Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9290680
Brian Bernards
Following his 1925–1931 overland trek across southwestern China to colonial Burma, Ai Wu's 1935 Travels in the South (the author's canonical collection of autobiographical travelogue fiction) represents a Sinophonic detouring of the key literary impulses of the author's May Fourth forebears and his left-wing literary contemporaries, especially with its social realist expressions of gendered frontier primitivism, interethnic romantic desire, and international leftist solidarity. Ai Wu's southbound transborder itinerary and “street education”—marked by a repetition of trespasses and evictions—develop a “counterpoetics of trespass” blurring boundaries between social realist fiction and autobiographical travelogue while intertextually rerouting romantic primitivism in depictions of indigenous women through counterpoetically anemic prose. Initially taking his cue from Lu Xun, Ai Wu similarly inscribes his literary mission as one of national redemption but in a way that conforms to the leftist internationalist ideals of the League of Left-Wing Writers, which Ai Wu joined after he was forcibly repatriated to China by British colonial authorities in 1931. Ai Wu's Sinophone transborder counterpoetics activate latent self-reflections on the narrator's own male Han-centric exoticism toward indigenous Shan and Burman women and on his unfulfilled desire to forge meaningful relationships with them. Rather than assimilating or subordinating his depictions of these women into a projection of a Chinese leftist national cause, Ai Wu ultimately sublimates his romantic desires into an allegory for Burma's anticolonial resistance movement.
{"title":"Sinophonic Detours in Colonial Burma","authors":"Brian Bernards","doi":"10.1215/25783491-9290680","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-9290680","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Following his 1925–1931 overland trek across southwestern China to colonial Burma, Ai Wu's 1935 Travels in the South (the author's canonical collection of autobiographical travelogue fiction) represents a Sinophonic detouring of the key literary impulses of the author's May Fourth forebears and his left-wing literary contemporaries, especially with its social realist expressions of gendered frontier primitivism, interethnic romantic desire, and international leftist solidarity. Ai Wu's southbound transborder itinerary and “street education”—marked by a repetition of trespasses and evictions—develop a “counterpoetics of trespass” blurring boundaries between social realist fiction and autobiographical travelogue while intertextually rerouting romantic primitivism in depictions of indigenous women through counterpoetically anemic prose. Initially taking his cue from Lu Xun, Ai Wu similarly inscribes his literary mission as one of national redemption but in a way that conforms to the leftist internationalist ideals of the League of Left-Wing Writers, which Ai Wu joined after he was forcibly repatriated to China by British colonial authorities in 1931. Ai Wu's Sinophone transborder counterpoetics activate latent self-reflections on the narrator's own male Han-centric exoticism toward indigenous Shan and Burman women and on his unfulfilled desire to forge meaningful relationships with them. Rather than assimilating or subordinating his depictions of these women into a projection of a Chinese leftist national cause, Ai Wu ultimately sublimates his romantic desires into an allegory for Burma's anticolonial resistance movement.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"76 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83865704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9290647
L. Gibbs
This article looks at three contemporary novels where songs sung by rural women from the border region of northern Shaanxi Province evoke cultural and temporal hybridities, fusing social continuity with the threat and promise of change. The novels alternately portray untamed others—ranging from a Xiongnu soldier to a mountain bride to a country girl—as invasive threats and purveyors of potentially beneficial hybridities, adapting tropes of ethnic alterity to rethink the rural-urban divide and challenge both urban-centered and rural-centered discourses of progress. The wild brings vibrancy to the civilized, the center is drawn to the periphery, and the rural and urban are alternately desired and dismissed. In the end, these rural women's songs erase hierarchical notions of center and periphery and bring together alternative worldviews and visions of progress as only songs of the borderland can.
{"title":"The Cultural Hybridity of Chineseness","authors":"L. Gibbs","doi":"10.1215/25783491-9290647","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-9290647","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article looks at three contemporary novels where songs sung by rural women from the border region of northern Shaanxi Province evoke cultural and temporal hybridities, fusing social continuity with the threat and promise of change. The novels alternately portray untamed others—ranging from a Xiongnu soldier to a mountain bride to a country girl—as invasive threats and purveyors of potentially beneficial hybridities, adapting tropes of ethnic alterity to rethink the rural-urban divide and challenge both urban-centered and rural-centered discourses of progress. The wild brings vibrancy to the civilized, the center is drawn to the periphery, and the rural and urban are alternately desired and dismissed. In the end, these rural women's songs erase hierarchical notions of center and periphery and bring together alternative worldviews and visions of progress as only songs of the borderland can.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"138 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88722719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9290664
E. Tan
Published in 2015, Padi Guli's A Hundred Years of Bloodline tells the story of Fatima, a Uyghur woman's journey to unpack her family history while struggling to understand the status of ethnic minorities in the larger fabric of multiethnic China. The novel concludes with a positive message calling for ethnic integration. This adoption of a state-sanctioned concept of ethnic integration is what this article calls conciliatory amalgamation; it privileges a rhetoric of multiethnicism that centers on national unity and economic progress. This article reads the novel against the PRC's ethnic minority policy to examine the implications of the protagonist's cultural, linguistic, and geopolitical border-crossing as she comes to terms with ethnic amalgamation as a necessary mode of survival. This allows the novel to be read as a symptom of Padi Guli's status as a Sinophone Uyghur writer who establishes herself within the dominant tradition of Chinese literature. As one of the few prominent Sinophone Uyghur writers, she inevitably becomes a token that sustains the rhetoric of Chinese literature as inclusive and diverse. Along this line of thought, the article argues that Padi Guli's status as a writer mirrors that of her protagonist as they both adopt a conciliatory attitude toward amalgamation.
{"title":"Conciliatory Amalgamation","authors":"E. Tan","doi":"10.1215/25783491-9290664","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-9290664","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Published in 2015, Padi Guli's A Hundred Years of Bloodline tells the story of Fatima, a Uyghur woman's journey to unpack her family history while struggling to understand the status of ethnic minorities in the larger fabric of multiethnic China. The novel concludes with a positive message calling for ethnic integration. This adoption of a state-sanctioned concept of ethnic integration is what this article calls conciliatory amalgamation; it privileges a rhetoric of multiethnicism that centers on national unity and economic progress. This article reads the novel against the PRC's ethnic minority policy to examine the implications of the protagonist's cultural, linguistic, and geopolitical border-crossing as she comes to terms with ethnic amalgamation as a necessary mode of survival. This allows the novel to be read as a symptom of Padi Guli's status as a Sinophone Uyghur writer who establishes herself within the dominant tradition of Chinese literature. As one of the few prominent Sinophone Uyghur writers, she inevitably becomes a token that sustains the rhetoric of Chinese literature as inclusive and diverse. Along this line of thought, the article argues that Padi Guli's status as a writer mirrors that of her protagonist as they both adopt a conciliatory attitude toward amalgamation.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75771767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922297
Laura Jo-Han Wen
{"title":"Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China","authors":"Laura Jo-Han Wen","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922297","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922297","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81967199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922329
Yugen Wang
{"title":"The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian'an and the Three Kingdoms","authors":"Yugen Wang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922329","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82284114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922185
Li Guo
This essay offers a study of male homoeroticism in an unconventional and yet seminal nineteenth-century woman-authored tanci work, Fengshuangfei 鳳雙飛 (Phoenixes Flying Together; preface dated 1899) by Cheng Huiying 程蕙英 (before 1859–after 1899). Perhaps the only tanci known today that focuses centrally on male same-sex relations, Phoenixes Flying Together offers a vital example of early modern queer literary tradition by illustrating fluid male-male bonds and hybrid ideals of homosexuality. Such textual representations shift Confucian cardinal relations, redefine the power of nanse, and demonstrate queer identifications beyond heteronormative relations. Reading women's tanci through the intersectional lenses of early modernity, queer theory, and narrativity, this study examines such narratives as an inspiration to initiate a more contextualized epistemological, historical, and methodical understanding of the dynamic textual spaces that harbor same-sex intimacies, erotic desires, and clandestine longings in vernacular traditions. Narratives of male intimacy, camaraderie, and homosexual love in Cheng's text facilitate the construction of queer subjectivities through character focalization and embedded frames of storytelling and thereby reconfigure patrilineal norms of personal, familial, societal, and political relations. Ultimately, when engaged in conversation with global queer discourses, early modern Chinese vernacular narratives foster a culturally situated understanding of queer historiography, as well as the shifting social structures of power that often condition and facilitate nonnormative expressions of gender and sexuality.
{"title":"Hybrid Subjects, Fluid Bonds","authors":"Li Guo","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922185","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay offers a study of male homoeroticism in an unconventional and yet seminal nineteenth-century woman-authored tanci work, Fengshuangfei 鳳雙飛 (Phoenixes Flying Together; preface dated 1899) by Cheng Huiying 程蕙英 (before 1859–after 1899). Perhaps the only tanci known today that focuses centrally on male same-sex relations, Phoenixes Flying Together offers a vital example of early modern queer literary tradition by illustrating fluid male-male bonds and hybrid ideals of homosexuality. Such textual representations shift Confucian cardinal relations, redefine the power of nanse, and demonstrate queer identifications beyond heteronormative relations. Reading women's tanci through the intersectional lenses of early modernity, queer theory, and narrativity, this study examines such narratives as an inspiration to initiate a more contextualized epistemological, historical, and methodical understanding of the dynamic textual spaces that harbor same-sex intimacies, erotic desires, and clandestine longings in vernacular traditions. Narratives of male intimacy, camaraderie, and homosexual love in Cheng's text facilitate the construction of queer subjectivities through character focalization and embedded frames of storytelling and thereby reconfigure patrilineal norms of personal, familial, societal, and political relations. Ultimately, when engaged in conversation with global queer discourses, early modern Chinese vernacular narratives foster a culturally situated understanding of queer historiography, as well as the shifting social structures of power that often condition and facilitate nonnormative expressions of gender and sexuality.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"64 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83927949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922281
Margherita Long
This essay introduces three works of post-Fukushima Japanese literature, by Hayashi Kyoko (1930–2017), Kimura Yusuke (1970–) and Kobayashi Erika (1978–), to offer an environmental humanities alternative to Giorgio Agamben's response to COVID-19. Politically, Hayashi is probably closest to Agamben in that her work has been embraced by antinuclear activists in Japan and upheld as evidence of the injustice of the state of exception into which victims of both Fukushima and Hiroshima/Nagasaki were thrust. The author focuses instead on how these three authors acknowledge the cruelties of biopolitics but nevertheless celebrate the fact that “life” is never bare. For them, ionizing radiation acts like the COVID cough did for many of us: not as an invitation to critique the state but as a material intrusion that forces an awareness of what Rocco Ronchi, in his response to Agamben, called “the destiny of the community of man with nature.” What are the material forces immanent to that destiny? What does it do to our mental health to engage them directly? The three works analyzed answer these questions in creative, powerful ways.
{"title":"COVID Cough and Fukushima Novels","authors":"Margherita Long","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922281","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922281","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay introduces three works of post-Fukushima Japanese literature, by Hayashi Kyoko (1930–2017), Kimura Yusuke (1970–) and Kobayashi Erika (1978–), to offer an environmental humanities alternative to Giorgio Agamben's response to COVID-19. Politically, Hayashi is probably closest to Agamben in that her work has been embraced by antinuclear activists in Japan and upheld as evidence of the injustice of the state of exception into which victims of both Fukushima and Hiroshima/Nagasaki were thrust. The author focuses instead on how these three authors acknowledge the cruelties of biopolitics but nevertheless celebrate the fact that “life” is never bare. For them, ionizing radiation acts like the COVID cough did for many of us: not as an invitation to critique the state but as a material intrusion that forces an awareness of what Rocco Ronchi, in his response to Agamben, called “the destiny of the community of man with nature.” What are the material forces immanent to that destiny? What does it do to our mental health to engage them directly? The three works analyzed answer these questions in creative, powerful ways.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85171751","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922201
Jie Guo
Reading the Taiwanese author Wu Jiwen's 1996 novel Fin-de-siècle Boylove Reader (Shijimo shaonian’ai duben), this essay considers the age-old figure of the male dan and the critical role it played in the emerging gay scene in the Sinophone world at the turn of the twenty-first century. Based on the Qing author Chen Sen's novel Precious Mirror for the Appreciation of Flowers (Pinhua baojian), Wu's version resorts to the figure of the male dan, often referred to as xianggong, to explore male same-sex intimacies, which were gaining increasing visibility in the 1990s Sinophone world. While scholars generally agree that the male dan in Wu's novel bears considerable resemblance to the figure of the contemporary gay man, some read the ending of Wu's novel, where the two protagonists, Mei Ziyu and Du Qinyan, part ways, as representing a compromise. I contend that this “unhappy ending” points to Wu's most radical departure from Chen's novel. The original novel's ending, where Ziyu lives happily ever after with both his wife and Qinyan, reaffirms the centrality of the “polygamous” patron-patronized relationship in the late imperial imagination of male-male relations. In contrast, the failed relationship between Ziyu and Qinyan in Wu's version points to the obsoleteness of the xiangong system, as well as the polygamous mode in the 1990s, which required new modes, categories, and symbols for the imagination of male same-sex relationships. Arguing that in this novel forces past and present, local and global converge, the author uses it to explore the larger question of how to approach the queer Sinophone.
{"title":"The Male Dan at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century","authors":"Jie Guo","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922201","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Reading the Taiwanese author Wu Jiwen's 1996 novel Fin-de-siècle Boylove Reader (Shijimo shaonian’ai duben), this essay considers the age-old figure of the male dan and the critical role it played in the emerging gay scene in the Sinophone world at the turn of the twenty-first century. Based on the Qing author Chen Sen's novel Precious Mirror for the Appreciation of Flowers (Pinhua baojian), Wu's version resorts to the figure of the male dan, often referred to as xianggong, to explore male same-sex intimacies, which were gaining increasing visibility in the 1990s Sinophone world. While scholars generally agree that the male dan in Wu's novel bears considerable resemblance to the figure of the contemporary gay man, some read the ending of Wu's novel, where the two protagonists, Mei Ziyu and Du Qinyan, part ways, as representing a compromise. I contend that this “unhappy ending” points to Wu's most radical departure from Chen's novel. The original novel's ending, where Ziyu lives happily ever after with both his wife and Qinyan, reaffirms the centrality of the “polygamous” patron-patronized relationship in the late imperial imagination of male-male relations. In contrast, the failed relationship between Ziyu and Qinyan in Wu's version points to the obsoleteness of the xiangong system, as well as the polygamous mode in the 1990s, which required new modes, categories, and symbols for the imagination of male same-sex relationships. Arguing that in this novel forces past and present, local and global converge, the author uses it to explore the larger question of how to approach the queer Sinophone.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88506338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922249
Zhuoyi Wang
Planetarianism, proposed by Masao Miyoshi for literature and literary studies, calls for a new sense and organization of human totality truly inclusive of all and against neoliberal division, exclusion, repression, and egocentric consumption. Ironically, it is also the global neoliberal economy that lays the only realistic foundation for such a totality, albeit under negative circumstances. This economy has caused a rapid environmental deterioration that involves everyone on the planet, regardless of identity. Human beings are left with just two choices: either collectively forge new relationships among ourselves and with the planet or perish in the environmental devastation wrought by our continuous consumption, exploitation, division, and conflict. Imagining a totalizing environmental disaster and a global unity fighting for the survival of humanity and Earth, the 2019 Chinese sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth is an important case for illustrating what complex forms the idea of planetarianism may take in a concrete ideological and creative context. The author argues that the film's future imagination bears laudable potential to promote a turn from exclusionist individualism, represented by the Hollywood science fiction model, to inclusive planetarianism. However, the film's persuasiveness is significantly limited by the double-layered restraint imposed on it by the state and the market. This article traces the turn and the restraint to their historical sources, closely analyzes where the film succeeds and fails in moving beyond the Hollywood vision of the planet's future, and thereby enriches our understanding of the cinematic imagination of planetarianism.
{"title":"Between the World Ship and the Spaceship","authors":"Zhuoyi Wang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922249","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Planetarianism, proposed by Masao Miyoshi for literature and literary studies, calls for a new sense and organization of human totality truly inclusive of all and against neoliberal division, exclusion, repression, and egocentric consumption. Ironically, it is also the global neoliberal economy that lays the only realistic foundation for such a totality, albeit under negative circumstances. This economy has caused a rapid environmental deterioration that involves everyone on the planet, regardless of identity. Human beings are left with just two choices: either collectively forge new relationships among ourselves and with the planet or perish in the environmental devastation wrought by our continuous consumption, exploitation, division, and conflict. Imagining a totalizing environmental disaster and a global unity fighting for the survival of humanity and Earth, the 2019 Chinese sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth is an important case for illustrating what complex forms the idea of planetarianism may take in a concrete ideological and creative context. The author argues that the film's future imagination bears laudable potential to promote a turn from exclusionist individualism, represented by the Hollywood science fiction model, to inclusive planetarianism. However, the film's persuasiveness is significantly limited by the double-layered restraint imposed on it by the state and the market. This article traces the turn and the restraint to their historical sources, closely analyzes where the film succeeds and fails in moving beyond the Hollywood vision of the planet's future, and thereby enriches our understanding of the cinematic imagination of planetarianism.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"204 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86948067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922273
Patrice D. Douglass
This essay approaches Blackness as a social contagion to examine the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and police violence. By placing the COVID-19 deaths of Black people who are refused hospital treatment in critical conversation with police murders during the pandemic, this essay argues that a focus on social violence helps clarify how the same racial taxonomies are at play in producing these deadly outcomes. As such, the essay concludes with a broadening of the concept of police power to illustrate how, outside of the private and public political spheres, the amorphous nature of the social drives the demand for collective health and safety through the excision of Blackness as a contagion or coercive element.
{"title":"Unnatural Causes","authors":"Patrice D. Douglass","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922273","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay approaches Blackness as a social contagion to examine the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and police violence. By placing the COVID-19 deaths of Black people who are refused hospital treatment in critical conversation with police murders during the pandemic, this essay argues that a focus on social violence helps clarify how the same racial taxonomies are at play in producing these deadly outcomes. As such, the essay concludes with a broadening of the concept of police power to illustrate how, outside of the private and public political spheres, the amorphous nature of the social drives the demand for collective health and safety through the excision of Blackness as a contagion or coercive element.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"84 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83927954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}