UCD Clinton Institute Research Collection

A proverbial statement of a picture being worth “a thousand words” may have been an early observation of the tensions between the world and its representations. Intensified, those tensions and uncertainty about the adequate means of describing reality have reportedly developed into a veritable crisis of representation that, since Foucault, has been diagnosed in much contemporary cultural production. A solid and dependably “real” world has been rendered inaccessible to human beings now destined to deal with a mere play of signifiers. But who creates signs and, therefore, who exercises power over the representations of the world we get? Zeynep Devrim Gürsel’s monograph Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation enters a conversation on representation with a question about news images and their role in the worldmaking. She sets out an anthropological investigation of news agencies and visual content providers in order to understand the process through which some images become formative fictions, that is, dominant narratives about the world, while other images never stand a chance to “circulate with evidentiary or truth value” (p. 14). To do so, she interrogates the infrastructures of news image-making and follows a very loosely aggregated group of decision-makers in the world of photojournalism whom she calls image brokers.

All happy media families resemble one another; every unhappy media family is unhappy in its own way. An Unlikely Audience examines the “confusion in the house” of Al Jazeera after its entry in the U.S. news media market and offers a novel explanation of the network’s struggles. A metaphor of a “port of entry” allows Will Youmans to foreground the role that specific locations played in shaping the network’s advancement and in molding its attempts to establish a solid footprint in the United States.

Connections between culture and memory have been actively explored by historians, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and literary theorists for a better part of the past century, most intensively since 1925 when Maurice Halbwachs published Social Framing of Memory (Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire). These extensive efforts (Erll, Nunning, & Young, 2010; Erll & Young, 2011; Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, & Levy, 2011) have aimed to understand remembering, commemorating, forgetting, and related activities from the standpoint of the genres they adopt, the participants they involve, and the symbols they use. In that context, the current volume positions itself at the intersection of memory and culture and strives to rescue the former from causal explanations dear to the heart of psychologists in order to root it in social and symbolic practices. Thus, it is bound to cover a lot of familiar ground before it sheds new light on the subject. The Handbook of Culture and Memory edited by Brady Wagoner masters this task by arguing that culture is to be viewed as a resource for and constraint on the memory process (p. 3) and by detailing the intricate dynamics of memory and culture in several contexts. Readers, however, have to put aside expectations triggered by the volume’s designation as a handbook. Unlike most academic handbooks, this collection does not offer an exhaustive treatment of the latest research on the intersections of culture and memory, programmatic projections of future inquiries, or a comprehensive bibliography. Instead, it surveys a range of sites where memory and culture are involved in mutually constituting people’s pasts and presents.

According to a comprehensive study of the year 2018 published in the journal Democratization (“State of the World 2018”), democracy is in decline around the world. A retreat in democracy implies a weakening of the conditions that make it possible; that is, a drift towards autocratic rule, a disregard for the rights and protection of minorities, the curtailment of civic freedoms such as the right to assembly and to critical dissent, and a lack of commitment to the rule of law. As the report by Lührmann et al. makes clear, this retreat has been ongoing for at least a decade—as attested to by the breadth and depth of debates and publications on the matter in recent years—and is taking place primarily, though not exclusively, in democratic regions, most notably in Eastern and Western Europe and the United States.

The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in November 2016 has been a happy time for fiction. Not only because of the amount of insightful and innovative literature that is being published since his inauguration, but also because of the prominent role that fiction has been awarded in the communal effort—admittedly, mostly by the liberal sector of the American public— to make sense of the present.

It would be impossible to cover all of the questions and “hot topics” of American electoral politics in a single, or a single series of, films. But films are often very effective in explaining, one or two at a time, a variety of relevant issues, from voter suppression and legal machinations to the workings of an arcane and arbitrary electoral system. Film often manages to transmit the affective implications of fundamental issues that, in the minds of those who take advantage of them, would better remain obscure. Leaving aside series and documentaries—in which the will to explain and sometimes to denounce is perhaps more straightforward— and because it would be unwise to speak generically of such a prolific genre that continues to fascinate viewers, in this piece I will focus on just a number of films that, in dealing with the “behind the scenes“ of election campaigns, draw attention to a number of issues that remain unsolved and that continue to be extremely relevant today.

This volume addresses what is arguably one of the hottest debates in recent years – the rise of right-wing populisms across the Western world in the 21st century – while at the same time framing it through one of its most obvious, but often least understood, consequence, which is the crisis of transatlanticism.

This editorial is not about pandemics. Or not only. After a long year, when most predictions about how society would change turned out to be wrong —or were revealed as mere wishful thinking—, if one thing has become clear it is the perennial difficulty, as Walker Kaplan noted in a recent article in LitHub (2020), of writing "about the swamp while still being waist-deep in it". Experiences of social and political unrest, trauma, or crises in the broadest sense “need time to percolate” and it is usually easier to look at them from a distance, obliquely, or with some measure of historical perspective (Power, 2020). And this applies to fiction as well as to historical, sociological or political analyses. In other words, the challenges of the last year are compounded by the difficulty of accurately diagnosing the present because, as the philosopher Patricia Manrique notes, faced with the novelty of a “crisis” the usual reflex is to interpret it within the parameters of the already known. We tend to appeal to tired tropes and dull meanings, for example our understanding of “time” and “crisis”, in our attempt to name that which does not yet have a name. In these brief introductory notes, I turn to these three concepts —contemporaneity, crisis, time— as a means of providing a framework for approaching the eight articles that make up this monographic dossier. In their examination of literary texts that traverse the long twentieth century and reach into the twenty-first, they span almost a century, from Virginia Woolf’s first modernist novel, published in 1922, to works published as recently as 2019.

This article examines one of the earliest novels of the Trump era, Salman Rushdie's The Golden House (2017), as part of a literary corpus that felt compelled to respond to the derealization of political culture by producing fictions commensurate to the new "American reality."Spanning the years from the first inauguration of Obama to the election of Trump, the novel depicts a nation that has "left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe,"a turn to fantasy that precedes the final irruption of a wealthy vulgarian who calls himself the Joker, and who subverts any previous sense of identity and of what is "real."Drawing from the notion of national fantasy as argued by Lauren Berlant (1991), Jacqueline Rose (1996), and Donald Pease (2009), the article suggests that Rushdie's novel performs and invites a rare self-examination in the context of early literary responses to the rise of Trumpism.

This chapter begins by considering the dominant affective state that came into being after the election of Trump in 2016, namely shock and disbelief, and contextualizes it through two opposed yet complementary impulses. First, it illustrates how political and cultural derealization was actively promoted by Trump himself and his administration, to then consider the liberal biases that were already implicit in the widespread perception that reality was collapsing. In the context of the emergence of two and seemingly irreconcilable American realities, ever more polarized along partisan lines, the literary world felt compelled to respond and did so publicly. This chapter considers various initiatives but focuses in particular on the insights provided by writers Aleksandar Hemon, Jan Clausen, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, who denounced the exceptionalist rhetoric that was often employed and called for a more engaged and less self-deluded American literature. It then proceeds to map the emerging corpus of ‘Trump fiction’ and existing scholarly studies, and argues that the analyses offered in American Literature in the Era of Trumpism contribute not only to the continued understanding of the landscape of American literature after 2016, but also to the long-standing scholarly tradition of decentering the notion of ‘America.’