Abstract:This essay proposes that recent texts of hemispheric horror, like those sentimental fictions on which Amy Kaplan turned her fierce analytic gaze, offer the field of American studies objects to think with as it grapples with the difficulties of conceptualizing US settler colonial capitalist empire in the present, particularly as neoliberal capitalist empire takes on neofeudal aspects. As the field searches for analytic frames that might allow scholars to best apprehend the complex entanglements of ongoing forms of colonial and settler colonial practices and relations with shifting structures of state and racial capitalist power, this essay looks to recent horror fiction and film—Bacurau (2020), Mexican Gothic (2020), and La Llorona (2019)—to examine how contemporary writers and filmmakers have been animating gothic genre conventions in order to make sense of ongoing yet evolving settler colonial capitalism and imperial formations in the Americas, as well as to imagine popular resistance. The resistance envisioned by these texts participates in theorizations of the international women's strike, as feminized bodies collectively haunt, flood, burn, and otherwise destroy a new class of extractive barons, genocidal generals, and US adventurers.
{"title":"Hemispheric Horror, Neofeudal Empire, and the International Women's Strike","authors":"Patricia Stuelke","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0044","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay proposes that recent texts of hemispheric horror, like those sentimental fictions on which Amy Kaplan turned her fierce analytic gaze, offer the field of American studies objects to think with as it grapples with the difficulties of conceptualizing US settler colonial capitalist empire in the present, particularly as neoliberal capitalist empire takes on neofeudal aspects. As the field searches for analytic frames that might allow scholars to best apprehend the complex entanglements of ongoing forms of colonial and settler colonial practices and relations with shifting structures of state and racial capitalist power, this essay looks to recent horror fiction and film—Bacurau (2020), Mexican Gothic (2020), and La Llorona (2019)—to examine how contemporary writers and filmmakers have been animating gothic genre conventions in order to make sense of ongoing yet evolving settler colonial capitalism and imperial formations in the Americas, as well as to imagine popular resistance. The resistance envisioned by these texts participates in theorizations of the international women's strike, as feminized bodies collectively haunt, flood, burn, and otherwise destroy a new class of extractive barons, genocidal generals, and US adventurers.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45145404","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 takes the juxtaposition of South Vietnamese and Confederate flags at the January 6, 2021 Capitol Riot as a point of departure for thinking through southern metaphors and southern memories connecting South Vietnam and the US South. It analyzes cultural productions by 1.5 generation South Vietnamese refugees—Andrew Lam's short story "Show and Tell" and An-My Lê's photographic series Silent General—to trace the ways in which South Vietnam has been represented through the iconography and vernacular of the US South. What links South Vietnam and the US South is a distinct articulation of southern memory and memorialization, forged in the wake of southern civil war defeat. Southern memory, however, is always already contested, manifesting in the US context either as Lost Cause mythology or as Black abolitionist remembrance. Southern memory and southern metaphor thus open up space for contingencies and interventions, to route South Vietnamese diasporic politics through Black freedom struggles instead of Confederate nostalgia. Overall, this essay interrogates what critiques of empire and white supremacy are enabled by juxtaposing South Vietnam and the US South: two seemingly conservative southern spaces that do not easily cohere to the anti-imperialist, Third World Liberationist politics typically associated with the "Global South."
摘要:本文以2021年1月6日国会暴动中南越和邦联旗帜的并列为出发点,思考连接南越和美国南方的南方隐喻和南方记忆。它分析了1.5代南越难民的文化作品——安德鲁·林(andrew Lam)的短篇小说《展示与讲述》(Show and Tell)和安米Lê的摄影系列《沉默的将军》(Silent general)——以追踪南越通过美国南方的图像学和方言表现出来的方式。连接南越和美国南部的是一种独特的南方记忆和纪念,这是在南方内战失败后形成的。然而,南方的记忆总是有争议的,在美国的背景下,要么表现为失败的神话,要么表现为黑人废奴主义者的记忆。因此,南方记忆和南方隐喻为偶发事件和干预开辟了空间,通过黑人自由斗争而不是邦联怀旧来引导南越流散政治。总的来说,这篇文章通过将南越和美国南方并列来探讨对帝国和白人至上主义的批评是什么:这两个看似保守的南方空间不容易与反帝国主义、第三世界解放主义政治联系在一起,这些政治通常与“全球南方”有关。
{"title":"Southern Memory, Southern Metaphor: Representing South Vietnam through the US South","authors":"Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0039","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay takes the juxtaposition of South Vietnamese and Confederate flags at the January 6, 2021 Capitol Riot as a point of departure for thinking through southern metaphors and southern memories connecting South Vietnam and the US South. It analyzes cultural productions by 1.5 generation South Vietnamese refugees—Andrew Lam's short story \"Show and Tell\" and An-My Lê's photographic series Silent General—to trace the ways in which South Vietnam has been represented through the iconography and vernacular of the US South. What links South Vietnam and the US South is a distinct articulation of southern memory and memorialization, forged in the wake of southern civil war defeat. Southern memory, however, is always already contested, manifesting in the US context either as Lost Cause mythology or as Black abolitionist remembrance. Southern memory and southern metaphor thus open up space for contingencies and interventions, to route South Vietnamese diasporic politics through Black freedom struggles instead of Confederate nostalgia. Overall, this essay interrogates what critiques of empire and white supremacy are enabled by juxtaposing South Vietnam and the US South: two seemingly conservative southern spaces that do not easily cohere to the anti-imperialist, Third World Liberationist politics typically associated with the \"Global South.\"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41417222","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}
he US War on Terror reached its twentieth anniversary while I was teaching an Introduction to African American Studies course, a coincidence that inspired a historical comparison of racial terror, minority rule, and state violence across time. More specifically, on September 11, 2021, my students and I discussed W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “The Propaganda of History,” from his 1935 masterpiece, Black Reconstruction in America . Du Bois discusses how Reconstruction—the unprecedented opportunity for the United States to realize a vision of abolition democracy following enslavement and Civil War—was viewed as a failure by many US historians. A consensus developed—propaganda—within the historical profession that Reconstruction failed because it was imposed against the will of the former Confederate states by carpetbaggers, scalawags, and radical abolitionists and because the freedmen, when they achieved political power, were incompetent and corrupt. This consensus understood Jim Crow segregation, supported in law and by white vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan, as restoring order to the nation while enabling continued white supremacist power as a governing rubric. As my students and I considered how the Reconstruction amendments to the US Constitution helped realize and guarantee abolition democracy, and how Jim Crow limited those possibilities, we noted that the forces of white supremacy, including the Ku Klux Klan and so-called Red Shirts, constituted a sort of insurgency and that terrorism had undermined Reconstruction’s promise. 1
美国反恐战争二十周年之际,我正在教授一门非裔美国人研究导论课程,这一巧合激发了对种族恐怖、少数民族统治和国家暴力的历史比较。更具体地说,2021年9月11日,我和学生们讨论了w·e·b·杜波依斯(W. E. B. Du Bois)的文章《历史的宣传》(The Propaganda of History),这篇文章出自他1935年的代表作《美国黑人重建》(Black Reconstruction in America)。杜波依斯讨论了重建是如何被许多美国历史学家视为失败的,重建是美国在奴隶制和内战之后实现废除民主愿景的前所未有的机会。历史学界形成了一种共识——宣传——认为重建之所以失败,是因为它是由冒险家、无赖和激进的废奴主义者违背了前邦联各州的意愿强加的,而且当自由民获得政治权力时,他们是无能和腐败的。这种共识认为,在法律和3k党(Ku Klux Klan)等白人治安维持团体的支持下,吉姆·克劳(Jim Crow)种族隔离制度在恢复国家秩序的同时,让白人至上主义者的权力得以继续作为统治准则。当我和我的学生思考美国宪法的重建修正案如何帮助实现和保证废除民主,以及吉姆·克劳如何限制这些可能性时,我们注意到白人至上的力量,包括三k党和所谓的红衫军,构成了一种叛乱,恐怖主义破坏了重建的承诺。1
{"title":"From Home Rule to Homeland: Counterterrorism as a Way of Life","authors":"Alex Lubin","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0036","url":null,"abstract":"he US War on Terror reached its twentieth anniversary while I was teaching an Introduction to African American Studies course, a coincidence that inspired a historical comparison of racial terror, minority rule, and state violence across time. More specifically, on September 11, 2021, my students and I discussed W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “The Propaganda of History,” from his 1935 masterpiece, Black Reconstruction in America . Du Bois discusses how Reconstruction—the unprecedented opportunity for the United States to realize a vision of abolition democracy following enslavement and Civil War—was viewed as a failure by many US historians. A consensus developed—propaganda—within the historical profession that Reconstruction failed because it was imposed against the will of the former Confederate states by carpetbaggers, scalawags, and radical abolitionists and because the freedmen, when they achieved political power, were incompetent and corrupt. This consensus understood Jim Crow segregation, supported in law and by white vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan, as restoring order to the nation while enabling continued white supremacist power as a governing rubric. As my students and I considered how the Reconstruction amendments to the US Constitution helped realize and guarantee abolition democracy, and how Jim Crow limited those possibilities, we noted that the forces of white supremacy, including the Ku Klux Klan and so-called Red Shirts, constituted a sort of insurgency and that terrorism had undermined Reconstruction’s promise. 1","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47845572","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:As the Trump era revitalized questions of racial capitalism and the place of the US in the world in spectacular fashion, this essay centers the Iraq War as a key site of twenty-first century US imperialism. Specifically, it considers the large-scale privatization of the US war apparatus, and the ways in which the proliferation of corporate actors after 9/11 both enabled and transformed the imperial power of the state through military contracting. Not only did defense contractors underwrite traditional military operations, they worked to shift power from civil federal institutions to corporations. This allowed contractors to dilute the US government's onus of responsibility and operate with impunity by evading the barest forms of democratic accountability. The enduring legacies of these processes into the present highlight the critical role of corporate power in the structure and maintenance of contemporary US empire.
{"title":"War Is Still a Racket: Private Military Contracting, US Imperialism, and the Iraq War","authors":"Zaynab Quadri","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0033","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:As the Trump era revitalized questions of racial capitalism and the place of the US in the world in spectacular fashion, this essay centers the Iraq War as a key site of twenty-first century US imperialism. Specifically, it considers the large-scale privatization of the US war apparatus, and the ways in which the proliferation of corporate actors after 9/11 both enabled and transformed the imperial power of the state through military contracting. Not only did defense contractors underwrite traditional military operations, they worked to shift power from civil federal institutions to corporations. This allowed contractors to dilute the US government's onus of responsibility and operate with impunity by evading the barest forms of democratic accountability. The enduring legacies of these processes into the present highlight the critical role of corporate power in the structure and maintenance of contemporary US empire.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46021188","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}
In the past two years, as the whole world has been deeply mired in the COVID-19 pandemic, we may have observed neoliberal capitalism's crisis of care: exposed and exacerbated by the global pandemic, made explicit alongside examples such as the collapsing of health systems, the shortage of care labor and overwork of nurses, the serious outbreaks in aged care facilities, the increased burden of domestic labor and care work due to school closures, and the worldwide rise of domestic abuse. In this short essay, I situate neoliberalism's care problems as a displaced process of imperial racialization in long-standing feminist debates over the "labor of love", returned to us by COVID in the form of crisis. I argue that the impacts on domestic care during the pandemic are intimately connected with colonial divisions of labor when outsourced surrogate intimacies are vicariously performed by racialized third world labor. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of American Quarterly is the property of Johns Hopkins University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
{"title":"Love of Empire by Dissociations","authors":"Chien-ting Lin","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0048","url":null,"abstract":"In the past two years, as the whole world has been deeply mired in the COVID-19 pandemic, we may have observed neoliberal capitalism's crisis of care: exposed and exacerbated by the global pandemic, made explicit alongside examples such as the collapsing of health systems, the shortage of care labor and overwork of nurses, the serious outbreaks in aged care facilities, the increased burden of domestic labor and care work due to school closures, and the worldwide rise of domestic abuse. In this short essay, I situate neoliberalism's care problems as a displaced process of imperial racialization in long-standing feminist debates over the \"labor of love\", returned to us by COVID in the form of crisis. I argue that the impacts on domestic care during the pandemic are intimately connected with colonial divisions of labor when outsourced surrogate intimacies are vicariously performed by racialized third world labor. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of American Quarterly is the property of Johns Hopkins University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49070128","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":"Forever End Times: GWOT in Three Parts","authors":"Junaid Rana","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0037","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45380101","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":"The Surplus Populations of Black Lives Matter","authors":"R. Ferguson","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0041","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44171561","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":"White Innocents: On the Decriminalization of White Terrorism in America","authors":"Simon Balto","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0040","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47256005","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:Biopolitical and necropolitical frameworks posit death as sovereignty's limit. However, colonial abuses of indigenous remains suggest otherwise. Taking Achille Mbembe's necropolitics as a point of departure, I draw attention to the extraction of soil containing human remains in the US military base construction of occupied Okinawa. I argue that ossuopower—the right to control remains, both human and nonhuman—is fundamental to colonial territorial expansion. Tracing the stories of bones, I first contextualize the exercise of ossuopower in the history of US settler colonialism and garrison militarism in the Pacific, where bones symbolize sovereign power and claims to land. I then offer a case study of the exercise of the right over remains in Okinawa, from the post–World War II era of US occupation through Reversion-era mainland Japanese development to the current Futenma Airbase relocation. Bones bear the material traces of the changing forces of US militarization and Japanese maldevelopment. In closing, I analyze Tsuyoshi Shima's short story "Bones" to illumine an indigenous Okinawan relation to land and suggest the need for epistemes of care for remains and land. In theorizing ossuopower, I offer a lens to analyze the entanglement of militarization, globalization, and securitization in the Pacific Century.
{"title":"Bone and Coral: Ossuopower and the Control of (Future) Remains in Occupied Okinawa","authors":"Nozomi Saito","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0038","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Biopolitical and necropolitical frameworks posit death as sovereignty's limit. However, colonial abuses of indigenous remains suggest otherwise. Taking Achille Mbembe's necropolitics as a point of departure, I draw attention to the extraction of soil containing human remains in the US military base construction of occupied Okinawa. I argue that ossuopower—the right to control remains, both human and nonhuman—is fundamental to colonial territorial expansion. Tracing the stories of bones, I first contextualize the exercise of ossuopower in the history of US settler colonialism and garrison militarism in the Pacific, where bones symbolize sovereign power and claims to land. I then offer a case study of the exercise of the right over remains in Okinawa, from the post–World War II era of US occupation through Reversion-era mainland Japanese development to the current Futenma Airbase relocation. Bones bear the material traces of the changing forces of US militarization and Japanese maldevelopment. In closing, I analyze Tsuyoshi Shima's short story \"Bones\" to illumine an indigenous Okinawan relation to land and suggest the need for epistemes of care for remains and land. In theorizing ossuopower, I offer a lens to analyze the entanglement of militarization, globalization, and securitization in the Pacific Century.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41633224","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}