Editorial

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"Towards the City of our Dreams: Reading the Urban Landscape of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow," our conference theme for 2003, produced many provocative presentations, with student papers and creative readings (and performances!) coming from the departments and programs of Communications, Film Studies, History, American Studies, and Creative Writing, to name a few. Here we present both creative work and scholarly expositions as a means of celebrating the exchange of ideas between undergraduate and graduate student members of the university community and of facilitating interdisciplinary discourse -- these are the goals of the Y|X Conference and the broader initiative, which includes the bi-annual Xchanges online journal.

At the conference, held on March 28, 2003, at WSU's Student Center Building, over 55 participants presented various interpretations of the theme "Towards the City of Our Dreams: Reading the Urban Landscape of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow." Students aimed to investigate our understanding of cities and to examine the representations of cities in film, literary text, and music. Yet, the "city" served as the site for many of the topics of discussion; in this sense the "city" became symbolic rather than actual. In the six pieces included in this issue of Xchanges, the city is implicit. In some it is a specific place - New York City or Detroit, for example; in others the "city" is an ideological construct - a symbol of modernity and progress.

Four scholarly essays by WSU undergraduatees demonstrate the high caliber of the annual conference and the multiple ways in which the theme was interpreted. Shashi Thandra's essay considers Curtis Hanson's film 8 Mile and the role of the film's "transculturator," in Mary Louise Pratt's terms, in negotiating this borderland. Abha Gupta's contribution considers the realities of urban education and the role that language and a student's native dialect play in determining a student's ability to "succeed" as the subject of dominant pedigogical practices that are often resistant to, or dismissive of, urban dialects. Nadine Credi's essay uses a site seemingly remote from the city, the rural Nebraska of Willa Cather's My Ántonia, to examine the unavoidable impact of modernity, and urbanism as its necessary adjunct, on the rural subject. Leah Warshaw's paper engages with the "possible end" of postmodern literary discourse. Warshaw addresses this question, as well as what this has to do with John Milton, via Stanley Fish's and John Carey's articles written in response to the September 11th terrorist attacks.

In the Personal Reflection section, undergraduate scholar David Topolewski presents the story of Ruben Flores, boxing coach at the Azteca Gym in Pontiac, Michigan. Through a regimen of fitness, competition, and confidence-building, Flores instills in his pupil a will to excel and to defeat the foes that have destroyed the lives of some of his young boxer's peers: drugs and violence. The poetry selections from MA student David Welper, excerpts from his "Sleeping in Curves, Waking in Angles," chronicle an urbanite's encounter with his environment. Welper presents a variety of forms as frames for these meetings; in his poems, language occupies the space of the urban subject.

The Xchanges journal and the annual conference are made possible through the support of Wayne State University American Studies Program and the Rushton Endowment, an endowment devoted to the exchange of ideas between undergraduate students throughout the university and within the American Studies Program with the goal of spreading the benefits of an interdisciplinary education.

We hope you enjoy this Fall 2003 issue of Xchanges. The essays and creative work presented here are provocative and thematically wide-ranging, yet each demonstrates the American city's power to catalyze discussion and examination. Please look for the CFP for our next issue (Winter 2004) in November 2003. Xchanges' annual Winter issue is comprised of essays submitted by American and international graduate student scholars in response to an open Call for Papers on a pre-selected theme. The essays are peer-reviewed and are held to a very high standard. The Winter issues of Xchanges serve as a forum for forward thinking American Studies scholarship and the essays often reconfigure the parameters of the discipline itself. Please look for the Winter journal issue in March 2004, and we will announce the theme on this site as well. Thank you for supporting the Y|X Conference and Xchanges.