295 ABSTRACTS AND NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS antonio barrenechea University of Mary Washington Fredericksburg, VA USA Dracula as Inter-American Film Icon Universal Pictures and Cinematográfica ABSA My essay explores the vampire cinema of Hollywood and Mexico. In parti- cular, I trace the relationship between Universal Pictures as the progenitor of horror during the Great Depression and Cinematográfica ABSA’s “mex- ploitation” practices.  The latter resulted in the first vampire film in Latin America—El vampiro (1957). Rather than strengthening separatist national cinemas, the unintended consequences of genre film production make this a case of inter-American scope. Keywords: Dracula, hemispheric, inter-American, cinema, mexploitation Antonio Barrenechea is  a  professor of  literature of  the  Americas and cinema. He is the author of America Unbound: Encyclopedic Litera- ture and Hemispheric Studies (University of New Mexico Press, 2016), which brings together comparative literature and  hemispheric stud- ies by  tracing New World historical imaginaries in  prodigious novels from  the  United States, Latin America, and  Francophone Canada. He is also co-editor of Hemispheric Indigenous Studies, a special issue of Comparative American Studies (2013) that calls for a trans-American frame for indigenous history and culture. Over the past fifteen years, Dr. Barrenechea has contributed articles and reviews to Comparative Literature,  Revista Iberoamericana,  American Literature, and  other venues, including the American Comparative Literature Association’s “state-of-the-discipline” report. The  forthcoming “Hemispheric Stud- ies Beyond Suspicion” was awarded the 2014—2016 prize for the best E N D /N O T E S Captive Minds Normativities and Protests RIAS vol. 13, Spring—Summer, № 1/2020 Review of International American Studies RIAS Vol. 13, Spring—Summer № 1 /2020 ISSN 1991—2773 DOI: https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.9627 https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.9627 296 Captive Minds Normativities and Protests r ia s v o l. 1 3, s p r in g –s u m m er № 1 /2 0 20 essay by the International Association of Inter-American Studies. Follow- ing upon a 2016—2017 fellowship at the Institut Américain Universitaire in France, Dr. Barrenechea’s recent work is on the relation between trash culture and analog cinema as produced in the fringes of North and South American film capitals. He also conducts ongoing research on the intellec- tual history of the literature of the Americas, particularly its international pioneering waves, and its contemporary manifestations in U.S. academia. Dr. Barrenechea presently serves on the boards of the International Ameri- can Studies Association, the International Association of Inter-American Studies, and Comparative American Studies.. manuel broncano rodríguez Texas A&M International University USA A Literary History of Mental Captivity in the United States Blood Meridian, Wise Blood, and Contemporary Political Discourse On July 15, 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump and Russia’s President Vla- dimir Putin held a  summit in  Helsinki that immediately set off a  chain reaction throughout the  world. By  now, barely two months later, that summit is all but forgotten for  the most part, superseded by  the  fran- tic train of  events and  the  subsequent bombardment from  the  media that have become the “new normal.” While the iron secrecy surrounding the conversation between the two dignitaries allowed for all kinds of spe- culation, the image of President Trump bowing to his Russian counterpart (indeed a  treasure trove for  semioticians) became  for many observers in the U.S. and across the world the living proof of Mr. Trump ś subservient allegiance to Mr. Putin and his obscure designs. Even some of the most recalcitrant  GOPs vented quite publicly their disgust at  the  sight of a president paying evident homage to the archenemy of the United States, as Vercingetorix kneeled down before Julius Cesar in recognition of the Gaul’s surrender to the might of the Roman Empire. For some arcane reason, the whole episode of the Helsinki summit brought to my mind, as in a vivid déjà vu, Cormac McCarthy ś novel Blood Meridian and more specifically, the characters of Judge Holden and the idiotic freak who beco- mes Holden ś ludicrous disciple in the wastelands of Arizona. In my essay, I provide some possible explanations as to why I came to blend these two unrelated episodes into a single continuum. In the process, I briefly revi- sit some key texts in the American canon that fully belong in the history of “mental captivity” in the United States, yet to be written. Obviously, I am not in hopes of deciphering the ultimate reasons for current U.S. foreign policy, and the more modest aim of my article is to offer some insights into the general theme of mental captivity through a novel and a textual tradition overpopulated with “captive minds.” Keywords: Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, U.S. foreign policy, Presi- dent Trump, President Putin Manuel Broncano (PhD Salamanca 1990) is  a  Regents Professor of English at Texas A&M International University. From 2015 to 2019 297 r eview o f in ter n a tio n a l a m er ica n stu d ies Captive Minds Normativities and Protests RIAS vol. 13, Spring–Summer, № 1/2020 he served as the president of the International American Studies Asso- ciation (IASA). Before moving to  Texas, he  taught for  two decades at  the  University of  Leon (Spain). Broncano has published a  number of  scholarly works on  various American authors such as  Flannery O’Connor, Willa Cather, Faulkner, Melville, Poe, etc. His latest book was released in  2014, Religion in  Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction: Apocry- phal Borderlands (Routlege). Broncano has also kept an active agenda as a translator. His latest translation is Giannina Braschi’s United States of Banana (Estados Unidos de Banana, Amazon Crossing 2014). sonia caputa Faculty of Humanities University of Silesia in Katowice Poland Resistance and Protest in Percival Everett’s Erasure As argued by  the  literary critic Margaret Russett, Percival Everett “unhinges ‘black’ subject matter from  a  lingering stereotype of  ‘black’ style [and] challenges the assumption that a single or consensual Afri- can-American experience exists to be represented.” The author presents such a radical individualism in his most admired literary work published in 2001. In Erasure, Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, the main character and nar- rator of the book, pens a stereotypically oriented African American novel that becomes an  expression of  “him being sick of  it”; “an awful little book, demeaning and soul-destroying drivel” that caters for the tastes and  expectations of  the  American readership but, at  the  same time, oscillates around pre-conceived beliefs, prejudices, and  racial clichés supposedly emphasizing the  ‘authentic’ black experience in  the  Uni- ted States. Not only is Erasure about race, misconceptions of blackness and racial identification but also about academia, external constraints, and one’s fight against them. The present article, therefore, endeavors to analyze different forms of resistance and protest in Percival Everett’s well-acclaimed novel, demonstrating the intricate connections between the publishing industry, the impact of media, the literary canon forma- tion and the treatment of black culture. Keywords: protest, resistance, Percival Everett, literary canon Sonia Caputa, PhD, works as  Assistant Professor at  the  Faculty of  Humanities at  the  University of  Silesia. She was a  participant of the Summer Fulbright Scholarship Programme “The United States Department of  State 2015 Institute on  Contemporary U.S. Literature” (University of Louisville, Kentucky). She is an active member of the Pol- ish Association for American Studies. Caputa was guest co-editor one of  the  issues of  RIAS and  a  co-editor of  the  series “Grand Themes of  American Literature.” She teaches contemporary ethnic American literature and  offers survey courses of  the  history of  American litera- ture. Her interests include, but are not limited to: ethnicity, assimilation, as well as stereotypes in literature and films. 298 Captive Minds Normativities and Protests r ia s v o l. 1 3, s p r in g –s u m m er № 1 /2 0 20 murat göç-bilgin Manisa Celal Bayar University Turkey Posthumanity and Prison-House of Gender in Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs This article aims to  analyze Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs with  a  deli- berate emphasis on  posthuman theory, body politics, and  gender to  construe the  transformation of  the  human body, human-machine nexus, and  captivity in  inhumanity with  a  struggle to  (re)humanize minds and their bodies. One of the arguments of the paper will be that posthumanism offers a new outlet for breaking the chains of captivity, that is, escaping into non-human to  redefine humanity and  to  eman- cipate the human mind and human body to notch up a more liberated and  more equitable definition of  humanity. As  gender and  sex are further marked by  the  mechanical and  mass-mediated reproduction of human experiences, history, and memory, space and time, postmo- dern gender theories present a perpetual in-betweenness, transgression and fluidity and the dissolution of grand narratives also resulted in a dis- solution of the heteronormative and essentialist uniformity and solidity of  the  human body. Gender in  a  posthuman context is  characterized by a parallel tendency for reclaiming the possession of the body and sexual identity with a desire to transform the body as a physical entity through plastic surgery, genetic cloning, in vitro fertilization, and computeriza- tion of human mind and memory. Therefore, the human body has lost its quality as gendered and sexed and has been imprisoned in an embodi- ment of infantile innocence and manipulability, a “ghost in the machine,” or a cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism (Haraway). The human- -machine symbiosis, then, is exteriorized and extended into a network of objects switching “natural human body” to an immaterialized, dehu- manized, and prosthetic “data made flesh.” In this regard, Coupland’s Microserfs boldly explores the potential of posthuman culture to provide a deconstruction of human subjectivity through an analysis of human and machine interaction and to demonstrate how human beings trans- gress the captivity of humanity by technologizing their bodies and minds in an attempt to become more human than human. Keywords: Douglas Coupland, Microserfs, posthuman, cyborg theory, gender Murat Göç is an assistant professor of English Language and Literature at Celal Bayar University Turkey. He received his PhD degree from Ege University American Culture and Literature Department. His main fields of interest are: contemporary American literature, literary theory, gender studies, and, in particular, masculinity studies. He is the founding editor of the Masculinities Journal and a member of the Initiative for Critical Studies of Masculinities, an academic network of scholars based in Tur- key, working on establishing and ensuring gender equality, supporting LGBTI rights, and inspiring a critical transformation of masculinities. 299 r eview o f in ter n a tio n a l a m er ica n stu d ies Captive Minds Normativities and Protests RIAS vol. 13, Spring–Summer, № 1/2020 michał kisiel Er(r)go. Theory—Literature—Culture University of Silesia in Katowice Poland Violence Hates Games? Revolting (Against) Violence in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games U.S. This article aims at  exploring Haneke’s Funny Games U.S. as  a  pro- test against violence employed in the mainstream cinema. Satisfying compensatory needs of  the  spectators, constructing their identities, and even contributing to the biopolitics of neoliberalism, proliferating bloodthirsty fantasies put scholars in a suspicious position of treating them as either purely aesthetical phenomena or exclusively ethical ones. Haneke’s film seems to  resist such a  clear-cut binary; what is  more, it  contributes immensely to  the  criticism of  mainstream cinematic violence. Misleading with  its initial setting of  a  conventional thriller, Haneke employs absurd brutality in  order to  overload violence itself. The scenes of ruthless tortures are entangled in the ongoing masque- rade, during which swapping roles, theatrical gestures, and temporary identities destabilize seemingly fixed positions of perpetrators and their victims, and tamper with the motives behind the carnage. As I argue, by confronting its spectators with unbearable cruelty devoid of closing catharsis, Funny Games deconstructs their bloodthirsty desire of reta- liation and unmasks them as the very reason for the violence on screen. Following, among others, Jean-Luc Nancy and Henry A. Giroux, I wish to demonstrate how Haneke exhausts the norm of acceptable violence to reinstate such a limit anew. Keywords: Haneke, violence, affect, brutality, Funny Games U.S., cinema Michał Kisiel holds a PhD in Humanities and an MA in English from the Uni- versity of  Silesia in  Katowice. His doctoral dissertation focused on  the  unfolding of  Samuel Beckett and  Tadeusz Kantor by  means of new materialist methods. His interests include the correspondence between literature and philosophy, and the ontological turn in humani- ties. In  2015, he  participated in  The  Northwestern University Paris Program in Critical Theory. monika kocot Department of British Literature and Culture University of Łódź Poland A Celebration of the Wild. On Earth Democracy and the Ethics of Civil Disobedience in Gary Snyder’s Writing The article attempts to shed light upon the evolution of Gary Snyder’s “mountains-and-rivers” philosophy of living/writing (from the Buddhist anarchism of  the  1960s to  his peace-promoting practice of  the  Wild), and focuses on the link between the ethics of civil disobedience, deep ecology, and deep “mind-ecology.” Jason M. Wirth’s seminal study titled 300 Captive Minds Normativities and Protests r ia s v o l. 1 3, s p r in g –s u m m er № 1 /2 0 20 Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis provides an interesting point of reference. The  author places emphasis on  Snyder’s philosophical fascination with Taoism as well as Ch’an and Zen Buddhism, and tries to show how these philosophical traditions inform his theory and practice of the Wild. Keywords: Gary Snyder, the Wild, interconnectedness, interbeing, rivers, mountains, Zen, Ch’an, Tao Monika Kocot, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of British Literature and Culture at the University of Lódź, Poland. Her main aca- demic interests include contemporary British poetry, Native American prose and poetry, literary theory, and literary translation. She is the author of Playing Games of Sense in Edwin Morgan’s Writing (Peter Lang, 2016) and co-editor of Języki (pop)kultury w literaturze, mediach i filmie (Wydawnic- two Uniwersytetu Łodzkiego, 2015), Nie tylko Ishiguro. Szkice o literaturze anglojęzycznej w Polsce (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2019), and Moving between Modes. Papers in Intersemiotic Translation. In Memo- riam Professor Alina Kwiatkowska (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego 2020). She is a member of the Association for Cultural Studies, The Asso- ciation for Scottish Literary Studies, and the French Society of Scottish Studies (SFEE). She is the President of The K.K. Baczynski Literary Society. monika kołtun Faculty of Humanities University of Silesia in Katowice Poland The Tragedy of a Whistleblower Adamczewski’s Tragic Protest and the Case of Chelsea Manning Bringing most carefully guarded secrets into light, political whistle- blowers deconstruct the essential oppositions upon which superpower ideologies are founded: they draw popular attention to  what has been relegated to  the  margins of  the  dominant discourses. Torpe- doing the reputations of the most powerful organizations in the world, and  well aware of  the  inevitability of  retaliation, they put themsel- ves in  a  most precarious position. Fighting against impossible odds in the name of the greater good, facing the gravity of the consequences, they become heroes in the classical sense of the word: arguably, their dilemmas are not unlike those faced by Antigone, Hamlet and other iconic figures in history, literature and mythology. Such is the central premise of this article. The methodological frame for the analysis of the material in this study has been adopted from Zygmunt Adamczewski’s The Tragic Protest, whose theory, bringing together classical and modern approa- ches to tragedy, allows for the extrapolation of the principles underlying the protest of such iconic figures as Prometheus, Orestes, Faust, Hamlet, Thomas Stockman or  Willy Loman to  discourses outside the  grand narratives of culture. His theory of the tragic protest serves as a tool facilitating the identification of the features of a quintessential tragic 301 r eview o f in ter n a tio n a l a m er ica n stu d ies Captive Minds Normativities and Protests RIAS vol. 13, Spring–Summer, № 1/2020 protester, which Adamczewski attains by means of the study of the defi- ning traits of mythological and literary tragic heroes. It is against such a backdrop that I adapt and apply Adamczewski’s model to the study of materials related to Chelsea Manning in search of parallels that locate her own form of protest in the universal space of tragedy. Keywords: whistleblower, tragic protest, archetype, Chelsea Manning Monika Kołtun, a PhD Candidate at the University of Silesia in Katowice, holds an  MA degree in  American and  Canadian Studies for  Intercultu- ral Relations and Diplomacy. As a graduate, she spent a year studying at the University of the Fraser Valley in Canada. Monika Kołtun autho- red an  article titled “Signed: Gombrowicz. ‘Pupa,’ the  Western Canon, and  the  English Translation of  Ferdydurke” in  a  high-ranking journal of  translation studies Między Oryginałem a  Przekładem. Her research interests embrace a  variety of  problems within the  areas of  cultural and literary studies, anthropology, politics, and ethics. giorgio mariani The “Sapienza” University of Rome Italy Emerson’s Superhero After offering some preliminary remarks on the notion of what makes a “captive mind,” the article shifts its attention to one of the most signi- ficant and yet relatively neglected early essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the essay “War.” This text, I argue, deserves not only to be considered the  (largely forgotten) founding document of  the  American anti-war movement, but  it  remains important even today, as  it sheds light on  the  inevitable contradictions and  double-binds any  serious move- ment against war and for social justice must face. It is a text, in other words, which helps us highlight some of the problems we run into—both conceptually and practically—when we try to free our minds from a given mindset, but we must still rely on a world that is pretty much the out- come of the ideologies, customs, and traditions we wish to transcend. To imagine a world free of violence and war is the age-old problem of how to  change the  world and  make it  “new” when the  practical and  intel- lectual instruments we have are all steeped in the old world we want to  abolish. Emerson’s thinking provides a  basis to  unpack the  aporias of what, historically speaking, the antiwar movement has been, both inside and  outside the  U.S. The  article concludes by  examining some recent collections of  U.S. pacifist and  anti-war writings, as  providing useful examples of the challenges antiwar, and more generally protest movements, must face. Keywords: Ralph Waldo Emerson, anti-war movement, protest move- ments Giorgio Mariani is a Professor of American Literature at the “Sapienza” University of Rome, Faculty of Letters and Philosophy. He has served 302 Captive Minds Normativities and Protests r ia s v o l. 1 3, s p r in g –s u m m er № 1 /2 0 20 as President of the International American Studies Association (IASA), from  2011 to  2015. His work has concentrated on  nineteenth-century American writers (Emerson, Melville, Stephen Crane, and others); on con- temporary American Indian literature; on literary theory; on the literary and cinematic representation of war. He has published, edited, and co- edited several volumes, listed below. His essays and  reviews have appeared in many journals, including American Literary History, Studies in American Fiction, Fictions, RIAS, RSA Journal, Stephen Crane Studies. Nuovo Corrente, Zapruder, Leviathan, Letterature d’America, AION, Acoma, Studi Americani. With Donatella Izzo he edits the American Studies series of  the  Sapienza UP, and  with Donatella Izzo and  Mauro Pala he  edits the  series “Le Balene” published by  La Scuola di Pitagora. He  is co- editor-in-chief (with Donatella Izzo and Stefano Rosso) of Acoma. Rivista internazionale di studi nord-americani. His books published in  English include:  Waging War on  War. Peacefighting in  American Literature (2015), Post-tribal Epics: The  Native American Novel between Tradition and  Modernity (1996), Spectacular Narratives: Representations of  Class and War in Stephen Crane and the American 1890s (1992). john matteson Department of English John Jay College of Criminal Justice City University of New York USA Mailer, Doctorow, Roth A Cross-Generational Reading of the American Berserk Of all  American paradoxes, none is  greater than this: that the  typical American cherishes free speech but is almost mortally offended by public protest, which he  regards as  at  best lacking in  taste and  at  worst an outright crime. A nation founded on dissent, America is exquisitely uncomfortable with  ill-mannered disagreement. More than freedom itself, an  American is  likely to  value moral insularity and  absolution: he  wants to  live his  life free from  ethical challenge. He seeks subur- ban anesthesia, a life of commercial abundance untroubled by the pain inflicted elsewhere to maintain it, whether through military aggression or  the  global exploitation of  labor. The  American hopes to  be remin- ded that he  is good and  blameless—and quickly condemns his  critics as envious or mad or driven by dark agendas. As by an unwritten law, he denounces protest as an offense against his amour propre. This con- demnation, ipso facto, makes a  figurative criminal of  the  protester, who, when her efforts are scorned, finds herself not  trying to  persu- ade, but acting in a spirit of resentment and self-vindication. She sees any  act by  her countryman that does not  challenge the  social sys- tem as intolerable evidence of complicity and collaboration. The spirit of compromise vanishes, and the protester risks falling into the attitude described by Philip Roth as “the American berserk.” My article exami- nes this process of polarization through three indispensable American 303 r eview o f in ter n a tio n a l a m er ica n stu d ies Captive Minds Normativities and Protests RIAS vol. 13, Spring–Summer, № 1/2020 novels of protest: Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night; E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel; and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. Keywords: protest, radicalism, liberalism, conscience, literature, Nor- man Mailer, E. L. Doctorow, Philip Roth John T. Matteson is a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. He has an  AB in  history from  Princeton University and  a  PhD in  English from Columbia University. He also holds a JD from Harvard and has prac- ticed as a litigation attorney in California and North Carolina. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal; The New York Times; The Har- vard Theological Review; New England Quarterly; Nineteenth-Century Prose; Leviathan: A  Journal of  Melville Studies;  and other publications. His first book, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father,  was awarded the  Pulitzer Prize in  2008. His more recent book The Lives of Margaret Fuller has been awarded the Ann M. Sperber Prize for Best Biography of a Journalist. Professor Matteson’s annota- ted edition of Alcott’s Little Women, published by W. W. Norton in 2015, reached #1 on Amazon’s list of best-selling works of children’s literary criticism. Professor Matteson is a Fellow of the Massachusetts Histori- cal Society and a former Fellow of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, where he formerly served as deputy director. He has received the Dis- tinguished Faculty Award of  the  John Jay College Alumni Association and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement by a PhD Alumnus of the Columbia University School of Arts and Sciences. His new a book, A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Chan- ged a Nation, is currently in print. federica perazzini The “Sapienza” University of Rome Italy Paradigms of Otherness The American Savage in British Eighteenth-Century Popular and Scholarly Literature In this article, I trace the changes in the literary and material represen- tations of the indigenous peoples of North America within the British sphere of  cultural production. As  a  first example, I  give an  account of the episode of the “Four Iroquois Kings” envoy at Queen Ann’s court in 1710, focusing on the resonance of such a historical encounter in popu- lar texts and  iconographic material. As  a  second example, I  analyze the popular story of Inkle and Yarico included in Richard Steele’s The Spec- tator in 1711, showing its impact on the early Enlightenment reflections on  colonial trade. In  my conclusion, I  examine the  role of  American natives in the scholarly works of the Scottish Enlightenment, in order to show how they were used as comparable types for the observation of the roots of European civilizations thus justifying the construction https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393333596 https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393333596 https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393343595 https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393247077 https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393247077 304 Captive Minds Normativities and Protests r ia s v o l. 1 3, s p r in g –s u m m er № 1 /2 0 20 of the British imperial hegemony both geopolitical terms and discursive practice. Keywords: American savages, public sphere, popular literature, Scottish Enlightenment, British Empire Federica Perazzini is Researcher in English Literature at the “Sapienza” University of  Rome where she currently teaches English Literature and  Culture. Awarded a  Fulbright Fellowship in  2011, she was visiting researcher at  Stanford University where she joined Franco Moretti’s research group at the Literary Lab. Her main research interests involve the application of computational tools to the study of literary genres and cultural discourse analysis. Her pioneering dissertation, published in two volumes in 2013, is an example of computational criticism applied to the case study of the English gothic novel. Her latest research pro- jects include the computational analysis of the emergence of modern subjectivity in  the  Long 18th Century (La Cifra del Moderno, 2019) and  the  publication of  a  study on  the  intersections between fashion and English literature titled Fashion Keywords (2017). małgorzata poks Faculty of Humanities University of Silesia in Katowice Poland “Where Butchers Sing Like Angels” Of Captive Bodies and Colonized Minds (With a Little Help from Louise Erdrich) The Master Butchers Signing Club—Louise Erdrich’s “countehistory” (Natalie Eppelsheimer) of the declared and undeclared wars of Western patriarchy—depicts a  world where butchering, when done with  preci- sion and expertise, approximates art. Fidelis Waldvogel, whose name means literally Faithful Forestbird, is  a  sensitive German boy turned the first-rate sniper in the First World War and master butcher in his adult life in America. When Fidelis revisits his homeland after the slau- ghter of World War II, Delphine, his second wife, has a vision of smoke and ashes bursting out of the mouths of the master butchers singing onstage in a masterful harmony of voices. Why it is only Delphine, an out- sider in  the  Western world, that can see the  crematorium-like reality overimposed on the bucolic scenery of a small German town? Drawing on decolonial and Critical Animal Studies, this article tries to demystify some of the norms and normativities we live by. Keywords: Louise Erdrich, decoloniality, species war, normative humanity Małgorzata Poks, PhD is  an  assistant professor at  the  Institute of Literary Studies, Faculty of Humanities, at the University of Silesia in  Katowice, Poland. Her main research interests revolve around con- temporary North American Literature, Indigenous Studies, US-Mexican 305 r eview o f in ter n a tio n a l a m er ica n stu d ies Captive Minds Normativities and Protests RIAS vol. 13, Spring–Summer, № 1/2020 border writing, Critical Animal Studies, Christian anarchism, Thomas Merton’s late poetry. She has published widely in  Poland and  abroad. Her monograph Thomas Merton and Latin America: a Consonance of Voi- ces (2006) received the International Thomas Merton Award and in her article “Home on the Border: in Ana Castillo’s The Guardians: The Colo- nial Matrix of Power, Epistemic Disobedience, and Decolonial Love” was awarded the 2019 Javier Coy Biennial Research Award. Poks is also a reci- pient of several international research fellowships. john eric starnes Faculty of Humanities University of Silesia in Katowice Poland Black Flag under a Grey Sky Forms of Protest in Current Neo-Confederate Prose and Song While ‘tragic’ protest and protest songs are normally conceived of as ori- ginating on the political left of American culture, in recent years protest from  the  political right, specifically the  racist right has flown under the cultural radar of most researchers of American studies. This article strives to  explore the  ways in  which the  neo-Confederate movement is currently protesting the state of cultural, political, and social affairs in the contemporary American South. The neo-Confederate movement is one of the oldest forms of ‘conservative’ protest present in the United States, originating out of the defeat of the Confederacy and the civic religion of the ‘Lost Cause’ of the last decades of the 1800s into the first three decades of  the  1900s. Since the  neo-Confederate movement is  both revolutionary and  conservative, it  is possible to  derive some valuable insights into the contemporary reactionary politics of the right by examining a brief sampling of the protest songs, novels, and essays of this particular subculture. Keywords: neo-Confederate, radical fiction, racist revolutionary subcul- ture, U.S. cultural history J. Eric Starnes is a native of North Carolina with a BS and an MA in his- tory, as well as a PhD in American Literature. His main fields of research revolve around the study of nationalism, revolutionary fiction (fiction that advocates revolution), revolutionary subcultures, psychology— particularly the  study of  historical trauma, Jungian social psychology, and the Men’s Rights Movement. Starnes is the author (among others) of: “The Riddle of Thule: In Search of the Crypto-History of a Racially Pure White Utopia” (2015) and  “The Ties of  Revolution, The  Knots of Race: An Examination of Two ‘Revolutionary’ American Pacific Nor- thwest Novels” (2018).