ARTICLE ALERT

October 12, 2007

Alsultany, Evelyn
SELLING AMERICAN DIVERSITY AND MUSLIM AMERICAN IDENTITY THROUGH NONPROFIT ADVERTISING POST-9/11  (American Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 3, September 2007, pp. 593-622)

The author, an assistant professor in the Program in American Culture, University of Michigan, explores how nonprofit advertising participated in refiguring an imagined American community in relation to Islam after 9/11 when patriotic advertising campaigns flooded highway billboards, radios, magazines, newspapers, and television.  Examining how Muslim identities were packaged, marketed, and sold through nonprofit advertising, the author compares three campaigns: the Ad Councils I am an American, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) I am an American Muslim, and the U.S. Department of States Shared Values Initiative.  It demonstrates how a nonprofit organization, a civil rights group, and the U.S. government sought to deconstruct the binary opposition between American citizen and Arab Muslim terrorist that emerged after 9/11 and produced a diverse imagined American community.  The least effective one, according to the author, was that of the U.S. government as part of its expensive public diplomacy campaign. The Ad Councils PSA was presumably successful effective while the CAIR ad was hard to evaluate as it was not widely circulated.  [PUBS;MJM]

Delbanco, Andrew 
ACADEMIC BUSINESS  (New York Times Magazine, September 30, 2007, pp. 25//30)

The author, director of American studies at Columbia University, questions whether the modern university has become just another corporation.  To maintain their tax-exempt status, hospitals are required to care for indigent patients and charitable foundations are required to give away a hefty percentage of their money but what exactly are colleges doing to justify their public subsidies? Private colleges and universities pay no taxes on tuition revenues or on income from their endowments, of which Harvard boasts the largest ($35 billion). Driven by big science and global competition, top universities now compete for market share and brand-name positioning, employ teams of consultants and lobbyists, furnish their campuses with luxuries to attract paying customers and earn royalties from technologies developed with the help of government grants, thanks to the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act which permitted patents on discoveries made with public funds.  [PUBS;MJM]

McCammack, Brian 
HOT DAMNED AMERICA: EVANGELICALISM AND THE CLIMATE CHANGE POLICY DEBATE  (American Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 3, September 2007, pp. 645-668)

The author, a doctoral student at Harvard University, argues that climate change is shaping up to be the defining environmental issue of the twenty-first century, as an unlikely group, evangelical Christians that have broken rank with the faiths politically conservative leadership, now represent one of the U.S. greatest hopes for instituting meaningful legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Potentially commanding an audience of more than 100 million, these evangelical environmentalists advocate immediate legislative action inspired by a biblical foundation in principles of environmental stewardship and a commitment to caring for the worlds poor, who will bear the brunt of climate changes environmental impacts.  For a faith that has found political coherence and influence in the past quarter-century on personal moral issues such as abortion and gay marriage, the result is a potential wedge within evangelicalism surrounding rhetorical, theological, and ideological battles over biblically-based responsibilities to the environment and to mankind.  Ultimately, evangelicals may prove to be just as important for climate change, with their ability to mobilize millions of Americans on the issue, as climate change proves to be for evangelicals a re-examination of political and theological priorities. [PUBS;MJM]

Winston, Diane H.
BACK TO THE FUTURE: RELIGION, POLITICS, AND THE MEDIA  (American Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 3, September 2007, pp. 969-989)

The author, who holds the Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, believes that since 2000, many American journalists have had a come to Jesus experience.  Spurred by the rise of increasingly politicized religion and religious politics, they have rediscovered the role of religion in public life.  But is this current fascination only the latest two-step in a longstanding dance?  When New Englands earliest colonists began circulating news of important events, they framed their stories with a religious perspective: divine providence played a decisive role in covering and interpreting everyday occurrences.  Since then, religion has continued to play an important role in the both the news media and in the news narratives that helped shape Americans self-understanding.  The author examines the religious tropes of the beloved community (left) and the promised land (right) that continue to dominate media coverage of American politics.  Focusing on the twentieth century, she explores how the mainstream medias hostility to religious conservatism has changed, and why progressive religious politics are rarely covered.  [PUBS;MJM]