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This book develops a theory of political animal voices in three steps. The first part focuses on language. Drawing on insights from recent studies in biology and ethology, it challenges a view of language as exclusively human and argues that other animals speak. It also investigates the relation between developing common languages and creating common interspecies worlds. The second part of this book focuses on interspecies politics; it challenges an anthropocentric demarcation of the political and develops an alternative, which takes into account non-human animal agency and interspecies political relations. The third and final part of the book draws on the insights about language and politics developed in the first two parts to investigate how existing political practices and institutions can be extended to incorporate non-human animal political voices, and to explore new ways of interacting with other animals politically. In addition to the theoretical chapters, the author discusses two case studies. In the first, she draws on her experiences of learning how to live with a stray dog from Romania. In the second, she focuses on the goose-human conflict in the Netherlands.

Archiving an Epidemic is the first book to examine the devastating effect of the AIDS crisis on a generation of Chicanx artists who influenced transgressive genders and sexualities operating in the Chicana and Chicano art movement in Southern California. From mariconógraphy to renegade street graffiti, from the Barrio Baroque to Frozen Art, these visual provocateurs introduced a radical queer languageemboldened by opportunities in LA’s art and retail culturein the 1980s. AIDS not only ravaged their lives, but also devastated their archives. A queer archival methodology is demanded to ascertain how AIDS and its losses and traumas have rearticulated recordkeeping practices beyond systemic forms of preservation. The resulting “archival bodies/archival spaces” of queer Chicanx avant-gardists Mundo Meza (1955–1985), Teddy Sandoval (1949–1995), and Joey Terrill (1955–present) refutes dismissive arguments that these provocateurs have had little consequence for the definition of the aesthetics of Chicano art and performance. With appearances by Laura Aguilar, Cyclona, Simon Doonan, David Hockney, Christopher Isherwood, Robert Mapplethorpe, and even Eddie Murphy, this book stands in defense of the alternative archivesthat emerged from this plague. Thinking outside traditional terms of institutional mediation, Archiving an Epidemic speculates not what Chicana/o art is but what it could have been.

Korean women and children have become the forgotten population of a forgotten war. Framed by War traces how the Korean orphan, GI baby, adoptee, birth mother, prostitute, and bride—figures produced by the US military—were made to disappear. Strained embodiments of war, they brought Americans into Korea and Koreans into America, intimate crossings that defined, and at times defied, US empire in the Pacific. The book looks to US and South Korean government documents and military correspondence; US aid organization records; Korean orphanage registers; US and South Korean newspapers and magazines; as well as photographs, interviews, films, and performances to suture a fragmented past. Integrating history with visual and cultural analysis, Framed by War reveals how what unfolded in Korea set the stage for US power in the postwar era. US destruction and humanitarianism, violence and care played out upon the bodies of Korean women and children, enabling US intervention and fortifying transnational connections with symbolic and material outcomes. In the 1950s Americans went from knowing very little about Koreans to making them family, and the Cold War scripts needed to support these internationalist efforts required the erasure of those who could not fit the family frame. These were the geographies to which Korean women and children were bound, but found ways to navigate in South Korea, the United States, and spaces in between, reconfiguring notions of race and kinship along the way.

“Frottage” elaborates a conceptual framework for the book. It describes how black diasporic geohistories reframe queer studies and how queer studies, in turn, reframe black diaspora studies. I identify three key terms in black diaspora studies: kinship, hybridity, and thinghood. Dominant approaches in black diaspora studies have framed the black diaspora as a search for kinship, whether biological or fictive, creating what I describe as a genealogical imperative for black diasporic intellectual and cultural production. Attempting to redress this genealogical imperative, and the racial and ethnic policing it produces, scholars including Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, and Paul Gilroy advanced the concept of hybridity, arguing that the cultural promiscuities produced through immigration and urbanization offered a way to imagine blackness as strategic and coalitional, rather than biological and ethnic. As the concept of hybridity moved from its black British context to the United States, it was appropriated by a genealogical imperative that privileged biological mixing as a “solution” to the problem of ethno-racial antagonisms. Thus, “hybridity” became a hetero-reproductive structure. I break from this genealogical imperative by arguing that “thinghood,” as theorized by Hortense Spillers and Fred Moten, provides an alternative paradigm for theorizing black being. I argue that “thinghood” is the central challenge that black diaspora studies poses for queer studies. The chapter introduces the four key figures in the book: Frantz Fanon, René Maran, Jomo Kenyatta, and Claude McKay.

This book uncovers popular games’ key role in the cultural construction of modern racial fictions. It argues that gaming provides the lens, language, and logic—in short, the authority—behind racial boundary making, reinforcing and at times subverting beliefs about where people racially and spatially belong. It focuses specifically on the experience of Asian Americans and the longer history of ludo-Orientalism, wherein play, the creation of games, and the use of game theory shape how East-West relations are imagined and reinforce notions of foreignness and perceptions of racial difference. Drawing from literary and critical texts, analog and digital games, journalistic accounts, marketing campaigns, and archival material, The Race Cardshows how ludo-Orientalism informs a range of historical events and social processes which readers may not even think of as related to play, from Chinese exclusion and the Japanese American internment to Cold War strategies, the model minority myth, and the globalization of Asian labor. Interrogating key moments in the formation of modern U.S. race relations, The Race Cardintroduces a new set of critical terms for engaging the literature as well as the legislation that emerged from these agonistic struggles.

This bookanalyzes diverse representations of environmental moral engagement in contemporary mediated popular culture. It identifies and explores intertwining, co-constitutive, yet contrary stories of what the author terms “ecopiety” and “consumopiety” as they flow across multiple media platforms. The way these stories compete and conflict, vying for space as contested narratives in the public imagination, constitutes a central inquiry of the book. Drawing together theoretical insights from cultural studies, media studies, environmental humanities, and religious studies, the book offers a critical reading of primary source data drawn from such areas as the marketing of green consumer products, “greenwashed” corporate advertising, environmental mobile device applications, eco-themed reality television, the marketing of eco-funerals, Internet sharing of environmental tattoos, “green” fashion guides, and the media strategies of green hiphop activism. Taylor makes the case that a detailed, multichannel, cross-platform approach to cultural analysis is critical to understanding the kind of important “work” taking place as mediated popular culture plays an integral role in the “greening” of American moral sensibilities. Ecopiety delves into the complex and contested processes of remaking our world and rescripting the future in the digital age—a time when storytelling processes themselves are shaping and being shaped by new media outlets and digital sharing technologies.

War affects human lives and public health far beyond the battlefield, long after combat ceases. Based on ethnographic research by anthropologists, healthcare workers, social workers, and activists, these chapters cover a range of subjects from maternal health in Afghanistan, to the public health effects of US drone strikes in Pakistan, to Iraq’s deteriorating cancer care system, to the struggles of US military families to recover from combat-related trauma, among other topics. With a spotlight on the US-led wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, started ostensibly to root out terrorism, the book argues that the terror and wounds of war have no clear resolution for the people who experience it, and for the communities where battles are fought.

Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. To fathom forms of freedom and bondage today—from unlawful detention to sex trafficking, the refugee crisis, genocide—this project reads a vast range of contemporary literature, showing how the literary forms used to tell these stories derive from the antebellum genre of the slave narrative. Exploring the ethics and aesthetics of globalism, the book forwards alternative conceptions of human rights, showing that the revival and proliferation of slave narratives offer a chance not just to rethink the legacy of slavery itself, but also to assess its ongoing relation to race and the human. Taking form seriously in discussions of minority literature, the book examines key genres associated with the slave narrative: sentimentalism, the gothic, satire, ventriloquism, and the bildungsroman. By offering a theory of form and how it travels, the book argues for the slave narrative as a new world literary genre, exploring the full complexity of an ethical globalism. Traversing multiple genres and disciplines, the book speaks to African diaspora and African American studies, transnational and world literatures, American studies, postcolonial and global studies, and human rights. Showing how slavery provides the occasion not just for revisiting the Atlantic past but for renarrating the global present, Runaway Genres creates a new map of contemporary black diaspora literature.

This book focuses on the stories of eighteen transgender survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) and how their accounts challenge conventional understandings of this form of abuse. By examining the contexts in which abuse occurs, the book anchors transgender experiences with IPV within a largely trans-antagonistic culture. The dynamics of abuse, as told by survivors, are largely informed by an existing transphobic and genderist society. The prevalent themes in the accounts describe how transphobic and genderist attacks manifested as distinct patterns of abuse. When reflecting and making sense of their reality, survivors saw many of their experiences with abuse as attempts by abusers to control their gender transition and define them on the abusers’ own terms. The book discusses a prominent dynamic of the abuse as controlling transition, in which victims felt that abusers wanted to regulate their identities. This control occurs through two generic strategies: (1) discrediting identity work, redefining the situation to focus on participant-defined insecurities, a form of altercasting; and (2) targeting sign vehicles, including regulating gender transition treatments and controlling through props. Finally, survivors described what is referred to as walking the gender tightrope in which respondents used gendered language in the processing of their victim identity. Additionally, they discussed various help-seeking strategies and how they navigated genderist boundariesand barriers to these resources. The book works toward characterizing the distinct experiences of transgender survivors of IPV while also identifying differences across the intersections of race, class, and gender identities.

Equally reviled and revered as “Sin City,” Las Vegas is both exceptional and emblematic of contemporary American cultural practices and tastes. Michael Ian Borer takes us inside the burgeoning Las Vegas craft beer scene to witness how locals use craft beer to create and foster not just a local culture but a locals’ culture. Through compelling detailed ethnographic accounts and interviews, Vegas Brews provides an unprecedented look into the ways that brewers, distributors, bartenders, and drinkers fight against the perceived and preconceived norm about what “happens in Vegas” and lay claim to a part of their city that is too often overshadowed by the bright lights of tourist sites. In doing so, Borer shows how our interactions with the things we care about—and the ways that we care about how they’re made, treated, and consumed—can lead to new senses of belonging and connections with and to others and the places where we live. In a world where people and things move around at an extraordinary rate, the folks Borer spent time talking (and drinking) with remind us to slow down and learn how to taste the “good life,” or at least a semblance of it, even in a city where style is often valued over substance.