The good life in the United States has hit a crisis, yet people remain wedded to it. Lauren Berlant has called this kind of situation an "impasse," which indicates the seeming unavailability of alternatives when the good life appears out of reach. In this essay, I develop impasse to show that the good life, while establishing how life ought to be lived, tacitly circumscribes what life is. The good life is founded on what Mel Chen has called an "animacy hierarchy," which categorizes and ranks beings through ascriptions of sentience, agency, and ability. Although impasse typically evokes stuckness, it is described here as full of unruly life that provokes new political control and possibilities. This essay navigates feminist, queer, and new materialist work on affect and Jennifer Egan's short story "Found Objects" to show that lively matter can open an impasse in the good life; disciplinary and biopolitical mechanisms seek to restore the animacy hierarchies of the good life; and impasse points to a life otherwise by opening modes of being that are irredeemable to the good life.

In this essay, we analyze a letter written in the Cherokee syllabary from inmates at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in 1951. We seek to explain how the letter serves as a model for language perseverance. We place the letter in the postallotment period of American Indian history, focusing on the unique circumstances engendering the letter's creation as a remarkably legible sample of Cherokee handwriting. Considering the imperial legacies of translation, we ask: How can we understand this letter in and on its own terms, and, more generally, how can we translate Cherokee-language manuscripts in ways that create alternatives to the imperial legacy of translation? To answer these questions, we argue, requires that language perseverance and preservation efforts be treated as mutually sustaining through decolonial translation methods, methods that we attempt to advance with a digital archive project. Within the letter we find a team working together to learn to use the Cherokee syllabary despite restrictive contexts, surveillance, and scrutiny from those outside the language community. In the process of the letter's translation, we find evidence of a team of community members, translators, students, and linguists working together to advance language learning and documentation.

Authenticity, Memory, and Materiality: Disgraced Memorials and Issues of Permanence Erika Doss (bio) What role does authenticity play in the judgment, value, and preservation of visual and material culture? Recent years have seen an uptick in the vandalism and the removal of “disgraced” memorials in the United States, most notably statues and other kinds of public art that some Americans find offensive, oppressive, and inappropriate. These include memorials, murals, and fountains dedicated to the Confederate States of America, Christopher Columbus, Father Junipero Serra, and western frontiersmen. Arguments for retaining and preserving these and other memorials are typically based on claims about their authenticity. Authenticity in art, the philosopher Denis Dutton explained, rests on assumptions that the object or image under consideration is “real,” “genuine,” and “true,” that it is a sign of undisputed credibility and legitimacy, a paradigm of irreplaceability. Whenever we use the term, however, Dutton advised us to first ask: “Authentic as opposed to what?”1 Authenticity, in other words, is a dynamic concept dependent on multiple cultural, social, economic, and political factors. Authenticity is neither innate nor permanent. Images and objects express and embody the values, beliefs, and norms of their makers and their audiences—and all these ideals are acquired and subject to change. Notwithstanding the mutability of authenticity, many Americans claim that challenging or removing certain memorials amounts to violating or destroying their inherent legitimacy. In 2018, a year after the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville erupted in violence and murder, an NBC poll reported that over 61 percent of southerners “oppose removing Confederate monuments and statues from public spaces.” That number is “even higher in some Deep South states, with 65 percent of Alabamians and Mississippians opposing removal.”2 In fact, southern fiscal support for Confederate monuments and sites has steadily escalated: over the past decade, Alabama’s Confederate Memorial Park, in Chilton County, has been allocated more than $5.6 million [End Page 135] in state funding. Since 2010, Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library in Biloxi, Mississippi, has received more than $21 million in federal and state funding.3 No matter how shameful or disgraced, no matter the violence they solicit and produce in their local communities, those who want to retain and preserve Confederate memorials and sites insist on their authenticity, a concept of truthfulness and validity that they attach to their original location and installation. For their supporters, monuments to the Confederacy are viewed as the “real thing,” as authenticating spatial and experiential links to the past. They value them as “teaching tools,” as “great objects for teaching and learning about the South’s dark, complex and troubled past.” By removing them, they argue, “we would be denying ourselves a great opportunity to learn about the South’s past.”4 Framing them as funereal tributes to southern soldiers who died in the Civil War, supporters discount the fact that the vast majority of Confederate memorials originated during Jim Crow, that many more were built during the civil rights era, and that dozens of monuments to the Confederacy have been erected in the past twenty years in states from North Carolina to Arizona. Whether or not they pay tribute to the Confederacy’s dead, all of them were and are intended as intimidating symbols of white supremacy. Understandings of the presumptive authenticity of Confederate memorials rest on the idea that legitimate visual and material cultures have unique origins, and that they are only or mainly genuine in the places and spaces where they were originally dedicated and installed. Defenders of Confederate memorials, for example, view them as authenticating “heirlooms” of southern history. Their authenticity is deemed far more significant than how they were originally received by different American audiences, or how they are contested today. Their credibility, and irreplaceability, rests on assumptions of their historical validity in the past, their physical occupation in the present, and the overarching assumption that all Americans share, or should share, the same understandings of history. It further stems from assumptions that American history, and history in general, is fixed and permanent: an unchanged narrative of facts and truth. In their 2017 “American Values” survey, however, researchers with the Public...

Disability in an Age of Fascism Jina B. Kim (bio) Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. By Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018. 304 pages. $17.95 (paper). Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea. By Eunjung Kim. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 312 pages. $104.95 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic. By Nirmala Erevelles. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 227 pages. $109.99 (cloth). $54.99 (paper). The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. By Jasbir K. Puar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 296 pages. $99.95 (cloth). $26.95 (paper). This is no longer a time of waiting. It is a time for the real work's urgencies. It is a time enhanced by an iron reclamation of what I call a burst of light—that inescapable knowledge, in the bone, of my own physical limitation. —Audre Lorde, "A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer" I would argue that disability justice is simply another term for love. —Mia Mingus, Disability Intersectionality Summit, opening keynote, 2018 Four years after the publication of The Cancer Journals (1980), self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" Audre Lorde received a diagnosis of liver cancer, "metastasized from the breast cancer for which [she] had had a mastectomy six years before."1 The 1988 essay "A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer" details the unfolding of her life thereafter, a record of navigating the medical-industrial complex and the body's rebellion at the height of the Reagan administration. Accordingly, the specter of the increasingly threadbare welfare state looms over Lorde's reflections: immediately after her February 1 diagnosis, she observes that the "starving old women who used to sit in broken-down [End Page 265] rooming houses waiting for a welfare check now lie under park benches and eat out of garbage bins."2 By drawing focus to the ravages of anti-welfare policy, even in the midst of diagnosis, Lorde connects her seemingly intimate experience of cancer to the material conditions—such as the withdrawal of already meager state support—that debilitate black and brown lives en masse. In 2019, thirty years after the publication of Lorde's essay, the systemic disablement of racialized and low-income populations continues unabated. The numbers of the uninsured continue to inflate under the current administration, and for the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries, the proliferation of disability, illness, and addiction enables the further harvesting of profit. In the afterlife of Reagan, whose platform of state divestment and corporate deregulation set in motion our present health/care crisis, disability, debility, and illness have emerged as primary arenas for racialized punishment. For instance, undocumented immigrants in the United States "already have the lowest rates of healthcare utilization and the highest uninsurance rate of any group in the country. … Immigrants' ability to access healthcare has deteriorated even further due to the increased threat of deportation under the Trump regime."3 A recent forum in the Boston Review, titled "How Race Made the Opioid Crisis," discusses the relationship between racial capitalism and "racially bifurcated understandings of addiction," demonstrating how the "demonization of urban, nonwhite drug users" during the so-called War on Drugs enabled the "opening of 'white' pharmaceutical markets" that "paved the way for our current public health crisis."4 Or as Britt Rusert succinctly observes, "The pattern of profiting from racialized sickness endures, and it shows no sign of stopping."5 Given the centrality of disability, illness, and the medical-industrial complex to contemporary regimes of racial capitalism, the insights offered by disability theory feel more urgent than ever. As Lorde puts it in the epigraph above, "This is no longer a time for waiting." But historically, what has disability studies taught us about US Empire, settler colonialism, globalization, biopolitics, and political economy? What has disability studies said about welfare, immigration, labor exploitation, and police brutality? What, as the disability scholar Lezlie Frye has so provocatively asked, is the relationship between the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, the first comprehensive civil rights law for people with disabilities, and the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, the Clinton-era...

In the influential 1930 proletarian novel by Mike Gold, Jews without Money, a young narrator travels with his parents to the then suburbs of Brooklyn with a “Zionist leader” to consider the real estate speculator’s offer to buy into racially segregated housing tracts. Observing the isolation of the neighborhood and the ostentatious whiteness of the Zionist developer, Gold forces implicit connections among whiteness, Zionism, and speculation in land. Reinforced by the narrator’s positive identification with a working-class Jew who proudly identifies as racially marked, the young Mikey contrasts working-class antiracism with the class pretentions and racism of Zionism. This essay explores the Jewish world in which Gold’s novel was written, looking at the ways in which Jewish writers and journalists in the Communist Party and other left-wing organizations articulated an anti-Zionist politics as part of a global critique of capitalism and imperialism. This essay argues that left-wing anti-Zionism articulated an ontologically different concept of Jewish being-in-the-world up to and after the Holocaust, one that centered solidarity and diasporic anti-imperialism in the face of fascist violence. Linking anti-Zionism with a Jewish left critique of whiteness, this essay provides a counternarrative to the assumption that assimilation, bourgeois liberalism, and support for Zionism were teleological certainties for the Jewish Left, or that nationalism was the default response to the European Judeocide.

Revolting Self-Care:Mark Aguhar's Virtual Separatism James McMaster (bio) These are the axes: 1 Bodies are inherently valid 2 Remember death 3 Be ugly 4 Know beauty 5 It is complicated 6 Empathy 7 Choice 8 Reconstruct, reify 9 Respect, negotiate —Mark Aguhar I still remember how I felt after reading Mark Aguhar's axes for the first time. Recognition and validation gave way to inspiration and aspiration—it was literally easier to draw breath. Here were nine principles about which a better world might turn: axes. Or else, here were nine rhetorical weapons, tools with which to chop, hack, or cut through the arborescent: axes. Here were words to live by, sacred script and profane scripture, gifted by a queer and trans-feminine Filipino American who relished her fatness and her fire. Whenever I have shown Aguhar's axes to friends and strangers, I have noticed a similar shift in them: a release into a queer of color communitas too infrequently felt. The axes teach us many things, among them, this: Mark Aguhar had a way of making the world feel survivable for those who were never meant to survive.1 [End Page 181] She was an artist perhaps most famous for work she posted to the online microblogging platform Tumblr under the handle "calloutqueen."2 There she housed her axes and many other expressions of alterity between 2010 and 2012. The site was as fragmented and fluctuating as the artist herself, and any account of it can only proceed in kind. Initially titled notheretomakefriends, Aguhar's blog was populated early on with the minor musings of minoritarian life and visual renderings of her gay male objects of desire, a preoccupation that would endure for the callout queen in varied forms. Over time, critical theory and personal drama disillusioned Aguhar, and she, in a self-consciously and self-critically politicized move, renamed her blog Blogging for Brown Gurls. Under this heading, the aesthetics of her ordinary existence and the existence of her extraordinary aesthetic projects emerged online as so many dismissals of whiteness, masculinity, thinness, and all things hegemonic while affirming brownness, femininity, and fatness for herself and others. Given her artist statement's description of her work as "a continuous exploration of queer expression and what it means to have grown up gay on the internet," it comes as little surprise that her highly sexual watercolor and textile-patterned pieces, her rope sculptures, and her text-based works such as her famous "Litanies to My Heavenly Brown Body" and, of course, "The Axes" still circulate widely in queer and trans corners of both the art world and the internet, easing the breathing of many like her who might slowly be suffocated otherwise.3 In this essay, I seek to understand what it was about Aguhar that made her (indeed, to this day, makes her) such a source of minoritarian sustenance. Minoritarian is a term I draw from the work of José Esteban Muñoz, whose thinking will serve as a touchstone throughout this writing. In Disidentifications—"one of the earliest texts to popularize the use of 'minoritarian' for contemporary readers in queer theory, performance studies, and critical race theory," according to Joshua Chambers-Letson4—Muñoz writes, "Although I use terms such as 'minoritarian subjects' or the less jargony 'people of color/queers of color' to describe the different cultural workers who appear in these pages, I do want to state that all of these formations of identity are 'identities-in-difference.'"5 I characterize Aguhar primarily as a minoritarian subject throughout this writing—as opposed to, say, a Filipino American or trans subject specifically—to account at once for all the identities-in-difference that she claimed and all the similarly identified communities that claimed her: Filipino American and trans, but also queer, fat, and femme—the list could go on. And while this characterization threatens to run roughshod over the various specificities of Aguhar's alterity, I aim to avoid this trap by foregrounding those specificities and the intellectual traditions associated with them when doing so can clarify [End Page 182] some aspect of this essay's thesis: namely, that Aguhar's social...

Race, Animality, and Animal Studies Julie Sze (bio) Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question. By Bénédicte Boisseron. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 288 pages. $30.00 (paper). Beyond the Doctrine of Man: Decolonial Visions of the Human. By Joseph Drexler-Dreis and Kristien Justaert. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. 303 pages. $35.00 (paper). Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age. By Claire Jean Kim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 346 pages. $30.00 (paper). Race Matters, Animal Matters: Fugitive Humanism in African America, 1840–1930. By Lindgren Johnson. New York: Routledge, 2018. 201 pages. $49.95 (paper). In 2005, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) launched a traveling exhibit called Animal Liberation Project: We Are All Animals. The exhibit compared animals suffering under factory farming to African Americans (as slaves, lynching victims, and victims of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment), Native Americans, and suffragettes who were force-fed. Earlier, PETA compared industrial farming to the Holocaust. The organization was forced to apologize, as a result of intense criticism from civil rights organizations, media institutions, and political figures. Because racist animalization has led to bodily violence, the association of people of color with animals has largely been outside the bounds of political discourse and cultural analysis in contemporary life. A recent suite of books explicitly reappraises and considers these exhibits alongside the growth of parallel fields that do not typically cross, such as animal studies and historical and cultural studies of race and racism. Over the last decade, the critical field of animal studies has grown tremendously.1 Although American studies and studies of race and racism in the humanities have not historically been at the forefront of research about animals, recent scholarship has confronted the racial blind spots in earlier scholarship within animal studies. [End Page 497] Scholars have foregrounded the questions of race and racism to the studies of ethics and contested politics in critical animal studies. Innovative research on the histories of race and racism, specifically antiblackness, shed light on the important questions of who constitutes the “we.” Collectively, recent scholarship grounded strongly in race and animal studies argues that to ignore racist histories of animalization does not undo them. Rather, our contemporary moment is ripe for a reappraisal of what has long been discarded and devalued. The category of the human and processes of dehumanization/animalization are better understood through the historical experiences of racialized others in the US, in particular, African Americans and Native peoples. The spectral nature of violence on land stolen is also an always invisible presence. The re-thinking of the long-standing animalization of black, brown, and Native bodies is necessary, in order to address the histories of racist conflation of nonwhite peoples/communities and animals. Bénédicte Boisseron calls color blindness a central problem in animal studies. That is, the sequential assumption that the “animal is the new black” ignores the very foundations of blackness to the category of the animal (12). These racial and animal questions are also intimately tied to gender. In 2013, Claire Jean Kim, a political scientist and ethnic studies scholar, and Carla Freccero, a literary scholar, coedited a special issue of American Quarterly titled “Species/Race/Sex.” In it, they highlighted scholarship that examined the species/race/sex nexus from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary topics and perspectives. The volume highlighted the wide-ranging breadth and depth of the scholarship rooted in the discursive construction of hierarchies of species/race/sex and how such research was deeply connected to activism and praxis. Kim built on these foundations in her 2015 book Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age. In it, she examines race and its entanglement with species and nature in the United States. Her case studies revolve around case studies: the battle over live animal markets in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Makah Whaling rights, and the spectacle around Michael Vick’s dogfighting ring (Vick is an African American professional football player who went to federal prison and returned to play in the NFL), as well as the PETA exhibit. What links these case studies of contested politics around race and...

In this essay, I argue that an important yet understudied consequence of the Vietnam War was an imperial turn toward modern logistics management. I track how the US empire-state used the war as a crucible for forging new hybridizations of military and corporate logistics. Over the course of the war, imperial forces assembled a transpacific infrastructure for managing the just-in-time flows of commodities and bodies between the United States and South Vietnam. Drawing on prior US imperial experiences in Korea and the Philippines, American supply chain managers recruited a multinational workforce of Vietnamese, South Korean, and Filipinx nationals to labor along transpacific supply chains. I read archival sources to track how supply chain managers enmeshed these logistics workers in regimes of slow violence and death. As the war dragged on, logistics workers struggled to dismantle these sociospatial infrastructures of exploitation, devalorization, attrition, and control. What emerged out of this frictional politics of encounter was the blueprint for a new, more just-in-time form of imperialism.