Tag: race

The Black Fugitive

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A review of The Problem of Passing, Sandra Harvey, Duke University Press, 2026.

Sandra Harvey’s The Problem of Passing argues that racial passing should not be understood primarily as an individual’s choice to “become” or impersonate someone else—such as a light-skinned Black person passing for white. Instead, Harvey shifts attention to the people and institutions that accuse, identify, and police passing in a more general sense: passing for white or assuming a racial identity that contradicts one’s family history or genetic makeup; passing for the opposite sex in the case of transgender identities; passing for able-bodied when one is disabled; passing for straight when one is gay; etc. Historically and conceptually, Black slaves passing for white to escape pursuers in the Antebellum South constitute the matrix in which all forms of passing in America have been shaped, which makes Black studies the central discipline to address the problem of passing. Harvey treats passing as a structure of surveillance: a way the United States has historically organized fears about Black freedom, mobility, illegibility, and supposed criminality. Passing is not passé; we haven’t been able to move beyond the problem of passing. Harvey contends that narratives of Black racial passing remain essential for understanding contemporary Black life, even though scholarship often regards passing as a historical phenomenon superseded by civil-rights-era demands for Black visibility. Passing, she argues, has never disappeared; it continues to shape how Black people are watched, classified, and exposed to state and vigilante violence. Her key conceptual intervention is to move from the passing subject to the accuser; from passing as an individual strategy to passing as a collective experience; and from racial or gender passing to a move that is always already both. Her book is especially well suited to showing that racial passing is not a marginal literary trope; it is a route into the modern political architecture of identification, surveillance, scientific authority, and state power.

A structure of surveillance

Conventional accounts ask why an individual passes and what freedom, safety, or social mobility they seek. Harvey instead asks why observers feel compelled to decide whether someone is “really” who they appear to be. The accusation that someone is passing becomes a technique of racial discipline: it authorizes surveillance, fixes identities, and regulates movement and belonging. In this account, “passing” is not merely self-presentation. It is also something done to people through acts of reading, suspicion, documentation, classification, and narration. Harvey traces the modern U.S. logic of passing to chattel slavery. Enslaved people who moved without authorization could be deemed fugitives; written passes, free papers, clothing, bodily marks, and racialized descriptions became instruments for distinguishing the supposedly legitimate from the fraudulent. Runaway-slave advertisements helped turn the “pass” into a broader cultural story about Black people’s alleged capacity to deceive, evade capture, or pass for free. This history produces a persistent contradiction: Blackness is imagined as hypervisible—instantly legible as racial difference and criminal threat. Yet Blackness is also imagined as potentially unreadable or deceptive—capable of escaping the watcher’s gaze. Black people have nowhere to hide except in darkness, deception, and fraud. Harvey argues that this contradiction fuels an imperative to watch more intensely. The state, police, scientists, and ordinary citizens are positioned as “master hunters” who must continuously authenticate the racialized other. Surveillance thus responds not simply to what Blackness visibly is, but to an anxious fantasy that Blackness may evade classification and control.

Trayvon Martin’s killing, one of the tragedies at the origins of the Black Lives Matter movement, is a central contemporary frame for this argument. Harvey reads the suspicion directed at Martin—his presence in a white neighborhood, his clothing, especially the hoodie—not as an isolated misrecognition but as part of a long history in which free Black movement is cast as trespass, fugitivity, and danger. The hoodie becomes an “anchoring signifier”: an ordinary object attached to the Black body to stabilize a racist reading of criminality. According to Harvey, “the ritualized, everyday hunting of black people” is still a defining feature of the United States. And the suspicion or accusation of passing is part of a long history of surveillance and control. To pass for free by passing for white or forging a pass was a way for fugitive slaves to escape the plantation and run for freedom, evading scrutiny and arrest by patrollers. Passing narratives and the folklore surrounding them crop up as early cautionary tales about the way fugitives evaded capture. The well-publicized nineteenth-century story of Ellen and William Craft illustrates all the dimensions of passing. It involves a daring, multi-layered escape from slavery in 1848 where light-skinned Ellen Craft passed as a white, male, disabled planter while her husband, William, acted as her enslaved servant. Harvey’s analysis focuses on the less-studied figure of William, whose supposed hypervisibility as a dark-skinned man allowed the performance of master and slave to take place. She twists the Hegelian dialectic of the master and the servant to introduce the additional characters of the “knowing-hunting subject” and the fugitive, showing that inherent to the idea of capture and containment is the ever-present threat of escape. This allows her to move from passing as a historical experience to passing as a discursive complex or an epistemological structure.

Slavery and Indian removal

Runaway slaves passing for white weren’t the only anxiety that plagued white settlers policing the Antebellum South.  Racial classifications and claims to national belonging were also entangled with the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the affirmation of settler colonialism. The drive for cotton land in the American South was fueled by the labor of enslaved people growing plantation crops and by the violent appropriation of fertile land through Indian removal. The next chapter of The Problem of Passing reads transcripts of rejected petitions for enrollment in the Choctaw Nation submitted by suspected black applicants “passing for Natives” between 1898 and 1914. Some historical background is in order. By the early 19th century, European Americans categorized the Choctaw Nation as one of the “Five Civilized Tribes” because they adopted centralized governments, written constitutions, and plantation practices, including slave ownership. This did not prevent President Andrew Jackson and his successors to dispossess the Choctaws from their ancestral lands and to relocate them west of the Mississippi River. The Choctaws who stayed were to be recognized as citizens of the state of Mississippi and to abandon their right to sovereignty. The signing of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek led to the Trail of Tears in the 1830s, when nearly 15,000 Choctaws were forced to march hundreds of miles in harsh conditions. Wealthy Native slaveholders forced hundreds of enslaved Black people to walk the Trail of Tears alongside them, enduring the same brutal winter conditions, disease, and starvation.

Established by Congress in 1898, the Dawes Commission (officially the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes) was charged to dismantle the collective land ownership and sovereignty of the Five Tribes in Indian Territory and to distribute individual plots of land to tribal members. This politics of recognition opened Blacks and Natives up to accusations of “passing for Native”. The Dawes Commission drew strict, often arbitrary racial boundaries that heavily penalized applicants with African ancestry. Applicants were rigidly categorized into specific groups: Citizens by Blood (those with documented indigenous ancestry); Citizens by Marriage (white individuals legally married to tribal citizens); and Freedmen (formerly enslaved people who had been adopted into the tribes after the Civil War, and their descendants). The Commission worked under the assumption that applicants by intermarriage could only be white, never black; that Blacks could not be Native, or speak a Native language as their native tongue; and that Blacks “passing for Native” should be excluded from any form of sovereignty. Preserved in the National Archives, the rolls produced through this commission’s census remain important documents of recognition and enrollment as members of the Choctaw Nation into the present. To become a legally recognized citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma today, an applicant must prove direct, unbroken lineage to an ancestor whose name is listed on the Dawes Final Rolls as a Choctaw “by Blood”. Thus many Americans are still affected by the Dawes Commission’s prejudiced ideas about race, nation, and citizenship.

The “HeLa bomb”

The problem of passing is not limited to historical episodes accessible in the archives; it can also characterize science in the making, as conceptualized by science and technology studies. Harvey’s earlier work on Henrietta Lacks’s HeLa cells—which informs one chapter of this book—reads the panic over HeLa contamination as an accusation of racial and gender passing. HeLa is an immortal cell line derived in 1951 from Henrietta Lacks, a Black American woman whose cervical-cancer cells were taken at Johns Hopkins. In 1966, geneticist Stanley Gartler demonstrated that many supposedly distinct human cell lines had actually been overrun by HeLa cells. Because HeLa could be identified partly through genetic markers then associated in population studies with Black people, the discovery was framed as a dramatic scientific scandal—the “HeLa bomb.” A technical problem of cross-contamination came to be narrated as an alarming exposure: cells presumed to originate from white donors had, unbeknownst to researchers, been replaced by cells derived from a Black woman. Harvey argues that the contamination narrative repeated an older U.S. racial grammar organized around the “one-drop rule,” which imagined Black blood as a polluting substance capable of compromising white purity. In this framework, HeLa was portrayed as a Black presence that had slipped undetected into ostensibly white or racially unspecified cultures, “passing” as something else until science exposed it.

The contamination narrative also fastened the cells to racialized stereotypes of Black female sexuality. Although HeLa cells are laboratory materials, journalists and researchers routinely referred back to Lacks’s body, cervix, sexuality, and presumed sexual conduct. Accounts connected cervical cancer, HPV, and the cells’ spread to insinuations about Lacks’s sexual behavior; one writer inferred from HPV-related material that she had “slept around.” A journalist compared being notified of HeLa contamination to parents receiving news that “little Darlene had VD”—a metaphor that feminized contamination and associated it with sexual shame. The term “HeLa bomb,” in a Cold War context, made contamination sound like infiltration or internal enemy action. Harvey reads this episode of moral panic as part of a wider biopolitical imagination in which science, the state, and surveillance seek to identify and neutralize biological threats. In short, Harvey shows how the language surrounding HeLa transformed a laboratory event into a racial and gender drama: a Black woman’s cells were figured as invasive, sexually contagious, deceptively mobile, and laboring beyond control. Her larger intervention is to expose how scientific knowledge can inherit and reproduce social structures of racial surveillance, colonial mastery, and anti-Black gendered violence even when its immediate object is cellular biology.

The drive to know

This leads to her broader critique of an “ethics of knowing.” For Harvey, passing exposes a deeper problem in Western epistemology: the desire to know another person completely. The watcher or “master hunter” believes that proper knowledge means being able to identify, classify, and secure the truth of the other. This drive to know is inseparable from the desire to possess, regulate, and govern. Harvey draws attention to the double sense of apprehend: to understand, but also to seize or capture. Scientific objectivity is not outside the history of racial capitalism. Western ideals of the rational, autonomous, knowing subject depend on a fantasy of mastery over an objectified and racialized other. In this sense, fugitivity might be understood as a rejection of the sovereignty of the white master’s symbolic order. Black scholars  like Fred Moten or Saidiya Hartman have shown how escaping captivity was not just a physical act of flight, but a radical refusal of the legal, cultural, and philosophical frameworks that defined Black people as property rather than human beings. The whole project of Black studies is oriented towards rethinking the question of the human from the perspective of fugitivity without “assuming to occupy the position of the normative subject, the transcendental subject.” Harvey’s book challenges liberal assumptions that autonomy, recognition, and inclusion alone can resolve racial violence. It allows the reader to move from the familiar literary history of racial passing to questions of surveillance, settler colonialism, scientific classification, policing, and racial capitalism. It suggests that racial classification itself is not neutral: it is historically connected to slavery, settler colonialism, state sovereignty, and white social authority. Narratives of passing help maintain these systems by turning uncertainty about identity into a reason for surveillance. The Problem of Passing ultimately calls for a decolonial or abolitionist ethics of knowing—one that refuses the violent aspiration to master the other through surveillance, classification, and exposure.

Intimate Chemistry

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A review of Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire, Mel Y. Chen, Duke University Press, 2023.

Mel Y. Chen’s Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire is a critical exploration of how race, disability, and sexuality intertwine through the lens of toxicity and intoxication. As a scholar whose work spans queer theory, critical race studies, disability studies, and more, Chen crafts a text that is both intellectually rigorous and deliberately disorienting, challenging readers to rethink conventional frameworks of knowledge production. This “strange book,” as Chen describes it, is not meant to offer neat conclusions but aims to unsettle, agitate, and invite readers into an “intoxicated method” of unlearning and reimagining. It is based on autobiography and personal experience rather than the constraining textures of academic disciplines. In their first book, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, which I reviewed here, Mel Y. Chen identified themselves as Asian American, queer, and suffering from a debilitating illness. They adopted the gender-neutral pronoun “they” or “them” to refer to oneself in the third person of the singular and gave some elements of their biography: growing up in a white-dominated town in the Midwest when they used to hear racist slurs thrown at them; being a first-generation student in a California college while their Chinese immigrant parents could barely master standard English; alluding to a female love partner while referring to their own queerness or kinkiness; mentioning various mental and physical impairments, among which multiple chemical sensitivity due to heavy metal poisoning.

A second book

Ten years later, and after having edited a primer on Crip Genealogies in the same academic publishing house (also reviewed here), Mel Chen is back in the game with a “second book” that bears the mark of the genre: less experimental and risk-taking, more assured in the legitimacy of its intellectual position, but also based on more limited archival research or fieldwork, also with a fair deal of repetition and cross-references. The autobiographical elements are still there: again, Mel Y. Chen defines themselves as neurodivergent (“even if I have an unstable relationship with the linguistic signification of this term”) and suffering from various ailments (“my asthma, my bleeding, my sickness”; “rolling migraines”). They survived a car accident in 1999 but “my knee and hip remain quirky.” They confess of being consecutively “slow” and “agitated,” alternating between bouts of “agitated reading, slow thinking, agitated writing, slow reading, agitated thinking, slow writing.” Perpetually experiencing a “brain fog,” Chen doesn’t often get stoned or high on drugs, but they confess they did on a particular occasion, which made them feel a lot better. It is not clear why Chen discloses all these autobiographical elements—“despite being a very private person,” they confess—, but the reason may have to do with campus politics as it is practiced in North American universities. There, academics state their positionality and indicate “from where they speak” in order to acknowledge how their personal identities, experiences, and social locations shape their research process and findings. Intoxicated is more concerned with “the politics of knowledge in the academy” than in autobiography per se. Mel Y. Chen positions themselves in the classroom or the lecture hall and tells of various interactions with the public. They describe talking back to contradictors on the use of non-binary pronouns (they/them/theirs) or confronting their feeling of compassion for people with disabilities, which Chen personally finds sickening.

Intoxicated is structured with an introduction, three chapters, and an “Afterwards,” each engaging with the concept of intoxication as a mode of understanding the entanglements of empire, race, and disability. Chen draws on nineteenth-century biopolitical archives from England and Australia, examining how colonial powers constructed racialized and disabled subjects through discourses of toxicity. Key examples include English scientist John Langdon Down’s characterization of intellectual disability (then termed “mongoloid idiocy”) as an “Asian interiority” and Queensland’s targeting of Aboriginal peoples under the guise of regulating black opium. These historical cases anchor Chen’s broader argument that intoxication—both literal and metaphorical—shapes marginalized subjects, often marked by “slowness” or agitation. The book’s chapters are not traditional case studies but rather “slantwise” explorations that weave together archival analysis, personal anecdotes, art, and contemporary political moments. Chapter 1, “Slow Constitution,” connects Down syndrome to colonial logics of development, revealing how racial and disability discourses converge. Chapter 2, “Agitation as a Chemical Way of Being,” explores opium’s role in imperial governance, while Chapter 3, “Unlearning: Intoxicated Method,” proposes intoxication as a reflexive, non-linear approach to knowledge. The “Afterwards” reflects on the ongoing reverberations of these entanglements, urging readers to embrace ambiguity over closure.

An intoxicated method

Chen’s greatest strength lies in their refusal to conform to traditional academic norms. The “intoxicated method” is a bold critique of linear, extractive scholarship, favoring instead a diffuse, atmospheric approach that mirrors the porous nature of toxicity itself. This method is particularly compelling in Chen’s analysis of historical archives, where the author illuminates how colonial administrations used intoxication to racialize and disable subjects. For instance, Chen’s discussion of Down’s racialized framing of intellectual disability is a revelatory critique of Western racial science in the 1870s, showing how disability was constructed as a “throwback” to a “primitive” Asian race. The reference to “Mongolism” or “Mongolian idiocy,” officially replaced by the medical category “Down syndrome” in 1972, is by no means a thing of the past: it still lingers in peoples’ minds, shaping attitudes and perceptions. It equates Asian features with disability, insulting both communities: Asians via racial caricature, and people with Down syndrome via dehumanizing pathologization. For Chen; this racist slur also has a personal feel: as an Asian American, “this was something I’d grown up with.” But perhaps more offensive that racial slurs and micro-aggressions was the feeling of compassion and empathy that they encountered at various stages of their research. Visiting the archives of British clinician John Langdon Down, best known for his description of the genetic condition that was later named after him, the author heard the librarian trying to exculpate the eminent physician for his use of the term “mongoloid”: “Of course, people didn’t know better at the time.” Similarly, during a seminar in South Africa, a white middle-aged woman came to the lecturer to argue that early concerns for disabled peoples were inspired by care and compassion, and that they should be redeemed as such. In these awkward situations, Chen is very attentive to eyes movements: people trying to evade the author’s gaze, or trying to lock vision with moisty and pleading eyes. For Chen, “some of these moments feel so queasy and out of time that they threaten being beyond inquiry, beyond mention.”

Mel Y. Chen is very sensitive to any reference to toxicity in the archives, especially when they relate to race and disability. As an abundant scholarship has established, indigenous peoples and racial minorities often face disproportionate exposure to toxic chemicals, a pattern known as environmental racism. Ethnic minorities in the US experience higher ambient air pollution, higher rates of toxic pollution from minerals (lead, mercury, cyanide) or from agribusiness pesticides, and have less access to affordable medical care. Other instances of intoxication in relation to race include the alcoholic proclivity among Native Americans or Pacific Islanders, or the infamous legacy of the opium trade in China. The overlap between race and debility has also been well documented and by no means limits itself to the case of the “mongoloid” designation. For Mel Y. Chen, the association of certain racial characteristics with cognitive deficiency continues insidiously in the United States and elsewhere: “Disability continues to lurk in the description of races and may lurk in the defining theme of race itself, race as a colonial trope of incapacity.” Less noticed is the role of toxicity in relation to debility and disablement. Chemicals like lead, mercury, benzene, pesticides, and solvents disrupt neurological, respiratory, and organ function, leading to lifelong impairments. Prenatal or early childhood exposure can contribute to developmental delays and mental retardation. Mel Y. Chen triangulates these three tropes of analysis into a race-disability-intoxication nexus. “Intoxication, they note, often lurk in scenes where race and disability come together” (one could add add sexuality, or queerness, to this conundrum). Chen puts great emphasis on the fact that nineteenth-century physician John Langdon Down used opium to sedate some of his disabled patients in his English clinic (although that must have been standard practice at the time). The opium trade, in its chemical, racial, and debilitating dimensions, is another instantiation of this triangle that stands at the core of Intoxicated.

The race-disability-intoxication triangle

The book’s interdisciplinary scope is another strong point. Chen seamlessly integrates critical ethnic studies, queer theory, and disability studies, while also engaging with art, pop culture (e.g., zombies as disabled figures), economics (“toxic assets” threatening financial health), and personal narratives. This expansive approach makes the book a rich text for scholars across fields, particularly those interested in how toxicity operates as a biocultural and political force. Critical race studies scholars will find in Intoxicated and its intersection of overlapping figures(Asian, disabled, intoxicated) a sharp contrast to the image of the Asian American as a model minority. The “model minority” figure, or myth, has been central to Asian American Studies as both a foundational critique and a persistent object of analysis. It shaped the discipline by prompting scholars to debunk stereotypes and reveal intra-group disparities. Associated to the model minority figure are the invisibility of Asian populations in the US context, their supposed discretion and effectiveness in the classroom or at the workplace, as well as the frailed masculinity of Asian men and the docile feminity of Asian women. The model minority model portrays Asian men as desexualized, emasculated, or effeminate; hardworking but passive, lacking leadership or physical prowess. Conversely, Asian women face hypersexualization as aggressive “Tiger Moms,” submissive Madam Butterfly, exotic Lotus Blossoms or seductive dragon ladies. The least one can say is that Mel Y. Chen doesn’t fit this model minority slot. To the docile and obedient figure of the Asian American student or scholar, they oppose “agitation as a chemical way of being.” The book crafts a different place for Asian Americans or for Asians, more rebellious and committed to the affirmation of each individual’s identity. More exposed to toxic attacks and poisonous libels, this non-normative identity is also paradoxically more resilient.

Chen’s affirmative stance on queer/crip forms of learning and unlearning is also noteworthy. Rather than framing intoxicated subjects as mere victims of pollution or failure, Chen celebrates their capacity for worldmaking under imperialism. This perspective is refreshing, offering a hopeful counterpoint to the often grim realities of colonial violence. Much like “queer” reclaims a slur for LGBTQ+ identities, people claim “crip” (a reclaimed slur for “cripple”) as a disability identity to express pride, reject ableism, and build community solidarity. Both draw from theory and are firmly rooted in academia: crip theory adapts queer methods to undo mainstream practices, revealing ableist exclusions. Professors routinely foster “agitation” through discussions that unsettle students’ assumptions—critiquing compulsory able-bodiedness or binary identities. Crip and queer pedagogies use fluidity and “crip time” to co-construct access, rejecting rigid norms of proper behavior. Chen welcomes, even encourages, agitation in the classroom. “When I begin classes or deliver talks, they note, I have developed the practice of opening them with an invitation to be otherwise.” Students are allowed “to rock, to twitch, to stand when others are not standing or to sit when others are standing.” Illegitimated expressions, such as wrong or slow cognition and agitated gesture, or incoherent behavior, usually end in the exclusion from places of higher learning. “Cognitive or intellectual disability—and its broad matrix of cognitive variation—is the near unthinkable for academia.” And yet some characterization of neuroatypicality seems standard for academics, whose work often gravitates towards solitary research, deep focus, and contestation of accepted theories. Differences should be celebrated, not frown upon, in an environment devoted to the production of new ideas and unconventional methods.

Here’s to the crazy ones

Despite its brilliance, Intoxicated is not without flaws. Its experimental style and compressed length (190 pages) can leave readers disoriented. Some readers may express frustration with the book’s “jumpy” pacing and lack of clarity around key concepts like “chemical intimacy.” While Chen’s intention is to resist “thorough aboutness,” this approach risks alienating readers who seek more concrete definitions or sustained analysis. For example, one may get the impression that the book’s most compelling moments—such as personal anecdotes or detailed historical discussions—are often too brief, overshadowed by dense theoretical detours. Additionally, the book’s ambitious scope can feel overwhelming. Chen’s attempt to cover vast temporal and thematic ground—spanning centuries, continents, and disciplines—sometimes sacrifices depth for breadth. Readers hoping for a focused exploration of environmental racism, for instance, may find the emphasis on intoxication diffuse. Intoxicated is best suited for graduate students, scholars, and readers comfortable with dense, theoretical texts and non-linear arguments. It is not an easy read, but its rewards lie in its ability to unsettle and inspire. For those studying race, disability, or empire, Chen’s work is a brilliant, if challenging, invitation to rethink how we engage with the toxic legacies of colonialism. I recommend approaching it with patience, ready to embrace its ambiguities as part of its intoxicated method.

The Land of Kush

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A review of Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan, Christopher Tounsel, Duke University Press, 2021.

Chosen PeoplesOn July 9, 2011, South Sudan celebrated its independence as the world’s newest nation. One name considered for christening the country was the Kush Republic, after the Kingdom of Kush that ruled over part of Egypt until the 7th century BC. According to historians of antiquity, Kush was an African superpower and its influence extended to what is now called the Middle East. Placing the new nation under the sign of this prestigious ancestor was seen as particularly auspicious. But for many people the name Kush has been connected with the biblical character Cush, son of Ham and grandson of Noah in the Hebrew Bible, whose descendants include his son Nemrod and various biblical figures, including a wife of Moses referred to as “a Cushite woman.” A prophecy about Cush in Isaiah 18 speaks of “a people tall and smooth-skinned, a people feared far and wide, an aggressive nation of strange speech, whose land is divided by rivers” that will come to present gifts to God on Mount Zion after carrying them in papyrus boats over the water. For many South Sudanese at independence, Isaiah’s ancient prophecy directly applied to them, to the point the newly appointed President Salva Kiir chose Israel as one of his first destinations abroad. Churchgoers also read echoes of their fight for sovereignty and independence in various passages of the Bible. Christian southerners envisioned themselves as a chosen people destined for liberation, while Arabs and Muslim rulers in Khartoum were likened to oppressors in the biblical tradition of Babylon, Egypt, and the Philistines. John Garang, leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M), was identified as a new Moses leading his people to the promised land. The fact that he left the reins of power to his second-in-command Salva Kiir before independence, just like Moses did with Joshua upon entering the land of Canaan, was interpreted as further accomplishment of the prophecy. Certainly God had a divine plan for the South Sudanese. For some Christian fundamentalists, the accomplishment of Isaiah’s prophecy was a sign of the imminent Second Coming of Jesus Christ that Isaiah identified as the Messiah, the king in the line of David who would establish an eternal reign upon the earth.

Isaiah’s prophecy

This moment of bliss and religious fervor did not last long. Conflict soon erupted between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir (of Dinka ethnicity, Sudan’s largest ethnic group) and former Vice President Riek Machar (of Nuer ethnicity, the South’s second largest ethnic group.) The South Sudanese Civil War that ensued killed more than 400,000 people and led about 2.5 million to flee to neighboring countries, especially Uganda, Sudan, and Kenya. Various ceasefire agreements were negotiated under the auspices of the African Union, the United Nations, and IGAD, a regional organization of eight East African nations. The last truce signed in February 2020 led to a power sharing agreement and a national unity government that was supposed to hold the first democratic elections since independence in 2023. Again, some predicators and religious commentators interpreted these internal divisions and ethnic strife using biblical metaphors. As with earlier periods, the war produced a dynamic crucible of religious thought. Supporters of civil peace called on South Sudanese not to divide themselves like the tribes of Israel or recalled Paul’s injunctions in the Epistle to the Galatians to become one in Jesus by forgetting divisive identities. “Let us take the Bible instead of the gun,” exhorted a senior official at the Ministry of Religious Affairs. “Shedding blood is the work of the devil, and anybody who is killing people is doing the work of the devil,” declared another cleric. The civil war was interpreted as an opposition between right and wrong; only this time the forces of evil were internal to South Sudan, not projected upon the northern oppressor. The most vindictive denounced their enemies by comparing them to the Pharisees or even to Herod. God was used in one breath to argue for cultural unity (“all are one in Christ”) and in another for cultural diversity (tribes are “gifts of God”). These conflicting arguments are proof that in all situations, the biblical referent remains major in the South Sudanese national imagination. Meanwhile, the “land of milk and honey” remains one of the poorest countries on earth, with all the characteristics of a failed state.

For some people, interpreting historical events along religious lines is not only irrational and delusional, but also dangerous and divisive. Looking at history from God’s perspective can lead to a fatalistic view of life and human action. Having “God on our side” has served as justification to some of the worst atrocities in human history, and the Westphalian system of nation-states that is enshrined in the United Nations Charter was originally created to bring an end to the religious wars that plagued Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. According to modern views, Christian interpretation of biblical prophecies should remain in the pulpit, and clerics should refrain from interfering in political issues of the day: “The more politically involved the church has become, the less spiritually involved the church is.” In the case of Sudan, religion was mobilized both in the North and in the South to bolster national identities and strengthen racial differences. Leaders in Khartoum have attempted to fashion the country as an Islamic state, making Islam the state religion and sharia the source of the law since 1983. Meanwhile, Southern Sudanese have used the Bible to provide a lexicon for resistance, a vehicle for defining friends and enemies, and a script for political and often seditious actions in their quest for self-determination and sovereignty. But Christopher Tounsel does not see religion as the source of the civil war that led to the independence of South Sudan. After all, rebels in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) were first inspired by Marxism and backed by the socialist regime of Mengistu in Ethiopia. John Garang believed in national unity and a secular state that would guarantee the rights of all ethnic groups and religions in a “New Sudan” conceived as a democratic and pluralistic state. Theology was only one of the discourses that informed the ideological construction of the South Sudanese nation-state. Race and, after 2005, ethnicity, were also important components of southern identities, working to include individuals in collective bodies and to distinguish them from others. In this perspective, the author cautions “against a limited view of South Sudanese religious nationalism as one based exclusively in anti-Islamization.”

A crucible of race

In Chosen Peoples, Christopher Tounsel presents “theology as a crucible of race, a space where racial differences and behaviors were defined.” Rather than approaching race and religion—the two elements most often used to distinguish North and South Sudan—as separate entities, he analyzes religion as a space where race was expressed, defined, and animated with power. Tounsel is particularly interested in how Christianity shaped the identity of the region’s black inhabitants (as opposed to Sudan’s Arab-Muslim population) and brings forth the notion of God’s chosen people (or peoples) using the Bible as a “political technology” in their fight against the oppressor. The first Catholic missionaries – Jesuits – settled in South Sudan in the middle of the 19th century following the creation by Pope Gregory XVI of the Vicariate Apostolic of Central Africa in 1846. As for the Protestants, they arrived in 1866 by through the British and Foreign Bible Society. However, this initial period of mission work was interrupted for nearly thirty years due to the Mahdist Wars that bloodied Sudan in the last decades of the century. When the British regained control of the region under the Condominium Agreement signed with Egypt in 1899, they facilitated the reestablishment of missions there in order to transform South Sudan into a buffer zone that could stem the expansion of Arabic and Islam up the Nile. The missionary work carried out there in the first half of the 20th century, mainly by Roman Catholics, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the United Presbyterian Mission (also known as the American Mission), in addition to its classic dimensions (translating the Bible, identifying socio-linguistic groups, schooling a new local elite), included a strong martial dimension by playing both on the symbolism of the crusade and the struggle against Muslim slavery. Through a case study of the Nugent School, created by the CMS in Juba in 1920, Tounsel shows that ethnic identities were also reinforced through the teaching of local vernacular languages and the definition of self-contained tribal units based upon indigenous customs, traditional usage, and competitive antinomies (a Nuer-English dictionary included the descriptive phrase “my cattle were stolen by Dinka.”) Ethnic conflict between indigenous identities, seen as natural and inevitable, could only be overcome by a common Christianity, while Islam and Arab culture was portrayed as alien and hostile.

After Egypt’s 1946 effort to assert its sovereignty over Sudan, Britain reversed course and conceded Sudan’s right to self-determination and, ultimately, independence, which was proclaimed on January 1st, 1956. The almost complete exclusion of southerners from the “Sudanization” policies in the 1950s fueled a growing sense of southern grievance and political identity. The 1954 creation of the first all-Sudanese cabinet under al-Azhari’s National Union Party, while the southern Liberal Party was in opposition, accelerated southern political thinking toward self-determination and federalism. It was in this context that a mutiny of the Equatorial Corps occurred in 1955 at Torit in the southern Equatoria province. The Equatorial Corps, composed entirely of Christian soldiers – around 900 –, had been created by Lord Reginald Wingate as part of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium on Sudan at the end of the 1910s: a bold decision in a context where military service had until then been reserved for Muslims. It was intentionally divided along ethnic lines: most of the corps was recruited from the Lotuho and other small eastern ethnic groups on the Sudanese slave frontier that were perceived to have “natural” military qualities. The mutiny, motivated by a project to transfer some units to the North and have them replaced by northern soldiers, was sparked by an incident involving an Arab soldier who allegedly insulted a black soldier by calling him a slave (abid). This term, then commonly used by Muslim Sudanese to denigrate black populations, testified to the very slow disappearance of slavery in the region. Sudanese slavery had even experienced a surge in the 1860s and 1870s with the progress of navigation on the Nile and had still been largely tolerated by British supervision until the beginning of the 20th century, after the end of the Mahdist wars. Mostly contained in Equatoria, where most of the mutineers were based and originated, the mutiny was quickly put down but it then led to the First Sudanese Civil War, taking its sources from the same crucible: Christian identity, racial confrontation, ethnic divisions, refusal of slavery and Muslim domination.

The First and Second Sudanese Civil Wars

The First Sudanese Civil War (1955-1972) considerably strengthened the biblical reference in the South Sudanese national emancipation movement. It was widely regarded as a religious confrontation between a Muslim government in Khartoum and its armies, and Christian liberation fighters in the South. Religious thought provided an important spiritual lexicon for the racial dynamics of the war, becoming a space for southerners to articulate the extent of racial division and hostility. The decision of the Sudanese government to Arabize school programs and gradually ban foreign missions, definitively expelled in 1964, not only amplified Christian proselytizing by local pastors but also provided new troops for the South Sudanese resistance. At the beginning of the 1960s, southern opposition was structured militarily and acquired propaganda organs such as the Voice of Southern Sudan published from London with the support of missionary societies. In 1967 the Youth Organ Monthly Bulletin of the Sudan African National Union (SANU) published a rewriting of Jeremiah’s Book of Lamentations where Israel was replaced by South Sudan and Babylon by Khartoum. This type of parallel was used more and more frequently, giving the conflict the appearance of a war of religion. While Arabs were demonized as inhuman evil agents of Satan, southerners framed themselves as God’s beloved people analogous to the Israelites. The war witnessed the creation of a theology that maintained that providence was leading southerners to victory. When the first civil war ended in 1972, biblical reference was clearly rooted while racial and religious identities were closely interwoven. For Sudanese refugees, returning home was presented as the end of exile in Babylon. Southern intellectuals, rather than approaching race and religion as mutually exclusive, used theology as a crucible through which racial identity was defined.

The peace agreement signed in Addis Ababa in 1972 provided for autonomy for South Sudan and religious freedom for non-Muslim populations. Despite their desire for independence, SANU leaders accepted to compromise, but multiple violations of the agreement, as well as the decision of the Sudanese government to impose Islamic law, contributed to relaunching the conflict in 1983 with the creation of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and Army (SPLM/A). The fall of Ethiopia’s Mengistu regime in 1991 was the second formative event, depriving the southern opposition from operational support and ideological justification. Though the SPLM never officially affiliated with any religion and maintained a policy of religious toleration, it increasingly turned to Christianity to mobilize and garner support at home and abroad. The SPLA was transformed into a largely Christian force that explicitly used Christian themes and language as propaganda. Apart from the Bible, few other sources were available with which to interpret their position. Episodes from biblical Israel’s history, like David’s clash with Goliath or Moses leading his people to the Promised Land, became popular narratives to fit the modern situation. It is in this context that Isaiah’s prophecy concerning Cush was referenced as foretelling ultimate victory. John Garang, a secularist at the beginning of the war, saw utility in including Cush in domestic politics. He also tried to mobilize support abroad, appealing to Pan-Africanism, Evangelical solidarity, and humanitarian repulsion against modern slavery. American human rights activists pressured the US government to get involved in the situation, framing the conflict as a war between Arabs and Africans, Christianity and Islam, masters and slaves. Their advocacy and humanitarian engagement influenced the manner in which the conflict was represented in mainstream Western media. Beginning in the 1990s, Sudan entered the American evangelical mind as a site of Christian persecution and possible redemption. President Bush appointed Senator John Danforth—an ordained Episcopal minister—as his special envoy on the Sudan. Without Washington’s support, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in 2005 and the ensuing independence of South Sudan in 2011 would never have taken place.

A failed state

Christopher Tounsel takes a neutral perspective on the role of religion in framing South Sudan’s struggle for independence. He does not see religion as a “veil” for material interests or as an “opium” that would intoxicate people into a war frenzy. He has consideration and respect for the religious narrative that interprets South Sudanese nationalism as a spiritual chronicle inspired by the Bible and corresponding to God’s plan. Of course, he does not himself offer a religious interpretation of historical events. The views he presents are those of local religious actors: mission students, clergy, politicians, former refugees, and others from a wide range of Christian denominations and ethnicities. He strictly endorses the role of the professional historian, crafting a rigorous history of religious nationalism—analyzing many printed sources and archives that are exploited from the first time; collecting oral testimonies by clerical and non-clerical figures in Juba; offering his own interpretation after discussing other viewpoints present in the academic literature. Only in the acknowledgement section does he make reference to his own religious affiliation by giving thanks to “my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” But if we consider the devastating toll that successive civil wars had on the local population, one may see the role religion has played in a more negative light. Were it not for a biblical narrative of suffering and redemption, a South Sudanese state would never have seen the day. There are serious concerns about the viability of such a landlocked, ethnically polarized country that political scientists subsume under the category of failed state. Religious faith may have been useful in forging a common identity against an oppressor perceived as Arab and Muslim, but could not prevent the newly independent state to plunge into prolonged ethnic warfare. And American Evangelicals who viewed South Sudan as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy and the sign of Christ’s second coming were not simply delusional: they added oil to the fire in an explosive crucible of race, religion, and ethnicity.

Critical Fashion Studies

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A review of Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property, Minh-Ha T. Pham, Duke University Press, 2022.

Minh-Ha PhamThe fashion world has always espoused the latest trends in society and kept up with the times. It should therefore come as no surprise that fashion producers and commentators now speak of “ethical fashion,” “sustainable fashion,” or “fashion for good.” But what do these terms exactly mean? Who has the power to declare fashion worthy of these labels? What lies behind the glamour and glitter of fashion shows and catwalk fame? Unsurprisingly, there is also a radical wing of fashion critique (or critical fashion studies) that scrutinizes those corporate objectives and tries to hold the fashion industry accountable. Minh-Ha T. Pham is one of those critics that read fashion in relation to race, class hierarchies, labor, indigenous knowledge, creativity, and intellectual property rights (IPR). In Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, she examines the way social media users monitor the fashion market for the appearance of knockoff fashion, design theft, and plagiarism. Through what she calls “crowdsourced IP regulation,” she envisages the online activities of bloggers and Instagram users as a form of free labor mobilized in the service of fashion capital accumulation. Network vigilantes who are policing the border between authentic and fake fashion are engaged in racial work: copycat producers and consumers are always portrayed as Asians and reviled as morally defective, while creativity is defined as a property of whiteness, which gives Western fashion designers the privilege to engage in racial extractivism and legitimate cultural theft.

The sociology of fashion

 Although this book is grounded in media studies, it also uses standard tools and concepts of sociological analysis. Its sociological value is limited by the fact that the author didn’t engage in fieldwork or participant observation: she only observed fashion blogging netizens from a distance and through the media impact of their activities. Nor did she collect quantitative data about fashion imitation and IPR policing activities. Her terrain is digital, and she gathered most of her observations online. But her critical perspective on the fashion industry places her in a long tradition of the sociology of fashion, from George Simmel and Thorsten Veblen to Pierre Bourdieu and Nancy Green. According to Simmel, fashion derives from a tension between, on the one hand, the tendency of each of us to imitate somebody else, and on the other hand, the tendency of each of us to distinguish oneself from others. Veblen coined the word “conspicuous consumption” to characterize the acquiring of luxury commodities by the “leisure class” as a public display of economic power. Bourdieu conceptualized fashion innovation as a field of values, norms, and power hierarchies structured around the opposition between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, mainstream élégance and avant-garde. Nancy Green gave a historical description of the working conditions of immigrants in the women’s garment industry in New York’s Seventh Avenue and the Parisian Sentier, showing how labor organization builds on gender and ethnic differences. Minh-Ha Pham’s perspective is thoroughly global: her examples and case studies originate from the heart of the fashion industry in Paris or New York as well as from the periphery of indigenous communities in Mexico or from ordinary social media users in Thailand. Call it multi-sited ethnography without direct engagement, or doing fieldwork from a distance.

Imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, but that is not how most fashion brands see it. For years, the luxury industry has been battling counterfeiters, investing heavily in technology, the internet, and AI to authenticate products. Brands have lobbied governments to seize and destroy fake goods, prosecute buyers and dealers, and managing online traffic to counterfeit platforms. However, legal action does not seem to be enough. For a start, in the fashion industry, intellectual property is not enforced as it is within the film industry and music industry. To take inspiration from others’ designs contributes to the fashion industry’s ability to establish clothing trends. Fashion copycat disputes rarely involve original designs: fashion is, after all, a copy culture, in which innovation feeds on imitation. With few legal basis to protect original works of authorship, fashion leaders turn to the public to defend them against imitators. In the early twentieth century, powerful fashion companies used the trade and popular press to create a popular sense of fashion legality. Today, social media users and environments do this work. For Minh-Ha Pham, crowdsourced IP regulation is extralegal work: rather than pay legal experts, fashion brands depend on social media users to stamp on knockoffs and copycats. The fashion industry reproduces downstream a practice that it uses at every step of its value chain: mobilizing unpaid or grossly underpaid labor, from the garment factory workers to the unpaid fashion interns and the models that are compensated in kind with the luxury goods they have to wear.

Crowdsourced IP regulation

In crowdsourced IP regulation, social media users are naming, shaming, and demanding boycotts against fashion copycats while defending and promoting alleged copycat victims. They are playing this digital vigilante role in good faith and with good intentions: most of them sincerely believe that they contribute to a more ethical fashion world in which creativity gets rewarded and copying is sanctiond. But according to Minh-Ha Pham, the denunciation of the copycat culture follows racial and colonial patterns. The copynorms that inform them are freighted with cultural assumptions and biases, whereby copiers are always construed as Asians and innovators as Western. Authentic and fake fashion, creativity and copying are racialized categories, not neutral facts. The Asian fashion copycat is ethical fashion’s quintessential racial other. It derives from deeply rooted ideas about, on one hand, Asians’ technical superiority and, on the other hand, their cultural and ethical inferiority. According to standard stereotype, Asians are incapable of creativity, they are condemned to rote learning and mechanical repetition. The premise of the Asian copycat is routinely accepted without question or qualification: fashion knockoffs are immediately perceived as made in Asia, as the products of cheap ethics and shoddy manufacturing. Google searches automatically associate copycat culture with China or South Korea. These countries are accused of having achieved development by imitation rather than innovation. Accusations of “bottom-up copying” bristle with moral indignation about the theft of creative property, hard work, and sales that should have benefited their rightful owners. Words like “copying,” “knockoff,” “piracy,” and “counterfeit” are laden with value judgements and potentially legal implications. Meanwhile, “top-down copying” receives much less attention, and “lateral copying” is mostly a concern within the industry that feeds on imitation and trend-making. Popular euphemisms for top-down copying include “creative inspiration,” “homage,” and “cultural appreciation.”

Several case studies in the book concentrate on this top-down copying and contrast the lack of sanction associated with it to the moral indignation and media campaigns raised by bottom-up imitation. In the exceptional cases where “top-down copying” is publicly acknowledged, the copying is often excused as an isolated lapse in judgement rather than a reflection of a broader cultural or racial pattern. In particular, indigenous knowledge and ethnic designs are considered as part of the public domain, constituting a “free bin” that Western designers can mine for their creations. For Minh-Ha Pham, cultural appropriation and cultural inspiration are two faces of the same coin. They rely on what she calls “copy rights,” the power to copy without being branded a copycat. Copy rights include the right to use and enjoyment and the right to exclude others. They provide some with the right to copy, to benefit from copying, and to exclude others from the same privileges. They constitute a “racial license to copy” that is part of the privilege of being white. Examples of such racial extractivim are numerous. Isabel Marant’s copycat version of the Mixe blouse, a traditional design from the Tlahuitoltpec people in Oaxaca, Mexico, led to a legal battle that classified the indigenous design as belonging to the public domain. The Maasai people of northern Tanzania and southern Kenya have experienced a similar pattern of legally sanctioned exclusion and extraction, being used in many media campaigns without receiving any share of the proceeds. The racial license to copy also protected the designers who launched “Navajo-inspired” collections, giving rise to a Navajo chic trend that didn’t benefit the Navajo people in any regard. In fashion’s parlance, “traditional clothing”, “folk costumes,” and “ethnic garb” are racially coded terms that de-skill non-Western designs as cultural and natural rather than artistic and intellectual.

Ppl knocking each other off lol

Whereas most websites dedicated to exposing fashion copycats “punch down” on cheap imitators and align with the interests of the luxury business, Diet Prada, an Instagram account with a massive followership, doesn’t hesitate to “punch up” or “punch laterally.” It plays the role of a whistleblower or an online watchdog exposing the structural problems that pervade the global fashion industry, particularly racism, misogyny, sexual predation, and labor exploitation. Diet Prada dares to name, shame, and, in some cases, flame industry giants. Its posts typically involve side-by-side comparison photos of two or more lookalike fashion garments or accessories. It also imitates the headlines of fashion magazines or uses internet memes to expose wrongdoings and express outrage. According to Minh-Ha Pham, Diet Prada is “a fashion insider that uses insider branding strategies and forms to articulate an outsider cultural political discourse about the inequalities sustaining the global industry of which it’s now a significant part.” Its refusal to consent to hegemonic ways also finds expression in absurd posts that poke fun at fashion, fashion policing copycat, and fashion copycatting itself by juxtaposing high fashion objects with mundane things, like a ham sausage adjacent to a Bottega Veneta shoe or a dog’s snout and a Saint Laurent dress. Its derisive one-line description, “Ppl knocking each other off lol,” has remained unaltered since its first post. Its status as an industry watchdog is now so established that fashion companies have instituted channels to communicate with it, eschewing the conventional language of corporate communication to publish off-the-cuff comments and candid reactions.

Apart from naming and shaming, another response to counterfeits is moving upscale. This makes perfect economic sense: according to market signaling theory, when counterfeits enter the market, authentic brands have incentives to upgrade their quality and innovate. A higher price signals a higher quality, while pervasive counterfeiting with low production cost could drive authentic products with lower prices out of the market (as in the “market for lemons” theorized by George Akerlof.) Chanel, Gucci, and Prada don’t really need to crack down on counterfeits: they control their own distribution outlets and have developed among their customer base a sensitivity to detail that allows them to distinguish between the authentic and the fake. Fashion is linked to elitism and fueled by the increasing wealth gap in society. This is why the notions of “democratic fashion,” or “affordable luxury,” are contradictions in terms. They were promoted at the turn of the century by television shows and feature films that made the rarefied world of high fashion relatable. With Sex and the City or The Devil Wears Prada, people who might never shop for luxury fashion were encouraged to become conversant in its language. Fashion imposed its brands and values upon a society that learned to distinguish between authentic taste and fake products, between high and low market positioning. This period also saw the rapid expansion of European “fast fashion” brands into US markets. After the 2008 financial crisis, terms like “cheap chic,” “recession chic,” and “credit crunch chic” were widely used to describe budget versions of designer fashions sold at stores like Zara, Target, and H&M. Cheap chic was as much a political fashion statement then as sustainable fashion is today. It promised to make fashion (the clothes and the industry) accessible to more consumers. More recently, fast fashion came to be associated with China and rejected as unethical: it became synonymous with cheap labor, shoddy quality, and environmental degradation.

Fast fashion

Minh-Ha Pham’s book encourages readers to take a broader view of the value chain in the fashion industry. It should include all actors who create value, including the “free labor” mobilized downstream to expose counterfeits and reinforce IPR protection. Could critical fashion studies be included in this broader industry environment? Does Minh-Ha Pham participate in the regulation of a sector she so vehemently criticizes? Like fashion bloggers, academic critics believe in the importance of fashion as a social phenomenon. They treat their activity as work and dedicate an important part of their time to monitoring the industry’s latest developments. By holding fashion accountable, they demonstrate that the fashion world cannot stand outside broader societal concerns pertaining to racial justice, gender equality, labor rights, and sustainable development. The fashion world is very sensitive about these issues, not because it is particularly virtuous (it was late to follow the #MeToo bandwagon), but because its business has always been to keep abreast of latest cultural trends and to align with the changing times. Corporations in the luxury business are very careful about the language they use and what is told about them. Any blemish in their corporate image translates into massive revenue loss and need for reputation repair. The Asia Pacific region has become one of the brightest spots in the global fashion economy: as the economic status of Asian women is growing globally, racial stereotyping of Asian groups is no longer acceptable, as any blunder can lead to devastating boycott campaigns. Reading Minh-Ha Pham’s book might help corporate executives in the sector become more aware of concerns about race, gender, and global justice.

Love Can Be Racist

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A review of Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy, Leslie Bow, Duke University Press, 2022.

Racist LoveRacist Love starts from the position that love can be racist. This is an idea that many people may find difficult to admit. Of course, most people will acknowledge that racism can be at work in the sexual fantasies of old white men attracted to young Asian women. In the same vein, the way Asian American communities are praised as a “model minority” can also be called racist. But can the sincere love of a white person to his or her Asian partner be called racist? What about the unconditional love of a mother to her child in the case of interracial adoption? And even if racist love exists, is the fact that some white people, male or female, prefer Asian sexual partners different from the attraction other people feel for blondes or redheads? Where do you draw the line between a preference for physical attributes in a partner and racism? If transracial love is systematically tainted by racism, what about the love or attraction one may feel towards people of one’s own ethnic group? Can people of color be suspected of racist inclinations because they are attracted to persons outside their ethnic group, or is racist love the preserve of white people? How to deal with the case of non-Asian persons (say, Gwen Stefani) who are so attracted by everything Asian that they themselves identify as Asian? There are no easy answers to these questions and, especially in the French context, it is hard to engage a conversation on these issues. Speaking of racism usually elicits the topical response “I am not a racist!”, while using the expression “structural racism” tends to deprive people of their agency. Racism, like religious beliefs or political affiliations, are topics that are best kept out of conversations at the dinner table. 

Asian fetishism

The value of Leslie Bow’s book is is not to raise the issue of racist love in the abstract, but through the exploration of cultural artifacts, children’s books, collectibles, and artworks. These material objects act as substitutes for Asian people, displaying some of the traits Americans associate with Asian cultures. These ethnic signs can take the form of artifacts (fans, chopsticks, rice bowls, dress style, and textile patterns) or body parts (slanted eyes and other facial features, black hair, petite silhouette) that are detachable from the whole body to convey attributes of gender, youth, and ethnicity. Together, they express a racial imaginary infused with desire, longing, and intimate connection. They show that “race can be a source of pleasure” and not just rejection or apprehension. Racism can be made cute and charming, as in the Hello Kitty series or the geisha car in Pixar’s animated movie Cars 2. These inanimate objects “spark joy”, to use the terms of Marie Kondo, the Japanese lifestyle guru. They also reinforce racial stereotyping as a process of abstraction in which a quality ascribed to one member of a group then applies to all. One such Asian stereotype is the notion of inscrutability: Hello Kitty’s lack of mouth and facial expression offers a blank slate for the feelings of the viewer. Another prejudice is the association of Asian women with submissiveness and passivity. This stereotype affects Asian American women in their career, causing many to plateau, but also in their affective life. Asian female bodies are fetishized, oversexualized, and objectified in the fantasies of white males. Asian women deal with a very specific type of racialized sexism that makes them especially vulnerable. For Leslie Bow, attraction is the very form of anti-Asian bias, and translates into a specific desiring structure characterized by equivocation. Racist love can easily turn into racist hate: they are the two sides of the same coin.

Portraying differences among peoples using animal surrogates has always been a standard approach in children’s literature. It has also always been controversial: from the “fairy tale wars” of the 1920s to the Great Society programs in the 1960s and to more recent initiatives to expunge public libraries from allegedly controversial or inappropriate material, adults have always invested children’s literature with a great deal of phantasies and anxieties. Once thought as a tool for celebrating human variation and diversity, the practice of enlisting animal as racial proxies for child audiences is now seen by some as fraught with stereotypes and latent racism. As a critic notes, “we expect a white child to find it easy to identify with an animal but not with a Black character. Is the child further removed from a person of another race than another species?” More specifically, why are Asian characters always depicted as panda bears, ninja turtles, or karate chicken? Can biodiversity act as a metaphor for racial diversity? Do narratives about overcoming species bias encourage ethnic tolerance among children? For Leslie Bow, children’s literature mostly reflects adult concerns. Taking D.W. Winnicott’s definition of the teddy bear as an exemplary transitional object for the child, she asks: “by the same token, how do picture books represent transitional phenomena for adults, a site where racial fears and desires also find expression if not also release?” Illustrated books depicting animal characters and how they can get along across species are “racial transitional objects” for adults. Much like stories can help the child work through unconscious pressures, race-as-species characters reveal unconscious adult pressures to promote both color blindness and diversity. Whereas young children may relate more to human characters than anthropomorphized animals, adults prefer to envision democratic inclusion without the messy divisiveness of American racial history.

Transracial adoption

Nowhere is this urge to reassure parents more apparent than in the vast literature that has developed over the past twenty years around transracial adoption. Leslie Bow lists dozens of illustrated books addressing the experience of transnational adoption as transpecies parenthood, from the Ugly Duckling story to mama polar bear and the grizzly cub. Such books aim to reassure the reader of the adoptee’s integration into a loving family despite biological differences. But according to many adult adoptees, such books do not mirror the experiences of transracial adoptees. They present transspecies adoption as the happy resolution of a mother-quest narrative, whereas the reality of intercountry adoption more often reflects a parental quest for a child. They assume a complex chain of inferential reasoning, from visual difference to species, from species to race, from race to different human features, and then require the child to discount the importance of these differences that may not have been perceived in the first place. Adoptive animal parents are very often single and female, leaving the adult companion largely absent. Books emphasize maternal love and caring as the solution to all personal or societal concerns regarding family resemblance or discrimination. They reinforce adoptive parents’ refusal to acknowledge racial difference and racial tensions within the family. The authors of these books are almost exclusively adoptive parents, although a young generation of adopted persons is starting to produce graphic novels reflecting their experience of intercountry adoption for adolescents and young adults. One such book reviewed by Leslie Bow was written by an American-Born Chinese who takes the character of the monkey-king in the classic novel Journey to the West to express his feeling of inadequacy and physical difference.

Moving from anthropomorphic characters to racist kitsch, Leslie Bow explores an archive of mundane household goods personifying East Asian iconography: Asianized chopstick holders and rice bowls, kitchen timers and coin banks, luxury handbags personifying “crazy rich Asians,” and a Mandarin citrus squeezer made by Italian designer Alessi. Given the legacy of white supremacy in the United States, these objects may well be seen as a form of hate speech. They parallel the infamous history of Black mammy cookie jars and Black lawn jockeys that now trade on eBay as collectibles, often bought by African Americans who “collect racism” as pedagogic tools to remind viewers of a repressed history that still produces deep affective responses. In the American context, stereotyping is now recognized as a microaggression that negatively affects the mental health and well-being of people of color. Hence the prohibition of the Indian American mascots of sports teams, ethnic Halloween costumes, brand commodities playing with racist clichés, and various instances of cultural appropriation. Household goods with Asian faces elicit different responses: they are both offensive and inoffensive, an ambivalence that the author experienced herself through her reaction to some items: “I thought it was adorable.” The racist love of cute things characterizes America’s reception of the Japanese aesthetic of kawaii or cute style. For Leslie Bow, cuteness is the aestheticization of powerlessness. The racial cute veils pleasure in domination; it allows for the enjoyment of unequal relations of power, and invokes asymmetries of power underlying racialization. Addressed to children and young women, the kawaii aesthetic marks an association with dependence and innocence. It conflates Orient and accessory, Asian as thing or commodity. It takes delight in the diminutive, the passive, the inscrutable. For the author, “the pleasure surrounding cute commodities, their enactment of complimentary racial stereotyping, masks a fetishistic anxiety surrounding East Asia writ large.” 

Fetishistic anxiety

Fear and anxiety also characterize what the author defines as techno-Orientalism, the projection of an Asianized future fueled by perceptions of economic ascendency in Asia. She analyzes three examples of the embodiment of a posthumanist future centered on Asia: the field of social robotics dominated by Japanese companies and researchers; humanoid robots who disproportionately tend to be modeled as Asian and female; and fictions involving AI characters such as Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. According to Leslie Bow, “techno-Orientalism is tech feeling as anti-Asian bias.” It reproduces the fetishistic structure of feeling that she has identified as racist love: anxiety transformed into pleasure. Attitudes towards artificial intelligence and social robots are often depicted as different in East Asia, compared to western countries where growing dependency on automatons generates negative feelings. In particular, Japan has more robots than any other country with robots contributing to many areas of society, including manufacturing, healthcare, and entertainment. Humanoid robots commercialized by Japanese companies are built as companion machines that establish bonds of sympathy and trust with their owners. But superior research and manufacturing skills in East Asia do not explain why robotic technology is so often embodied as Asian and female. Asian female clones, robotic geishas, mecha women, and digital assistants are coming out of research labs and now populate the reception desks of department stores, the animated stands of gaming conventions, and the imaginaries of Hollywood movies. For Leslie Bow, these robotic dolls reproduce familiar tropes about Asian women: “innocent and passive yet willing to please; sexually desirable but curiously lacking sexual desire; marvelously enhanced yet emotionally fragile.” They reinforce the association between Asian women and modern slavery, sexual exploitation, and human trafficking. The attitude they encourage among their public is highly problematic: boys and adults are encouraged to touch the face, to poke the body, and to aggress verbally in order to elicit reaction. It is as if #MeToo and the obligation of consent never happened. “Our visions of the future are thus tethered to existing social categories and histories even at the moment we imagine transcending them.”

In her last chapter, Leslie Bow turns to contemporary visual art and media engaging fetishism. Asian fetishism is “the quintessential form of racist love”: race fetishism involves sexual objectification and the same processes of reduction and exaggeration bound to the stereotype. Asian women are reduced to hair, eyes, or skin; they are seen as a type in which one individual represents them all. For the author, “the Asian fetish represents a form of harm that reflects a presumably degrading fantasy of reduced personhood, an injurious affront to individuality.” Fetishism is pleasure that masks anxiety: this is the same structure of feeling that has been identified as racist love. Fetishism is not necessarily a bad thing: a case can be made for fetishism as a site of split identifications and queer desires. It can be turned into a productive site of artistic expression. Several such artworks are curated in the book: Laurie Simmons’s photographic series The Love Doll consisting of images of a life-size doll from Japan exposed in various locations and situations; Elisha Lim’s cake sculpture of high-heel boots; Hong Chun Zhang’s collective self-portrait Three Graces depicting Asian women as wholly hair; Japanese artist Mari Katayama creating self-portraits using her own disabled body as a living sculpture; and video artist Laurel Nakadate provocatively engaging lonely white men to convince them to be involved in her videos. In the same way she reacted to racist cute objects with a mix of attraction and repulsion (“I both hate it and love it”), Leslie Bow questions her fascination with fetishistic art, and her scholarly involvement in the field of Asian American studies more generally. Asian American as a category of political visibility is also a type, she remarks, and “my critical and pedagogical practice may inadvertently enforce taboos surrounding race.” What is the point of critique that offers us pleasurable images simultanenous with the message that it’s wrong to enjoy them? How to answer a student who, after a class discussion on race fetishism, requested: “Remind me again why that’s wrong?”

The Uncanny Valley

What’s wrong with racist love is that it can easily turn into racist hate. Hate and love are merely flip sides of the same coin of stereotyping. Roboticians talk about the “uncanny valley” phenomenon, the point at which our reaction to artificial human likeness veers from familiarity into repulsion. As the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers’ emotional response to the robot becomes increasingly positive and empathetic, until it reaches a point beyond which the response quickly becomes strong revulsion. The tipping point on the continuum between racist love and racist hate is easily crossed. Witness the evolution of relations between the United States and Japan, or with China, over the course of the past century. America and Japan fought as bitter enemies during World War II; yet during the Cold War and beyond, Japan arguably became America’s closest and most reliable ally in the Asia-Pacific region. Sino-American relations show that the “responsible stakeholder” in the global economy can turn in less than a decade into a “strategic competitor” or an existential threat. Within the United States, the “model minority” will regularly transform into a target for envy and aggression. The slur can be indistinguishable from the compliment. This is why fetishistic love, racial scopophilia, and perverse spectatorship are suspect pleasures: they trigger profoundly ambivalent desires split between repulsion and attraction. Racist love is not located in vague and ineffable beliefs or in great conscious or unconscious prejudices—the sky of ideas—but it has a material, corporeal and organic reality. Throughout her book, Leslie Bow approaches it in the series of objects that surround people most closely: children’s picture books, home décor and kitchen tchotchkes, dolls and machines. She cannot hide her own attraction to this Asian paraphernalia; likewise, she suspects that her own investment in Asian American studies may itself be fetishistic. The structure of the fetish (“a story masquerading as an object”) is similar to the structure of feeling that characterizes racist love: anxiety transformed into pleasure, positive attraction as anti-Asian bias. It pursues a satisfaction that is impossible. As Leslie Bow reminds us, “desire is not democratic”: sexual attraction cannot be legislated in the same context as rights violations. Likewise, you cannot judge Hello Kitty figures and children’s books based solely on the criteria of adult critics and scholars: it would be missing the way they “spark joy” and elicit simple pleasures.

Passing for White, Passing for Black

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A review of Passing and the Fictions of Identity, Elaine K. Ginsberg ed., Duke University Press, 1996.

Passing

On September 10, 2020, the editorial director of Duke University Press issued a statement about Jessica Krug, a published author who for several decades had falsely claimed a Black and Latinx identity before being exposed as a case of racial fraud. The public statement was brimming with rage and indignation: “I have been sickened, angered, and saddened by the many years that she deployed gross racial stereotypes to build her fake identity,” the editor wrote. The feminist scholar was denounced as a case of deception and fraud, rendered more shameful by the fact that “early in her career, she took funding and other opportunities that were earmarked for non-white scholars.” Confronted with her lies, Jessica Krug herself issued a blog confession in which she disclosed her original identity “as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City” who, because of “some unaddressed mental health” issues, had assumed a false identity initially as a youth and then as a scholar. Using a word tainted by a history of antisemitism, she described herself as “a culture leech,” apologized profusely, and asked to “be cancelled.” It turned out Jessica Krug wasn’t the only case of racial impersonation in academia: over the forthcoming months, other scholars were exposed as having claimed a false racial identity, including another author who had manuscripts accepted by Duke University Press even after she was denounced as a so-called “Pretendian,” or a person falsely claiming a Native American heritage. In another statement, the same editor indicated that “for months now, we at Duke University Press have engaged in difficult conversations about how we can do a better job of considering ethical concerns as we make our publishing decisions.” But she did not indicate whether the academic publisher would take measures to check the self-declared racial identity of its contributors, or how it would proceed in doing so.

Policing race, unpolicing gender

I remember being amused and puzzled by these media statements. I saw them as a typically American story as we like to imagine them in France: a narrative following a pattern of public exposure, legal confrontation, personal confession, atonement for past sins, and redemption, as was the case of Bill Clinton in the Jessica Lewinsky affair. Only in the case of white people assuming a Black identity there was neither mercy nor redemption: the culprits were expected to expose their shame publicly before disappearing into oblivion. And indeed, following her confession Jessica Krug vanished from public view, never to be seen again: she was, in effect, cancelled. To a certain degree, I can understand the outrage of the Duke editor and other persons who had been fooled into believing the usurpated identity of racial impostors. But only to a degree: there are also convincing arguments to support the fact that racial usurpation is not such a big deal, and should be treated with leniency. Whom did Jessica Krug harm by pretending to be black? Does having benefited from earmarked resources justify the policy of cancellation of a scholar who may otherwise have brought useful contributions to the field? What if it was possible to “play one’s race” as one plays a role? After all, isn’t it a central tenet of critical studies that identity is a fiction and that social roles are performatively enacted? According to Judith Butler, whose Gender Trouble was published in 1990, gender is performance. Likewise, in Epistemology of the Closet, also published in 1990, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that limiting sexuality to homosexuality or heterosexuality, in a structured binary opposition, is too simplistic. The discipline of queer studies that they helped establish is a broad tent: one does not have to prove one’s credentials as a gay, lesbian, or otherwise LGBTQI+ person to identify as “queer.” Likewise, in crip theory—the radical arm of disability studies—, a person is considered as disabled if she considers herself to be so. There are no checks of medical records or social security status: indeed, disability scholars deny doctors the exclusive right to declare who is disabled and who is not, and argue that disability status is biased against persons of color, people living in precarious conditions, and otherwise discriminated persons. Being disabled (or being queer) is a social construction, just like what is opposed to it, namely being able-bodied (or being straight). Why should race be treated differently? Are academics serious when they claim that race is also a fluid and reversible category?

The moral panic raised by racial usurpations of minority identity is a very contemporary phenomenon. To understand its roots, one has to delve into the American history of race relations, and to understand the academic context as it emerged in the 1990, especially in literature departments where questions of identity and fiction were most prominently raised. It was a time when the modern racial impersonators started their career, and when transracialism, although based in those cases on identity theft and deception, appeared as a feasible option. The book Passing and the Fictions of Identity, edited by Elaine K. Ginsberg and published in 1996, therefore provides a useful benchmark to assess contemporary debates in light of their foundational moment. The term passing designates a performance in which one presents oneself as what one is not, a performance commonly imagined along the axis of race, class, gender, or sexuality. In American literature, passing across race and across gender are thoroughly imbricated—most famously in the narrative of William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), in which the black couple escaped from slavery, she dressed as a white man and he posing as her servant, and in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) when Eliza, traveling to Canada, disguises herself as a white man and her young son as a girl. In the twentieth century, novels such as Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) added to the discourse of racial passing a third important sense of passing: the appearance of “homosexual” as “heterosexual.” Passing and the Fictions of Identity explores passing novels as a literary genre that complicates racial and sexual categories. It also considers passing across social status delimitations, as in The Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) in which the narrator, an Igbo African and a former British slave, becomes a free sailor and a pioneer of the abolitionist cause. It addresses gender crossing through a close reading of The Woman in Battle (1876), an account of Civil War cross-dressing that presents itself as the autobiography of Loreta Velazquez, a woman who masqueraded as a Confederate officer and spy during the war. Passing novels also include The Hidden Hand (or Capitola the Madcap), a picaresque adventure tale first published in 1859, and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), in which national, racial, and sexual identities are presented as nostalgic constructions subject to a pathos of lost origins. Black Like Me (1961) is not a work of fiction but a realistic account of a journey in the Deep South of the United States, at a time when African-Americans lived under racial segregation, by a journalist who had his skin temporarily darkened to pass as a black man. Closing the book, Adrian Piper, a philosopher and a performance artist, offers her personal testimony as an African American woman who identifies herself as black but often passes for white because of her light-skin complexion.

The dilemma of passing

Passing for white is still a reality in contemporary American society, where African American identity was built on a history of slavery and segregation and where Blacks still suffer from racial prejudice and social exclusion. As F. James Davis writes in Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition (1991), “Those who pass have a severe dilemma before they decide to do so, since a person must give up all family ties and loyalties to the black community in order to gain economic and other opportunities.” There is no forced “outing” of people who pass for white in the African American community: “Publicly to expose the African ancestry of someone who claims to have none is not done,” writes Adrian Piper. And yet passing is met with ambivalence and equivocation. In the novel Passing, one character remarks: “It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.” By contrast, at the time the book was published, passing for black when one is white was deemed a complete impossibility. Adrian Piper, who was suspected of doing so, reacts violently to such accusation: “It’s an extraordinary idea, when you think about it: as though someone would willingly shoulder the stigma of being black in a racist society.” Based on her own experience, she considers being black as “a social condition, more than an identity, that no white person would voluntarily assume, even in imagination.” The many instances of microaggressions, discriminatory treatment, racial slurs, or racist conversations she overheard even in an academic context considered as “safe” justify her point: raised as an African American by a committed family, but as a person who “looked white” and “talked white,” she involuntarily passed as white and thus was able to witness the racist behavior of white persons who lower their guard when they think they are among themselves (as in the Saturday Night Life routine when a whitefaced Eddy Murphy experiences the sight of relief as a single black man exits a bus full of white passengers.) In Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin expresses outrage and mortification at a variety of incidents that would have been commonplace to black Southerners living under Jim Crow: being turned away from hotels and restaurants, made the target of racial animosity and sexual objectification, denied banking privileges, rejected peremptorily from jobs, required to use segregated toilet facilities, and forced to sit at the back of the bus. Clearly under such conditions, no white person would willingly become black.

There are several reasons why passing became a popular trope in American literature, and why literary criticism took on the subject with an enthusiasm bordering on frenzy in the 1990s. Cross-dressing and assuming a fake identity have always been a familiar ploy in literary fiction, from picaresque novels of sixteenth century Spain to the theater comedies of Shakespeare and Marivaux. The American legacy of slavery and racial segregation added an element of drama to this familiar plot. The fictitious characters of the passing novel and the unknown thousands of very real black men and women who passed out of slavery moved from a category of subordination and oppression to one of freedom and privilege. According to the one-drop rule, any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry (“one drop” of “black blood”) was considered black (Negro or colored in historical terms). African blood is invisible on the surface of the body, allowing persons of mixed descent with a light skin and Caucasian facial features to pass as white. Crossing racial or sexual boundaries involves a suspension of disbelief that is at the heart of literary fiction: appearances are deceiving, identities are in flux, and nothing is what it seems. The visual force of passing, and especially the shock of its discovery after the fact, is extraordinary. Especially in the case of race, passing is not simply performance or theatricality, the pervasive tropes of recent work on sex and gender identity, nor is it parody or pastiche, for it seeks to erase, rather than expose, its own dissimulation. Unlike sexual identity which is not necessarily apparent, race is eminently visible, as if it were natural. Race is essential, communal, and public, whereas sexuality is contingent, individual, and private. The misperception of race is therefore surprising insofar as it contradicts the established belief in the strength of blood ties and genetic makeup. Racial passing resonates deep within the American psyche. Even though a significant proportion of white Americans, about 3.5 percent according to geneticists, are known to have some African ancestry, very few people who identify themselves as white are ready to acknowledge this heritage. According to Adrian Piper, “the fact of African ancestry among whites ranks up there with family incest, murder, and suicide as one of the bitterest and most difficult pills for white Americans to swallow.”

The fictions of identity

Through the contributions to this volume, passing was constituted as a literary genre and a productive space in which to interrogate identity in all its dimensions. According to one contributor, “passing is an act of resistance against dominant constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and identity.” As she explains, the discourse of racial passing reveals the arbitrary foundation of the categories “black” and “white,” just as passing across gender and sexuality places in question the meaning of “masculine” and “feminine,” “straight” and “gay.” For the editor in her introductory chapter, “just as the ontology of race exposes the contingencies of the categories ‘white’ and ‘black,’ so the ontology of gender exposes the essential inauthenticity of ‘man’ and ‘woman.’” Socially constructed identities seemed to connote an identity easily altered or cast off: one could be black or white (or Native American) by an act of volition, a conscious decision that would engage the rest of one’s life but that had no relation to one’s previous self. The facticity of identity made any experience of that identity necessarily inauthentic: “Passing is only one more indication that subjectivity involves fracture, that no true self exists apart from its multiple, simultaneous enactments.” It was accepted as a an article of faith that “identities are not singularly true or false but multiple and contingent.” There was no authentic self, but an assemblage composed by “a series of guises and masks, performances and roles.” Literature had first established passing as a trope, and literary criticism gave it its badge of honor. The 1990s were years of transformation in the humanities, and the university became a factory for ideas of gender transition and eventually of race fluidity. Under the influence of Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick, who are quoted at length in this volume, identities were read as fictions and constructed as fantasies. Race was compared to a “metaphor,” an “empty signifier,” a “mark empty of any referential content” or “the unheimlisch return of a desire” that could be as malleable as text. Then was a time to “construct new identities, to experiment with multiple subject positions, and to cross social and economic boundaries that exclude or oppress.”

In such intellectual climate, it is no wonder that some enterprising individuals took critical theory at its own word and decided to experiment in real life the theses that literary critics and social scientists had proposed on the cultural front. If all identities are in passing and race is a masquerade, why not assume a different racial identity and pretend one belonged to a minority of color instead of dull and undifferentiated whiteness? If race is a role we play, why not choose the character we wish to embody and play the part accordingly? Of course, assuming a different ethnic identity involves lying about one’s “true” origins. But if race is a lie, lying about a lie is not a lie: it is all performance. There were several motivations behind the choice made by some individuals, mostly academics and performing artists, to take on the identity of an ethnic minority. First, the stigma once associated with being colored started to recede with the civil rights movement and the promotion of ethnic identities. In the ideologically charged climate of the 1970s, Black was beautiful, Native Indian was noble, ethnic was chic. There was a whiff of marginality and radicalism in embracing the cause of ethnic minorities fighting for their rights. As the author of Black Like Me experienced it, one could not act as a spokesperson of a group in which one did not belong. He chose to step aside and to support black separatism from a distance; others preferred to espouse the cause with which they identified unequivocally, and to play the part until the end. As a second reason, this was a period when ethnic studies and other interdisciplinary fields emerged as new and exciting disciplines. For a promising academic, it was important to position oneself where all the action was. If this involved lying about one’s ethnic origins, so be it. Most of the time, the deception began with a lie by omission or a sous-entendre that may have been based on family lore. In a nonsuspecting environment, there was no hard questions asked, and no need to provide minute answers about one’s genetic makeup. In some cases, what began as a histrionic role became an acting career. Academics spend their life on a stage and impersonate a role in front of a devoted audience. They tend to embody the ideas they defend to the point their appearance becomes inseparable from their discipline. Teaching ethnic studies made one feel part of this ethnicity.

The backlash against transracialism

And yet, transracialism has few modern proponents, and academics who are found to have lied about their ethnic origins are subjected to public shaming and a strict policy of cancellation. “In Defense of Transracialism”, an article published by the philosopher Rebecca Tuvel in the academic journal Hypatia in spring 2017, was met with a barrage of insults and denunciations, and the journal’s editors had to publish an apology. How, then, are we to understand the backlash against racial trespassing and the cancellation of individuals who claimed an ethnic identity when in fact they were white? Why did race and gender follow different paths and ended up on opposite sides of academic debates, with transracialism denounced as wholly illegitimate while trans identities were recognized and even praised by gender theorists? First, the issue of passing involves not only an individual’s decision to change race, but also deliberately lying and deceiving about it. Academia is an industry that defines itself in large part by its ethical standards: having a career based on a lie makes other people angry and resentful. American ethics adds a layer or prudery and moral posturing to these manifestations of public outrage: remember that in the Lewinsky case, what was reproached to Bill Clinton was not to have had an affair with an intern, but to have lied about it. Denunciations of ethnic fraud also emphasize the fact that the culprits benefited from preferential treatment and financial resources originally earmarked to members of ethnic minorities: they “stole” these resources from others, who may have benefited from these affirmative action measures but could not. One may find this argument shallow and petty: there is more to academia than just money and a struggle for positions, and every social policy has its leakages. The resolution to curtail the phenomenon of passing also comes from the realization that it may have reached massive proportions. According to the 1990 census, two million Americans reported as American Indians and Alaska Natives. In 2000, almost twice as many gave the same answer to the questionnaire. Among them, in proportion, Latinos and highly educated adults as well as women were the groups most directly affected. Checking the “Native American” box is not only a means of gaming the university admission system: Native American cultures have experienced a kind of cultural renaissance, which increases the number of persons willing to associate with them. As a last argument, the reaction to Rebecca Tuvel’s article showed that feminists who support trans identities and queer studies are particularly ill at ease with the possibility of transracialism. They do not want to witness the contamination of gender debates with issues of racial transition. Policing race is also a way to police their own discipline and to erect barriers to avoid trespassing.

Hawai’i on Ice

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment, Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Duke University Press, 2022.

Cooling the tropicsMany public events in the United States and in Canada begin by paying respects to the traditional custodians of the land, acknowledging that the gathering takes place on their traditional territory, and noting that they called the land home before the arrival of settlers and in many cases still do call it home. Cooling the Tropics does not open with such a Land Acknowledgement, but Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (thereafter: Hi′ilei Hobart) claims Hawai’i as her piko (umbilicus) and pays tribute to the kūpuna (noble elders) and the lāhui (lay people) who “defended the sovereignty of [her] homeland with tender and fierce love.” She describes her identity as “anchored in a childhood in Hawai’i, with a Kānaka Maoli mother who epitomized Hawaiian grace and a second-generation Irish father who expressed his devotion to her by researching and writing our family histories.” She expresses her support for decolonial struggles and Indigenous rights, and participated in protests claiming territorial sovereignty for Hawai’i’s Native population. How can one decolonize Hawai’i? How can Hawaiian sovereignty discourse articulate a claim to land restitution and self-determination that is not a return to a mythic past? What about racial mixing, once regarded with anxiety and now touted as a symbol of Hawai’i’s success as a multicultural US state? What happens to settler colonialism and white privilege when the local economy and the political arena are dominated by populations originating from East Asia and persons of mixed descent? Is economic self-reliance a feasible option considering the imbrication of Hawai’i’s economy into the US mainland’s market? Can the rights of the Indigenous population be better defended in a sovereign Hawai’i? What is the meaning of supporting decolonial futures that include “deoccupation, demilitarization, and the dismantling of the settler state”? Can decolonization be achieved by nonviolent means, or do sovereignty’s activists have to resort to rebellion and armed struggle? What would be the future of a decolonized Hawai’i in a region fraught with military tensions and geopolitical rivalries? What can a decolonial perspective bring to the analysis of Hawai’i’s colonial past and possible futures? And why is academic research on Hawai’i’s history and society so often aligned with the decolonization agenda, to the point that decolonial approaches are almost synonymous with Hawaiian studies in the United States? More to the point: how can a PhD student majoring in food studies and chronicling the introduction of ice water, ice-making machines, ice cream, and shave ice in Hawai’i address issues of settler colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, Native rights to self-determination, and decolonial futures?

Decolonize Hawai’i

Unbeknownst to most Americans, and to all non-US citizen but a few exceptions, there is a thriving independence movement taking place in the Hawaiian Islands today. It was borne out of an unlawful US-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, it survived Hawai’i’s accession to statehood in 1959, and it is currently in opposition to the territorial encroachment by military infrastructure and other state interests over confiscated land and sacred sites. The Hawaiian soveignty movement doesn’t advocate a return to a mythic past. Simply put, Native communities demand respect for their traditional cultures, consideration for their role as stewards of the land, and empowerment to take part in all decisions that affect them. Since 2014, local activists have opposed the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), a scientific endeavor with governmental support from Canada, France, Japan, China, and India. Slated to become the most powerful telescope on the planet, the stadium-sized facility threatens to desecrate one of the most sacred sites for Kānaka Maoli. Construction was temporarily halted due to a blockade of the roadway leading to the site, and further protests as well as legal battles prevented construction of the telescope to resume. Hi′ilei Hobart took part in the protests, helping to keep the basecamp of picketers provisioned with food and beverages. Participating in local struggles fed into her dissertation in more than one way. Firstly, it underscored the obvious: ice and snow are native to Hawai’i; they are not an imported commodity brought by Anglo-American settlers along with “civilization”. Those who tell the story of how ice first came to Hawai’i get it wrong: ice and snow have been there since time immemorial. During winter, snow frequently falls on the ice-capped summits of the island chain’s tallest mountains. But even confronted with this evidence, popular discourse continues to construe ice and snow as alien to Hawai’i, and to frame Maunakea―the site of the TMT―as a terra nullius unoccupied by the Native population and thus open for grabs and available for construction in the name of science and progress. Discursive logics have combined to produce Maunakea as “not-for-Hawaiians” (Kānaka Maoli were supposed to steer away from altitude, and the first individuals on record to climb the mountaintops were Westerners), as “not-Hawai’i” (outsiders picture Hawai’i as a tropical paradise of lush valleys and beaches), and as “not-Earth” (NASA used the desolate volcanic site for outerspace simulations of spacewalks on Mars and the moon). Cumulative efforts to frame Maunakea as empty and alien have resulted in disregard for Natives’ rights and belief systems.

The second lesson Hi′ilei Hobart could draw from her roadblock picketing is a better sense of the local cosmogonies that tie humans with nature and the elements in Hawai’i. For Kanaka Maoli, Maunakea’s snow, mist, and rain are not just atmospheric phenomena: they signal the lingering presence of gods (akua) and ancestors’ spirits who have been occupying the place even in the absence of humans. Local tales or mo’olelo kept by way of oral transmission carry foundation myths of the islands and mountains and attest to Maunakea’s central role in Indigenous place and thought, while animating the elements and other life forces with their own spirit and consciousness. Likewise, for the anthropologist, commodities are animated with a life of their own. According to Marx, a wooden table “does not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.” Ice and refreshments in the tropics are imbued with values, desires, longings, and social hierarchies. They have a history that intersects with the history of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and the militaro-touristic complex in Hawai’i. Discourses about ice encapsulate ideas about race, modernity, gender, and the affective sensorium. They help rationalize Indigenous dispossession and contribute to the legitimization of imperialism. As historian Eric Jennings has demonstrated, the concepts of freshness and refreshment marked colonial relationships in the tropics. The hill stations and colonial spas built by the French and the British in their colonial outposts were predicated on the idea that fragile European bodies could not endure tropical heat and had to periodically regain some of their vigor in high-altitude places where conditions of life in the homeland were reproduced. The same logic explains how ice and frozen refreshments were progressively naturalized in Hawai’i’s foodscape. First to penetrate the Hawaiian market in the nineteenth century, ice cubes were associated with masculinity, alcohol consumption, saloon culture, plantation ownership, and white privilege. By contrast, the more feminine ice water came to be seen as a means to achieve temperance, mitigating the warm climate, and cooling after effort. Ice cream was a symbol of whiteness, sugary sweetness, purity, leasure, and innocent childhood; for young women, who could frequent the ice cream parlor without being chaperoned, the fast-melting delicacy was also synonymous with freedom and romantic encounters. Born on the plantations, shave ice is associated with brown labor, rural life, Asian migrants, mom-and-pop stores, and nostalgia for simpler times.

Infrastructures of the cold

As a third lesson of the author’s fieldwork as an activist came the realization that American society depends on thermal infrastructures, from the cold chain to keep perishable foodstuff to air conditioning and big houses protected from outside temperature. Freezers and refrigerators are essential to modern survival. These infrastructures have become so embedded in everyday life that they fade into the background, and their very invisibility guarantees that structures of dispossession and extraction go unnoticed. This is what the author labels “thermal colonialism”, defined as the modes by which temperature was managed and organized to favor settlers’ interests and reproduce racial hierarchies. Americans have become quite literally “conditioned” to experience coolness or frozen taste in hot weather, to the point that they consider the “right to chill” as constitutionally guaranteed. But desire for freshness and refreshment has a history: it is not biologically determined. We realize the importance of infrastructures of the cold when they fail us: the fragility of the cold chain in Hawai’i reveals itself after a hurricane, when lines of supply are disrupted, or each time the islands brace for an emergency. When things fall apart, networks of care and resilience take precedence over market relations and commercial interests. This is what Hi′ilei Hobart realized in the encampment at Mount Maunakea as she filled coolers with ice and drained their brown water to keep foodstuff fresh and edible. Managing community food resource pooling made her aware of food insecurity and thermal dependence in a state that heavily relies on imported goods and processed food. As her food studies turned to food work, she realized that “all that is frozen melts into water” (to paraphase Marx’s famous quote) and wondered whether Hawai’i had a future beyond the ice age: “what place does refrigeration have within Indigenous futures that move beyond settler capitalism, when coldness has played such an intimate role in these systems of oppression?” Draining water from coolers also drew her attention to melt as a condition of our current times marked by climate change and the images of fast-disappearing glaciers. She also discovered the materiality of freshness and frozenness, which pointed to a different kind of political economy as the one she had envisaged as a graduate student: an economy that is not based on commodity fetishism and labor exploitation, but on user value and short “farm-to-fork” circuits of exchange. Commodity trade, Marx argues, historically begins at the boundaries of separate economic communities based otherwise on a non-commercial form of production. As Marx explains, the commodity remains simple as long as it is tied to its use-value: “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

Hi′ilei Hobart’s history of how artificial ice came to Hawai’i is heavily dependent on her sources. Scarce at the beginning, with a few advertisements and newspaper clippings (including publications in the local language, ‘ōlelo Hawai’i), they include a wider array of testimonies, photographs, business records, cookbooks, consumer goods, and personal memories as we move closer to the present. She first chronicles the great American ice trade, in which big blocks of ice harvested from lakes in the Northeast or in Alaska circulated the globe from 1840 to 1870, the year the first ice-making machines were introduced. The ice that went to the tropics was a luxury product, used in cocktails, to chill wines, and for service at fine hotels where American planters, Western missionaries, European tourists, and Hawaiian elites mingled. The ice importing business never really took off in Hawai’i: even though entrepreneurs petitioned the local rulers for monopoly rights and invested in storage facilities, the venture remained unprofitable and was interrupted in 1860 after two decades of sporadic shipments. King Kamehameha III had mixed feelings about alcoholic beverages and iced punches: ruling over a “semi-European” polity that was modernizing fast, he also leaned to the robust temperance movement championed by Western missionaries and patronage ladies. He eventually died in 1854 after drinking from a poisoned punch-bowl of iced champagne. Under the reign of the last Hawaiian monarch, King Kalākaua, Honolulu was a fast-growing city with all the trappings of a Western metropole. ‘Iolani Palace, the royal residence, had electricity, indoor plumbing, and telephones even before Buckingham Palace or the White House. Among these technologies, ice machines and ice factories came into operation in the 1870s, transforming a once-foreign commodity into a local product.

Entering the Ice Age

Hawai’i entered the ice age at about the same period as the United States: when home refrigeration, cold chains for perishable goods, ice cream parlors, and soda fountains connected Honolulu’s domestic life to global standards of modernity. But unlike in the mainland, the use of freezing technologies were subject to colonialist frames of interpretation and local resistance. Settler reports of Kānaka aversion to ice stood as indictment of their slow pace to civility. Native people’s first contact with ice cream, taken as extremely hot instead of freezing cold, was derided as a sign of inferior civilizational status. Hawaiian-language newspapers, however, refuted implications that Kānaka Maoli were confused about or afraid of ice, and advertised the lavish cosmopolitan banquets including icy desserts served at the ‘Iolani Palace. But haole (foreigners), ali’i (elite Hawaiians), and maka’āinana (local commoners) reacted differently to frozen tastes, reflecting hierarchies of class, gender, and racialized proximity to whiteness. The racist and classist distinctions manifested themselves after US annexation during the pure food battles of the 1910s. The newly appointed food commissioner decided to apply US legislation strictly to ban poi, a local dish alternatively described as a truly delicious paste with yeasty flavor or “a native concoction that tastes like billboard paste,” and to increase the butterfat content of ice cream to mainland levels, contradicting local tastes and recipes developed by Japanese and Chinese ice cream vendors.

Shave ice and its “rainbow” of flavors is now offered as a metaphor for the “rainbow state” and its multiethnic, postracial population. As a symbol of Hawai’is racial landscape, the rainbow offers an important vehicle for the affective, and often tense, sentiments of identity and belonging. How did a food practice brought by Japanese migrants come to epitomize a US state, and how did a sugar plantation economy built along racial lines produce a racially harmonious society in the only US state with a nonwhite majority population? Shave ice offers an alternative narrative to forms of refreshment oriented toward white leasure, like the ice creams or tiki cocktails fetishized by the touristic gaze. Historians trace the origin of shave ice to Japanese agricultural workers and plantation store owners who brought the food tradition of kakigōri from Japan. Born in rural spaces where non-Hawaiians put down deep community roots, shave ice offers an alternative story about race and refreshment, one that is not tethered to whiteness and the leisure class. Asian immigrant populations in Hawai’i, once systematically marginalized, have become a “model majority” characterized by upward class mobility and adherence to nationalist values. They dominate the local economy, to the point scholars have forged the category “Asian settler colonialism” to describe the ascendancy of working-class communities of color. Hawai’i is now considered as a laboratory for multiethnic harmony as well as a harbinger of what the whole United States could become: a postracial nation, turning its back on its history of Native Indian extermination and Black enslavement. These fictions mask ongoing structural racism against Native Hawaiians and other ethnic minorities (Samoans, Filipino-Americans…) The shave ice success story glosses over such divisions and obscures Kānaka Maoli claims for Indigenous sovereignty. For present-day Hawaiians, it also brings back shared memories of childhood and nostalgia for “simpler times” characterized by community resilience, rural life, and low economic wealth. Again, this nationalist narrative envisioning an ahistorical and uncomplicated past erases a history of racial discrimination and labor exploitation, and produces “Hawaiians” as an always already multiethnic category that excludes indigeneity or Kānaka Maoli claims to place.

Hawaiian futures

I don’t see much potential in an independent, sovereign, or post-statehood Hawai’i that would grant Indigenous people rights of self-determination and privileges of territorial ownership. There are other ways to tackle the deep structural inequalities and discrimination that affect the Native population. As the French have experienced in French Polynesia, recognizing Indigenous rights is not synonymous with granting full independence or a right to secession. Politics of atonement and official apologies may be aligned with the Anglo-saxon protestant mindset, but they have their limits: short of reparations and restitution, they leave intact the structures of power that have led to Native dispossession and do not advance the living conditions of Indigenous populations. Economic needs must also be addressed, and the responsibility of all leaders, oriented toward independence or otherwise, is to chart a course that guarantees economic growth and sustainable development. I see tourism as a chance for Hawai’i, and militarization as a necessity borne out of historical and geopolitical concerns. Americans will always remember Pearl Harbor. Hawai’i is America’s first line of defense and its most strategic outpost in the Pacific. The security of the continent hinges on the continued presence of military forces which, along with tourism, form the twin pillars of the economy. Envisaging a decolonial future for Hawai’i seems to me more dystopian than real. And yet, with all these caveats in mind, I still find potential for decolonial approaches in modern scholarship about Hawai’i or other territories in the Pacific. Other Pacific islands have acceeded to independence and have demonstrated the viability, resilience, and vitality of Indigenous sovereign states. In the case of Hawai’i, but also the other US territories in the Pacific (Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa), solutions might exist toward or beyond US statehood without resorting to full independence. Besides, scholarship and politics are distinct endeavors. The challenge that decolonial studies must address is the decolonization of the mind. I see must potential in a decolonial perspective to the history of Hawai’i and other once occupied nations, and I learned much from reading Cooling the Tropics as much as I enjoyed reviewing it. One can quote Marx without being a Marxist; one can use decolonial scholarship without believing in a decolonial future for Hawai’i.

Disability Studies and Crip Theory

Etienne RP1 Comment

A review of Crip Genealogies, edited by Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, Duke University Press, 2023.

Crip GenealogiesCrip Genealogies is an anthology of texts that claim the pejorative word crip as a moniker to distance themselves from earlier contributions in the field of disability studies. Crip is a diminutive for “cripple” and is used as a slur to designate people with visible forms of disabilities, mostly physical and mobility impairments. It is also a word associated with violence and ghetto culture, as the Crips are one of the largest and most violent associations of street gangs in Los Angeles. Reclaiming crip as a definition of self-identity is a way to return the stigma against the verbal offenders and to express pride in being a member of the disability community. In the academic world, it is also a way to carve a niche for critical disability studies and to express solidarity with non-normative forms of living that may also include queerness and ethnic pride. Symptomatic of this convergence between academic currents and social movements is the proliferation of acronyms to designate minoritarian identities that may be based on sexual orientation and gender identity (LGBTQ+), race and ethnicity (BIPOC, pronounced “bye-pock,” which stands for Black, Indigenous, and people of color), mental health and physical disability (MMINDS, an acronym which stands for Mad, “mentally ill,” neurodivergent, disabled, survivor), or an intersection thereof (SDQTBIPOC, which stands for sick and disabled, queer and trans non-white persons). Most contributors to Crip Genealogies are part of this extensive community and define themselves as queer persons of color, diversely abled, and straddling the line between scholarship and activism. The publication is meant to provide foundational basis for crip theory as a discipline opposed to the apolitical and normative aspects of disability studies and that is “disrupting the established histories and imagined futures of the field.”

Crip ancestors

A genealogy is a history designed to shed light on a person’s origins or a family’s ancestral line. It involves forefathers, ancestors, elders, lineages, progenitors, siblings, cousins, relatives, and descendance. It also build upon myths of origin, narratives of displacement, acts of foundation, coming-of-age stories, acknowledgements of cultural transmission and biological inheritance. In cultural term, a genealogy may include schools of thought, intellectual traditions, disciplinary boundaries, seminal texts, and anthologies or primers. Part of the motivation of many contributors to this volume is to palliate the lack of ancestors and role models they can turn to when they try to ground their scholarly and activist practices. “Where are our queer elders?”, ponder two activists during a panel discussion in which they are asked to name their “crip ancestors.” The lack of obvious answers (beyond the figures of Frida Kahlo, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa) leads them to reflect on “the conditions that will allow disabled QTBIPOC elderhood to flourish,” some of which having to do with the avoidance of premature death, social exhaustion, cultivated marginality, and academic bickering. But the main responsibility for the invisibility of the crip queer-of-color subject falls on the cultivated whiteness of disability studies as an academic discipline and of disability rights as a social movement. According to Sami Schalk, “the early disability rights movement was often very white, middle-class, and single-issue focused.” Leslie Frye considers “how investments in whiteness that underwrite US disability rights have been obscured and where the traces of this movement’s racial legacy lie.” Investments in “making the cripple visible” led to the invisibilization of race, gender, sexuality, and all the other axes of individual or collective identity. The editor’s intention is therefore to underscore “not only the whiteness of the field but also the way in which it both stays white and perpetuates whiteness.” 

Histories of social movements often involve a succession of “waves” or the passing of the baton from one cause to the other. One refers to “third-wave feminism” or the “third wave of the civil rights movement” to describe the succession of challenges that feminism or the fight against racial discrimination had to face, in a linear progression that goes from oppression and alienation to self-determination and enlightenment. Likewise, the fight for disability rights seems like the logical next step once “we’ve done race/gender/sexuality.” The temporality of disability studies charts a progression from self-awareness and nascent identity to the mobilization for equal access and equal treatment, then the affirmation of pride and visibility, culminating in the disability justice movement and crip theory. It is believed that recognizing disability history will inspire persons with disabilities to feel a greater sense of pride, reduce harassment and bullying, and help keep students with disabilities in schools or universities. The authors reject such genealogies built around change, progress, and modernity. They refuse to engage in celebratory commemorations of disabled people’s advancement punctuated by legislative victories, from the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, and the Affordable Care Act of 2010. They are critical of the term “genealogy” itself, which creates “the illusion of descent as a line,” or of metaphors of genealogical trees, epistemological roots, native soil, and disciplinary fields, which inscribe “colonial temporalities and spatialities into our conceptions of scholarship.” ”Even the rhizome can be colonial,” they note in the introduction. Their ambition is to build “epistemologies of radicalized disability that do not comply with compulsory improvement, personal initiative, and change on the way to a good life.” The mixed genealogies they call forth need to “stay with the trouble” and nurture crip theory’s revolutionary potential: “crip disrupts convention and undermines social norms.” Not unlike what the deinstitutionalization movement did for people locked up in hospital wards and collective homes, crip genealogies deconstruct all aspects of institutions. 

A new wave of deinstitutionalization

Deinstitutionalization is a political and a social process which provides for the shift from institutional care and other isolating and segregating settings to independent living. The Independent Living philosophy is based on the assumption that people with disabilities should have the same civil rights, options, and control over choices in their own lives, as do people without disabilities. Crip Genealogies advocates a new wave of deinstitutionalization. The institutions under consideration are mostly academic: the authors grapple with the place of disability studies, and of crip theory as a nascent discipline, within the space of the North American university. The university’s dependency on diversity and inclusiveness is something both to be valued and criticized: according to Mel Y. Chen, “disability can confer a selective entitlement, or reveal an interior hierarchization.” Some forms of behaviors or modes of teaching and learning are valued over others: “in the university, agitated gesture—whether in the form of politically legible protest, aggressive physicality, or movement (including stillness or slowness) inopportune to class habitus—has no proper home, save perhaps in the possibilities of dance training or intramural sport.” For scholars coming from abroad, such as Eunjung Kim, “the institutional legitimacy in US academia came with a price, as it valued certain kinds of writing and thinking over others.” The unmarked human who embodies all scholarly virtues and properties continues to be “white, non disabled, masculine, ‘functionally’ social, and creditable.” “Academia, ableist to its core, rejects disability in its love for abilities.” The result, for scholars who don’t fit, is a feeling that they don’t really belong. This feeling is shared by the four editors: ”as the four of us worked together, we all confessed feelings of inadequacy to each other.” The “academic impostor syndrome” noted by Julie Avril Minich combines with a “disability impostor syndrome”: “I know I am not the only disability scholar to feel, constantly and simultaneously, both not academic enough and not crip enough.” But in the end, writes Alison Kafer, “we owe our loyalties to people, not to institutions.”

The authors are also critical of the disability rights movement as it has been institutionalized. Focusing its demands on self-determination, legal rights, and non-discrimination, the disability rights movement led to the advancement of disabled people who were considered as “good citizens” (white, heterosexual, and affluent) at the expense of others (non-white, queer, and poor). Nor did it question the fact that belonging to the working class or to an ethnic minority are factors that promote disabilities: precariousness, which affects a large part of these categories, is one of the main causes of disability because it comes with degraded, even dangerous living conditions and limited access to healthcare. People of color and queer people of color are often confronted with stigmatizing diagnoses of disability, such as “mental retardation” or “gender identity disorder,” whereas white people tend to receive less negatively connoted diagnoses, such as “attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder” (ADHD) or “gender dysphoria.” Historically, pejorative labels were often used by public authorities with a view to disqualifying immigrants, African-Americans, the poor, but also women whose “debility” was a major argument for sterilization (including white women whose behavior corrupted whiteness). This explains why minority rights movements have often perceived the need to distance themselves from disability in order to avoid being further stigmatized, involuntarily contributing to making queer people-of-color with disabilities invisible (this is by no means general: Sami Schalk claims the Black Panther Party has been an early supporter of disability rights.) It is this invisibilization that the disability justice movement tries to repair, by taking a close interest in intersectionality and also in mental disorders, which are also marginalized by the disability rights movement. For Tari Young-Jung Na, writing from the perspective of South Korea, the deinstitutionalization movement must expand into a movement for the liberation of nonnormative beings in society, including transgender people, sex workers, people living with HIV/AIDS, and other victims of “incarceration without walls.”

Decentering disability

The editors of Crip Genealogies made a laudable effort to include perspectives coming from outside the United States. The anthology contains chapters reflecting viewpoints or evidence from South Korea, Palestine, Vietnam, Kenya, the Czech Republic, the Philippines, and Australia. One of the contribution was written in Korean and translated into English, thereby contributing to a distancing from Anglosphere imperialism, although the editors acknowledge they included too few references in languages other than English in their bibliography. The article from South Korea indeed shows that modernity is not always synonymous with the West: in Korea, it came from neighboring Japan, both during the imperial occupation with the isolation of Hansen’s disease patients, and in more recent years with the import of the Independent Living movement through seminars and training. For Jasbir Puar, settler colonialism is very much alive in the West Bank, where a “number of Palestinians are maimed by Israel on a daily basis” and a policy of extreme spatial regulation keeps an entire population in a debilitating chokehold.  The analysis of a dance film, Rhizophora, featuring young patients affected by Agent Orange in a Vietnam Friendship Village, demonstrates “the possibility of queering and cripping chemical kinships that exist as alternatives to normative familial structures.” Faith Njahîra, who lives with muscular dystrophy, discovered late in childhood that she was disabled: growing up in Kenya, she experienced no markers of difference during primary school except remarks about her “walking style” and invocation of “chest problems” to limit participation in physical education. Kateřina Kolářová, who positions herself as a feminist, queer and crip scholar, reminds us that whiteness takes a different value in postsocialist Eastern Europe, where it is reproduced in conjunction with the pathologization of Roma people. Sony Coráñez Bolton uses the concept of “supercrip,” disabled individuals believed to have superior abilities to compensate their impairment, to analyze a novel written in Spanish by mestizo Filipino José Reyes. Mel Y. Chen describes a site-specific work of art by Indigenous Australian artist Fiona Foley installed in the Queensland State Library in Brisbane. Coming back to America, ethnic minority perspectives are offered on Asian Americans whose illness punctuates the myth of the”model minority”; an experimental zine project by a self-identified “queer crip Chicanx/Tejanx single mother” in South Texas; and the activism of the Black Panther Party as a precursor to today’s disability justice movement.

Assembling this edited volume in times of COVID-19 took place under the shadow of home confinement, city lock-downs, overcrowded hospitals, mandated teleworking, and Zoom conferences. For scholars critically engaged with disability studies, there are several lessons to draw from this pandemic. Because COVID-19 is associated with old age, fragility of the immune system, respiratory problems, or other health concerns, there is a worrying tendency to treat the lives of those most at risk as less valuable, as more or less expendable. Triage in hospitals became the most terrifying illustration of the hierarchy of human lives, between lives worthy of living and lives left to die. For Achille Mbembe, to kill or to let live, or “to make live and let die,” are the principal attributes of the sovereign state. As disability studies have shown, many disabled persons already experience a kind of social death. The coronavirus crisis has only provided an infallible justification for this death, making it more physical than social. At the same time, the pandemic situation and the imposed lockdowns made whole populations experience what is in fact only a banal fact of life or a permanent condition for millions of people living with disabilities. Being condemned to stay at home because public space is not accessible, facing shortages of beds and medical equipment in hospitals overloaded with patients, having to rely on social media to maintain a network of friends and relatives: all these situations sound familiar for a part of the population overlooked by public policies. As Jasbir Puar notes, “what has been widely fetishized as ‘pandemic time’ is actually what ‘crip time’ has always been—never on time, waiting out time, needing more time, unable to keep up with time, forced time at home, too long a waiting time.” The rapid development of remote working and videoconference, which has long been requested by people with disabilities to facilitate their participation in the economy and society, shows that a previously unsurmountable challenge becomes suddenly feasible once it is perceived as the only solution to continue to run the country’s economy and allow able-bodied people to carry out their activities. The authors remind us that “texting, now used by everyone, was created as assistive technology for Deaf people.” Likewise, videoconferencing can be considered as a crip technology.

Pertinence and impertinence

I realize my review may fall within “the reductive and extractive citational practices” that the authors criticize in their introduction. Why do I take an interest in crip theory, and why do I think this intellectual endeavor needs to be known beyond a small circle of social activists and academic pundits? Simply put, because of the pertinence of the question it raises, but also on behalf of the impertinence with which it addresses issues of pressing concern. The pertinence, or relevance, of crip theory seems obvious. The question of gender and sexuality, of race and identity, of minorities and rights, are at the center of contemporary debates. As Crip Genealogies makes it clear, the terms “queer” or “crip” are not limited to questions of gender or disability: from the moment we deviate from the norm, we are no longer really “straight” or “fit” even if we are otherwise heterosexual, able-bodied, or white. Disability justice activists, claiming the impossibility to achieve normality, suggest imagining new social configurations, new solidarity movements, a new public sphere which would not base participation in social life on abilities or capacities. The impertinence, or irreverence, of crip theory is just as remarkable. Crip Genealogies is relatively measured in this respect. To the more radically inclined, I recommend the reading of Testo Junkie by the transgender activist and philosopher Paul B. Preciado. Subtitled Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era in its English edition, it chronicles the author’s multifaceted and liminal experience taking testosterone and other pharmaceutical drugs as a political and performative act in order to undo all normative categories of gender, health, and ableness. Despite the obvious provocations, there can be something stimulating and positive about a crip theory approach. It allows us to desacralize, if need be, the discourse on disability and ableness, to remind us of its human character – not halfway but through and through. Disability studies share with ableism a number of implicit, unquestioned assumptions about what is “right” or what is “normal.” Crip theory makes fun of these conveniences, it jostles them cheerfully and not without humor. Again, this will not be to everyone’s taste. But that’s no reason not to listen to what crip theory has to tell us about human beings in their embodied and racialized selves, the way gender and ethnicity shape who we are, the forms of injustice that exist in relation to people who do not recognize themselves in the heteronormativity and whiteness inherent in our culture. Crip theory is here to stay, and should be engaged with a positive and open mind.

Black Disabled Lives Matter

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Black Disability Politics, Sami Schalk, Duke University Press, 2022. 

Black Disability Politics

“This is a book written for Black people, especially Black disabled people.” Faced with this strong message in the introduction, the reader cannot help but ask questions. Who wrote this book, and for what purposes? Who shall read it, and to what ends? The author’s answer to the first question is straightforward: Sami Schalk identifies herself as “a fat Black queer disabled woman,” or “a Black person who seeks to avenge the suffering of my ancestors and to earn the respect of future generations.” Her goal is to understand how Black people have addressed disability as a political concern, and to develop Black disability politics as a tool and as a weapon in the fight for recognition and justice. She turns to history “because it benefits us as Black people to know and learn from what our ancestors did, to understand and honor them, and to continue their legacy of finding liberation.” Regarding the second question, the answer is even more blunt: Black readers are welcome. This book was written for them, especially for Black disabled people. As for non-Black persons, they are asked not to intrude into the conversation, for this book is not for or about them. The author makes an exception for “disabled people of color, disabled queer people, and disabled queer people of color”: even if they are not Black, the combination of traits that marginalizes them at multiple levels gives them a seat in the conversation about disability justice and collective liberation. But beware: white disabled persons should not confiscate the conversation, for their advocacy of disability rights has often led to the exclusion of people of color, queer people, or otherwise marginalized persons. Especially if you are white, living with disability does not give you the privilege to speak on behalf of other disabled persons.

A conversation about disability and Blackness

Black Disability Politics starts from the premise that “disability, as an identity, an experience, and a political category, has been conceptualized and approached differently by Black activists and intellectuals than by white activists and intellectuals.” There is something in Black disability that makes it different from disability without qualifier. Black disability has to be understood within the context of white supremacy. Even in the legal and medical sense, Black disabled persons are not equivalent to white disabled ones. Disabilities more common in rich white families are more likely to receive legal and medical recognition, while the types of disability more common in poor and racialized communities may not fit into legal and medical definitions of disability. In addition, “we cannot understand Black disability politics without engaging histories of anti-Black violence, scientific and medical racism, health disparities, health activism and environmental racism.” This makes the fight against ableism align with denunciations of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and fatfobia. The author points out “the whiteness and racism of the disability rights movement and disability studies as a field,” which often excludes or alienates Black disabled people. She defines the key principles around which Black disability politics is built: it has to be “intersectional but race centered” (race trumps other factors as it combines with them); not necessarily based on disability identity (unlike the white-dominated disability rights movement); contextualized and historicized (the book presents itself as a first step into that direction); centered on those most impacted by discrimination and injustice (i.e. multiply marginalized disabled people); holistic (the author believes in the “bodymind” literature); and action oriented (“I do not believe in knowledge for the sake of knowledge”). The reason Black disability politics, or the combination of critical race studies and disability studies, didn’t appear sooner as a discipline and as a social movement is because the few voices that have connected disability justice and Black liberation have been consistently ignored, overlooked, or other wise silenced by a white-dominated disability rights’ paradigm.

The book explores how Black people have engaged with disability as a social and political concern through delving into the history of two institutions: the Black Panther Party, or BPP, and the National Black Women’s Health Project, of NBWHP. To many, the Black Panther Party conjures up a hypermasculine image of Black men in leather coats and berets carrying shotguns. Yet for the bulk of its existence, and especially after 1972, the BPP had a majority of women in its membership, and many women featured prominently in its leadership. The BPP had a stated policy of gender equality from its outset, in stark contrast with many leftist groups at the time. While the role of women in the BPP and the Black struggle more broadly has been highlighted by recent scholarship, the same isn’t true of people with disabilities. The same prejudice that identifies Black Panthers with hyper macho men applies to its alleged ableism and neglect of disability rights. Surely a group that advocated armed self-defense and class struggle couldn’t open its ranks broadly to persons impaired in their ability to fight and to parade. Sami Schalk wants to correct this misperception and testify that disabled persons, and disability justice, indeed had a place in the concerns of the Black Panther movement. Exhibit #1 in this rehabilitation trial is a cover story of the weekly newspaper of the BPP dated May 7, 1977, and titled “HANDICAPPED WIN DEMANDS – END H.E.W. OCCUPATION.” The story that unfolds tells the involvement of the BPP in the “504 seat-in,” a nationwide protest in which people with disabilities and their supporters occupied federal buildings in order to push the issuance of long-delayed regulations regarding Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Based in Oakland, California, the BPP apparently provided support to the San Francisco seat-in in the form of free meals for the 150 people involved and, as the magazine title testifies, a press release. In addition, two BPP members, one of them in a wheelchair, participated in the occupation of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) in San Francisco and appeared on the article’s photo illustration.

Exhibits and posters

Exhibit #2 advanced by Sami Schalk to support the Panthers’ Black disability politics is the Panther-supported Oakland Community School’s stated policy of openness and inclusion “regardless of ability, ethnicity, or geographic location” (although the author couldn’t find any evidence that children with disabilities actually attended the school.) Another argument in the defense of the long-neglected disability politics of the Black Panther Party is the fight against the “medical and psychiatric industrial complexes” that made psychiatric abuse in mental and carceral institutions a pressing racial concern. Here again, exhibit #3 is composed of “numerous” press articles (thirteen in total) from the Black Panther weekly magazine that raised issues like forced pharmaceutical treatment, unpaid labor inside mental institutions, physical abuse in nursing homes, and involuntary commitment to state institutions. Another set of newspaper clips (exhibit #4) documents the use of psychiatric drugs in prisons as a means of control, while exhibit #5 consists of denunciations of the return of psychosurgery as a way to mitigate aggression and violence. A trial-within-the-trial, presented as a “praxis interlude,” takes issue with the ableist language and tropes used in some of the Black Panther magazine articles, such as the word vegetable to describe the potential result of psychosurgery and forced pharmaceutical treatment, or the presentation of disability and chronic illness as tragedies in need of prevention and eradication. Here the Black Panther activists are found guilty (“vegetable is used in a clearly ableist way”), but with extenuating circumstances (the term has to be placed “in its historical, medical, and linguistic context”) and they are released on parole provided they will use more proper language (alternative rhetoric and anti-ableist approaches are given.)

The author then turns to the National Black Women’s Health Project, a Black feminist health activist organization started in the early 1980s. Here, the tone is not judicial but celebratory: unlike the mock trial destined to rehabilitate the Black Panther Party’s disability politics from ignorance and neglect, the two chapters devoted to the NBWHP is an exhibition of Black women’s “empowerment through wellness.” Poster #1 in this celebratory exhibition analyzes Black feminist health activism as another prime example of Black disability politics, assessing how disability was explicitly and implicitly included within this collective’s holistic approach to health and wellness. Here the author is faced with a conundrum: she could find very few references to disability (and to the word “feminism”) in publications and internal documents of the NBWHP. But she sees this relative absence as a confirmation that Black disability politics is “intersectional but race centered, not based in disability identity.” Race and gender trump (dis)ability in the affirmation of a collective identity. The NBWHP insisted on the political nature of health and took a holistic approach that included disability in its definition of health and well-being. The self-help groups it organized were neither based in disability identity nor segregated by disability or health status (although they were segregated by race and gender: only Black women could attend.) Its publications addressed a wide variety of health and wellness problems, refusing to stigmatize or shame Black women for their health and promoting wellness for all (in a country where the majority of people don’t have social security.) It insisted on the emotional aspects of wellness and disease, and acknowledged the role of spirituality, faith, and religion in the lives of Black women (Amen to that!). For Sami Schalk, “the NBWHP was not a disability rights organization but a health organization that frequently acted in solidarity with disabled people in much of its work and included disabled people in leadership positions” (like many other health NGOs.)

HIV/AIDS is a disability

Poster #2 gets a little bit more specific on how the NBWHP provided support for people living with disability and chronic disease. The author performs a close analysis of the organization’s work on HIV/AIDS as a disability condition. The organization contributed to awareness and prevention through educational publications and campaigns taking into acount “the reality of Black women’s sexual lives.” It also provided material and emotional support for Black women living with HIV/AIDS (in the form of magazine articles and focus group discussions.) Here Sami Schalk is faced with a similar dilemma as in Poster #1: the programs focused on HIV/AIDS make no mention of disability at all. She nonetheless considers them a valid example of Black disability politics, and for three reasons. A chronic disease like HIV/AIDS is a disability condition, and is recognized as such under the American Disability Act (ADA). Even if a person doesn’t self-identify as disabled, she may be objectively included in the category. The distance or denial taken by some Black communities toward disability (the “Black disability consciousness gap”) can be explained by structural racism and the history of systemic oppression on the part of whites. Even so, the NBWHP is not without blame for keeping silent on HIV/AIDS as a disability issue and for failing to inform AIDS patients that they were eligible for support under the ADA. Again, in this mini-trial, NBWHP is deemed to have benefited from extenuating circumstances (there are “important historical and cultural reasons for that avoidance”) and is left with a prescription to encourage people to openly identify as disabled (even if they don’t have “a piece of paper to prove that”). To show that the lessons of the past are directly connected to the work of the present, Sami Schalk concludes Black Disability Politics by summarizing her interviews with eleven Black disabled activists and cultural workers whom she made provide feedback on the last chapter of her book (they were paid for their time), and four examples of contemporary instantiations of Black disability politics (a website, a book, another website, and another book.)

I feel uncomfortable in commenting this book. As a non-Black, non-disabled, non-academic, non-American, non-native speaker, I have the feeling I am intruding in a place where I don’t belong, and taking part in a conversation without a full understanding of its terms and stakes. And yet, Black Disability Politics is not a community blog or a restricted-access newsletter. It is published in an academic publishing house with an international distribution, its author presents herself as a scholar, and she wants a wide readership as she offers free access to the book through her webpage. I am therefore authorized to offer my five-cents comments for all it’s worth: if someone or something is intruding, it is this book that is trespassing into my favorite academic press series, not me. My first remark is that each time Sami Schalk uses the word Black (and she uses that word a lot), she should specify: Black American. Or maybe African American, or any other term that emphasizes geographical context. The USA is a country where, at any point in time, more than two million people find themselves behind bars; where most people don’t have social insurance; where life expectancy for men is inferior to Iran’s; and where there are more homicides in a day than in Japan during a whole year. African Americans are disproportionately represented in these categories (incarcerated, non-insured, premature deaths, authors or victims of violent crimes.) This situation should inspire shame and a modicum of modesty to all Americans, regardless of race or political persuasion. Viewed from outside, the United States increasingly appears as a country you don’t want to deal with, and definitely not as a country that should give lessons to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, what happens in the US doesn’t stay in the US. The United States influences conversations globally, especially academic conversations or discussions that find their origins on American campuses. What goes around comes around: China’s propaganda apparatus has seemingly become an active supporter of the global Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement – mostly in the form of lambasting the US government and system. In France, conservative forces dismiss any discussion on racial justice or equal opportunity by invoking “wokeness” and the excesses of political correctness observed in the US. As much as Sami Schalk wants to restrict participation in the conversation she is establishing with Black activists and scholars in the United States, I don’t want Black Disability Politics to be part of the conversation about race, disability, and politics in France.

Activism as a vocation

My second remark is that Sami Schalk should take sides more clearly: does she write as a scholar or as an activist? Does she take science or politics as a vocation? The material she presents (what I called exhibits and posters) may be fit for a trial or an exhibition, but cannot pass any academic test in the social sciences. The author recognizes it herself: “Black disability politics refuses to be disciplined,” and breaks away “from the typical disciplinary academic monograph mode.” Mining the past and the present to find heroic ancestors and comrades-in-arms does not a history book make: legacy is not history, and the intention to “exalt,” “honor,” or “avenge” past figures is usually a bad start for writing history books. I personally think African Americans deserve a genuine historical narrative of their relationship with disability, not an hagiography that takes no account of the rules of the discipline. The role of the historian should not be to “draw lessons from the past” but study it as it was. He or she should refrain from two major sins: presentism, or the introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past; and taking the role of the judge, for history is not a courthouse or a trial. She should try to exploit a vast array of sources, including oral testimonies, community documents, and national archives, but she should also apply critical lenses to appreciate the veracity of the sources and not take testimonies at face value. When doing survey research, the important thing is not to obtain a waiver from an institutional review board, but to apply the tools and methods of the social sciences regarding sample selection, baseline or control group, questionnaire design, and textual analysis of responses. If the scholar wants to take the position of the political militant or the social activist (and she is perfectly free to do so), she should specify in each of her interventions in which capacity she is speaking. Readers may find such literature inspiring or uplifting, or they may prefer to turn to other narratives as a source of inspiration. Personally, I still find relief in the statements of Martin Luther King and in his “dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

When Freedom Turns Ugly

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A review of Ugly Freedoms, Elisabeth R. Anker, Duke University Press, 2022.

Ugly Freedoms“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These truths are no longer self-evident: few people now believe in a Creator ; the inclusion of women in the generic term “all men” has to be specified ; and rights in their modern acceptation are not endowed or bestowed, but conquered and defended. What about Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness? Are they not the expression of an American ideology that is shared by few people, even in the United States? Life itself has become a contested issue, as it hinges on when life starts and ends and some people are claiming a right to death in order to exit life with dignity. The pursuit of happiness was a central theme in Hollywood comedies of the 1930s and 1940s—a time of great unhappiness—, but we now look at these black-and-white motion pictures with nostalgia and irony, while Hollywood has moved to other descriptions of people’s aspirations and beliefs. Most significantly, freedom now has a hollow ring. The “Liberty Bell” march or the “Battle Cry of Freedom” were calls to rally round the flag and show patriotism, but these battle songs were used to legitimate wars of aggression and imperialism that made freedom a mockery of justice and equality. Domestically, the “land of the free” has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We now speak with less assurance than our forefathers about the rights and values enshrined in declarations of independence or bills of rights. What if they were wrong in proclaiming life, liberty and happiness as our guiding principles? What if the reverse was true? What if freedom was not universally desirable, but “ugly” and repulsive? This is the argument that Elisabeth Anker makes in her book Ugly Freedoms, as she invites us to challenge self-evident truths and commonly believed assumptions.

Actually existing freedoms

Her point of departure is to consider “really existing freedoms,” not ideals or abstractions put forth in declarations of independence, philosophical treatises, and patriotic songs. And reality is where freedom often turns ugly. Anker’s argument is not to say that freedom leads to its own excesses and that it should be limited and regulated, or that autocratic regimes are better than unbridled democracies. She doesn’t claim that one person’s freedom ends where another’s begins, as in the popular saying that “the right to extend your hand stops where my nose begins.” She even contests John Stuart Mill’s do-no-harm rule as a limitation of freedom: under this criterium, most of our valued principles, including freedom from tyranny and national sovereignty, would be only empty promises. She is not interested in classical distinctions between “freedom to” and “freedom from,” what Isaiah Berlin distinguishes as positive and negative freedoms, or in Benjamin Constant’s “Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns.” She discards both liberal political theory and Marxist or postcolonial critiques of freedom. For Marx, exploitative forms of freedom such as freedom to sell one’s labor on a free market are “a mere semblance, and a deceptive semblance.” Under this vision, freedom is an excuse or a veil that capitalists and profit-makers use to hide and legitimize subjugation and exploitation: the ideology of freedom diverts workers from fighting for the overhaul of the capitalist order. For Frantz Fanon, colonial ideology has colonized what freedom is and who can practice it. Reclaiming freedom is a violent act: as Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, “killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free.” But these masculinist visions of liberty still posit an untainted, heroic version of freedom and liberation that we should all strive for.

The ugly freedoms catalogued in this book do not serve these grand narratives. Freedom, for peoples liberated by US military interventions, often means being subjected to torture, indiscriminate killings, and lifelong incapacitation. Death is what liberty often tastes like for the liberated subject. On the other end of the war spectrum, freedom for Americans at home means suburban boredom, overweight-induced health risks, and unsustainable consumption. Torture, dispossession, and racial domination are not an excess or a deviation from principled ideals; they are a regular practice of American freedom. The history of freedom in the United States is tied to centuries of brutality, genocide, rape, environmental destruction, and racial hierarchy. It is too reassuring to claim that rights violations are a temporary blip in the long journey toward freedom and emancipation, or that truth will eventually prevail over the hypocrisy of those who use a distorted view of freedom to legitimate their predatory practices. American freedom entails the right to exploit and the power to subjugate. It continues to this day in ongoing settler practices of land appropriation, racial violence, and cultural erasure. US visions of freedom also contribute to mass carbon emissions, deforestation, pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Slave ownership was not different in nature from the exploitation of natural resources: in both cases, private individuals have final authority to use and dispose of their property as they see fit. Such freedom stands in stark contrast from indigenous peoples’ relations to land, living creatures, and fellow humans included in nonhierarchical webs of reciprocity and stewardship. For Michel Foucault, the history of reason included unreason as its constitutive other. Similarly, Elisabeth Anker shows that discourses of freedom and emancipation are built upon the very same philosophy and practices that wiped away indigenous cultures and justified the enslavement of racial others.

The Black Book of Freedom in America

Anker’s black book of freedom in America begins with the settler colony of Barbados, where sugar plantations offer a material archive of freedom’s violent practices. The Barbados sugar plantation owner is a key figure in the history of slavery and freedom. Cultivating sugar, as opposed to other crops, required the mobilization of money, indentured workforce or slave labor, land reclaimed from the wild, and other natural resources. It was also a lucrative business: indeed, it was the first crop to render colonization profitable, and Barbados was the first English colony to successfully cultivate and market sugar. As they became richer, Barbadian sugar plantation masters demanded more self-rule against the colonial metropole, prioritized rational choice and self-interest in juridical relations, and developed an ethos of entrepreneurship and profit-making. Meanwhile, their development was backed by unacknowledged indigenous dispossession, the wholesale destruction of ecosystems for short-term profit, and the inscription of racial hierarchies into the first English-language slave code in the world. Any free white person could discipline and punish any Black slave from a perceived infringement of the code. New practices generated on Barbados influenced political theories of individual freedom, especially in John Locke’s contribution to the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which was created to bring Barbadian practices to North America. Locke’s doctrine that property rights stem from improvement of land through enclosure and industry gave legal credence to the appropriation of native lands and the violation of treaties concluded with Native American nations; and his defense of New World colonization is also a defense of “every free man to have absolute dominion and power over his negro slaves.” The Barbadian sugar master is therefore a key figure of modern freedom; and the plantation slave, its constitutive other, is a core constituent in the elaboration of political theories of individual freedom. The history of sugar doesn’t stop here: Anker reminds us that the pursuit of sugar profit contributed to US imperialist wars in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, and the Philippines, all of which were occupied in part to grow sugarcane. Sugar, “freedom’s digestible form,” also finds its way in contemporary artworks such as Kara Walker’s Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014), a gigantic sculpture of a nude Black woman in a sphinx position temporarily installed in an abandoned sugar factory in New York City.

Slavery, as a legal construct, was interpreted by its promoters not as the opposite of liberty but as a practice of freedom. It provided the ruling class the privilege of ownership, prosperity, and leisure, including the leisure to write treatises on liberty. Radical discourses of emancipation are themselves built upon the very same modern philosophies and practices that enslaved the racial others and justified their enslavement. Unfreedom remains after and even through emancipation. This is the disturbing lesson of Manderlay, a 2005 movie by Danish director Lars von Trier in which a Black community chooses to remain enslaved on the Manderlay plantation seventy years after emancipation. Manderlay deconstructs “the mythic march of freedom” that places Black unfreedom in the past, claims uninterrupted progress to the present, and considers white emancipators as the main protagonists. In fact, de jure emancipation neither offers freedom nor ends slavery. It casts freedom as a gift from a magnanimous nation to a grateful Black population, who first requires disciplinary guidance to become responsibly free. It sheds light on another set of “ugly freedoms”, acts of rebellion or defiance that would otherwise seem to reflect defeat and despair but that, in the movie under consideration, ultimately bring an end to the slavery plantation. The Manderlay residents have rejected the compulsion to desire the freedom they have been gifted and are seeking instead to define and enact a conception of freedom on their own terms. These deviant practices of freedom are ugly and compromised: they include theft, gambling, rape, property destruction, and the maintenance of slavery on the plantation where willing subjects self-organize their daily lives. Black freedom is typically cast as both illegible and a threat to the social order. But it also challenges the very presuppositions of white supremacy by establishing a political community that is not grounded in private possession, patriarchal mastery, and racial hierarchy. The freedom of Manderlay’s Black residents is not predicated on their virtuous suffering, on their likability, or on their resistance, as if they would have to be morally pure to deserve to be free. 

Tainted freedoms

We now live in a neoliberal economic system in which trade and financial flows, not people, must be set free. Many critics have described the rise of economic and social insecurity, the erosion of public spaces, the financiarization of transactions, and the encroachment of economic logic to previously nonmarketized activities that characterize the advent of neoliberalism. In order to thwart neoliberalism, Elisabeth Anker exposes the ugly freedoms that it represents, from the freedom to own guns to the freedom to evict nonpaying tenants, but also the tainted freedoms found in discarded and devalued spaces that can challenge the neoliberal order. She turns to a television drama set in Baltimore, The Wire (2002-2008) that describes the effects of raw, unencumbered capitalism on local governance and law enforcement. Part of the power of neoliberal capitalism is its insistence that there is no viable alternative to the American clientelist way of organizing politics and economics. But a series like The Wire shows that neoliberalism’s triumph has never been complete: its progression is obstructed and undermined by everyday acts of resistance and forces of bureaucratic inertia. Failed circuits, ineffective norms, outmoded technologies, and agency rivalry do not articulate an alternative to the current system or propose a vision for how the world could be organized otherwise, but neither do they lead to the conclusion of withdrawal, capitulation, and defeat. As Anker notes, commenting on Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism, lack of guiding vision do not equate to hopelessness. Characters in The Wire have renounced the unattainable fantasy of the good life and know that clinging to that ideal will only bring them pain. For many, only the drug trade can offer economic support and a semblance of order; but even in the drug business, money and profit-making are not the primary factors for motivating individual action. The Wire’s depiction of Baltimore city life illustrates how neoliberal governance strategies can be weaker than otherwise presumed.

The last chapter of Ugly Freedoms examines freedom as climate destruction, or “Guts, Dust, and Toxins in an Era of Consumptive Sovereignty.” It draws from the work of Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Mel Chen, and other proponents of “queer inhumanisms” which focus on attachments with objects and creatures consigned to the nonhuman, the inanimate, the mineral, or the molecular. It also draws from visions of the individual as primarily an assemblage of microbes, toxins, companion species, and social interactions constituted in webs of dependence. At the planetary level, ugly freedoms are propelled by the forces of neoliberal capitalism, human exceptionalism, settler colonialism, and resource extraction, which all contribute to environmental damage and establish a regime of consumptive sovereignty. Its vision to liberate individuals by installing them as masters over things they consume puts the world they live in on a path to self-destruction: “consumptive sovereignty inexorably leads to the wasting away of much life, to incinerated landscapes, extinct species, desiccated habitats, toxic dust storm, climate refugees, and increasingly precarious populations.” But Anker also expands the commons, agents, and collectives that can be considered as political subjects of freedom. A new vision of freedom is to be “found in the dank registers of human guts, in the dirty register of household dust and shed skin, and in the geochemical registers of preplanetary gases and synthetic toxins, sites rarely explored for their political visions let alone for nurturing the hallowed practice of freedom.”

The Ugly American

Ugly Freedoms comes at a time when American liberal democracy is in tatters. Free speech has turned into ugly speech, moneyed interests dominate the legislative process, and the pledge to honor the flag of the United States of America, and the government for which it stands, has been debased by angry crowds of looters and rioters assaulting the Capitol. America is no longer a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere. It now appears as it has always been: a settler state built on the genocidal erasure of its native population and the exploitation of Black slave labor, whose abusive practices of racial division and imperial dominance continue to this day. Americans conquered their independence over the British King to make sure they couldn’t be bossed around by a distant monarch; yet their freedom meant they could be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt king or queen. It is when they want to do good and project their values overseas that Americans, like in the Marlon Brando movie, are at their ugliest. To paraphrase Graham Green in The Quiet American, I never knew a people who had better motives for all the trouble they caused. Exporting freedom has become a piece of a hegemonic ideological infrastructure, and efforts to impose democracy by force have turned into a nightmarish caricature. To be sure, no nation can claim for itself the saintliness of the promised land, and no iteration of freedom is wholly pure, righteous, or free from ambivalence. But it is time to take America down from the moral high ground that it claims for itself, and to subject its imperium to the law of nations, or indeed to the fate of any object exposed to the gravitational pull: what has been elevated must come down.