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"Desmond, Jane"
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Global perspectives on the United States : pro-Americanism, anti-Americanism, and the discourses between
\"This edited collection emphasizes public discourse and the related circulation of debates, practices, and commodities that get perceived abroad as having an American origin, such as hip-hop in Japan or the organization of higher education in Germany. These essays provide a unique, global perspective on America, because they are authored by Americanist scholars situated outside of the United States, and working in Britain, Japan, Germany, Kazakhstan, Egypt, South Africa, Panama, Mexico, the Republic of Georgia, Hungary, Norway, and Poland. Encompassing a range of disciplines, including literary studies, art history, political science, and sociology, the collection aims to provide a series of in-depth case studies that focus on specific cultural practices, as well as the importation and exportation of institutional organizational systems. Rather than simply accepting as its starting point the idea of 'Pro-Americanism' and 'Anti-Americanism,' this project analyzes the production of those concepts when attached to specific social practices, and uncovers the impact that such labeling has on social change within the specific cultural and political contexts of disparate locations. The collection emerges out of research done by the International Forum for U.S. Studies scholars, and includes essays that cover a range of topics, such as the Arab uprising in Egypt, 9/11, U.S.-Latin American relations, and global responses to the Civil Rights Movement\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Medicine, Value, and Knowledge in the Veterinary Clinic: Questions for and From Medical Anthropology and the Medical Humanities
The welcome development of the veterinary humanities, and veterinary anthropology specifically, raises the question of its potential relationship with the now well-established field(s) of the medical humanities, and of medical anthropology. Although there are national variations, the term “medical humanities” generally refers to either the tapping of the humanities to improve medical education by developing, through engagement with the humanities like literature and visual art, skills in empathy, visualization and expressivity, or alternatively, it refers to the application of humanities approaches of cultural critique to the presumptions, practices and institutions of the human medical world to denaturalize the ideologies of knowledge that contemporary human medicine professions depend upon. This article reflects on the potential impact that the development of a veterinary medical humanities could have on the field of (human) medical humanities and vice versa. Could such a development force a re-conception of notions of agency, of consent, and of the position of “patient” when the (human based) medical humanities is expanded to include both human and veterinary medicine? What would the potential usefulness, or limitations, both in conceptual and in applied terms, be of constructing a multi-species notion of “medical humanities?” What can such a comparative approach offer to veterinary medicine, in practice and in terms of the curricula of veterinary training? To reflect on these questions, this article draws on my multiple years of fieldwork in veterinary clinics and classrooms to first lay out the constituent components of the formal practice of contemporary veterinary medicine (at least in the U.S.) in terms of the roles that species specificity and relations to humans play in the delivery of care, and then seeks to center the animal in these practices to ask questions about consent, resistance, veterinary obligation, and the role of finance in comparison with human medicine. These similarities and differences will form the basis for a consideration of the effects of enlarging the medical humanities to encompass more than one species.
Journal Article
Vivacious Remains: An Afterword on Taxidermy’s Forms, Fictions, Facticity, and Futures
That taxidermy, in whatever form, requires a recognizable physical trace of a once-living animal calls attention to the inescapably elegiac ground of taxidermy and its ability through such traces to point to the world outside the home, the museum, the gallery walls, and even literary taxidermic fictions. The remains function multidirectionally in time and space. They point outward to the wider world—backward in time to when and where the animal was living—and forward in time to an imagined future of new human-animal relations. Taxidermy thus offers us new possibilities of encounter, through what I term a “speculative interspecies physicality” and “translational phenomenology,” both embodied ways of imagining empathically beyond the human.
Journal Article
Zones of Production in Possible Worlds: Dance's Precarious Placement, an Afterword
Is dancing special? For those of us passionate about dance—about making it, watching it, analyzing it, writing about it, or doing it—dance and dancing seem special, and especially compelling. And in many ways it is, of course. Dancing integrates our physical and cognitive selves in ways that few other professions do. Depending upon the form and format, it can be emotionally meaningful, aesthetically charged, intellectually inspiring, affectively transcendent, politically stirring. It can help us create community and embody politics. But in other ways, dancing and dance making are not so unique. They share characteristics both with other arts and with other modes of work outside of the arts. This special issue of Dance Research Journal, with its focus on dance, labor, and precarity, provides us with an opportunity to consider several questions that I want to take up here: In what ways do the conditions of production of dance shape the resulting experiences and products of dancers/choreographers? Of audiences? How are those conditions different from, or similar to, that for other modes of labor? What can the analytical lens of “precarity,” adopted from other discourses, reveal to us about the work of dancing? Is it new? And finally, how might our answers to these questions make a difference? And for whom?
Journal Article
Zones of Production in Possible Worlds
This essay investigates dance's “conditions of possibility” to argue that while dance and dancing is, in some ways unique, it many other ways it is similar to other types of labor. These types of labor function not simply as a job, or even career, but also as a “calling,” in the sense that they provide a core part of an individual's identity in the world and organize their life practices. Key dimensions of dance's labor which influence its precarity include the status of the arts in a particular social formation, the role of the state, the functioning of an informal economy, and the tension between art's marginalization and its simultaneous valuation as “priceless” cultural commodity.
Journal Article
Postmortem Exhibitions: Taxidermied Animals and Plastinated Corpses in the Theaters of the Dead
This essay compares contemporary conventions for the public display of dead bodies as they apply to humans and to animals. Focusing on the Body Worlds exhibits by Gunther von Hagens, the phenomenally successful exhibits of posed, plastinated cadavers that have drawn twenty-seven million visitors worldwide, it compares these museum exhibits of human remains to the long-standing tradition of taxidermy as a mode of display for dead animal bodies. It argues that the Body Worlds shows, although generating some controversy, are ultimately acceptable to these millions of viewers precisely because they function as a form of anti-taxidermy. The skins that are the essence of taxidermic work on animals are absent from the human displays, which present the interior of the bodies only. The essay suggests that this difference is not simply a choice about how to reveal human anatomy—namely, to show the muscles under the skin—but is crucial to how such displays became the most-viewed exhibition in history. This anonymity—the stripping of marks of racialization and class positioning—facilitates the \"right to look\" under the twin supports of the discourses of art and anatomical science.
Journal Article
Ethnography as Ethics and Epistemology: Why American Studies Should Embrace Fieldwork, and Why it Hasn't
In the US American Studies scholarly community, the last thirty years have produced significant changes: changes in the demographics of our practitioners that are marked by the rise of women and members of US minority groups (racial, sexual, and ethnic) to the highest levels of leadership in the American Studies Association (ASA) and the move of scholarship addressing racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual issues to the center of the field. [...]I want to acknowledge the difficulty in speaking about American Studies as an intellectual community.
Journal Article
Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities on and off the Stage
What happens to the writing of dance history when issues of sexuality and sexual identity are made central? What happens to queer theory, and to other theoretical constructs of gender and sexuality , when a dancing body takes center stage? Dancing Desires asks these questions.
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