Browse

In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, the cultural critic and historian Tavia Nyong’o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the wake of post-blackness. Moving fluidly between the insurgent art of the 1960s and the intersectional activism of the present day, Afro-Fabulations challenges genealogies of blackness that ignore its creative capacity to exceed conditions of traumatic loss, social death, and archival erasure. Tracking how the bodies that were speculated in as commodities became speculative bodies, he develops an account of black fabulation that is always already feminist and queer. In so doing, he revises accounts of post-humanism and new materialism that ignore the subversive potential of life lived outside the sovereign coordinates of the human. If black survival in an anti-black world often feels like a race against time, Afro-Fabulations looks to the modes of memory and imagination through which a black polytemporality is invented and sustained. “Angular sociality” names the gate and rhythm of black social life as it moves in and out of step with itself, providing its internal dynamism and drama. To outline his theory of afro-fabulation, Nyong’o takes up a broad range of sites of analysis, from speculative fiction to performance art, from artificial intelligence to blaxploitation cinema. Reading the archive of violence and trauma against the grain, Afro-Fabulations summons the poetic powers of world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life.

Growing Up Queer explores what it is like being young and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ) in the United States today. Using interviews and ethnographic research conducted at an LGBTQ youth drop-in center, it shows how young people understand their sexual and gender identities, their interest in queer media, and the role that family plays in their lives. The young people who participated in this research are among the first generation to embrace queer identities as kids and teens, and Growing Up Queer shows how both sexual and gender identities are formed through complicated, ambivalent processes, as opposed to the natural characteristics one is born with. In addition to showing how youth understand their identities, Growing Up Queer describes how young people navigate queerness within a culture in which being gay is the “new normal.” Using Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer orientation, it argues that being queer is not just about one’s sexual and/or gender identity but is also understood through intersecting identities including race, class, ability, and more. By showing how society accepts some kinds of LGBTQ-identified people while rejecting others, Growing Up Queer provides evidence of queerness as a site of social inequality. The book moves beyond an oversimplified examination of teenage sexuality and shows, through the voices of young people themselves, the exciting yet complicated terrain of queer adolescence.

In the early 2000s, New York City began to experience a surge in “stop, question, and frisks”—a police tactic that became a distinctive feature of the New York Police Department. Young black and Latino men disproportionately became the focus of this approach, which targets residents of selected neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. Nowhere is this issue more critical than in the Bronx, which became “ground zero” for many of these stops. This book draws from approximately three years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork, beginning in 2011 (the year stops would reach their highest point) and conducted in and around the 40th, 42nd, and 44th Precincts of the southwest Bronx. Relying primarily on participant observation, informal interviews, focus groups, and life-history interviews, this book examines how community members make sense of aggressive policing tactics and explores the strategies and sources of resilience these individuals use to cope. This book takes a close look at residents’ (re)conception of what it means to be a citizen and just how their right to public space has been transformed by aggressive policing tactics. Findings suggest a substantial erosion of faith in local and state institutions. Moreover, these aggressive policing tactics discourage the formation of social ties in the neighborhood—the very networks needed to get ahead.

In 1980, young, healthy women in the United States suddenly began to get sick and even die. The unexpected link to these deaths was superabsorbent tampons. Thousands of women used them during their menstrual periods, signaling the potential for a large-scale outbreak. Toxic Shock: A Social History traces the emergence of this new illness of toxic shock syndrome (TSS) and its relationship to tampon technology. This multifaceted history engages microbiology, design and innovation, journalism and mass communication, product liability, and federal policy and regulation. The broad scope captures the various approaches that contributed to defining meaning about the emergent illness. Vostral argues that tampon-related TSS was a paradigm shift in the way that illness manifests. No longer was an infection necessarily the origin of disease, or a faulty product the direct cause of injury. Together, a new pathway to an illness formed, in which a supposedly inert tampon became interactive, and a bacterium once in equilibrium grew dominant and produced toxins. Toxic Shock: A Social History makes a case for understanding tampon-related TSS as the result of biocatalytic activity between technology and bacterium. Moreover, though women were the primary consumers of tampons, the bacterium became the unintended users. This unusual disease process challenged standard approaches to public health, required women to evaluate technological risk, and currently serves as a harbinger about other internal medical devices used and worn within the human body.

In On Infertile Ground, Jade S. Sasser explores how a small network of international development actors, including private donors, NGO program managers, scientists, and youth advocates is bringing population back to the center of public environmental debate. With an increasing focus on climate change coming to dominate news media and international development circles, population advocates have harnessed an opportunity to reframe population growth as an urgent source of climate crisis, and a unique opportunity to support women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) via funding international family planning policy. Making Sexual Stewards follows the network through a diverse range of sites—from Silicon Valley foundation headquarters to youth advocacy trainings, the halls of Congress and an international climate change conference—to investigate how the new population advocacy is constructed and circulated, while drawing on longstanding development narratives linking population growth to environmental scarcity and geopolitical instability. Sasser argues that this advocacy revolves around framing the sexual steward: a neoliberal development subject sitting at the nexus of discourses linking scientific knowledge production, creative donor advocacy, and youthful advocacy focused on global social justice.

Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory reassesses the legacy of the Vietnam War through the figure of South Vietnam. More specifically, it offers a reinterpretation of the military policy of Vietnamization. In 1969, Richard Nixon pledged to “Vietnamize” the regional armed conflict in Indochina, placing all responsibility for winning the war onto the South Vietnamese—a “transfer” of power that ended in the swift collapse of the south to northern communist forces in 1975. It recognizes that Vietnamization and the end of South Vietnam signals not just an example of flawed American military strategy but an allegory of power, providing subterfuge for U.S. imperial losses while denoting the inability of the Vietnamese and others to become free, modern liberal subjects on their own. The main thesis of this book is that the collapse of South Vietnam under Vietnamization complicates the already difficult memory of the Vietnam War, pushing more for a better critical understanding of South Vietnamese agency and self-determination beyond their status as the war’s ultimate “losers.” The denial of a viable independent future for South Vietnam produces a compensatory demand for increased South Vietnamese representation, knowledge production, and memory-making. Through a multi-method examination of different case studies, from refugees returning to the homeland to refugee anti-communist politics to refugee participation in the U.S. War on Terror, the book pushes scholars to consider not simply the ways refugees are Vietnamese but how they are Vietnamizing their social landscapes and political environments.

This book offers multiple inroads into thinking with and through the dominant tropes of sexuality. By analyzing particular works of art, each chapter draws our attention to specific aspects of pornotropic (violent and exoticizing) capture that black and brown people must negotiate. These technologies differ, but together, they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters. In addition, the book identifies and analyzes moments that exceed these constraints—the sensual excess that is theorized as brown jouissance. Brown jouissance is a political and philosophical intervention into what constitutes selfhood, knowledge, and fleshiness. The book works through several examples of brown jouissance in the work of Lyle Ashton Harris, Kara Walker, Mickalene Thomas, Xandra Ibarra, Amber Hawk Swanson, Cheryl Dunye, Carrie Mae Weems, Nao Bustamante, Patty Chang, and Maureen Catbagan by dwelling on the analytic possibilities opened by the artwork’s entanglement with the sensual. The sensual, in turn, leads us to imagine possibilities for orienting relationality around queer femininity.

Emergent Worlds reframes the modernity of nineteenth-century America by displacing three central critical narratives about the era: the westward spread of imperialism, the redemptionist story of black freedom, and the notion that the United States constituted a new world. It begins by identifying dissonant forms of time that ought not to have existed if these three metanarratives were total: chance on a Pacific whaling vessel, a calm on a Caribbean slave ship, and a near apocalypse on an Atlantic merchant ship. These oceanic times provide a gateway into larger historical and geographical frames. They reveal that nineteenth-century America existed in historical interstices in the world-system: between colonialism and the nation, slavery and freedom, subject and citizen, old world and new. With this historical repositioning, Emergent Worlds makes visible a series of transitional ideologies and figures that emblematize them, such as the queer migrant, the suspended state, and the living dead, which are passed over if the modernity of the era is assumed. Such configurations in turn produced symptomatic forms of consciousness oriented around the perception of time. These four domains—oceanic space, transitional historical position, emergent ideology, and dissonant time—created the conditions of possibility for three previously uncataloged genres of the 1850s: the Pacific elegy, the black counterfactual, and the immigrant gothic. Emergent Worlds thus carries out a generic reclassification that brings together this international mix of canonical and noncanonical books of the 1850s, showing how they internalized and attempted to transcend their own historical conditions of possibility.

This book presents two cases of faith-based community organizing for and among the formerly incarcerated. It examines how the Community Renewal Society, a protestant-founded group, and LA Voice, an affiliate of the Catholic-Jesuit-founded PICO National Network, foster faith-based community organizing for the formerly incarcerated. It conceptualizes the expanding boundaries of democratic inclusion—in order to facilitate the social integration of the formerly incarcerated—as prophetic redemption. It draws from participant observation and semistructured interviews to examine how the Community Renewal Society offered support for the Fighting to Overcome Records and Create Equality (FORCE) project, while LA Voice offered support for the Homeboy Industries–affiliated Homeboys Local Organizing Committee (LOC), both as forms of prophetic redemption. Both FORCE and the Homeboys LOC were led by formerly incarcerated persons, and drew from their parent organizations’ respective religious traditions and community organizing strategies. At the same time, FORCE and Homeboys LOC members drew from displays learned in recovery to participate in community organizing. The result was that prophetic redemption led to an empowering form of social integration, “returning citizenship.”

This book about Korean American immigrant families is the result of a collaboration between an anthropologist and a psychologist. Combining quantitative surveys with family ethnography, the book explored the central question, How do Korean American teens and parents navigate immigrant America? Both survey and ethnographic data revealed that acculturation differences between parents and teens—long assumed in the psychological literature to account for distress—did not necessarily make for family hardship. Instead, this research found that families struggle together, although not always easily, to figure out how best to navigate an American society that they all understood to be racist. This is not to say that the parents did not speak about cultural distinctions or that they were unconcerned about academic achievement. But what these parents anguished over most was how to fortify their children with protective psychological health and character traits that would allow them to succeed. Ethnographic chapters on five Korean American immigrant families introduce the parenting strategies and adolescents’ responses, which were at times defiantly resistant, sometimes accommodating, and at other times enormously appreciative. The book examines the delicate negotiations between parents and teens in the intimacy of family life, following them from homes to shopping malls, music recitals, church, workplaces, and school. The five families reflect a diversity of family dynamics, but uniting them all is the hard work that parents and children engage in to maintain the bonds of their family relationships.