Browse

This book advocates for what it calls African American aesthetic abstractionism—a representational mode whereby an artwork, rather than striving for realist verisimilitude, vigorously asserts its essentially artificial character. It argues that while realist representation potentially reaffirms the very social facts that it might have been understood to challenge (such as politically problematic racial regimes), abstractionism shows up the actual constructedness of those facts, thereby subjecting them to critical scrutiny and making them amenable to transformation. The book thus reconceives abstractive principles as a potential boon to African Americanist social critique, rather than as the antithesis to black cultural engagement that they are routinely taken to be. It further finds that literature is better able to serve an abstractionist function than either visual art or music, and that experimental prose is the literary genre within which abstractionism can be most critically effective. Ultimately then, the book argues for the displacement of realism as the primary mode of African American representational aesthetics, for the recentering of literature as a principal site of African American cultural politics, and for the elevation of experimental prose within the domain of African American literature. It makes its case by reviewing a variety of visual, musical, and literary works by artists such as Fred Wilson, Kara Walker, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Cecil Taylor, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, and John Keene.

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.

This volume brings together scholars of childhood, adulthood, and old age to explore how and why particular ages—such as sixteen, twenty-one, and sixty-five—have come to define the rights and obligations of American citizens. From the colonial period to the present, Americans have relied on chronological age to determine matters as diverse as who can cast a vote, marry, buy a drink, or qualify for a pension. Contributors to this volume explore what meanings people in the past ascribed to specific ages and whether or not earlier Americans believed the same things about particular ages as we do. The means by which Americans imposed chronological boundaries upon the ongoing and variable process of growing up and growing old offers a paradigmatic example of how people construct cultural meaning and social hierarchy from embodied experience. Further, as the contributors to this volume argue, chronological age always intersects with other socially constructed categories such as gender, race, and sexuality. What makes age different from other categories such as whiteness and maleness is that, if we are lucky to live long enough, we will all pass through the chronological markers that define us as first young, then middle aged, and finally old.

This book examines representations of Arabs, Islam, and the Near East in nineteenth-century American culture, arguing that these representations play a significant role in the development of American national identity over the century, revealing largely unexplored exchanges between these two cultural traditions that will alter how we understand them today. Moving from the period of America's engagement in the Barbary Wars through the Holy Land travel mania in the years of Jacksonian expansion and into the writings of romantics such as Edgar Allan Poe, the book argues that not only were Arabs and Muslims prominently featured in nineteenth-century literature, but that the differences that writers established between figures such as Moors, Bedouins, Turks and Orientals provide proof of the transnational scope of domestic racial politics. Drawing on both English and Arabic language sources, the book contends that the fluidity and instability of the term Arab as it appears in captivity narratives, travel narratives, imaginative literature, and ethnic literature simultaneously instantiate and undermine definitions of the American nation and American citizenship.

This book addresses popular and academic concerns that the institution of work is being irreparably damaged by digital/media technologies. The book considers three specific concerns (each in a separate chapter): 1) that all jobs may soon be automated out of existence, 2) that the sharing economy will degrade the few jobs that remain, and 3) that services like Facebook and Instagram are turning leisure into work, exploiting users in their so-called free time. Through an in-depth examination of these concerns, the book proposes that what really concerns these writers is not that work is being degraded or may soon disappear altogether, but rather that society itself is under attack, and more specifically the bonds of responsibility on which social relations depend. Drawing from recent work on affect/emotion and from the controversial antisocial thesis in queer theory, the book argues that the anxiety surrounding these transformations aims primarily not to slow or reverse these changes, but rather to solicit readers to identify with the social: to stop being irresponsible, unaccountable, lazy, self-serving, and hedonistic, and to once again engage in the hard work of being a productive member of society.

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.

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically antiblackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism. Rather than applying a pre-given philosophical framework to literature and visual culture, Becoming Human provides a model for reading African diasporic literature and visual art for the philosophical premises, interventions, and implications of these forms and traditions. Becoming Human argues that African diasporic cultural production does not coalesce into a unified tradition that merely seeks inclusion into the dominant conception of “the human” but, rather, frequently alters the meaning and significance of being (human) and engages in imaginative practices of worlding from the perspective of a history of blackness’s bestialization and thingification: the process of imagining a black person as an empty vessel, a nonbeing, a nothing, an ontological zero, coupled with the violent imposition of colonial myths and racial hierarchy. In complementary but highly distinct ways, the literary and visual texts in Becoming Human articulate being (human) in a manner that neither relies on animal denigration nor reestablishes liberal humanism as the authority on being (human). What emerges from this questioning is a radically unruly sense of being/knowing/feeling existence, one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of the current hegemonic mode of “the human.”

Before Chicano: Citizenship and the Making of Mexican American Manhood, 1848-1959 is the first book-length study of Latino manhood before the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Mexican Americans are typically overlooked or omitted from American cultural life of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite their long-standing presence in the U.S. This book dislodges the association between Mexican Americans and immigration and calls for a new framework for understanding Mexican American cultural production and U.S. culture, but doing so requires an expanded archive and a multilingual approach to U.S. culture.Working at the intersection of culture and politics, Mexican Americans drew upon American democratic ideals and U.S. foundational myths to develop evolving standards of manhood and political participation. Through an analysis of Mexican American print culture (including fiction, newspapers and periodicals, government documents, essays, unpublished manuscripts, images, travelogues, and other genres), it demonstrates that Mexican Americans in the 19^th and 20^th centuries envisioned themselves as U.S. national citizens through cultural depictions of manhood. Before Chicano moves beyond the resistance paradigm that has dominated Latino Studies and uncovers a long history of how Latinos shaped—and were shaped by—American cultural life.

Being U.S. Muslims: A Cultural History of Women of Color and American Islam offers a previously untold story of Islam in the United States that foregrounds the voices, experiences, and images of women of color in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. Until the late 1960s, the majority of Muslim women in the U.S.—as well as almost all U.S. Muslim women who appeared in the American press or popular culture, were African American. Thus, the book contends that the lives and labors of African American Muslim women have—and continue to—forcefully shaped the meanings and presence of American Islam, and are critical to approaching issues confronting Muslim women in the contemporary U.S. At the heart of U.S. Muslim women’s encounters with Islam, the volume demonstrates, is a desire for gender justice that is rooted in how issues of race and religion have shaped women’s daily lives. Women of color’s ways of “being U.S. Muslims” have been consistently forged against commonsense notions of racial, gendered, and religious belonging and citizenship. From narratives of African American women who engage Islam as a form of social protest, through intersections of “Islam” and “feminism” in the media, and into contemporary expressions of racial and gender justice in U.S. Muslim communities, Being U.S. Muslims demonstrates that it is this continual againstness— which the book names affective insurgency—that is the central hall marks of U.S. Muslim women’s lives.

This book charts an expansive history of Filipino literature in the United States, forged within the dual contexts of imperialism and migration, from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first century. It theorizes and enacts a queer diasporic reading practice that attends to the complex crossings of race and nation with gender and sexuality. Tracing the conditions of possibility of Anglophone Filipino literature to U.S. colonialism in the Philippines in the early twentieth century, the book examines how a host of writers from across the century both imagine and address the Philippines and the United States, inventing a variety of artistic lineages and social formations in the process. The book considers a broad array of issues, from early Philippine nationalism, queer modernism, and transnational radicalism, to music-influenced and cross-cultural poetics, gay male engagements with martial law and popular culture, second-generational dynamics, and the relation between reading and revolution. It elucidates not only the internal differences that mark this literary tradition but also the wealth of expressive practices that exceed the terms of colonial complicity, defiant nationalism, or conciliatory assimilation. Moving beyond the nation as both the primary analytical framework and locus of belonging, the book proposes that diasporic Filipino literature has much to teach us about alternative ways of imagining erotic relationships and political communities.

In the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, an observation saliently circulated in public: Black children are not seen as children. Yet when and how is black embodiment of any age accurately seen? Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life argues that age for people of the black diaspora has been historically constituted as “untimely.” Over various phases of the transatlantic slave trade, the black body had been separated from hegemonic relations to human time. Black age became contingent, malleable, and suited for the needs of enslavement. As a result, black embodiment became figural of any age at all, and age itself came to signify the inhumanness of blackness. Black Age posits that age is an analytical category that reveals where alternative humanisms exist, and is a figure of a counter-historical temporality of modernity. By building on Hortense Spillers’s influential theorization of blackness as having been “ungendered” during transport across the Atlantic Ocean, this book argues that blackness is concomitantly “unaged,” a process thought of as “Oceanic lifespans.” This book uncovers how critical observations of black age’s untimeliness arise from black feminist critiques of liberal humanism from the 1970s onward. By focusing on black literary culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this book examines how the history of transatlantic slavery and the constitution of modern blackness has been reimagined through the embodiment of age. Black Age tracks the struggle between the abuses of black exclusion from western humanism and the reclamation of non-normative black life.

Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left uses the notion of excess—its transgression, multiplicity, and ambivalence—to consider performances of the sixties that circulated a black political discourse capable of unsettling standard understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. Following a route from the United States to West Africa, Europe, and back, these performances staged imaginative subjectivities that could not be contained by disciplinary or national boundaries. Looking broadly at performances found in music, theater, film, and everyday life, the performers considered brought Marxist political strains into contact with black expressive strategies, restaging ideas of the subject that are proposed by each tradition. Attention to their work helps illuminate the role black theatricality played in what is understood as the radical energy of the sixties, and further reveals the abilities of blackness to transform social conditions. Following a transnational route forged by W.E.B. Du Bois and other modern political actors, this book considers the ways artists negotiated at once the local, national, and diasporic frames through which race has been represented. In the works of American singer and pianist Nina Simone, Ghanaian playwrights Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann, and California-based performer Sylvester, shared signs of racial legacy and resistance politics are articulated with regional specificity. Further, each artist explores the ways blackness responds to gender and sexuality as it proliferates images of difference. They bring important attention to the imbrication of these conditions.

The Black Radical Tragic examines twentieth-century performances and historiography as repetitions of the late-eighteenth-century Haitian Revolution as it relates to struggles for Black freedom and Black self-determination. It engages work by Lorraine Hansberry, Sergei Eisenstein, Frantz Fanon, Raymond Williams, Edouard Glissant, Eugene O’Neill, Orson Welles, Hegel, Malcolm X on Hamlet and Baruch Spinoza, and others. The book enacts a speculative encounter between Bertolt Brecht and C.L.R. James to mine questions of immediacy and mediation, repetition, self-determination, and political theater at the intersection of performance studies and Black studies.

This book explores the globalization of African American television and the way in which foreign markets, programming strategies, and viewer preferences have influenced portrayals of African Americans on the small screen. Television executives have been notoriously slow to recognize the potential popularity of black characters and themes, both at home and abroad. As American television brokers increasingly seek revenues abroad, their assumptions about saleability and audience perceptions directly influence the global circulation of these programs, as well as their content. This book aims to reclaim the history of African American television circulation in an effort to correct and counteract this predominant industry lore. Based on interviews with television executives and programmers from around the world, as well as producers in the United States, the book traces the shift from an era when national television networks often blocked African American television from traveling abroad to the transnational, post-network era of today. While globalization has helped to expand diversity in African American television, particularly in regard to genre, it has also resulted in restrictions, such as in the limited portrayal of African American women in favor of attracting young male demographics across racial and national boundaries. The book underscores the importance of examining boardroom politics as part of racial discourse in the late modern era, when transnational cultural industries like television are the primary sources for dominant representations of blackness.

From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siècle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character, that curiously formable yet equally formidable “stuff,” has had a long and checkered history giving shape to the American national identity. This book reconceives this pivotal category of nineteenth-century literature and culture by charting the development of the concept of “character” in the fictional genres, social reform movements, and political cultures of the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. By reading novelists such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman alongside a diverse collection of texts concerned with the mission of building character, including child-rearing guides, muscle-building magazines, libel and naturalization law, Scout handbooks, and success manuals, the book uncovers how the cultural practices of representing character operated in tandem with the character-building strategies of social reformers. The book offers a radical revision of this defining category in U.S. literature and culture, arguing that character was the keystone of a cultural politics of embodiment, a politics that played a critical role in determining—and contesting—the social mobility, political authority, and cultural meaning of the raced and gendered body.

This book demonstrates how American citizenship and civic culture were profoundly transformed by the racialized material histories of free, enslaved, and indentured labor. It illuminates the historical tensions between the legal paradigms of citizenship and contract, and in the emergence of free labor ideology in American culture. The book argues that in the age of emancipation the cultural attributes of free personhood became identified with the legal rights and privileges of the citizen, and that individual freedom thus became identified with the nation-state. It situates the emergence of American citizenship and the American novel within the context of Atlantic slavery and Anglo-American legal culture, placing early American texts alongside Black Atlantic texts. Beginning with a revisionary reading of the Constitution's “slavery clauses,” the book recovers indentured servitude as a transitional form of labor bondage that helped define the key terms of modern U.S. citizenship: mobility, volition, and contract. It demonstrates how citizenship and civic culture were transformed by antebellum debates over slavery, free labor, and national Union, while analyzing the writings of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville alongside a wide-ranging archive of lesser-known antebellum legal and literary texts in the context of changing conceptions of constitutionalism, property, and contract. Situated at the nexus of literary criticism, legal studies, and labor history, the book challenges the founding fiction of a pro-slavery Constitution central to American letters and legal culture.

The US-Mexico border zone is one of the most visualized and imagined spaces in the United States, not just for the mythology of the Southwest as the cornerstone of US identity but as a place under continual crisis, permanent visibility, and territorial defense. Border Optics argues that the border is both a laboratory and an archive that indexes an optical regime and a way of seeing drawn from maps, geographical surveys, military strategic plans, illustrations, photographs, postcards, novels, film, and television—all of which combine fascination with the region with the visual codes of surveillance and survey. Optics signals a complete visual apparatus, from recording and representation to the infrastructure and institutions that support the visual regime. The border optic refers to the expanded vision of the border as a consequence of the interface of militarism, technology, and the media archive of the region. The primary aim of this complex of industry, state, and private endeavors is not simply enforcement but control, particularly of the movement of goods and people in accordance with the split codes of the border-security imaginary. This book explores several related cultural media and apparatuses that have shaped a dominant way of seeing informed by the history of the region. This includes a countervision apparent in revisionist border historical accounts, art, media, architectural design, and activist movements, along with the strains of subversion within the dominant view.

A transnational study of Asian performance shaped by the homoerotics of orientalism, this book focuses on the relationship between the white man and the native boy. It unpacks this as the central trope for understanding colonial and cultural encounters in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Asia and its diaspora. Using the native boy as a critical guide, the book formulates alternative readings of a traditional Balinese ritual, postcolonial Anglophone theatre in Singapore, and performance art in Asian America. Tracing the transnational formation of the native boy as racial fetish object across the last century, the book follows this figure as he is passed from the hands of the colonial empire to the postcolonial nation-state to neoliberal globalization. Read through such figurations, the traffic in native boys among white men serves as an allegory of an infantilized and emasculated Asia, subordinate before colonial whiteness and modernity. Pushing further, the book addresses the critical paradox of this entrenched relationship that resides even within queer theory itself by formulating critical interventions around “Asian performance”.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Internet became a major player in the global economy and a revolutionary component of everyday life for much of the United States and the world. It offered users new ways to relate to one another, to share their lives, and to spend their time—shopping, working, learning, and even taking political or social action. Policymakers and news media attempted—and often struggled—to make sense of the emergence and expansion of this new technology. They imagined the Internet in conflicting terms: as a toy for teenagers, a national security threat, a new democratic frontier, an information superhighway, a virtual reality, and a framework for promoting globalization and revolution. This book maintains that contested concepts had material consequences and helped shape not just our sense of the Internet, but the development of the technology itself. It focuses on how people imagine and relate to technology, delving into the political and cultural debates that produced the Internet as a core technology able to revise economics, politics, and culture, as well as to alter lived experience. The book illustrates the conflicting and indirect ways in which culture and policy combined to produce this transformative technology.