{"title":"Making History, Making Worlds","authors":"Robin D. G. Kelley","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a898167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a898167","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48948818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Muslim American Protest Iconography and Revisionism: On the Gendered-Racial and Secular Aesthetics of (Neo)Liberal Dissent","authors":"Najwa Mayer","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a898161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a898161","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this essay, I account for the continuum of inclusion, regulation, and historical revision formative to \"Muslim American\" iconography in the late war on terror era. In 2017, a poster of a South Asian Muslim American woman wearing a hijab in the style of the United States flag was touted by transnational media as \"the face of the Trump resistance\" and carried across pro-immigration and feminist protests that imagined a more inclusive state. It was also rebuked by Muslims for desanctifying the hijab through the US flag, perceived as symbol of the state's settler-imperial violence. Tracing the poster's production—from its source artwork to its distinct revisions—and mass circulations, I consider the intersections of race, gender, and secularism in US politics, markets, and aesthetics. I situate the poster within uneven neoliberal art markets that commodify dissent as well as flexible genealogies of secular arts and civil religion, which racially discipline Islam into an aesthetic of the US state and its resistances. I then focus on the poster's mobilization in the Women's March on Washington, where Muslim women, Islam, and transnational solidarities with Palestine became subjects of feminist inclusion and contention. I argue the shifting aesthetics of gendered-racial and secular (neo)liberalism converge on Muslim American iconographies of protest and inclusion while managing the terms of Muslim protest and inclusion.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45786390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"US Urbanism and Its Pacific Histories","authors":"Kelema Lee Moses","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a898171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a898171","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43365353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Eating, Critical Distance, and Qallunaat Cosmology","authors":"Nadia Chana","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a898158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a898158","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay produces a reading of Qallunaat—glossed as white people, or sometimes non-Inuit—as they come into view via two things: their relationships with Inuit and with animals, and their reactions to Inuit relationships with animals. Alongside three filmic texts that appear—especially to those who follow Qallunaat conventions—to be about Inuit and Inuit practices of hunting and eating seals, this essay reads against the (perceived) grain to shine the spotlight on Qallunaat: What can the tensions between eating and critical distance tell us about Qallunaat cosmology? The three filmic texts in question are the Qallunaaq filmmaker Robert Flaherty's 1922 Nanook of the North, the first full-length documentary film; the Inuk performer Tanya Tagaq's 2012 Nanook of the North, in which Tagaq rewrites Flaherty's version by adding a live soundtrack; and Tungijuq, a 2009 film by Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël in which Tagaq stars and whose screenplay she co-wrote. This essay also performs its reading: Tagaq becomes the theorist who leads us in equal parts through these filmic texts and through the thick, fleshy contexts in which they are embedded. I, neither Inuk nor Qallunaaq, take on a hyperbolized critical distance as a quasi-anthropologist. Qallunaat proclivities are eagerly displayed.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47007461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Forest of Energy: Settler Colonialism, Knowledge Production, and Sugar Maple Kinship in the Menominee Community","authors":"G. Hitch, M. Grignon","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a898159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a898159","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Menominee have long tapped into and cocreated energy flows within ecosystems, particularly with maple trees. The United States, however, seized nearly all Menominee land, transforming ecosystems into industrial systems, including for maple sugar. Moreover, thermodynamic ideas of energy rendered more-than-human beings into \"the ability to do work.\" Many Menominees, however, have understood \"energy\" in the more-than-human world from a grounded, relational perspective, guided by an ethical system of reciprocity and an intellectual tradition of interconnectedness. Energy studies has critically examined how societies and cultures are entangled with energy systems, particularly fossil fuels. More research, however, on settler colonialism's impacts on ecological energies from perspectives beyond thermodynamics would greatly strengthen the field. We therefore make three major arguments. First, American settler colonialism is an act of environmental injustice that violently appropriated vast stores of energy, or wealth, embodied in the Menominee's ancestral lands. Second, the Menominee consistently adapted to and resisted colonization by utilizing their ancestral knowledge systems and interspecies ethical frameworks while appropriating dominant science and technology to further their goals. Finally, sugar maple trees provide a material example from which to incorporate an Indigenous energy theory into the study of settler colonialism.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43271553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Dialectics of Abolition","authors":"Lisa Lowe","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a898165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a898165","url":null,"abstract":"The Dialectics of Abolition Lisa Lowe (bio) Ruth Wilson Gilmore has devoted decades to the study of the prison-industrial complex and to organizing for its abolition, and her profound contributions have become cornerstones of carceral studies and the prison abolition movement owing to their compelling explanatory power. Her famous formulations that \"capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it\"1 and that \"racism is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death\"2 have become indispensable for scholars, students, and activists. Now, three decades of her essays are available to inspire new generations, meticulously collected and introduced by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano. It is a daunting task to attempt to briefly highlight Gilmore's contributions to our understanding of the conditions that lead to prison expansion and the abolition imperative, but I trust that collectively, this forum may highlight a range of them. In my comment, I emphasize the profoundly dialectical thinking and practice that underlie Gilmore's invaluable work on the buildup of US prisons in the 1980s, and the significance of her situating this expansion both within the contradictions of neoliberal globalization and in relation to the political struggles of people on the ground responding to these increasingly violent conditions. Gilmore's commitment to thinking and acting dialectically means that she always approaches prisons systematically within the conditions of globalizing racial capitalism. Situating the buildup of US prisons in the 1980s within contradictions of neoliberal globalization, she analyzes this historical shift as a transition from \"military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism.\"3 Significantly, she draws attention to how this entails the US postwar racial state's structural adjustment from \"the welfare-warfare state to the workfare-warfare state\"4 as well as the \"organized abandonment\" and \"organized violence\" of the \"anti-state state.\"5 Yet Gilmore has emphasized repeatedly that \"the prison fix\" is not an isolated phenomenon: the decisions to build prisons—and to invest in industrial punishment, policing, and military rather than in public welfare, health care, roads or schools—have been central to a structural reorganization of the US postwar \"landscape of accumulation and dispossession.\"6 [End Page 371] In other words, Gilmore emphasizes the ways that US prison expansion cannot be separated from the multiple crises of racial capitalism as it expanded globally in the second half of the twentieth century and thus, dialectically, that prisons cannot be countered as a single institution and that abolition cannot be understood or fought without consideration of this global imperial context. Racial capitalism is inherently unstable, and it comes into crisis when the contradiction between accumulation and exploitation reaches a level that is unsustainable, expressed in t","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135887735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Un/Blocked: Writing, Race, and Gender in the American Academy","authors":"Naomi Greyser","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a898162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a898162","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines writer's block (and flow) in the American academy. It critically maps the production of blocks in higher education policy, the organization of knowledge, and academics' lived experiences with inquiry. University studies scholars, such as Marc Bousquet and Christopher Newfield, have powerfully critiqued academia's corporatization. This work, however, at times glosses over the diversely felt impacts of institutionalized oppression on writing and learning. In contrast to university studies, faculty development literature has provided granular accounts of writing in a publish-or-perish climate, as in Robert Boice's classic Advice for New Faculty Members or Paul Silvia's How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing. The latter work, however, tends to offer individualized advice that risks exacerbating the very problems of the knowledge economy. The present essay underscores that written inquiry is both personal and political, bringing intersectional American studies together with university studies and affect studies to extend work on academe and social justice—such as Roderick Ferguson's The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference and Eli Meyerhoff's Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World. \"Un/Blocked\" argues that writer's block is less a psychological syndrome than a symptom of nationalist investments in academic writing as a way to manage knowledge, labor, and subject-formation. The slash in the title, then, marks writers' ongoing efforts to grapple with knowledge's terms and conditions—hard work that is part of academic inquiry itself.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41404648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}