American Uses of History

Tomasz Basiuk is a literary and cultural studies scholar, whose work is focused in postmodernism and queer studies.Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska works on social American history with a strong interest in gender-inflected aspects of American society.Krystyna Mazur has written on American poetry and film. She is working on a project about lesbian poets in Modernism.All three teach at the American Studies Center of the University of Warsaw.

• Contents: Tomasz Basiuk/Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska/Krystyna Mazur: Introduction – Erika Doss: Who Owns Historical Memory? Commemorative Conflicts in the American Southwest – Edyta Frelik: «Ideas freed from events which brought them into being»: Jasper Johns’s Use of History – William R. Glass: «Do We Get to Win this Time?» Hollywood’s History of the Vietnam War – Radosław Rybkowski: Meaningless History: The Use of History in the American Musical – Marta Marciniak: «Do you remember rock and roll radio?» - Punk as Nostalgia for Punk – Jason Ruiz: Travel to Porfirian Mexico and the Cultural Politics of Economic Conquest – Keith Griffler: Come Together: The Underground Railroad and the Project for the New American Century – Aleksandra Szaniawska: «Freedom Is Contagious»: Conflicted Relations between Black and White Women in the Civil Rights and Early Women’s Liberation Movement – Yuri Stulov: Black History in Contemporary African American Fiction – Dominika Ferens: Diachronic vs. Synchronic Accounts of Cultural Difference in Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, the Timeless People – Aneta Dybska: History and Heterotopia in Gloria Naylor’s Novel Linden Hills (1985) – Emilia Borowska: Gayl Jones’s Corregidora: A Post-Cartesian Response to the Past Which Is Not Her Own – Małgorzata Ziółek-Sowińska: History in the Music and Poetry of African American Spirituals – Jerzy Kamionowski: Out of the Past Endlessly Rocking: Audre Lorde’s Use of Dahomean Myths – Paulina Ambroży-Lis: «It Is this Brokenness that Interests Me»: The Aesthetics and Politics of Fragment in Susan Howe’s Historical Poetry – Paweł Stachura: The End of History in Whitman’s War Poems – Alicja Piechucka: «History Is Now»: Historical Experience and Historical Vacuum in T. S. Eliot and the French Symbolists – Mateusz Liwiński: Retrofuturistic Impulse: Skeuomorphs of the Atomic Era in Fallout – Justyna Kociatkiewicz: History as Loss, History as Waste: American Twentieth Century in the Novels of Bellow and DeLillo – Maciej Masłowski: «Like nothing in this life»: The Concept of Historic Time in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man – Gustavo Sánchez Canales: «In a Different World, We Could Have Been Real Friends:» Two Opposite Approaches to the Issue of the Holocaust in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated – Agnieszka Graff: «But this was not Nazi Germany. This was America.» Revisiting the Concentration Camp Analogy in Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique – Włodzimierz Batóg: The American 1960s: Historians’ Debate – James G. Ryan: Historians of American Communism Remain in Denial – Paweł Laidler: The Best Mean to an End: The «Three-Element List» as a Method of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Adjudication. A Historical Perspective – Damian S. Pyrkosz: The Past Revitalized: Preservation of the Rural America’s Cultural Heritage – Karol Derwich: American Exceptionalism in U.S. Latin American Policy at the Turn of 19th and 20th Century – David Jones/Joanna Waluk: The Magic Became Tragic: The Special Diplomatic Exchange Between the Republic of Poland and the United States of America, 1934 to 1939.