Bücher der Reihe Studies in United States Culture

Explores the intense and ultimately fleeting moment in 1980s America when the future looked Japanese. From autoworkers to anime fans, Consuming Japan introduces new unorthodox actors into foreign-relations history, demonstrating how the flow of all things Japanese contributed to the globalizing of America in the late twentieth century.

In this eye-opening cultural history, Brian Tochterman examines competing narratives that shaped post-World War II New York City. Tochterman reveals how elite culture producers, planners and theorists, and elected officials drew on and perpetuated the fear of death to press for a new urban vision.

For the majority of the twentieth century, Americans thought of the past as foundational to, but separate from, the present, and they learned and thought about history in informational terms. But Rymsza-Pawlowska argues that the popular culture of the 1970s reflected an emerging desire to engage and enact the past on a more emotional level.

In the decades after the civil rights movement, the ideology of colorblindness co-opted the language of the civil rights era in order to reinvent white supremacy. The key to this shift, Justin Gomer contends, was film - Hollywood provided the visual medium necessary to dramatize an anti-civil rights agenda over the course of the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

Reveals how the slave commodity survived emancipation, arguing that the enslaved person - understood here in legal, economic, social, and embodied contexts - still operated as an indispensable form of value in American national culture.

Between the invention of photography in 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, portraiture became one of the most popular and common art forms in the United States. Sarah Blackwood tells a wide-ranging story about how images of human surfaces became understood as expressions of human depth during this era.

The Berlin Wall is arguably the most prominent symbol of the Cold War era. Its construction in 1961 and its dismantling in 1989 are broadly understood as pivotal moments in the history of the last century. In A Wall of Our Own, Paul Farber traces the Berlin Wall as a site of pilgrimage for American artists, writers, and activists.

In a work brimming with fresh insights about contemporary American food media and culture, Emily Contois shows how the gendered world of food production and consumption has influenced the way we eat and how food itself is central to the contest over our identities.

In this bold book, A. Naomi Paik grapples with the history of U.S. prison camps that have confined people outside the boundaries of legal and civil rights. Removed from the social and political communities that would guarantee fundamental legal protections, these detainees are effectively rightless, stripped of the right even to have rights. Rightless people thus expose an essential paradox: while the United States purports to champion inalienable rights at home and internationally, it has built its global power in part by creating a regime of imprisonment that places certain populations perceived as threats beyond rights. The United States' status as the guardian of rights coincides with, indeed depends on, its creation of rightlessness.Yet rightless people are not silent. Drawing from an expansive testimonial archive of legal proceedings, truth commission records, poetry, and experimental video, Paik shows how rightless people use their imprisonment to protest U.S. state violence. She examines demands for redress by Japanese Americans interned during World War II, testimonies of HIV-positive Haitian refugees detained at Guantanamo in the early 1990s, and appeals by Guantanamo's enemy combatants from the War on Terror. In doing so, she reveals a powerful ongoing contest over the nature and meaning of the law, over civil liberties and global human rights, and over the power of the state in people's lives.