Abstract:This essay considers how a transnational feminist literary practice, one that proceeds through the modality of rereading and rewriting, opens up the meaning and possibilities for the right to self-determination, against and beyond the settler state sovereignty into which it has hardened. It examines the 1995 short story “My Elizabeth,” by the Arab American writer Diana Abu-Jaber, as an unexpected source of political theory, which rewrites self-determination from the perspective of occupied peoples—namely, Native peoples in the United States and Palestinians—subject to ongoing settler colonialism. Abu-Jaber’s portrait of intimacies between subjects “in transit” imagines how “radical futures past” become the source of alternate affective and political communities in the present.
{"title":"“The End of Our World”: Transnational Feminist Literary Practice and the Right to Self-Determination","authors":"Crystal Parikh","doi":"10.1353/aq.2024.a929164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2024.a929164","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay considers how a transnational feminist literary practice, one that proceeds through the modality of rereading and rewriting, opens up the meaning and possibilities for the right to self-determination, against and beyond the settler state sovereignty into which it has hardened. It examines the 1995 short story “My Elizabeth,” by the Arab American writer Diana Abu-Jaber, as an unexpected source of political theory, which rewrites self-determination from the perspective of occupied peoples—namely, Native peoples in the United States and Palestinians—subject to ongoing settler colonialism. Abu-Jaber’s portrait of intimacies between subjects “in transit” imagines how “radical futures past” become the source of alternate affective and political communities in the present.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141408942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Drawing on settler colonial grammar of place, the colonial practice of naming and renaming Native land through mapmaking processes that historically deny, erase, and homogenize Indigenous communities, this essay argues that Indigenous Oaxacans disrupt settler colonial renaming of land by engaging in their community’s collective understanding of pertenencia mutua (mutual belonging)—an Indigenous Oaxacan relational consciousness of belonging across Abya Yala (“the Americas”) that allows them to recognize their role as Indigenous visitors on Native land and as Native to Abya Yala. Theorizing through pertenencia mutua offers a deep understanding of Indigenous efforts to (re)build communities in their struggle against settler colonial violence, including through naming practices and grammar of place. Using semistructured interviews, oral histories, and social media content, I analyze how Indigenous Oaxacan young adults engage on the ground and on social media to unsettle colonially named places by placing their identity and their own communities in relational existence. Such unsettlings call for the retheorization of place.
{"title":"Pertenencia Mutua: Indigenous Oaxacans Contesting Settler Colonial Grammars","authors":"Brenda Nicolas","doi":"10.1353/aq.2024.a929165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2024.a929165","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Drawing on settler colonial grammar of place, the colonial practice of naming and renaming Native land through mapmaking processes that historically deny, erase, and homogenize Indigenous communities, this essay argues that Indigenous Oaxacans disrupt settler colonial renaming of land by engaging in their community’s collective understanding of pertenencia mutua (mutual belonging)—an Indigenous Oaxacan relational consciousness of belonging across Abya Yala (“the Americas”) that allows them to recognize their role as Indigenous visitors on Native land and as Native to Abya Yala. Theorizing through pertenencia mutua offers a deep understanding of Indigenous efforts to (re)build communities in their struggle against settler colonial violence, including through naming practices and grammar of place. Using semistructured interviews, oral histories, and social media content, I analyze how Indigenous Oaxacan young adults engage on the ground and on social media to unsettle colonially named places by placing their identity and their own communities in relational existence. Such unsettlings call for the retheorization of place.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141396359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Native Survivance and the Violent Pleasures of Resignifying the Cowboy","authors":"Beenash Jafri","doi":"10.1353/aq.2024.a929169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2024.a929169","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141396969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Meditation apps present mindful listening as sonic self-care: a pathway to managing anxiety, depression, insomnia, and the distractions of other digital media. This essay investigates the collection of audio “sleepcasts” produced by Headspace, a Silicon Valley digital wellness corporation that claims over seventy million users of its meditation app. Sleepcasts are designed to extend media engagement and the productive labor of self-care beyond waking hours and past the threshold of consciousness. As they guide listeners through “night-time journeys” to palliative virtual escape zones, sleepcasts choreograph a sensory fade-out from hypervigilant insomniac listening to oblivious somnolence. I show how Headspace drew on a century-old scientific model of sleep as conditioned performance, blended with the domestic ritual of the children’s bedtime story, to conjure fantasies of restorative travel, fulfilling work, and intimate relationships with virtual caregivers. These sedative audio journeys follow tourist itineraries shaped by colonialism, aligning “mindfulness” with the privileges of cosmopolitan mobility. By tethering sleepcasts to bedtime, Headspace cultivates nightly listening as ritualized self-care that is the mirror image of one’s day job—the labor of rest that makes the next day possible. Meanwhile, listeners remain productive participants in the attention economy even as they fall asleep.
{"title":"Switching Off with Sleepcasts: Insomniac Listening and Sonic Self-Care","authors":"Kiri Miller","doi":"10.1353/aq.2024.a929166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2024.a929166","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Meditation apps present mindful listening as sonic self-care: a pathway to managing anxiety, depression, insomnia, and the distractions of other digital media. This essay investigates the collection of audio “sleepcasts” produced by Headspace, a Silicon Valley digital wellness corporation that claims over seventy million users of its meditation app. Sleepcasts are designed to extend media engagement and the productive labor of self-care beyond waking hours and past the threshold of consciousness. As they guide listeners through “night-time journeys” to palliative virtual escape zones, sleepcasts choreograph a sensory fade-out from hypervigilant insomniac listening to oblivious somnolence. I show how Headspace drew on a century-old scientific model of sleep as conditioned performance, blended with the domestic ritual of the children’s bedtime story, to conjure fantasies of restorative travel, fulfilling work, and intimate relationships with virtual caregivers. These sedative audio journeys follow tourist itineraries shaped by colonialism, aligning “mindfulness” with the privileges of cosmopolitan mobility. By tethering sleepcasts to bedtime, Headspace cultivates nightly listening as ritualized self-care that is the mirror image of one’s day job—the labor of rest that makes the next day possible. Meanwhile, listeners remain productive participants in the attention economy even as they fall asleep.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141413131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay shows how Jimi Hendrix’s experiments with fuzz anticipated notyet-audible sonic worlds and evinced Blackness in sound. Focusing on the American guitarist’s debut album, Are You Experienced (1967), I describe fuzz as an entryway into the politico-theatrical scene of Black sociality. My analysis pivots on two axes: edgework and excess. I argue that Hendrix’s pursuit of new sonic territory, as well as the mathematical-electrical engineering that brought such sounds into being, can be read as an aesthetic practice of edgework, but also that the resulting music—which early reviewers described as “hellish,” “freaky,” “unimaginable,” and “manic”—acts as a sign of fuzz’s unruly excess. Across my analysis, I am in conversation with Matthew Morrison’s theory of “Blacksound,” which shows how US popular music attempts to essentialize and delimit Black performativity. If Hendrix’s fuzz tone is audible as an enactment of fugitivity born from a tradition of radical Black aesthetics, I argue, then its unruly and anarchistic ethos refutes racial essentialism, insisting on agency, beauty, and life in the face of social death. Through this intervention, I develop a theory of “rehearsal” as a future-oriented Black performance sensibility that creates the conditions in which living otherwise becomes imaginable and achievable.
{"title":"Edgework and Excess: Jimi Hendrix, the Phenomenology of Fuzz, and the Rehearsal of Black Liberation","authors":"John Brooks","doi":"10.1353/aq.2024.a929163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2024.a929163","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay shows how Jimi Hendrix’s experiments with fuzz anticipated notyet-audible sonic worlds and evinced Blackness in sound. Focusing on the American guitarist’s debut album, Are You Experienced (1967), I describe fuzz as an entryway into the politico-theatrical scene of Black sociality. My analysis pivots on two axes: edgework and excess. I argue that Hendrix’s pursuit of new sonic territory, as well as the mathematical-electrical engineering that brought such sounds into being, can be read as an aesthetic practice of edgework, but also that the resulting music—which early reviewers described as “hellish,” “freaky,” “unimaginable,” and “manic”—acts as a sign of fuzz’s unruly excess. Across my analysis, I am in conversation with Matthew Morrison’s theory of “Blacksound,” which shows how US popular music attempts to essentialize and delimit Black performativity. If Hendrix’s fuzz tone is audible as an enactment of fugitivity born from a tradition of radical Black aesthetics, I argue, then its unruly and anarchistic ethos refutes racial essentialism, insisting on agency, beauty, and life in the face of social death. Through this intervention, I develop a theory of “rehearsal” as a future-oriented Black performance sensibility that creates the conditions in which living otherwise becomes imaginable and achievable.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141398725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay examines the promotion of Twentieth Century–Fox’s production of The Robe (1953)—which exhibited Dean Cornwell’s oil paintings in local department stores in Detroit—in relation to the city’s sociocultural context and racial tensions. It argues that ongoing issues in the city such as property ownership, racialized topographical boundaries, and class aspiration can be traced across Detroit’s film culture in the postwar period, particularly in the burgeoning middlebrow culture of materialistic consumption. The promotional campaign’s use of art exhibitions in department stores represented a significant moment for new ideas about class, culture, and racial identity in the city, contributing to the formation of the white suburban middle class and functioning as an example of racialized tastemaking. Accounts of this postwar cultural shift, particularly as it pertained to film culture, have underemphasized the importance of racial identity and exclusion to such formations. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that integrates film history, material culture studies, and cultural history, this essay uses the Cornwell exhibition as a case study for understanding the impact of racial tensions on class identity in 1950s Detroit.
{"title":"The Oil Paintings in the Department Store: The Robe and Racialized Tastemaking in 1950s Detroit","authors":"Joshua Schulze","doi":"10.1353/aq.2024.a929162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2024.a929162","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines the promotion of Twentieth Century–Fox’s production of The Robe (1953)—which exhibited Dean Cornwell’s oil paintings in local department stores in Detroit—in relation to the city’s sociocultural context and racial tensions. It argues that ongoing issues in the city such as property ownership, racialized topographical boundaries, and class aspiration can be traced across Detroit’s film culture in the postwar period, particularly in the burgeoning middlebrow culture of materialistic consumption. The promotional campaign’s use of art exhibitions in department stores represented a significant moment for new ideas about class, culture, and racial identity in the city, contributing to the formation of the white suburban middle class and functioning as an example of racialized tastemaking. Accounts of this postwar cultural shift, particularly as it pertained to film culture, have underemphasized the importance of racial identity and exclusion to such formations. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that integrates film history, material culture studies, and cultural history, this essay uses the Cornwell exhibition as a case study for understanding the impact of racial tensions on class identity in 1950s Detroit.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141394245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Note on the Presidential Address","authors":"Sharon P. Holland","doi":"10.1353/aq.2024.a929161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2024.a929161","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141406048","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract: This essay investigates the phenomenon of wealthy white men who use financial means and power to "revive" Detroit after a perceived "death" through what we call white savior capitalism. This "death," popularized by media portrayals of decline, relies on projecting an image of Detroit, a Black-majority city on stolen Native land, as a vacant, postindustrial "frontier" despite the continued existence and resistance of Black and Indigenous residents. We trace the prehistory of white savior capitalism to the area's eighteenth-century conquest by French settlers, the exclusionary redevelopment policies of Mayor Coleman Young's administration (1974–94), and Detroit's use of federal antipoverty funds and eminent domain to establish a General Motors Plant in the Poletown neighborhood. Finally, we demonstrate how the recent and ongoing "rediscovery" of Detroit by businesspeople such as Dan Gilbert gave rise to white savior capitalism. Parallel to these developments, activist movements in the Black Left have presented alternative solutions and imagined futures that include Black and Native Detroit.
{"title":"\"See Detroit Like We Do\": White Savior Capitalism and the Myth of Black Obsolescence","authors":"David Helps, Christine Hwang","doi":"10.1353/aq.2024.a921582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2024.a921582","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay investigates the phenomenon of wealthy white men who use financial means and power to \"revive\" Detroit after a perceived \"death\" through what we call white savior capitalism. This \"death,\" popularized by media portrayals of decline, relies on projecting an image of Detroit, a Black-majority city on stolen Native land, as a vacant, postindustrial \"frontier\" despite the continued existence and resistance of Black and Indigenous residents. We trace the prehistory of white savior capitalism to the area's eighteenth-century conquest by French settlers, the exclusionary redevelopment policies of Mayor Coleman Young's administration (1974–94), and Detroit's use of federal antipoverty funds and eminent domain to establish a General Motors Plant in the Poletown neighborhood. Finally, we demonstrate how the recent and ongoing \"rediscovery\" of Detroit by businesspeople such as Dan Gilbert gave rise to white savior capitalism. Parallel to these developments, activist movements in the Black Left have presented alternative solutions and imagined futures that include Black and Native Detroit.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140268971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Networks of Apprehension and the Everywhere Border","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/aq.2024.a921583","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2024.a921583","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140278310","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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