Canadian Review of American Studies – Volume 40, Number 2, June 2010 is now available at http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/h70l22135655/.

This issue contains:

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“We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes”: Alfred Hitchcock, American Psychoanalysis, and the Construction of the Cold War Psychopath

Robert Genter

Abstract: This article explores the image of the psychopath in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho. The famed director’s portrayal of a psychologically damaged young man connected with a much larger discussion over political and sexual deviance in the early Cold War, a discussion that cantered on the image of the psychopath as the dominant threat to national security and that played upon normative assumptions about adolescent development and mother-son relations.

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/01876283g1878524/?p=bce1af402de641acbb0924c423b9f2e4&pi=0

DOI: 10.3138/cras.40.2.133

Brutal Honesty? The Uses of Gore in Tribal-Warrior and Gangbanger Autobiography

H. David Brumble

Abstract: Gangbanger autobiography brims with gore: bones broken, flesh cut, blood flowing. This can best be understood in cross-cultural terms. Gangbanger and warrior-tribe autobiographers have identical reasons for dwelling upon gore. Such passages help to establish and maintain status by convincing hearers of the bravery of those who face such terrors. Warriors and gangbangers describe gore in considerable detail and with detached objectivity; warriors and gangbangers alike, audiences understand, are thoroughly inured to pain—both suffered and inflicted. The gore also works to establish warrior claims to authenticity and special knowledge. Precisely because accounts of gore are important to warrior status, there is a powerful incentive to exaggerate. Like warrior tribes, street gangs have evolved means—not always effective—of authenticating such claims.

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/888675471217u474/?p=bce1af402de641acbb0924c423b9f2e4&pi=1

DOI: 10.3138/cras.40.2.163

Something Black in the American Psyche: Formal Innovation and Freudian Imagery in the Comics of Winsor McCay and Robert Crumb

Edward A. Shannon

Abstract: Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland anticipates Robert Crumb’s work. McCay’s innocent dreamscapes seem antithetical to the sexually explicit work of anti-capitalist Crumb, but Nemo looks forward to Crumb in subject and form. Nemo’s presentation of class, gender, and race, and its pre-Freudian sensibility are ironic counterpoints to Crumb’s political, Freudian comix.

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/qx1g079m0v4h22lp/?p=bce1af402de641acbb0924c423b9f2e4&pi=2

DOI: 10.3138/cras.40.2.187

Liberia as American Diaspora: The Transnational Scope of American Identity in the Mid-nineteenth Century

Richard Douglass-Chin

Abstract: The issue of nineteenth-century African-American exploration in Africa raises a number of questions: can we compare the discursive patterns of these black American narratives of exploration to contemporaneous nineteenth-century white chronicles of the American west? What can narrative patterns tell us about the ways in which Americans, both black and white, perceived themselves and others in the various landscapes they gradually came to occupy? Are there ways in which the nineteenth-century chronicles of African Americans Benjamin Anderson, James Sims, and George Seymour in Liberia can shed light on the turbulent state of affairs in Liberia and other parts of Africa both then and now?

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/96u30m711mm76115/?p=bce1af402de641acbb0924c423b9f2e4&pi=3

DOI: 10.3138/cras.40.2.213

Clarifying Blackness in Anglo-Native Fictions: Tom Spanbauer’s Cross-Ethnic Borrowings

Brian Norman

Abstract: Anglo writer Tom Spanbauer’s The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon (1991) and American-Indian author Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues (1995) illustrate how contemporary multicultural literature uses Jim Crow figures as reference points for sorting intricate social lines among other ethnic groups. Spanbauer also illustrates the related dangers of cross-ethnic pilfering.

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/hg5768p72qp31545/?p=bce1af402de641acbb0924c423b9f2e4&pi=4

DOI: 10.3138/cras.40.2.235

“Join the Knitting Revolution”: Third-Wave Feminist Magazines and the Politics of Domesticity

Elizabeth Groeneveld

Abstract: The mid-1990s saw the rise of a new sub-genre of political magazine in the United States: the “third-wave” feminist periodical. A key feature of these publications is that they promote reclaiming and repoliticizing activities traditionally associated with the domestic sphere, particularly knitting. This paper critically examines and historically contextualizes the discourses on the “new” knitting in the letters to the editor, editorials, articles, and advertisements of third-wave feminist periodicals and argues that contemporary feminist craft cultures sit at a politically ambiguous nexus of privilege, complicity, and resistance. By historicizing third-wave periodicals’ promotion of knitting, this paper sheds light on changing ways in which the domestic sphere has figured within the broader history of US feminism and suggests that, despite their appeals to the “new,” these periodicals are very much in conversation with what is, to some extent, an imagined feminist “past.”

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/a14g258032735325/?p=bce1af402de641acbb0924c423b9f2e4&pi=5

DOI: 10.3138/cras.40.2.259

American Studies in Review

Geoff Hamilton

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/tn982x8711418057/?p=bce1af402de641acbb0924c423b9f2e4&pi=6

DOI: 10.3138/cras.40.2.279

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