A review of A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir by Donald Worster

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A Diaspora Dialogue

First Generation Indian-American Identity 
and the film American Desi

Since the late 1990s, Indian-Americans have begun acting on a desire to see their experience of America reflected through the mass culture they consume.  American Desi (2001), which offers a comedic, coming-of-age college narrative of US-born Indian-Americans, was the first true film-based articulation of this desire. A cultural look into identity among ‘Desis’—a word meaning literally “someone from India”—through the lens of youth is the film’s ambitious proposition.  This paper places American Desi in its historical and cultural context by privileging what Homi Bhaba coined as “cultural difference”; an examination of the textual articulation of culture to illuminate and analyze the tensions it houses.  Through this lens, culture is revealed to inform individuals on simultaneous, multiplex levels that include gender, race and racism, class, consumerism and nationalism.  Locating and evaluating the presentation of these dynamic categories and their tensions within the praxis of culture is thus the critical benchmark for American Desi.  

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An Interview with Gwynne Dyer

NeoAmericanist interviews Gwynne Dyer, independent journalist and renowned commentator on American politics, on the Obama administration and the logistics of capitalizing on the crises in America.

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Punk Will Never Diet

Beth Ditto and the (Queer) Revaluation of Fat

This essay examines the songs, performances, videos, public comments and magazine cover appearances of Beth Ditto, the lesbian lead singer of dance-punk band the Gossip.  Drawing from queer theory and fat studies scholarship I argue that Ditto has challenged dominant conceptualizations of beauty, gender and sexuality and, in the process, constructed an alternative to conventional standards of attractiveness. Through a variety of recuperative strategies, Ditto has staged a critique of normative iterations of the body and rescued fatness from its representation as revolting and worthless. She has done this, first of all, by embracing her body in its current form, thus serving as an example of what I term “embodied corpulence.”  Embodied corpulence is about taking pride in the fat body in its existing state and refusing to change, shrink or disappear. Second, Ditto has been a major figure in the struggle to reclaim “fat” as a term of positive self-identification, taking away its power to injure. Third and finally, by foregrounding her various identities as a fat lesbian femme, Ditto has brought attention to the commonalities between these identities, including the fact that they can all be contested via performative acts that disrupt their fixity and recast them as sites of strength, complexity and renewal.

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