipline. In that vein, there is Maarten Arnoldus’s analysis of the failed promise of the counter-hegemonic in Mr. Robot as discerned from a review IntroducTioN 7 of A.V. Club viewer comments in his “(Do Not) Read the Comments: Mr. Robot and the Limits of Critique in an Age of Narrative Excess.” Another archival-based project included in this issue focuses on wom- en’s travel writings. Rikki Bettinger, in ““Exceedingly Neat and Clean”: Household Management in North Atlantic Women’s Travel Writings, 1800–1850,” uses the journals of four women travelers across four geo- graphically distinct areas in the first half of the nineteenth century in order to demonstrate ideological and social links across the Americas during this period, as well as, in her words, demonstrate “the ways in which the women were transmitters of a racialized and gendered hierar- chy.” Moving from the nineteenth century to the present day, Christina Riley’s “How the Women’s March Happened, or, Adventures in Digital and Material Feminist Solidarity,” details the build up and organization of the 2017 Women’s March in order to analyze how race-based, but also geographical, economic, and ableism issues interpenetrated to shape what proved to be a massive grassroots campaign. Riley’s focus on Facebook as the medium through which most of these concerns played out is also es- pecially timely as the platform has been at the center of controversies over the 2016 election and privacy issues. The New Americanist will also strive to provide a fulsome book re- view section, as we believe an important function of an academic journal is to not only evaluate and discern, but also disseminate and promote. We are especially delighted to have reviews by Laleh Khalili on Caren Kaplan’s Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (2017), Dani Spinosa on Safiya Umoja Noble’sAlgorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2017), and many more. We hope to present reviews on a diverse range of topics, and we are always open to suggestions and contributions. Finally, The New Americanist will run a backpage feature every is- sue detailing a recent event at the ASC. In this issue, we have a report by Jedrzej Burszta on Jack Halberstam’s December 2017 visit to the ASC. The New Americanist announces calls for papers for every issue, but we welcome abstract proposals at any time. Please submit a 350-word abstract and 200-word biographical note to newamericanistjournal@ gmail.com. The Life and Art of Mary Parks