Asian-Indigenous Relations across Hemispheres, Oceans, and Islands Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (bio) Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas. By Quynh Nhu Le. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019. 250 pages. $99.50 (cloth). $39.95 (paper). Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements. By Juliana Hu Pegues. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 232 pages. $95.00 (cloth). $32.95 (paper). Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures. By Erin Suzuki. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021. 268 pages. $110.50 (cloth). $39.95 (paper). How do we make sense of Asian-Indigenous relations across settler colonial states? In what ways have Asian-Indigenous entanglements been structured by militarism, settler colonialism, and liberal empire? In 2000, the Kanaka Maoli scholar-activist Haunani-Kay Trask coined the term "settlers of color" to describe nonwhite, non-Indigenous communities in Hawai'i who, even as they bear the brunt of labor exploitation and racial exclusion, are structurally implicated in the ongoing dispossession of Native Hawaiians.1 In particular, Trask pinpointed East Asian Americans' rise to key positions of power in the Democratic Party following statehood, marking their direct responsibility for policies that uphold the occupation of the illegally overthrown Hawaiian Kingdom. In response, Asian American scholar-activists in and from Hawai'i such as Candace Fujikane, Jonathan Okamura, and Dean Itsuji Saranillio have developed the field of Asian settler colonialism studies, which seeks to grapple with Asian American attachments to the settler state even as it demands forms of ethical accountability and Asian-Indigenous solidarity, as theorized by Fujikane's term "settler ally."2 Moving beyond the context of Hawai'i, other American studies scholars have offered different key terms and concepts for attending to Asian-Indigenous relations in the wake of war, settler colonialism, and migration. The Chickasaw [End Page 1067] scholar Jodi Byrd's concept of the "transit of empire" illuminates how the imperial United States "made Indian" those lands and peoples it sought to conquer, replicating the so-called Indian Wars across Turtle Island with the wars of military occupation and empire building across Oceania and Asia.3 "Settler imperialism"—Byrd's term for the concomitant processes of settler colonialism and imperialism—displaced Asian subjects onto Indigenous lands and waters, necessitating the terms "arrivant," which Byrd borrows from the Caribbean writer Kamau Brathwaite, and "arrivant colonialism" to index the distinct contours of nonwhite migrants' implication in the ongoing displacement and dispossession of Native peoples.4 As such, Byrd insists that we attend to the "cacophonies" of colonialism: the chaotic, often contradictory ways that settler imperialism positions racialized and Indigenous communities in relation.5 Engaging Marxist theory and homing in on the racialization of Asian laborers in the North American context, Iyko Day proposes that the position of "arrivant" can be more precisely articulated as the "alien"—a migrant positionality marked for exploitation and exclusion that is nonetheless complicit in Indigenous displacement and dispossession via a logic of settler colonial capitalism.6 Gesturing more expansively, Lisa Lowe's Intimacies of Four Continents takes late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European liberalism as a point of departure for thinking about how British imperialism, settler colonialism across the Américas, the transatlantic slave trade, and Asian labor migration are entangled, both historically and in the contemporary moment.7 Her book offers "intimacy" as a reading practice, heuristic, and methodology for relational ethnic studies projects. The three books discussed here build on these relational studies of Asian-Indigenous entanglements in new and exciting ways. They engage literature, photography, history, and law to think through Asian and Indigenous proximities and affinities across multiple geographies of mutual encounter: the Américas, Alaska, and Oceania. Although sharply attentive to how settler colonialism, liberal empire, and racial capitalism shape Asian-Indigenous relations, collectively these books engage aesthetic cross-representations, shared intimacies, and imaginative possibilities that move us beyond binary oppositions and political impasses. In this way, the books are deeply feminist and hopeful in their orientations and commitments. All three theorize space in relation to time, offering conceptual tools that emerge from specific sociohistorical contexts yet can travel and be taken up in new directions. Although anchored in...

Lives More Recognizable Than Individual:Indigenous Communities in the Face of Pandemics Dallas Hunt (bio) and Gina Starblanket (bio) At the beginning of his text The Monster Enters, Mike Davis writes: "Viruses, which are likely responsible for 90 percent of infectious diseases, are basically parasitic genes that hijack the genetic machinery of the cells they invade to make myriad copies of themselves."1 That is to say, they reproduce ad infinitum, and do this largely invisibly, except for the symptoms that eventually accumulate and grow worse as time goes on. The symptoms proliferate and manifest in a variety of different ways, so this attack on the body takes many forms, each one a signal or palpitation gesturing to a larger illness housed within us. In this short forum, we attempt not only to gesture to the ways in which COVID-19 has affected Indigenous communities in what is currently called North America but also to illustrate the larger, systemic issues that something like the coronavirus helps reveal. In so doing, we attend to the ways in which specific understandings of reality are normalized and afforded the authority of consensus. We advance, then, an argument that finds new political possibility in the relational obligations of life. It is necessary, however, to contemplate the singularity of something like a crisis or pandemic and its complex, multiple manifestations across different scales. Indeed, how might crisis be waged differently and by whom? And on what scale? As COVID-19 inflicts a variety of symptoms and maladies on our bodies, what other violences are working, subterraneously, but yet are no less dire? The political subordination of Indigenous peoples in contexts of colonialism has prompted many to shift attention toward questions of coexistence and interrelation between humans, and between humans and the living earth. Globally, we have seen heightened awareness and attention to the asymmetrical nature of social and political relations around the world, as COVID-19 has drawn our attention to existing structural inequalities and the disproportionate impacts that such crises have on Indigenous peoples, Black people and other people of color, people with disabilities, and sexual and gender minorities. This period in time has also been accompanied by a rise in white supremacist, [End Page 696] nationalist, capitalist rhetoric that has bolstered movements toward justice within and across many marginalized communities, with increased attention to the need for effective policy responses from governments in order to attend to the unsustainable conditions of our interrelatedness. It can be difficult to perceive the relational stakes at play between Indigenous peoples and Canada, especially in times of crisis or chaos. Indeed, we are presented with alternate frames, since a crisis is the precise moment in which states (or empires more generally) can capitalize on chaos or obfuscate its impacts on marginalized populations. And yet, these frames are broken by the realities they cannot contain, namely, the sociality and conditionality of life. In Frames of War, Judith Butler writes that "an obligation does emerge from the fact that we are, as it were, social beings from the start, dependent on what is outside ourselves, on others, on institutions, and on sustained and sustainable environments, and so are, in this sense, precarious."2 Because precarious life is the very "condition of being conditioned," or forged, that is, through "reproducible social institutions and relations," to acknowledge anything less is to deny our obligations to each other which are always also obligations to ourselves.3 A global crisis such as COVID-19 can reveal a nation's weaknesses, and it can also evidence fracture points in relations and commitments. In Canada, the pandemic has only affirmed a long-standing disconnect between government rhetoric and action in the realm of treaty relations, illuminating the selective, inconsistent, and contingent nature of the state's commitment to respect the implementation of treaty relationships with Indigenous nations. And yet, from early on in the pandemic, there have been several significant ways in which Indigenous governments have enacted their jurisdiction and authority over reserve communities. Indigenous communities across Canada took steps to restrict travel and visitor access to reserves. Some declared states of emergency, implementing advisories and/or bylaws for their membership. Some of these steps...

Herd Racialization and the Inequalities of Immunity Neel Ahuja (bio) The COVID-19 pandemic has been the context for public health institutions, epidemiologists, and a range of social scientists to make a public case for an idea concisely stated by the American Medical Association in November 2020: "Racism is a threat to public health."1 While activists and medical historians have long noted inequalities of access and outcomes for patients as well as exploitative conditions for research subjects based on race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and disability, such a statement by the AMA reflects a shift in public discourse at an organization that has historically worked to entrench such inequalities through its advocacy against universal health care and an elitist approach to medical training.2 At the moment of this public statement on racism, the intersection of the global pandemic with public activism against police violence created conditions for a reckoning with medical and health institutions' complicity in racially unequal life outcomes, which Ruth Wilson Gilmore centers as racism's production of "group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death."3 In the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and the summer of Black Lives Matter protests that followed, the AMA Board of Trustees and other health officials made public statements about the health consequences of racism, the consequences of Trump-era xenophobia, and the historical discrimination against Black patients and doctors.4 Such statements of the causative relation of racism to poor health outcomes were echoed by other institutional authorities. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) clarified that not only is racism an interpersonal relation, it is a structural one, which requires addressing a full range of social determinants of health.5 The World Health Organization convened an expert panel in March 2021 to address the relationship between health inequalities in COVID-19 outcomes and "discrimination" based on race and ethnicity.6 [End Page 689] At the same time that the Black Lives Matter movement spurred some public health experts and institutions to more directly address racial difference, both media discourse and scientific research on COVID-19 publicly highlighted inequalities in viral exposure, case rates, hospitalization rates, death rates, vaccine uptake, and other indicators of vulnerability. Recognition of widespread inequalities has also led social scientists and epidemiologists to set forth interdisciplinary analyses of COVID-19 as they relate to social phenomena ranging from housing segregation to occupational health to transportation inequalities.7 Although such innovative work has moved toward producing more contextual knowledge of race, in particular localities, industries, and legal contexts related to public health, much of the national-level reporting and data suffer from problems based on data sets that flatten the complexity of racial identity and fail to capture experiences of Indigenous and multiracial individuals. Based on large data sets collected by the CDC and state health agencies, the main data on racialized differences in health outcomes in the era of COVID-19 tends toward a "four food groups" model of minoritization, highlighting vulnerabilities experienced on a mass scale by Black, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous groups (with the category "Hispanic" still in use for Latinx in a number of studies). Notably, the "Native American" category often gets removed from the analysis due to a small sample, repeating a larger problem that exists in social science data that reproduce the absenting of Indigenous peoples in North America.8 Data on racial disparity have often been helpful in articulating certain stark differences, such as the significantly higher case and hospitalization rates among Black and Latinx people relative to population in the early phases of the pandemic.9 Although many media reports highlighted inequality facing Black and Latinx groups, the more comprehensive and critical data sets showed from an early stage that there were also unequal outcomes for American Indians and Asian Americans affected by the virus.10 Recent published data from the CDC put American Indian risks of hospitalization rates at triple those of whites and the death rate as the highest of all racial groups in the US.11 When some data showed that Asian Americans experienced case and hospitalization rates similar to or lower than whites, breakdowns of the...

Somewhere "Over the Horizon" Mary L. Dudziak (bio) I am everywhere, but to the eyes of common mortals, I am invisible. —the Wizard of Oz On August 31, 2021, President Joe Biden announced that the war in Afghanistan had ended. It was the nation's longest war, he emphasized, thereby severing one segment of the post-9/11 "war on terror" from all the rest.1 Whatever this war had been, he made it clear that the use of US deadly military force in the region would continue. "We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries," Biden emphasized. How could this be consistent with the dramatic pronouncement that the war had ended? He explained: "We just don't need to fight a ground war to do it. We have what's called over-the-horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground—or very few, if needed."2 With this statement, US military conflict was reimagined. It would occur in an imaginary space, somewhere beyond the clouds, a place where Americans would not be harmed, yet it would ensure comfort and security in what is now called the homeland.3 Magical thinking about faraway places has of course been a staple in American culture. In a widely known example, the film The Wizard of Oz, a girl named Dorothy wondered to her dog Toto about whether there was a faraway place "where there isn't any trouble." Breaking into song, she imagined that it was "behind the moon, beyond the rain." As storm clouds hovered above the isolated, sepia-hued farm scene, she thought that "somewhere over the rainbow" was a paradise where bluebirds flew and dreams came true.4 Frank Baum's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been described as a critique of the gold standard and a parable on populism.5 Changes to the story in the 1939 film, such as enhancing the role of the Wicked Witch of the West, Christian Caryl suggests, reflected fears about the rise of Nazism.6 The film has a happy ending, however. Dorothy defeats tyranny, and then goes home. The most resonant part of this war story is not her victory, however; it is that the conflict and terror do not occur in Dorothy's Kansas. US war has been fought in faraway places for some time, and battles closer to home are marginalized in American memory.7 [End Page 552] Even World War II was "over the horizon" for most Americans. US territories were bombed, but not the forty-eight states. Civilians on the US mainland did not have to flee for their safety, as did Hawaiians and others in US island territories, but Americans at home nevertheless imagined themselves as sharing the experience of "total war." Some worked long shifts in war production, and many had family members deployed, but the experience of the war's totality was significantly shaped by government war mobilization efforts, including the calibrated release of images of carnage for publication. It was a government project to encourage Americans to feel that they were personally involved in a distant conflict.8 In contrast to World War II, Americans now are often oblivious to the use of deadly force on their behalf. The film rendition of The Wizard of Oz captures this feature of contemporary distant war. As Dorothy, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion battle a witch seeking to eliminate them, Dorothy's Auntie Em back in Kansas is completely unaware. After Dorothy's ruby slippers bring her home, her aunt and uncle dismiss her efforts to explain the conflict, thinking it was a dream. Like Auntie Em's experience, most American war is largely invisible within the United States. When information is available, paying attention is nevertheless optional.9 In Biden's war plans, even soldiers in combat zones are optional. Robots can do the work. Flying robots, otherwise known as drones, are very good at killing people. They have often proved to be poor, however, at killing the intended targets.10 The problem is not with the drones themselves, national security experts have suggested. Instead, the lack...

This essay focuses on Ida B. Wells’s rarely analyzed application of statistical thinking in her anti-lynching pamphlets. I show how assumptions about the self-evident nature of data diminish the significance of Wells’s hidden calculations. My essay contextualizes her methods in the larger history of social quantification and scientific racism to underscore the urgency and novelty of her use of statistics. Wells not only reframes existing lynching records to show Black Americans as victims of racial terrorism but develops a critical framework for analyzing and humanizing the data. By more closely examining her use of empirical and quantitative methods to study the sociocultural underpinnings of lynching, we can recognize more fully her significant contributions to sociological research on Black life and to intersectional social activism and resistance. Her work contains urgent lessons for our contemporary moment: a blueprint for a more just approach to racial data collection and analysis, or what we would today call “data justice.”

Preparing to See Hope: On the Utopic Potentiality of the Stories We Share Frances Tran (bio) Dear Cathy, I framed my response to your presidential address as a letter in hopes that this intimate form will find you and others in the vein of the words you cite from Audre Lorde, “the personal as political.” Writing to you in this way allows me to aspire after the intimacy denied by the virtual 2021 ASA conference, to imagine what it would have been like to be in a shared space, feeling the urgency of your call for “Love and Resistance in a time of COVID.” This letter, then, might be read as a yearning for social and intellectual associations that have been made dangerous, not least by the COVID-19 pandemic, but also by the increased policing of our work as scholars and teachers in a nation and within institutions organized around the violences of settler colonialism and white supremacist politics hostile to the flourishing of minoritized life and knowledges. Let me begin by thanking you for the story of your experience growing up as a mixed-race Cambodian American adoptee in Valdosta, Georgia. Your evocative descriptions helped ground me in time and place, from the significance of Valdosta as a site of “refuge” during the American Civil War to its transformation over the course of Reconstruction and Jim Crow to the 1980s, when it became the scene of the “most formative” years of your childhood. The reflections you shared on the loneliness you experienced, and the painful “lesson of indifference” instructed by your father, who believed it best to keep the racist crimes committed against your family “to oneself simply because ‘no one cared’ and doing otherwise would lead to undeniable trouble and unreconciled hurt,” were deeply affecting and illuminating. Your story finds resonance with the work of Leslie Bow, Lee Isaac Chung, and Monique Truong, who elucidate histories of Asian racial formation and sociality in the US South.1 As a recent transplant to Tallahassee, a north Floridian city that often feels like a part of south Georgia, these texts and your words have helped me negotiate the conflicting feelings and palimpsestic temporal geographies of a place I am still trying to make into home. [End Page 239] To thank you for this piece of your personal history, I want to offer a story from my childhood. Unlike you, whose youth was shaped by constant movement, I grew up mostly rooted in place in New York City, apart from the short move my family made from Astoria to Little Neck, Queens, when my sister and I were entering elementary school, so we could take advantage of the better public education available in this predominantly white and Asian neighborhood. As Vietnamese but ethnically Chinese Americans, we had no trouble finding friends who looked like us. But I do have disconcerting memories, the wrongness of which only took shape upon reflection years after—the teacher who assumed my sister and I belonged in ESL because we were too shy to speak up and another who “let” me take an oral exam for my class because the other students clamored that my inherent “model minority” studiousness would score them all a hundred. The memory that sticks with me most occurred on a day that felt like any other. It was sunny and warm, and I was annoyed that I had to accompany my mother to Stop & Shop to buy groceries. We had picked up some fresh produce and bagels and were wheeling down the refrigerated aisle when my mother’s cart bumped into that of an elderly white woman. I still remember the look of disgust that creeped over her face, followed by her loud exhortation to “go back to your country” and similar expletives. I remember my ears burning, registering the shock of this unexpected encounter. I remember pushing the cart and my mother along, hurrying us out of range of this woman’s explosive anger. I remember the anguish on my mother’s face when she stopped and cried, “What do you want me to do? I’m going as quickly as I can.” Most of all, I remember the...

Recent examples of virtual assistant technologies designed as Latina information service workers are noteworthy objects of study for their potential to bridge analyses of Latinas’ labor history and information technology. Latinas in the United States have traditionally worked in blue-collar information technology sectors characterized by repetitive labor and low wages, such as electronics manufacturing and customer service. Latina information service workers, though fundamental to technoscience, have been largely invisible in histories of computing. Latina virtual assistants mark a shift in this labor history by relying on the strategic visibility of Latina identity in/as the technology interface. Our research explores Latina virtual assistants designed by Airus Media and installed as airport workers in airports along the southwestern border of the United States. We situate the technocultural narratives present in the design and marketing of these technologies within the broader histories of invisible Latina information labor in the United States. We find continuities between the ways Latinas have historically been positioned as “ideal” information workers and the use of Latina identity in the design of virtual assistants. We argue that the strategic visibility of Latina virtual assistants is linked to the oppressive structures of invisibility that have traditionally organized Latina information service workers.

This essay considers the idea of freedom through the prism of Toni Morrison's twinned aspirations to remake American English and to "transfigure the complexity and wealth of Afro-American culture into a language worthy of the culture." Although she is celebrated as a novelist and literary critic, Morrison's political thought has yet to receive its due. Focusing on her nonfiction writing from 1971 to 2019, I investigate how Morrison interprets the conjunction of freedom, colonization, and slavery in the language through which she writes. And I highlight her innovative uses of two of the most contested terms of political thought—sovereignty and territory—to conceive practices of freedom that do not rely on the conquest or subjugation of others.