English and American Studies

This essay reads John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy in the generic context of the bildungsroman. Because the Rabbit series rests on the premise of showing a hero after the conclusion of his formal education, I argue that the four novels can be seen as a post-bildungsroman. This notion reconciles the tetralogy’s three-decade-spanning frame – which invites readings focused on character development (Bildung) – with Updike’s narrative decision to leave out the most formative period in Rabbit’s life: his adolescence. I discuss the large-looming absence of the high school, which Updike introduces as a kind of social laboratory or rehearsal space. This function is traceable in various of Updike’s unpublished juvenilia as well as the mythological high-school novel The Centaur. The second section of this essay discusses the strained relationship between Rabbit and his son Nelson, focusing on the bildungsroman topos of generational fears of epigonism. Finally, I turn to Updike’s often-debated use of an anti-intellectual character, lower than himself in social class and education, as a recording device for the historical era. This direction-based concept of writing ‘down to’ a protagonist is put into dialogue with Rabbit Angstrom’s pervasive ‘down-from’ trajectory, which stands in direct opposition with more conventional American bildungsromane.

[The John Updike Review 8.2 (2021): 49–76]

Position paper for the General Assembly Third Committee The issues before the General Assembly Third Committee (GA3) are: Improving Coordination in Humanitarian Response to Natural Disasters and Other Emergencies, Preventing Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, Promoting Rights and Strengthening Protections for Older Persons. The Philippines considers all three topics to be of highest importance and is delighted to participate in the upcoming discussions to find amicable solutions for these issues on an international level. I. Improving Coordination in Humanitarian Response to Natural Disasters and Other Emergencies Due to frequent exposure to natural disasters, the Philippines is highly aware of the importance of coordinating humanitarian aid in order to strengthen the emergency-response-capacity of Member States, particularly developing countries. The Philippines strongly believes that networking among stakeholders is crucial to deliver humanitarian aid as well as hazard specific, area-focused and timebound services. Furthermore, the Philippines emphasizes the sharing of standards and new technology. A cooperative spirit and open dialogue among civil coordinators, military, aid donors and community leaders is equally important. The Philippines calls attention to the efforts made in the Asia Europe Meeting Manila Conference Post-Haiyan Tacloban declaration, which promotes the inclusion of international humanitarian-aid standards into private sectors. The Philippines continues its commitment to the cluster response system and Civil-Military Coordination framework (CMCoord/UNOCHA, 2012) and emphasizes the role of CMCoord in information sharing, planning and task division. The Philippines supports the Sendai Declaration and Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 (A/RES/69/ 283, 2015) and stresses the importance of humanitarian response mentioned in the Hyogo Framework (A/RES/60/195, 2005). The Philippines emphasizes mutual exchange as important for sharing experiences and bettering the coordination of humanitarian aid. The Philippines welcomes A/RES/70/107, 2015, A/RES/71/128, 2016 as well as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (A/RES/70/1, 2015), reaffirming the Sendai Framework. The Philippines is proud of its role within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in forming an Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (2005), as well as being part of the Asian Disaster Reduction Center, promoting the exchange of information, enhancing coordination and partnership among stakeholders. The Philippines strongly supports the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005) and Accra Agenda for Action (2008) on the harmonization of international development assistance and the Central Emergency Revolving Fund (A/RES/60/124, 2005), considering the responsibilities of aid donors. The Philippines appreciates the work of the Regional Consultative Groups and the United Nations (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on CMCoord and the Oslo Guidelines (2007). The Philippines strongly suggests considering the needs of local communities as well as directing culturally appropriate and sustainable aid. The central role of national governments is important in disaster coordination to effectively direct humanitarian aid. The Philippines recommends cluster initiatives to be guided by national coordinators, specifically in channeling national and international efforts where needed. The Philippines endorses the formulation of culturally and locally inclusive coordination guidelines. The Philippines suggests to reinforce legal responsibilities of aid donors by reporting to the Inter-Agency Standing Committee about their actions. The Philippines calls upon the International Humanitarian Assistance Cluster to strengthen situational awareness and build understanding of the cluster system among stakeholders. Furthermore, the Philippines stresses the role of humanitarian CMCoord in improving dialogue between civilian and military actors. Due to its administrative capacities, the military has a central role in coordination. Therefore, the Philippines calls for increasing training on humanitarian CMCoord, ongoing engagement between the military, OCHA, Logistics Cluster and Humanitarian Country Team and increasing contributions towards this purpose. The Philippines offers sharing knowledge and experiences with all Member States in regard to coordinating emergency humanitarian relief. II. Preventing Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity The Philippines expresses its conviction that historic, religious and culturally diverse backgrounds as well as national particularities should be respected in regards to sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). The Philippines considers combating violence and gender-based discrimination to be an important step in the process of realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Philippines is concerned that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people suffer from discrimination in healthcare and other social services. The current position of LGBTI people increases their vulnerability to the exclusion from public health service, especially in the area of HIV/AIDS. The Philippines values raising awareness of the human rights of LGBTI people as well as the stigma and discrimination faced by them. The Philippines Department of Education issued The DepEd Child Protection Policy (DepEd Order No.40, 2012), protecting students from violence and discrimination regardless of SOGI. Geraldine Roman, a Filipino openly transgender candidate, was elected to the House of Representatives in 2016. Limited access to HIV/AIDS programs, lack of resources and funding create

Television is an evocative reference point in domestic spaces and daily lives. Watching a serial television program in an intimate setting on a pro- longed routine basis tends to encourage an emotional connection and identification with its characters and, in turn, the formation of televisual memory. the long-running AMC television series Mad Men (2007–15), set in 1960s New York, lends itself to this process, creating memories in the present for both the text and the context in which it is viewed. In addition, it evokes 1960s televisual memory through its sets, narrative, and intertextualities, demonstrating retro’s dual process of memory-making. Mad Men entwines these threads of televisual memory, interweaving the period television iconography and archival footage that form part of collective memory with the everyday personal memories formed by experiencing and interacting with its mediations of the former. In doing so, it creatively weds together memories old and new, cultural and personal; it creates a unique montage of televisual impressions tied together by continuities and dissonance and draws attention to the processes of mediation, selection, and sequencing of cultural memories.
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Table of Contents


Acknowledgments v

Introduction (Jilly Boyce Kay, Cat Mahoney and Caitlin Shaw) 1

Part I.

Recent Historical and Period

Fictions: Reframing the 20th Century

Modern Art and Mediated Histories: Pleasantville, Mona Lisa

Smile and Far from Heaven (Christine Sprengler) 12

Mad Men and Memory: Nostalgia, Intertextuality and Seriality in 21st Century Retro Television (Debarchana Baruah) 32

The Women’s Land Army Remembered on British Television (Cat Mahoney) 46

Part II.

Feminism in ­Non-Fiction Media: Historical Narratives and ­Counter-Memories

“Spiced with a touch of glitz and a lot of fun”: Watch the Woman, “Rogue” Feminism and 1980s Television for Women (Jilly Boyce Kay) 66

Feminist Magazines and Historicizing the Second Wave: Whose

Histories? (Claire Sedgwick) 84

Discursive Activism and ­Counter-Memories of SlutWalk (Kaitlynn Mendes) 101

Part III.

Media Histories and Discarded Technologies: Recycling Memory in the Information Age

The Same Handful of Images: Submarine, Indie Retro and 2000s Youth Cinema (Caitlin Shaw) 121

To Hold On or to Let Go? ­Small-Gauge Amateur Filmmaking

and Nostalgia in Super 8 and Frankenweenie (Marta Wąsik) 137

Room 237: Cinephilia, History and Adaptation (Laura Mee) 154

Part IV.

Sites of Memory: Mediating Iconic Spaces, Objects and Ephemera

The BBC Archive ­Post–Jimmy Savile: Irreparable Damage

or Recoverable Ground? (Rowan Aust and Amy Holdsworth) 170

A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Childhood Television

Memories (Jo ­Whitehouse-Hart) 185

“Whispers of escapades out on the ‘D’ train”: The Entangled

Visions of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (Vanessa Longden) 203

Space and Place to Remember: Television’s Double Articulation

in the National Space Centre (Helen Wood and Tim ­O’Sullivan) 220

About the Contributors 241

Index 245

Numerous contemporary televisual productions revisit the past but direct their energies towards history's non-events and anti-heroic subjectivities. Debarchana Baruah offers a vocabulary to discuss these, using Mad Men as a primary case study and supplementing the analysis with other examples from the US and around the world. She takes a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach to studying film and television, drawing from history, memory, and nostalgia discourses, and layering them with theories of intertextuality, paratexts, and actor-networks. The book's compositionist style invites discussions from scholars of various fields, as well as those who are simply fans of history or of Mad Men.

Undocumented migrants in the US are often identified as threats to society or reluctantly acknowledged for their labor, essential to the US agricultural farms, construction industries, and food processing and packaging industries. In this essay, I argue for a slight reorientation in the understanding of migrant labor. I start by paring down the undocumented migrants' identity to their bare bodies. I zoom in on the moment of the border crossing, analyzing the immediate consequences of illegality on the migrant body. Migrants from Mexico and Central America regularly cross the US southern border through the Sonoran Desert, experiencing hyperthermia, dehydration, and intense disorientation. Many die in the desert. The few who make it across carry deep physical and emotional scars of the crossing, much beyond the border and into their lives as 'illegals' within the US territory. A second part of the essay will focus on the reconstructive efforts in migrant narratives to acknowledge undocumented migrants beyond their capacity to do the hard labor that citizens refuse to do. It will look at the physical and emotional symptoms (headaches, ulcers, sleep disorders, depression) of working in exploitative conditions, and living a life bereft of opportunities and in constant fear of incarceration and deportation. Juxtaposing the two approaches of disassociating an undocumented migrant's body from their labor and then recognizing their labor in spite of their bodily limitations and disabilities can contribute to a more complex representation of an undocumented migrant's identity.

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio positions her book The Undocumented Americans as a "work of creative non-fiction," experimentally mixing literary genres such as the memoir, personal essay, and testimonio. She draws on journalistic methods of doing interviews and fact-checking exercises, but departs from them at will as she blends these stories from the undocumented community with the personal and the magical. This essay details some of these creative overtures and discusses how and why Villavicencio's work sits uncomfortably between fact and fiction, between memoir and manifesto, as she sets out to represent America's undocumented.

The essay examines the politics of Villavicencio’s unapologetic tone, her
focus on undocumented life post-migration, and her mapping of the self as
an extension of community. It contextualizes her work in relation to the self-
narratives that appear during the youth movements surrounding the DREAM
Act in the first decade of the 21st century and probes at the limits of self-
representation, especially for an undocumented writer. Villavicencio registers
her struggles at representing a community that is vulnerable to the extent that
it is rendered voiceless, but also overrepresented in the mainstream media
as caricatures or through simplified categorizations. Her critical engagement
with representing undocumented voices also manifests as complaints against
translation biases in the publishing industry. Long after the publication of her
book, Villavicencio has continued the behind-the-scenes work to position
her voice, doing book readings and interviews. This essay is interested in
Villavicencio’s efforts to retain the autonomy over her voice within the textual
boundaries and beyond.