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Bilingual Brokers: Race, Literature, and Language as Human Capital

Jeehyun Lim

Bilingual Brokers examines bilingual personhood in Asian American and Latino literature through social debates on bilingualism. Instead of arguing for or against bilingualism this study focuses on ... More

Bilingual Brokers examines bilingual personhood in Asian American and Latino literature through social debates on bilingualism. Instead of arguing for or against bilingualism this study focuses on the contingencies under which bilingualism is taken as good or bad to bring into high relief the function of language as capital in these debates. Behind the discourse of American identity, economic calculations and rationale played a significant role in challenging the long-held popular view of bilingualism as a liability. The emergence and recognition of Asian American and Latino literature take place against the backdrop of these debates on bilingualism as the place where social anxieties about American identity in the face of new immigration and globalization are worked out. Interweaving the social significance of language as human capital and the literary significance of English as the language of cultural capital, Bilingual Brokers traces a structure of feeling around the dual meaning of bilingualism as liability and asset in Asian American and Latino literature. In literary representations, bilingual personhood illustrates a regime of flexible inclusion where an economic calculus of value for racialized subjects crystallizes at the intersections of language and racial difference and is used in deliberations of social worthiness. By pointing to the nexus of race, capital, and language as the focal point of negotiations of difference and inclusion, Bilingual Brokers probes liberalism’s fault lines for racialized subjects.Less

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility

Ashon T. Crawley

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility investigates the relationship of aesthetic productions to modes of collective, social intellectual practice. Engaging black studies, queer ... More

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility investigates the relationship of aesthetic productions to modes of collective, social intellectual practice. Engaging black studies, queer theory, sound studies, literary theory, theological studies, continental philosophy, and visual studies, Blackpentecostal Breath analyses the ways otherwise modes of existence are disruptions of marginalization and violence. The immediate objects of study Blackpentecostal Breath engages are the aesthetic practices—whooping, shouting, noise-making and speaking in tongues—found in Blackpentecostalism, a multiracial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect that has one strand of its modern genesis in 1906, Los Angeles, California. Blackpentecostal Breath argues that the aesthetic practices of Blackpentecostalism constitute a performative critique of normative theology and philosophy that precede the twentieth-century moment. These performances constitute an atheological-aphilosophical project, produced against the desires and aspirations for the liberal subject of modern theological-philosophical thought. In contradistinction to the desire for subjectivity, Blackpentecostal Breath theorizes the extra-subjective mode of being together that is the condition of emergence for otherwise worlds of possibility. These choreographic, sonic, and visual aesthetic practices and sensual experiences are not only important objects of study for those interested in alternative modes of social organization, but they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture.Less

The Corpse in the Kitchen: Enclosure, Extraction, and the Afterlives of the Black Hawk War

Adam John Waterman

The Corpse in the Kitchen explores relationships between the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the enclosure of Indigenous land and extraction of Indigenous resources, and settler colonialism as a ... More

The Corpse in the Kitchen explores relationships between the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the enclosure of Indigenous land and extraction of Indigenous resources, and settler colonialism as a technique of racial capitalism. Drawing upon the literature and historiography of the so-called Black Hawk War, it looks to the colonization of the upper Mississippi River lead region as one instance of primitive accumulation for purposes of mineral accretion. While conventional histories of the Black Hawk War have treated the conflict as gratuitous and tragic, The Corpse in the Kitchen argues that the conflict between Black Hawk, settler militias, and the federal military were part of a struggle over the dispensation of mineral resources, specifically, mineral lead. The elemental basis for the fabrication of bullets, the federal state had a vested interest in control over regional lead resources, as a means of manufacturing the implements by which it would secure its sovereignty over North America. As the basis for metallic type, the abundance of lead drawn from the mines of the upper Mississippi would also occasion an expansion of printing, creating new technologies of memory and forgetting. The Corpse in the Kitchen explores the intimacies between extraction and killing, writing, printing, memory, and forgetting, a story of settlers as rapacious consumers of Indigenous peoples.Less

Experiments in Exile: C. L. R. James, Helio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness

Laura Harris

Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, James and Oiticica, Harris chart a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, ... More

Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, James and Oiticica, Harris chart a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, wherein common reception of popular cultural forms is linked to a potentially expanded, non-exclusive polity. By carefully analyzing the materiality of the multiply-lined, multiply voiced writing of the “undocuments” that record these social experiments and relay their prophetic descriptions of and instructions for the new social worlds they wished to forge and inhabit, however, Harris argue that their projects ultimately challenge rather than seek to rehabilitate normative conceptions of citizens and polities as well as authors and artworks. James and Oiticica’s experiments recall the insurgent sociality of “the motley crew” historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe in The Many-Headed Hydra, their study of the trans-Atlantic, cross-gendered, multi-racial working class of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reading James’s and Oiticica’s projects against the grain of Linebaugh and Rediker’s inability to find evidence of that sociality’s persistence or futurity, Harris show how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and seek to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms, which are for them always also aesthetic forms, in the barrack-yards of Port-of-Spain and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the assembly lines of Detroit and the streets of the New York. The formal openness and performative multiplicity that manifests itself at the place where writing and organizing converge invokes that sociality and provokes its ongoing re-invention. Their writing extends a radical, collective Afro-diasporic intellectuality, an aesthetic sociality of blackness, where blackness is understood not as the eclipse, but the ongoing transformative conservation of the motley crew’s multi-raciality. Blackness is further instantiated in the interracial and queer sexual relations, and in a new sexual metaphorics of production and reproduction, whose disruption and reconfiguration of gender structures the collaborations from which James’s and Oiticica’s undocuments emerge, orienting them towards new forms of social, aesthetic and intellectual life.Less

Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor

Allan Punzalan Isaac

Filipino Time examines how a variety of immaterial labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines and around the world, while producing bodily and affective disciplines and dislocations, also ... More

Filipino Time examines how a variety of immaterial labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines and around the world, while producing bodily and affective disciplines and dislocations, also generate and explore vital affects, multiple networks, and other worlds. Whether in representations of death in a musical or keeping work time at bay in a call center, these forms of living emerge from and even work alongside capitalist exploitation of affective labor. Affective labor involves human intersubjective interaction and creative capacities. Thus, through creative labor, subjects make communal worlds out of one colonized by capital time. In reading these cultural productions, the book traces concurrent chronicities, ways of sensing and making sense of time alongside capital’s dominant narrative. From the hostile but habitable textures of labor-time, migratory subjects live and weave narratives of place and belonging, produce new modes of connections and ways to feel time with others.The book explores how these chronicities are re-articulated in a capacious archive of storytelling about the Filipino labor diaspora in fiction, in a musical, in an ethnography, and in a documentary film. Each of the genres demonstrates how time and space are manifest in deformations by narrative and genre. These cultural expressions capture life-making capacities within the capitalist world of disruptions and circulations of bodies and time. Thus, they index how selves go out of bounds beyond the economic contract to transform, even momentarily, self, others, time, and their surroundings.Less

Flashpoints for Asian American Studies

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (ed.)

Born out of mid-century social movements, Civil Rights Era formations, and anti-war protests, Asian American studies is now an established field of transnational inquiry, diasporic engagement, and ... More

Born out of mid-century social movements, Civil Rights Era formations, and anti-war protests, Asian American studies is now an established field of transnational inquiry, diasporic engagement, and rights activism. These histories and origin points analogously serve as initial moorings for Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, a collection which considers—almost fifty years after its student protest founding—the possibilities of and limitations inherent in Asian American studies as historically entrenched, politically embedded, and institutionally situated interdiscipline. Unequivocally, Flashpoints for Asian American Studies investigates the multivalent ways in which the field has—and, at times and more provocatively, has not—responded to various contemporary crises, particularly as they are manifest in prevailing racist, sexist, homophobic, and exclusionary politics at home, ever-expanding imperial and militarized practices abroad, and neoliberal practices in higher education.Less

Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives

Janet Neary

Fugitive Testimony traces the African American slave narrative across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in order to rethink the epistemological limits of the form and to theorize the complicated ... More

Fugitive Testimony traces the African American slave narrative across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in order to rethink the epistemological limits of the form and to theorize the complicated interplay between the visual and the literary throughout its history. Gathering an archive of ante- and post-bellum literary slave narratives and visual art, the book redraws the genealogy of the slave narrative in light of its emergence in contemporary art and brings visual and performance theory to bear on the genre’s central problematic: that the ex-slave narrator must be both object and subject of the narrative to provide an eyewitness account of his or her own enslavement. The book takes as its starting point the evocation of the slave narrative in works by a number of current-day visual artists, including Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, and Ellen Driscoll, and uses the representational strategies of these artists to decode the visual work performed in 19th-century literary narratives by Elizabeth Keckley, Solomon Northup, William Craft, and Henry Box Brown. Focusing on slave narratives’ textual visuality and aspects of narrative performance, rather than the intermedial, semiotic traffic between images and text, the book argues that ex-slave narrators and the contemporary artists under consideration use the logic of the slave narrative form against itself to undermine the evidentiary epistemology of the genre and offer a model of visuality as intersubjective recognition rather than objective division.Less

Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India

Vaibhav Saria

This book seeks to describe the fullness of lives. As one of India’s third gendered populations, hijras are too often and easily relegated to positions of marginality as if their lives can be fully ... More

This book seeks to describe the fullness of lives. As one of India’s third gendered populations, hijras are too often and easily relegated to positions of marginality as if their lives can be fully contained within the imperatives of survival. By offering a way of thinking about sexuality in Indian kinship in relation to the queer figure, and by restating an argument for psychoanalytic thinking of the Indian family, the hijra is invited to step out from the long reaching shadows of global discourses of HIV prevention and human rights. Hijras are situated within the moral and ethical dramas that define their everyday lives such as discharging the duties of kinship, achieving financial solvency, choreographing love affairs, and participating in the sociality of the local world. By studying scenes in the marketplace where the flirting between the hijra and the men of the village take place, easy readings of marginality and the outsider status ascribed to the hijra are disputed. The focus is shifted from the queer son and the patriarchal father to the hijra sibling and her brother, to offer a new way of thinking about the Oedipal drama in South Asia. Dwelling with the hijras for a period of two years, begging on the trains with them and co-inhabiting various other sites offers a provocation to think about hijras as embedded in fields of power and circles of sociality that do not reduce their lives to suffocating oppression but render them in terms of aspirations for ethical accounting.Less

Postcards from Rio: Favelas and the Contested Geographies of Citizenship

Kátia da Costa Bezerra

Postcards from Rio examines the complex interconnections between notions of citizenship and space in the works of photographers and video makers. It dialogues with a large body of scholarship on Rio ... More

Postcards from Rio examines the complex interconnections between notions of citizenship and space in the works of photographers and video makers. It dialogues with a large body of scholarship on Rio de Janeiro and its favelas in particular. Only that, in this case, the point of departure is a cultural production that, coming from the peripheries, reconfigures dominant images of the favelas, their residents, and the city itself. These new mediators are mostly young people of the favelas, whose daily practices are used as the lens through which they contest stigmatized images of favelas. This cultural production lays the foundation for an aesthetic of representation involved in the appropriation and rewriting of the city as part of a process of political resistance and affirmation of difference. The book also discusses the centrality of favelas in the marketing and branding of the city as a strategy to attract external investors and tourists. The cultural productions analysed here discuss the impacts and priorities of the urban interventions on the sphere of the individual and the collectively. They also denounce the key role played by race in a logic characterized by models of exclusion and discrimination that structure the social and spatial organization of the city. The city then emerges as political space where a multiplicity of interests and urban policies are intertwined with demands for more inclusive forms of governance—certainly a form of citizenship that promotes inclusion, nondiscrimination, equal treatment, and the right to have a say over the city’s future.Less

Pre-Occupied Spaces: Remapping Italy's Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies

Teresa Fiore

By highlighting Italy’s long history of emigration to all continents in the world, as well as its lesser known colonial experiences, Fiore’s book poses Italy as a unique laboratory to rethink ... More

By highlighting Italy’s long history of emigration to all continents in the world, as well as its lesser known colonial experiences, Fiore’s book poses Italy as a unique laboratory to rethink national belonging at large in our era of massive demographic mobility. Through an interdisciplinary cultural approach, the book finds traces of globalization in a past that may hold interesting lessons about inclusiveness for the present. Fiore’s imaginative remapping of Italy’s national formation and development foregrounds the perspectives of the “outsiders,” that is, departing and arriving migrants along diasporic and (post-) colonial routes. In adopting a lens that introduces space theories by de Certeau, Lefebvre, and Soja to the trans-national dimension of the Italian nation, Fiore analyzes films, novels, songs, plays, and nursery rhymes by migrant and non-migrant authors and artists. They range from established names such as Calvino, Rodari, Mazzucco, Ghermandi, and Lakhous to lesser known artists in the English-speaking world such as Cavanna, Pariani, and Mignonette. Set in such diverse places as Argentina, Egypt, the U.S., Italy, and France, and created by authors originally from Algeria, Tunisia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Romania among other places, these works are strongly focused on the spaces where migrants travel, reside, and work. Seas and oceans, multi-ethnic neighborhoods and buildings, as well as construction sites and domestic environments, are spaces full of preoccupation about the presence of migrants as well as spaces always pre-occupied by previous stories of migration that set up commonalities rather than divisions along cultural lines.Less

Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction

Mark C. Jerng

When does racial description become racism? Critical race studies has not come up with good answers to this question because it has overemphasized the visuality of race. According to dominant ... More

When does racial description become racism? Critical race studies has not come up with good answers to this question because it has overemphasized the visuality of race. According to dominant theories of racial formation, we see race on bodies and persons and then link those perceptions to unjust practices of racial inequality. Racial Worldmaking argues that we do not just see race. We are taught when, where, and how to notice race by a set of narrative and interpretive strategies. These strategies are named “racial worldmaking” because they get us to notice race not just at the level of the biological representation of bodies or the social categorization of persons. Rather, they get us to embed race into our expectations for how the world operates. These strategies find their most powerful expression in popular genre fiction: science fiction, romance, and fantasy. This book thus rethinks both racial formation in relation to African American and Asian American studies, as well as how scholars have addressed the relationships between literary representation and racial ideology. It analyzes how genre and race build worlds. In doing so, it engages questions central to our current moment: in what ways do we participate in racist worlds? How can we imagine and build an anti-racist world?Less

Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life

Terrion L. Williamson

From sapphire, mammy, and jezebel to the angry black woman, baby mama, and nappy-headed ho, black female iconography has had a long and tortured history in public culture. The telling of this history ... More

From sapphire, mammy, and jezebel to the angry black woman, baby mama, and nappy-headed ho, black female iconography has had a long and tortured history in public culture. The telling of this history has long occupied the work of black female theorists—much of which has been foundational in situating black women within the matrix of sociopolitical thought and practice in the United States. Scandalize My Name builds upon the rich tradition of this work while taking a detour from conventional stereotype discourse to argue that black social life defies the limitations of representational thought and practice. By approaching the study of black female representation not as a mechanism of negative or positive valuation but as an opening onto a serious contemplation of the vagaries of black social life, Williamson makes a case for a radical black subject position that structures and is structured by an amorphous social order that ultimately destabilizes the very notion of “civil society.” At turns memoir, sociological inquiry, literary analysis, and cultural critique, Scandalize My Name explores topics as varied as serial murder, reality television, Christian evangelism, and the novels of Toni Morrison, to advance black feminist practice as a modality through which black sociality is both theorized and made material.Less

Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture

Mehammed Amadeus Mack

Sexagon studies the broad politicization of sexuality in French debates about immigration and diversity since the 1980s, and how that politicization is reflected in and also created by French ... More

Sexagon studies the broad politicization of sexuality in French debates about immigration and diversity since the 1980s, and how that politicization is reflected in and also created by French cultural productions. Surveying representations of communities of immigrant origin, as well as discourses circulating within them, it focuses in on literature, film, psychoanalysis, ethnopsychiatry, erotica, and feminist and gay and lesbian activist rhetoric to examine where sexualized representations take a political turn. It furthermore examines how guardians of French Culture have judged the integration of Muslim immigrants from North and West Africa—as well as their French descendants—according to these Muslims’ attitudes about gender and sexuality. More precisely, it studies the symptomatic “frustration” that French establishment figures consistently exhibit in the face of changes to a familiar France and argues that this frustration gravitates around the concept of virilism. A volatile virilism would not only animate the “difficult” Arab, black and Muslim boys so often the focus of sensational newscasts, it would also define their neighborhoods in the banlieues, their religion of Islam, and the notion of immigration itself. The frustrations studied here are crucially inflamed by a defining element of these virility cultures, namely their clandestinity. Mirroring the secret and underground qualities of “illegal” immigration, the proponents of clandestine cultures, both gay and straight, choose to withdraw away from official scrutiny within ethnic communitarian shelters that are anathema to the Republic’s desires for universalism and transparency. These sealed-off spaces of virile domain are all the more “annoying” to the surveillance apparatus for their impenetrability.Less

Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies

Kent L. Brintnall, Joseph A. Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore (eds)

Sexual Disorientations brings some of the most recent and significant works of queer theory into conversation with the overlapping fields of biblical, theological and religious studies to explore the ... More

Sexual Disorientations brings some of the most recent and significant works of queer theory into conversation with the overlapping fields of biblical, theological and religious studies to explore the deep theological resonances of questions about the social and cultural construction of time, memory, and futurity. Apocalyptic, eschatological and apophatic languages, frameworks, and orientations pervade both queer theorizing and theologizing about time, affect, history and desire. The volume fosters a more explicit engagement between theories of queer temporality and affectivity and religious texts and discourses.Less

Thinking Through Crisis: Depression-Era Black Literature, Theory, and Politics

James Edward Ford

Thinking through Crisis turns to 1930s African American literature to offer a critical response to Trauma Theory. This theoretical discourse carries a nostalgia for “European Man” that limits its ... More

Thinking through Crisis turns to 1930s African American literature to offer a critical response to Trauma Theory. This theoretical discourse carries a nostalgia for “European Man” that limits its understanding of racial and class antagonisms. Consequently, its version of “bearing witness” yields a political passivity that cannot address the injustices of racism as they are linked to class conflict. Against the political passivity produced by this idealist approach, this book offers a materialist theory of trauma that develops concepts for identifying the agency that Black life produces amid social breakdown.Less

Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence

Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig

Timothy J. Huzar and Clare Woodford (eds)

This volume forms a tribute to Adriana Cavarero’s extraordinary contribution to feminist philosophy. Responding to Cavarero’s provocative style the text presents an engagement between Cavarero, ... More

This volume forms a tribute to Adriana Cavarero’s extraordinary contribution to feminist philosophy. Responding to Cavarero’s provocative style the text presents an engagement between Cavarero, Judith Butler, Bonnie Honig, and seven other interlocutors, engaging with the themes of horrorism, sex, maternity, inclination, and the body to develop her feminist ethics of nonviolence. Presented as a musical arrangement that demonstrates Cavarero’s theory of pluriphony, this volume captures the collaborative yet diverse mood of much contemporary feminism, and particularly the inspirational, scholarly friendship between Butler, Honig, and Cavarero.Less

Undocumented and in College: Students and Institutions in a Climate of National Hostility

Terry-Ann Jones

Laura Nichols (ed.)

The current daily experiences of undocumented students as they navigate the processes of entering and then thriving in Jesuit colleges are explored in this book alongside an investigation of the ... More

The current daily experiences of undocumented students as they navigate the processes of entering and then thriving in Jesuit colleges are explored in this book alongside an investigation of the knowledge and attitudes among staff and faculty about undocumented students in their midst, and the institutional response to their presence. Cutting across the fields of U.S. immigration policy, theory and history, religion, law, and education, this book delineates the historical and present-day contexts of immigration, including the role of religious institutions. This unique volume, based on an extensive two-year study (2010–12) of undocumented students at Jesuit colleges in the United States, incorporates survey research and in-depth interviews to present the perspectives of students, staff, and the institutions.Less

Urban Formalism: The Work of City Reading

David Faflik

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin ... More

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.Less