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The 2022 ASN Book Prize

The ASN Book Prize 2022 has been awarded to Sharon Monteith, SNCC’s Stories: The African American Freedom Movement in the Civil Rights South (University of Georgia Press, 2020)

The premise of SNCC’s Stories is to look at a whole host of contemporary primary sources related to SNCC—field reports, journalism, cartoons, short stories and novels, poems and poetry collections, plays, and personal, lyrical, and essays—which constitute what the author refers to as its “narrative culture and literary history.” Monteith convinces the reader that hers is a neglected aspect of the organization’s history and one which provides entirely new insiders’ viewpoints to the topic. Not only does she dig up a range of neglected writings produced by the movement, she shows that “literary activism” was a consciously designed strategy by SNCC, one which has previously been understudied.  The novelty of her approach is that she does not valorize so-called “objective” historical accounts but sees value in exploring SNCC’s history “subjectively in ways they could not be explored in other kinds of writing.”

The book is an example of an American Studies approach par excellence, looking at intersections of politics and culture through social movements and activism, elucidating the everyday and the literary, the scholarly and the vernacular.  The various types of texts provide a nuanced discussion of the intersection of politics and culture, ranging from first-person accounts of everyday experiences, through cartoon characters of comics to literary depictions that offered a “safer space than jour­nalism, a place where writers could do justice to local people, dramatize the courage that made their lives more than ordinary.” Although not explicitly labeled as such, the starting point is transdisciplinary; it is about “studies,” rather than disciplines.

Honourable Mention

The ASN also wishes to recognise with an honourable mention Anna Pochmara, The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel (University of Georgia Press, 2021)

ASN: The Nadir and the Zenith contains a highly original and very timely theoretical design, thought-provoking arguments regarding the chosen texts, and impressive engagement with the complexities of the subject.  The panel agreed that  the closing of the historic gap, the conversation with Temperance writing, and the way the text carves out the nuances and subtleties (of resistance and affirmation) in these texts by African American authors deserves our praise.

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Beyond the White House: The First Lady in Film, Fiction, and Culture. 

This edited collection seeks to explore the representation of the First Lady in a range of different texts and media. The collection aims to examine the President’s wife in a purely cultural context by investigating the ways in which she has been represented, embodied, characterised and commemorated in film, fiction, memoir, photography and portraiture, television, theatre, education, museum studies, fashion, and social media.  

Beyond the White House is an original work that makes use of cultural interpretation to reconfigure the figure of the First Lady as a culturally authoritative individual possessing the ability to sway, change, inspire, and manipulate public attention and opinion. Moving away from biographies and histories, this is the first volume of its kind to consider the representation of the First Lady figure through the prism of popular culture - and therefore consider her impact upon ‘cultural politics’ - and the first to regard her as a strategically important socio-cultural figure.  

Removed from the patriarchal hierarchy of White House politics and expectations, the First Lady emerges as a force of her own; she subtly carves out cultural agency and gender identity despite her (in)visibility in the public eye. Simply by being the ‘First Lady of the United States’ she possesses what MaryAnne Borrelli has labelled the “performance of descriptive representation” (Women and the White House: 229). The relationship between the woman and the office is paramount; the existence of the title ‘First Lady’ permits popular culture to tolerate or reject not only political and cultural manoeuvring, but also issues of gender, race, self, location, fashion, identity, satire, memory, authority, and even pedagogy. The office of the First Lady is what the woman makes it, and in Beyond the White House she has become a commanding cultural icon. 

Possible topics might include (but are not limited to): 

• The First Lady in film and on television (both fictional First Ladies and representations of real First Ladies, such as in the new First Ladies series from Showtime)  
• First Ladies in fiction (this might be retellings of the stories of real First Ladies, or new fictional First Ladies) 
• First Ladies and self-representation, life-writing and memoir (i.e. Becoming by Michelle Obama, Hard Choices by Hilary Clinton)  
• First Ladies in education; how the role of FLOTUS is represented and taught in classrooms 
• The First Lady on display; exhibitions, curatorship and portraiture of FLOTUS  
• Photography and portraiture of the First Ladies (in magazines, photoshoots and journalism as well as official portraiture) 
• First Ladies on stage and in theatre  
• Fashion and the First Ladies (from inaugural gowns to Melania’s ‘I really don’t care’ jacket) 
• Self-representation and social media; FLOTUS on Twitter and Instagram.  
  
   

Please send 300-500 word abstracts, a short bio to Dr Anne-Marie Evans (a.evans@yorksj.ac.uk) and Dr Sarah Trott (s.trott@yorksj.ac.uk ) by 16^th July 2021.