Minor Genres in Circulation: Cultural Flows and Friction in the Late American Empire

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel examines how minor cultural forms and genres—from pamphlets and jokes to translations and telenovelas—circulated in the waning years of the 20th century and served as sites of imperial strategy and anti-imperial resistance. Anchored in the broader conference theme of the Late American Empire, the panel explores the political and cultural networks that facilitated these forms' production, distribution, and reception. By analyzing the transnational flows of these "minor" genres, the panel highlights the tensions between hegemonic powers and insurgent voices during an era marked by Cold War geopolitics, decolonial movements, and emerging global solidarities. At the same time, we investigate how the political economy, cultural friction, and ideological mismatches limited the circulation of these forms.
Perin Gürel investigates the U.S. State Department's use of Nasreddin Hodja puppet shows and folk humor to foster anti-Communist sentiment in the Middle East and North Africa during the Cold War. She contrasts the materials (and their uneven reception) with the Soviet representations of Hodja as a revolutionary folk hero. Melani McAlister explores the U.S. circulation of Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani's works in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on the role of Three Continents Press in Washington, DC. Her paper addresses the challenges of publishing revolutionary literature on a shoestring budget and the broader implications of Kanafani's work in shaping transnational solidarities. Genevieve Clutario examines how pamphlets advocating for the release of political prisoners in the Philippines—such as detained beauty queens—traveled across international networks, rallying allies and creating a counter-discourse to state narratives. This paper situates these pamphlets within the broader framework of resistance literature and political activism.
Jasmine Mitchell brings us to the contemporary moment of rising neo-fascism by examining how a popular 2021 Brazilian telenovela depicts the 19th-century Portuguese empire in Brazil. Critiquing the genre’s romanticization of enslavement and erasure of Black abolitionist activism, her study critiques the perpetuation of imperial nostalgia across the Americas while highlighting resistance from Black actresses and audiences against these dominant narratives.
Together, these papers foreground the role of ephemeral and "minor" cultural forms as vital mechanisms of circulation, contestation, and meaning-making in the twilight of the American Century.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Hodja Fools Them All: Middle Eastern Folk Humor and the Cultural Cold War - Perin Gurel, University of Notre Dame

• Ghassan Kanafani in America: Radical Art in a Liberal Marketplace - Melani McAlister, George Washington University

• Guerrilla Beauty Queens: Beauty as a Political Force in Anti-Martial Law Movements - Genevieve Clutario, Wellesley College

• Televisual Imperial Nostalgia in the Americas: Recasting Empire and Benevolent Whiteness in Brazil’s Nos Tempos do Imperador - Jasmine Mitchell, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Chair

• Lili Kim, Hampshire College

Comment

• Zareena Grewal, Yale University

Biographical Information

Genevieve Clutario is Associate Professor of American Studies, Wellesley College. She is the author of Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines,1898 - 1941 (Duke University Press, March 2023) and the recipient of the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University First Book Award. She published “Pageant Politics: Tensions of Power, Empire, and Nationalism in Manila Carnival Queen Contests” in the anthology, Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (Brill Press, 2017) and “World War II and the Promise of Normalcy: Filipina Lives Under Two Empires” in Beyond the Edge of the Nation: Transimperial Histories with a U.S. Angle (Duke University Press 2020). She co-edited a special issue of the Amerasia Journal, entitled Rethinking Gendered Citizenship, with Rana Jaleel. Intimacy, Sovereignty, and Empire. Her new research project, Power and Allure: Gender, Authoritarianism, and the Promise of Development, focuses on a history of feminized power (beauty, celebrity, allure, and charisma) in the Philippines under authoritarian regimes of the Cold War, international development projects, U.S. imperialism, and the making of the global south.

Zareena Grewal is Associate Professor of American Studies, Ethnicity, Race, & Migration, and Religious Studies at Yale Universiry. She’s a historical anthropologist and a documentary filmmaker whose research focuses on race, gender, religion, nationalism, and transnationalism across a wide spectrum of American Muslim communities. Her first book, Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority (NYU 2013), is an ethnography of transnational Muslim networks that link US mosques to Islamic movements in the post-colonial Middle East through debates about the reform of Islam. Her first film, By the Dawn’s Early Light: Chris Jackson’s Journey to Islam (Cinema Guild 2004), examines the racialization of Islam and the scrutiny of American Muslims’ patriotism long before September 11 2001. Her forthcoming book, titled “Is the Quran a Good Book?”, combines ethnographic and cultural studies analyses with historical research to trace the place of the Islamic scripture in the American imagination, particularly in relation to national debates about tolerance. She has received awards for her writing and research grants from the Fulbright, Wenner-Gren and Luce Foundations.

Perin Gürel is Associate Professor of American Studies and concurrent Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She’s the author of The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey (Columbia University Press, 2017) and Türkiye, Iran, and the Politics of Comparison: America’s Wife, America’s Concubine (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Her articles have appeared in American Quarterly, American Literary History, Diplomatic History, Journal of Transnational American Studies, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Journal of Turkish Literature, and elsewhere. Her 2019 American Quarterly article, “Amerikan Jokes: The Transnational Politics of Unlaughter in Turkey,” won the 2020 Jack Rosenbalm Prize for American Humor Studies, given by the American Humor Studies Association. Her current book project explores humor in the Cold War.

Lili M. Kim is Professor of History and Global Migrations at Hampshire College. Her first book, Unlikely Enemy: Korean Americans, World War II, and the Transnational Struggle for Justice on the Homefront, investigates how Korean Americans negotiated the racial terrains of the homefront that witnessed mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. She is currently at work on her second book, In Transit: Migration, Globalization, and Koreans in Argentina and the United States, which traces the history of Korean migration to Argentina beginning in 1965, and their remigration to the United States. Her work has been supported by the NEH stipend, Fulbright grant, and Whiting Foundation Fellowship, among others. Professor Kim teaches a wide range of interdisciplinary courses that focus on the historical experiences of marginalized people. Her courses include: “From Sugar Plantation Laborers to ‘Gangnam Style’: Transnational History of Koreans in the Americas,” “Narratives of (Im)migration,” “U.S. Imperialism and Hawai‘i,” “Division II and III Seminars,” “Black and Yellow Encounters: Race, Labor, Immigration, and the Emergence of the Third World Left.”

Melani McAlister is Professor of American Studies and International Affairs at George Washington University and the president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Her most recent book, Promises, Then the Storm: Notes on Memory, Protest, and the Israel-Gaza War, is a memoir and meditation on US responses to ongoing conflict. (2024). She is also author of The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals (2018, updated ed. 2022), and Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (rev. ed. 2005, orig. 2001). She has written for the Washington Post, New York Times, the Nation, and the Atlantic, among others. The recipient of a number of honors and awards, in 2023-24 she was a Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is Treasurer and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

Jasmine Mitchell is Associate Professor of Puerto Rican and Latin Studies at Brooklyn College-City University of New York. She was formerly Associate Professor of American Studies and Media Studies at the State University of New York-Old Westbury. She is the author of Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U.S. and Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Her scholarly specialities include race and gender representation in popular culture, mixed-race, African-Americans and Afro-Brazilians, black feminisms, and race and sports. Her scholarship has been featured in wide-ranging academic to public media outlets, from Comparative Migration Studies and Social Sciences to Newsweek and The Hill.