Editor's Note

Abstract

Editor's Note Mari Yoshihara This issue opens with Shana L. Redmond's presidential address delivered at the 2022 ASA annual meeting held November 3–6, 2022, in New Orleans, the first in-person conference in three years. The devastating deaths, violence, pain, mourning, policing, and confinement that filled the world during the intervening years only highlighted what Blacks have lived through for centuries. Redmond's powerful, beautiful, and heart-wrenching address, "The Dark Prelude," frees from capture the Black lives that were arrested, suspended, or terminated with a "routine" traffic stop by the police—Sundiata Acoli, Zayd Malik Shakur, and Assata Shakur on May 2, 1973; and Sandra Bland on July 10, 2015—by listening, accompanying, amplifying, and conversing with the sonic everyday of Black living. By turning our ears, eyes, hearts, and brains to the life before terror, Redmond urges us to imagine otherwise and be better. Kimberly Juanita Brown re-creates and joins the Black chorus Redmond called forth by pointing to the inquiry, immersion, politics, and prose of Black study and tracing Blackness that upends temporality. Erica R. Edwards responds to Redmond's invocation of "thick emotion" and "thick camaraderie" of Black study by beholding and listening to the Black anterior that lies in advance of and surrounds Black death and taking the reader through Redmond's act of indictment, not of the state of the field but of the world and our hearts. "Abolitionist Worldmaking" is a forum on Ruth Wilson Gilmore's muchanticipated collection of essays, Abolition Geography, published in 2022. In his introduction, convener Alyosha Goldstein situates Gilmore's decades-long contributions to the prison abolition movement in the history of abolitionism and elucidates the mode of critique that abolition requires. Alisa Bierria, Lisa Lowe, Sarah Haley, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Angela Y. Davis each reflect on the significance of the collection from a variety of perspectives, ranging from everyday movement building to the historical conditions of possibility for worldmaking as well as Gilmore's theoretical and methodological contributions. The first two essays examine settler cosmology, knowledge, and relationship to Indigenous lands and the environment. Nadia Chana's "On Eating, Critical Distance, and Qallunaat Cosmology" critically reads filmic texts that are purportedly about the Inuit and the hunting and eating of seals, showing that the tensions between eating and critical distance indeed illustrate Qallunaat (non-Inuit) cosmology. In "A Forest of Energy: Settler Colonialism, Knowledge Production, and Sugar Maple Kinship in the Menominee Community," [End Page v] the study of the impact of settler colonialism on Menominee land and their understanding of "energy," Gregory Hitch and Marcus Grignon show that the Menominee consistently adapted and resisted colonization by utilizing their ancestral knowledge systems and interspecies ethical frameworks while also appropriating dominant science and technology for their goals. The next two essays bring contrasting approaches to the racial meanings of iconography. Sharron Conrad's "More Upset Than Most: Measuring and Understanding African American Responses to the Kennedy Assassination" uses a public opinion poll conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center that illuminated African Americans' deep veneration and mourning for the slain President John F. Kennedy. Through the analysis of the poll and Black families' practice of hanging his portrait alongside images of Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King Jr., Conrad challenges scholarly assessments of Kennedy's civil rights accomplishments. In "Muslim American Protest Iconography and Revisionism: On the Gendered-Racial and Secular Aesthetics of (Neo)Liberal Dissent," Najwa Mayer traces the production and mass circulation of a poster of a South Asian Muslim American woman clad in hijab in the style of the United States flag and argues that the aesthetics of racial and secular liberalism converge on gendered Muslim American iconographies while managing the terms of Muslim protest and inclusion. Finally, in "Un/Blocked: Writing, Race, and Gender in the American Academy," Naomi Greyser offers an innovative look at the American academy. Focusing on the felt impacts of institutional oppression on writing and learning, Greyser reframes writer's block less as a psychological syndrome than as a symptom of nationalist investment in academic writing as a means of managing knowledge, labor, and subject formation. In Book Reviews, Kristin...