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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.