W. Mark Sutherland's "America a Videopoem"

Unpublished talk, delivered 22 June 2005, Sydney Film Festival.

Anthropology now, 2018

In this course, we shall explore a few classic works written by mostly European thinkers about America. The central issue will be the “rhetoric of America,” the question of American exceptionalism, and the roots of anti-Americanism. Is America the complete incarnation of the ideas of the Enlightenment, a “postmodern” ideal situated beyond history, a source of spiritual decadence that threatens the European tradition? Or is it a source of rejuvenation for the rest of the world? Why are some people inclined to espouse various forms of anti-Americanism? Readings will include selections from classic books such as Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America; James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Francis Troloppe’s The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1834) Charles Dickens’s American Notes (1842) as well as contemporary analyses such as Peter Katzenstein and Robert Keohane, eds., Anti-Americanisms in World Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); Andrei Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Philippe Roger, The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

American Studies in Scandinavia, 2001

About a year ago in a Times Literary Supplement review, the English novelist Lawrence Norfolk praised the emerging generation of US writers for resisting the allure of the mediated culture and providing readers with 'news of a rare and real America' ('Closing time in the fun-house' 26). Norfolk is thinking of William T. Vollmann's red light districts (mostly cleaned up now and Hilton-ed over), Jonathan Franzen's inner city (newly gentrified), Richard Powers's intelligentsia (last seen working online), and David Foster Wallace's mid-priced cruise ships, halfway houses, and rural state fairs (now mostly funded by corporations). Norfolk would probably oppose this America to the more globally familiar prospect of 'total operationality, hyperreality, total control' and total interchangeability of sign and referent that Jean Baudrillard finds here, along with technology's 'mortal deconstruction of the body' ('Simulacra' 121, 11 1, cited in Simulacrum America 6). To the contributors in Simulacrum America, however, Baudrillard's America is no less real than the vanishing spaces of the naturalist tradition; and its media representations are by now so familiar that they hardly count as news. Now that Roland Barthes's 'empire of signs' has been digitized, continental theory sounds less provocative, more descriptive of things as they are. What is new, however, and what separates this collection from mainstream critical writing, is the editors' recognition that, with the technologization of everything, criticism itself no longer looks the same: 'When the distance between the real and the imaginary begins to disappear,' they write, 'there is no longer any space for an ideal or critical projection' (6). And so, beyond the global understanding of America offered from these mostly European critics, the collection poses a local problem for critical writing: Under circumstances of simulation, working in the nonspace of Baudrillard's hyperreal and the virtual reality of cybernetic media, what's left for criticism itself to do? When literature's most compelling historical fictions have 'long given up the binary concept of fact versus imagination' (8) and when mass media imagery has made 'the very concept of "representation" ... problematic' (I), it makes little sense to think of

America Analysis Observation Interpretation, 2023

The United States of America is a land of contradictions, where the best and the worst coexist. This land, on the one hand, hosts the world's best universities, libraries, cultural centers, hospitals and technology centers, NASA, military power, sports facilities, Hollywood... On the other hand, it has the most unfair income distribution among all industrial societies, chock full prisons, homeless people, high crime rate, the world obesity championship despite billion-dollar investments for healthy and long life... In short, the winners and losers of society… Will all these contradictions lead to a radical change of order in the New World in the 21st century? How does America, the land of contradictions, maintain its superpower status? This book seeks to answer these and similar questions with an analytical approach within the integrity of theory and practice. One should read the book to better understand the United States of America as a whole with both its rights and wrongs. I believe the book is one of the most significant studies after Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. While doing his doctorate, Dinç served as my assistant for four years. Only his intellectual capacity and honesty could have produced such a book. I hope his book will be published in America...

Publications of the Modern Language Association of …, 2003

Literature at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and the president of the International American Studies Association. He has published numerous works on America, including Questing Fictions (U of Minnesota P, 1986), Columbus and the Ends of the Earth (U of California P, 1992), and The Other Writing (Purdue UP, 1993). He is a coeditor of The Oxford Comparative History of Latin American Literary Cultures (Oxford UP, 2003).

2008

Who is included and who is not in the family of "us" in United States history? Here this question is related to a concern with the formulation ofaimsfor American Studies in Scandinavia and inspired this presentation at the NAAS conference in Tampere 2007. The "essentially contested concept" of who is an American is discussed in the context of Native American presence and absence in the grand narrative of the history of the US. Native American history has had little impact on the national narrative, but it is argued here that attention to it challenges the boundaries of the US in three dimensions-through expanding the chronology, the geographical limits, and by complicating the many layers of human presence in the landscape. Investigations of the relationship between Delaware Indians and colonists in early Pennsylvania, the Comanche empire in the Southwest, and the struggles over belonging in the upper Midwest constitute examples of exercises that stretch the boundaries of the historical field. This, it is argued, ought to be reflected in the scope of American Studies.

Transition Milwaukee, 2014

America was not infinite; it only seemed that way to early European explorers, conquerors, and settlers for whom the size of the known world had suddenly doubled and the quantity of effectively unclaimed resources increased by far more than that. This sudden immeasurable and unearned abundance, it is clear, authorized a new set of cultural practices that would not have been deemed appropriate by a people confronted by visible boundaries and limits. The stories we continue to tell ourselves about the discovery of America, its conquest and settling, the Enlightened awakening from an age of unreason are similar to those that helped develop and profoundly shaped a new way of thinking about the world whose main contours are still in place today. The remaining question is how deep beyond these specific practices and habits of consumption does the false image of the infinite run? Our way of life is clearly not sustainable; but what if our way of perceiving reality-our fundamental political, economic, even scientific categories-were also inalterably deformed by the false image of an infinite land? Is philosophical Liberalism compatible with a finite planet and a way of life designed to live on it? How fundamental are the changes we must make in order to recast the American way of life to fit on a finite, increasingly crowded, planet?

Filmhistoria online, 1995

The past is modifiable , J. L. Borges At that moment, it was Rodrigo de Triana who shouted «Tierra! tierra!...» meaning that land could be seen on the horizon., That cry signaled the beginning of a continuous enterprise carried out through a period that from then on has been called the Discovery and Conquest of America. The shaping of this endeavor has relied upon innumerable chronicles narrated then by both priests and conquistadores of the time. Beyond the written accounts later summarized by historians, there have been a considerable number of films related to this epoch. l My attraction to these kinds of films shares two sets of questions certainly not unrelated. First, a theoretical inquiry connected to the controversial existence of film representations of History-to their validity as historical accounts-which will necessarily take me to the more general question of the conception of History itself: Are historical representations different from other discourses? Can they be connected to certain film styles? My second set of questions are ideological and connected to the actual signification conveyed through the films that will inform this analysis: Whose histories are being told and from whose point of view? Tracing out and mapping these questions will be the main purpose of this treacherous journey.

European Journal of American Studies, 2014