Edward Clough

University of Nottingham, Liberal Arts, Faculty Member

Newcastle University, School Of English Literature Language and Linguistics, Faculty Member

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Teaching Associate in Liberal Arts at University of Nottingham, UK. Previously Lecturer in American Modernist Literature at Newcastle University, UK and Lecturer in American Literature & Culture at University of Manchester, UK.

My teaching and research focuses on social, cultural, and artistic representations of space and power in relation to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. I am particularly interested in the expression of these ideas in twentieth century literature, contemporary popular music, world cinema, and in relation to the legacies of slavery and the plantation in the US.

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Matt Karp

Princeton University

Mark L. Thompson

University of Groningen

Ruben López-Cano

Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya

Timothy N Laurie

University of Technology Sydney

calvin warren

Emory University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Amy Clukey

University of Louisville

Manfred Malzahn

United Arab Emirates University

Athanasios Vionis

University of Cyprus

Niccolò Scaffai

University of Siena / Università di Siena

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Papers by Edward Clough

Introduction: Cultures of Protest in American Music

Comparative American Studies, 2021

This special issue, with its focus on Cultures of Protest in American Music, is anchored in the i... more This special issue, with its focus on Cultures of Protest in American Music, is anchored in the investigation, from various diverging perspectives, of a set of core questions. What possibilities of protest can be found in music? How does music, as a form of artistic expression and cultural communication, facilitate – or even articulate in itself – the act of protest? What changes, in measurable societal and political terms, can the production and reception of music in the contemporary world in general, and in the Americas in particular, engender and create?

Devil Is Fine, Devil Is Kind: Slave Spirituals, Satanic Black Metal, and Cultural Appropriation in the Music of Zeal & Ardor

Comparative American Studies, 2021

This article explores the relationship between cultural appropriation, musical protest, and Afric... more This article explores the relationship between cultural appropriation, musical protest, and African American history, as foregrounded in the music of avant-garde metal band Zeal & Ardor. Under the leadership of mixed-race Swiss-American multi-instrumentalist Manuel Gagneux, the band gained prominence in 2016 for combining the influences of Satanism and Scandinavian black metal with African American spirituals and blues. Such a combination has allowed Zeal & Ardor to creatively engage the violence of African American historical experience and sonically and conceptually explore the possibilities of an alternative account of African American experience under the influence of individualism and self-determination as promoted in Satanic philosophies. This proposition becomes complicated, however, when the Satanic worldview espoused in Scandinavian black metal articulates not only an aggressive critique of Christianity, but also, in a number of instances, the promotion of white supremacist and national socialist worldviews. The resultant combination of these clashing influences is a complex interlinking of musical traditions and ideological positions through which Zeal & Ardor explores cultural appropriation as a form of protest, and ultimately embraces jarring juxtapositions and messy fusion as a necessary mode of artistic expression amid the racial tensions and culture wars of the early twenty-first century.

Enthusiasm and Difficulty: Teaching Popular Subjects in American Studies – The Case of Beyoncé

Journal of American Studies, 2020

Dying of the Stranger’s Disease: Yellow Fever, Racial Exclusion, and Narrative Space in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!

Faulkner Journal, 2017

"Poisonous Possibilities: Telling Stories and Telling Ruins in Donna Tartt's The Little Friend"

Mississippi Quarterly, 2015

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"In Search of Sunken Graves: Between Postslavery and Postplantation in Charles Chesnutt's Fiction"

Southern Quarterly, 2015

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"Violence and the Hearth: Lynching and Resistance in Go Down, Moses"

Mississippi Quarterly, 2012

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"Duelling and Jamming: Hurricane Katrina, Everyday New Orleans, and the Satisfactions of Treme"

Dramatising Disaster: Character, Event, Representation, ed. Christine Cornea & Rhys Owain Thomas (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013): 102-117.

The crisis of New Orleans in the wake of 2005's Hurricane Katrina has, to date, been less the pro... more The crisis of New Orleans in the wake of 2005's Hurricane Katrina has, to date, been less the problem of reconstruction than the question of it. The process of recovery that the disaster demanded also held in it potential for reinvention; the city's restoration also presented an opportunity for re-conception. Despite its leisured touristic image, New Orleans has for centuries been a city of extreme racial and economic divisions, whose civic leaders have typically adopted short-term rather than long-range solutions, aimed at ameliorating or obscuring rather than solving the city's substantial social problems. Post-Katrina, the city's tourist industry -particularly centred on the French Quarter -has been restored and maintained, but so the city's traditionally high rate of individual poverty i and murder ii , factors which particularly affect the city's majority black population.

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Drafts by Edward Clough

"The darkness has a lot more territory": True Detective and Southern Desolation

Studying the South: Approaches and Orientations, Southern Studies in the UK Network (SSUKN) colloquium, University of Hertfordshire, Aug 26 2017

Popular representation of the US South is dominated by images of ruin and decay. From skeletal pl... more Popular representation of the US South is dominated by images of ruin and decay. From skeletal plantation mansions to rusted shacks and trailer parks, and from eroded bayous to the broken bodies of slavery or pellagra or chain gangs, the distinctive and defining tropes of “Southern” imagery articulate a startlingly consistent impression. The region, as an imaginative geography, is predominantly constructed as a site of physical – and, consequently, moral – decline and exhaustion. In the larger project from which this paper is drawn, I examine the tensions between ideas of “static” ruin and lived “dilapidation”, and how they are separated by yet also conjoined within an overarching framework of Southern “desolation”. And no contemporary text better encapsulates this tension than the first season of True Detective (2014). Centred on the search for a suspected serial killer on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, the series is sustained on themes of depopulation and devastation. Its aesthetic frequently mixes intimate conversations in impoverished settings with broader depictions of weathered, decayed, or industrialised environments, juxtaposing the personal with the sociological. This aesthetic particularly highlights how the felt personal experience of emotional and material loss or absence – especially as experienced by impoverished and socially marginalised individuals – has been displaced by an abstracting imagery of ruin and decay as primarily aesthetic or symbolic. This tension endures throughout the series, but is most powerfully conveyed in the series’ two final sections: a climactic confrontation in a ruined antebellum fort, and a contrasting sequence of reflections on the nature of absence, mourning, and repetition while the main characters are hospitalised afterward. This paper accordingly focuses on such moments of contrast to explore how True Detective addresses notions of damage, loss, and change in a way that illuminates the central functioning of such notions within historically constructed ideas of the South.

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