Q&A with Sara Ahmed, author of Complaint!

Sara Ahmed is an independent scholar and author of What’s the Use?, Living a Feminist Life, and other books also published by Duke University Press. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, in her new book Complaint! she examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power.

In the introduction to Complaint! you write about how your resignation created the conditions that made this book possible. Was it essential for you to be outside the institution as you compiled these stories?

I decided to do this research on complaint before I resigned. I did not know I was going to resign until I did! Once I had resigned, it changed how I could do the research. I wouldn’t say it was essential that I was outside the institution to be able to collect the stories but it certainly shaped how I could do it.

That I was outside the institution had an impact on the kinds of stories that were shared with me. The complaints that I talk about in the book (I don’t talk about all complaints!), complaints about abuses of power, complaints that challenge hierarchies, can devastate lives as well as careers. Complaints can be hard to talk about – you can even be prevented from talking about them.  Many of the participants in my study got in touch with me because they heard about my resignation. It mattered to them that I had resigned. I had refused to be silent; I had said no. That I was outside the institution probably also meant I could provide a safer space: they were not speaking to someone who was in the same institution they were speaking about. 

From my point of view, I do not really feel outside the institution – even if I sometimes call myself post-institutional. The fact that I did the research shows in a way that I am still in it, still on it. Leaving my post and profession was a very painful, bumpy and difficult process – and doing this research helped me to come to terms with what happened and to feel more grounded where I am, doing what I am.  I am so grateful for that.

Complaint! is about grievances against institutions of higher education but discrimination is everywhere, as are HR roadblocks to disciplinary procedures. What can non-academic readers learn from the stories you’ve collected?

You could do the kind of research that I have done for this book in many other institutions – and in fact, I have been approached by people about their experiences in other sectors who have shared very similar stories. I spoke to someone in my own neighborhood recently. She asked me what I was working on and when I said I was working on complaint, she shared a story. She told me what happened when she tried to complain about being bullied by her manager at the supermarket where she worked. She said “I knew I was in trouble, when they shut the door.” The experience she had of ending up under scrutiny because she complained, her knowledge of what the closed door meant, how her complaint was going to be managed and contained, was very similar to many of the experiences shared by academics and students. 

We learn from what we share. 

The book is really about power, how power works to make it hard to challenge how power works. That complaint procedures become techniques for stopping complaints and complainers is telling us something about the mechanics of power. So, I hope the book reaches readers outside the university. I also am planning to write a shorter book, The Complainer’s Handbook, which will follow The Feminist Killjoy Handbook that I am currently drafting, so I can share the stories with less of a focus on the university as a specific site. 

You map how complaints can lay groundwork for future change, and can create communities of shared experience between people whom institutional processes would otherwise have kept apart. Complaint activism is not a guarantee of institutional change, but rather “a way of thinking about what we get from complaint even when we do not get through.” Is this hopeful, or exhausting? 

It is hopeful and exhausting! I call the hope of complaint, a “weary hope,” we have hope because of what we go through not despite it even when we don’t get very far. This kind of hope gives us a sense of the point, of there being a point, but it keeps us close to the ground. Complaints can take so much out of you. But most of the time, we also get something from them. I was really delighted that Leila Whitley, Tiffany Page and Alice Corble (with support from Heidi Hasbrouck and Chryssa Sdrolia and others) wrote one of the two conclusions of the book about their experience of making a collective complaint. They took on this work as PhD students – I joined the collective they had already formed. The last sentence of their conclusion is very simple and very powerful and very true. They write: “We moved something.” We have hope, they moved something, even if it took a huge amount of effort to get there. And that effort led us to each other.  A weary “we” is still a “we.” That matters.

What does it mean for complaint to be pedagogy? 

Complaint as feminist pedagogy became the Twitter hashtag for my project – this wasn’t an intentional decision; it was one of the formulations I was trying out to pull out the significance of complaint and it is the one that stuck! Other formulations in the book are “complaint as diversity work,” and “complaints as a queer method.” Each “as” brings out different aspects of what complaints are about. 

Why pedagogy? When we think of pedagogy, we might think of how we teach – the teacher is the subject who uses different methods of instruction (which are also different ways of thinking about learning). By saying complaint is pedagogy, I am putting complaint in the position of the subject/teacher. We learn from complaint about the world. If we hadn’t complained, there is so much we would not know (even could not know) about what goes on. By making complaint my teacher, I position myself as learning from those I have spoken to. In my conclusion I acknowledge that “learning,” is one of the most used words in the book.

Complaint is heavy work. What strategies have you learned for those engaged in complaint to persevere? 

Finding other people to support you in your institution is vital.  If you can’t find someone inside your institution, go outside. Complaint procedures are designed to keep us apart for a reason. We need to combine our resources and energies. We need our co-complainers. We often lose people when we make complaints. But we also find people. 

Working together is also about accepting the limits of what each of us can do. There is only so much we can do. I have in my “Killjoy Survival Kit” from Living a Feminist Life, permissions notes – sometimes, we need to give ourselves permission not to do something if it is too much. We are different and we need different things to keep going. I also think of tactics that might lighten the load – we might laugh, dance, eat, breathe, take walks, hang out with our companions, furry and non-furry. 

There are two sentences from my conclusion to Complaint! that are key to my thoughts about working on as well as at institutions. They are slightly modified versions of sentences that appeared in What’s the Use: On the Uses of Use, which also made use of data from my research into complaint.  

Transforming institutions can be necessary if we are to survive them. But we still need to survive the institutions we are trying to transform.

The heavier the task, and complaint is made heavy, it is no accident that you feel the weight of the institution coming down on you, the more you need to attend to what you need to survive.  I am, of course, learning from Audre Lorde here. 

Complaint! is learning from Lorde

Read the introduction to Complaint! free online and save 50% on it and all in-stock titles with coupon FALL21 through October 15, 2021. After October 15, save 30% on Complaint! with coupon E21AHMD.

Hispanic Heritage Month

Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated from September 15- October 15 each year. We invite you to check out some of our recent books in Chicano/a and Latinx studies. You can save 50% on these titles through October 15 with coupon FALL21.

Focusing on artists and art collectives in Argentina, Mexico, and the United States, in Another Aesthetics is Possible Jennifer Ponce de León examines how experimental artistic practices in the visual, literary, and performing arts have been influenced by and articulated with leftist politics, popular uprisings, and social struggles that resist neoliberal capitalism.

In Magical Habits Monica Huerta draws on her experiences growing up in her family’s Mexican restaurants and her life as an academic to sketch out habits of living that allow us to consider what it means to live with history as we are caught up in it and how those histories bear on our capacities to make sense of our lives.

Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández challenges the stereotypes of machismo with nuanced portraits of Mexican men and masculinities along and across the US-Mexico border in Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora.

Analyzing a range of Chicano/a and Native American novels, films, short stories and other cultural artifacts from the eighteenth century to the present, Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita examine literary representations of settler colonial land enclosure and dispossession in the US Southwest in Spatial and Discursive Violence in the US Southwest.

In Abstract Barrios Johana Londoño examines how the barrio has become a cultural force that has been manipulated in order to create Latinized urban landscapes that are palatable for white Americans who view concentrated areas of Latinx populations as a threat.

Analyzing the personal clothing, makeup, and hairstyles of working-class Black and Latina girls, in Aesthetics of Excess Jillian Hernandez examines how cultural discourses of aesthetic value racialize the bodies of women and girls of color.

In Latinx Art Arlene Dávila draws on numerous interviews with artists, dealers, and curators to explore how and why the contemporary international art market continues to overlook, devalue, and marginalize Latinx art and artists.

Margaret E. Dorsey and Miguel Díaz-Barriga argue in Fencing in Democracy that border wall construction along the U.S.–Mexico border manifests transformations in citizenship practices that are aimed not only at keeping migrants out but also enmeshing citizens into a wider politics of exclusion.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, her experience reporting for People magazine, and dozens of interviews with photographers, journalists, publicists, magazine editors, and celebrities, Vanessa Díaz traces the complex power dynamics of the reporting and paparazzi work that fuel contemporary Hollywood and American celebrity culture in Manufacturing Celebrity.

The contributors to We Are Not Dreamers—who are themselves currently or formerly undocumented—call for the elimination of the Dreamer narrative, showing how it establishes high expectations for who deserves citizenship and marginalizes large numbers of undocumented youth. Leisy J. Abrego and Genevieve Negrón-Gonzalez edited this collection.

Don’t forget, through October 15 you can save 50% on these great Latinx studies titles, and all our in-stock books and journal issues using coupon FALL21.

New Books in September

Start off the semester strong by perusing our new September releases!

Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power in Complaint! Angela Y. Davis says, “Complaint! is precisely the text we need at this moment as we seek to understand and transform the institutional structures promoting racism and heteropatriarchy.”

Mark Rifkin examines nineteenth-century Native writings by William Apess, Elias Boudinot, Sarah Winnemucca, and and Zitkala-Ša to rethink and reframe contemporary debates around recognition, refusal, and resurgence for Indigenous peoples in Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form.

In The Nature of Space, pioneering Afro-Brazilian geographer Milton Santos attends to globalization writ large and how local and global orders intersect in the construction of space.

In Hawaiʻi is my Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific, Nitasha Tamar Sharma maps the context and contours of Black life in Hawaiʻi, showing how despite the presence of anti-Black racism, the state’s Black residents consider it to be their haven from racism.

The contributors to Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media, edited by Matthew Hockenberry, Nicole Starosielski, and Susan Zieger, document how media and logistics—the techniques of organizing and coordinating the movement of materials, bodies, and information—are co-constitutive and key to the circulation of information and culture.

In Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker, McKenzie Wark combines an autobiographical account of her relationship with Kathy Acker with her transgender reading of Acker’s writing to outline Acker’s philosophy of embodiment and its importance for theorizing the trans experience.

In A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People: Food Not Bombs and the World-Class Waste of Global Cities David Boarder Giles traces the work of Food Not Bombs—a global movement of grassroots soup kitchens that recover wasted grocery surpluses and redistribute them to those in need—to examine the relationship between waste and scarcity in global cities under late capitalism and the fight for food justice

Patricia Stuelke traces the hidden history of the reparative turn, showing how it emerged out of the failed struggle against US empire and neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s and unintentionally supported new forms of neoliberal and imperial governance in The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique.

Michael K. Bourdaghs, in A Fictional Commons: Natsume Sōseki and the Properties of Modern Literature, presents a radical reframing of the works of Natsume Sōseki—widely considered to be Japan’s greatest modern novelist—as critical and creative responses to the emergence of new forms of property ownership in nineteenth-century Japan.

The contributors to Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas, edited by Yolanda Covington-Ward and Jeanette S. Jouili, investigate the complex intersections between the body, religious expression, and the construction and negotiation of social relationships and collective identities throughout the Black diaspora.

Sarah Jane Cervenak traces how Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and land as given to enclosure and ownership in Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life.

The exhibition catalog to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, by curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, chronicles the pervasive visual and sonic parallels in the work of Black artists from the southern United States.

Andil Gosine revises understandings of queer desire in the Caribbean in Nature’s Wild, Love, Sex and the Law in the Caribbean, showing how the very concept of homosexuality in the Caribbean (and in the Americas more broadly) has been overdetermined by a colonially-influenced human/animal divide.

In Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism, Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes how legacies of colonial violence and the ways dispossession and extraction that destroyed indigenous and colonized peoples’ lives now poses an existential threat to the West.

In Roadrunner, cultural theorist and poet Joshua Clover examines Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ 1972 song “Roadrunner,” charting its place in rock & roll history and American culture.

Drawing on close readings of 1960s American art, Jason A. Hoelscher offers an information theory of art and an aesthetic theory of information in which he shows how art operates as information wherein art’s meaning cannot be determined in Art as Information Ecology: Artworks, Artworlds, and Complex Systems Aesthetics.

Tucker Carlson in Orbanland Echoes the Media in Trujillolandia, the Dominican Republic, after World War II, Complete with the Mar-a-Lago Factor: A Guest Post by Eric Paul Roorda

Tucker Carlson broadcasted his nightly Fox News program from an autocracy last week, Viktor Orban’s regime in Hungary. Carlson praised the dictator for cleaning up the place; muzzling or replacing his irresponsible critics in government and the media; keeping out the riff-raff at the border; and promoting an ugly Orbanized nationalism and nativism. Carlson seemed to frame Hungary as an example of what Trump was trying to do—will do?!—here.

My ongoing research for an upcoming Duke University Press title, The Dictator Stands Alone: United States Cold War Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1946-1961, a sequel to my 1998 book The Dictator Next Door, gives Carlson’s Big Adventure a sense of déjà vu.

If you substitute a few names and places, you have a similar scenario to a subplot of the book. Take out “Viktor Orban of Turkey” and plug in “Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.” Substitute “Tucker Carlson of Fox News” for “the right-wing press and its political allies.” And most weirdly, make the owner of Mar-a-Lago not the Celebrity Guy, but über-lobbyist Joseph E. Davies, close confident of presidents: FDR, Truman, and Ike, alike.

My prying into recently declassified materials shows that Mar a Lago Joe Davies orchestrated a successful public relations campaign in the United States for the benefit his employer, the dictatorial Trujillo. “The Goat” had gunned his way to power in 1930, then earned international infamy in 1937 by ordering the Haitian Massacre, arguably the first genocidal event of WWII.

Davies’ efforts, run out of a new Dominican Tourism Office on 5^th Avenue, NYC, cleansed the reputation of the mass murderer and ushered in a tourist rush to “Ciudad Trujillo,” the ancient city formerly known as Santo Domingo. Within a decade of Hiroshima, the Dominican Republic had become the major tourist destination in the Caribbean, with regular passenger service on three steamship lines; jet airliner connections on both Pan American Airways and KLM; a chain of fourteen modern hotels, beginning with the flagship Jaragua in 1946; new highways connecting them; and inordinate cleanliness, imposed by the Marine Corps discipline the dictator learned during his tutelage with the US Occupation, 1916-1924.

In 1955, Trujillo hosted a grandiose World’s Fair of Peace and Brotherhood. By then, Joe Davies was too old and sick to attend, confined to his king-size bed at Mar-a-Lago. As Davies faded and died in 1958, so did Trujillo’s public relations/tourism foreign policy strategy. By 1960, Trujillo was the pariah of the Western Hemisphere, soon to be assassinated, and thereafter grieved by few.

Eric Paul Roorda is the author of The Dictator Next Door and, more recently, editor of The Ocean Reader: History, Culture, Politics. He is also Professor of History at Bellarmine University. Save 30% off The Dictator Next Door with the coupon code E98RORDA. Read the Introduction to The Ocean Reader free on our website and save 30% on the paperback using the coupon code E20RORDA.

Q&A with Monica Huerta, author of Magical Habits

Monica Huerta is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University. In Magical Habits, she draws on her experiences growing up in her family’s Mexican restaurants and her life as an academic to sketch out habits of living that allow us to consider what it means to live with history as we are caught up in it and how those histories bear on our capacities to make sense of our lives.

The format of Magical Habits is unique and is clearly born out of an unwillingness to reduce interlocking stories to a single, brittle narrative. How did these texts come together for you?

I mention in the acknowledgments that for a long time – for most of the time it was “coming together” – I didn’t know why or what I was writing. There’s portions of writing – single sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs – that I wrote my first year of college, and other small portions I wrote in the last pass through the manuscript during copy edits. That’s a span of two decades! I tried to mark the “compendium” quality of the book with a series of dates of when I first started some of the writing in each essay and of when I last substantively revised it at the end of each of the essays. My hope is that what’s not reduced, but rather, as you say, interlocking, gives a layered sense of the varying needs the writing was meeting—some personal, some critical, some theoretical, some formal.

The “coming together” happened when I realized that the disparate bits asked related questions about habits we cultivate, knowingly and otherwise – through reading, but also through ordinary forms of distraction and pleasure – in order to live with what are unbearable histories by any measure. But even as the writings now gathered speak to each other through these questions about habits, I also hope the book as a whole maintains a sense of having been worked on and worked through alongside the ordinary course of living that made the writing possible and thinkable.

A lot about Magical Habits is unconventional, but one of your most surprising moves is to incorporate prose from your senior thesis project. Does this book track your evolution as a scholar, or of an evolving discourse about what being Mexican means? Are these two one and the same? 

I’m hoping that the portions from my undergrad thesis add dimensionality to the idea that the questions we have can change over time. I’m not proposing my undergraduate work makes a scholarly contribution to current scholarship in a traditional way. Obviously, there’s been so much exciting work between when I was in college and now about restaurants and food as sites of critical inquiry. I’m proposing the thesis bits as “an intimate archive” that turns my first sustained attempt at scholarship inside out and so contextualizes that effort in the more personal stories from which its questions arose. In the essays, those episodes are also situated in relation to history, memory, language games, migrations, and the mutations of racial capitalism in the late-twentieth century.

I suppose there is a way to read the book as tracking the way my own questions changed over time. My graduate training was as a nineteenth-century Americanist and my first traditional scholarly monograph, The Unintended: Photography, Property & the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism (forthcoming April 2022, NYU Press, America & the Long Nineteenth Century series) is about legal clashes over photography in the late-nineteenth century and a particular aesthetics of whiteness through which property relations are forged. It might not be immediately obvious, but The Unintended is a kind of answer to the questions about commodified ethnicities that my senior thesis was asking. The book is trying to show some of the specific mechanisms through which white supremacy works with capitalist regimes of private property.

At the same time, including the thesis bits is a pedagogical gesture. I thought it could be helpful in a classroom to use those portions to talk with students about how scholarship (which, in my mind, includes the ways we’re trained to produce it) bears a relation to our lives in direct and indirect ways. Of course, this also implies a collective work to build a culture of transparency with one another rather than embarrassment or denial. We choose our intellectual questions for intimate reasons, and “love” or “interest” are always far from the full story. Not every work or book needs to confess its reasons in that way, I don’t think. But it seems to me that engaging with one another through that kind of holistic investment in our questions can only make our work stronger; for one, it might shift our relations to one another and lend another kind of urgency to the kinds of work we can do together.

So I think I’m saying that I also wrote Magical Habits as a colleague: I wrote as a scholar and as a teacher, but also as someone who genuinely cares about the people who do the work we do, and in the interest of making more space for more people to engage multiply with the work of making knowledge that pushes beyond (and against) the way knowledge in the service of power has reproduced and legitimated unlivable worlds for most.

Magical Habits is part of the Writing Matters! series, which seeks to expand what constitutes critical writing. At the same time this book is a journey through your “family’s archives.” For instance, you recount anecdotes about your great grandfather you learned not from family tradition but from published histories written about him. This feels both unbearably personal, and unbearably impersonal. What was it like to excavate your family history this way?

There’s so many brilliant people writing in varied keys about the blur between the personal and critical right now! It’s a really exciting time to be thinking through our dreams for our institutions and knowledge-making together. It’s interesting that you use the word “unbearable.” I think the question of “what can be borne/born” from and of history is exactly the question that I’ve learned to ask from scholars like Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Hortense Spillers, Imani Perry, Ashley Farmer, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jessica Marie Johnson, Yomaira Figueroa, and so, so many others, but with Black feminists at – to use another Black feminist, Martha Jones’ term – the vanguard. The personal/impersonal process of excavating family history this way is, from what I’ve tried to learn from scholars and history, exactly what any family history excavation project would confront. Most recently, I think of Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands and Elizabeth Povinelli’s new graphic novel The Inheritance. Our personal archives – photo albums, emails, clothing, songs, overheard conversations – can only leak into the structural, material conditions through which they were created, or which conditioned their reception and experience. Another way to say it is that, of course, the personal is never entirely free from the structural (and some of that structure is utterly material), and vice versa. I tried to write from having learned that from Black feminists, even as my own position with relations to structures and affects is also distinct from theirs because of my own subject position, but also because of the histories we engage and question. 

I also tried to write from a speculative place, imagining some “after” from the heartbreakand specifically-manifested suffering of the histories we live inside; both the unbearability and the material manifestations of history are just as much our ecosystem as our other harmed ecosystems. I did that not to disavow either present distress or the strenuousness of the work it will take to be in an “after” but rather to try to think beyond the property logics that can dominate the personal and that would make the interest what’s personal in the book, the fact that it was mine and not someone else’s. I tried to write toward some other than the “mine-ness” of the story as an invitation to reallocate the very grounds for allegiance from the one to the many precisely because these histories are – differentially, always – our shared ecosystem. If dismantling property is the most direct path towards eradicating white supremacy, then dissolving the property logics through which we’ve come to know ourselves as selves could bring that horizon closer. That’s part of the experiment I was writing through.

What do you hope a reader will come away with from Magical Habits? 

As part of the Writing Matters! series, I hope the book continues to open up more space for the various forms that intellectual work might take and make for ever more actual, material, and imaginative freedom.

My friend Carolyn Biltoft, a world historian and theorist (get her book, it’s incredible!), told me she thinks of Magical Habits as an invitation to divest, to disentangle, and to disintegrate. If there is a singular “doing” that the book hopes to provoke, it’s as simple and challenging as that. I hope readers feel invited and seriously consider how they can (continue to) divest from the ways that their lives are enmeshed in and benefit from power and white supremacy in particular – but also in all its forms. Also to say that as storytelling, the book importantly includes missteps I made. Magical Habits isn’t offering a template for the right habits, but it is suggesting a tenacity towards being willing to become dedicated to continual divestment, when another un-free layer makes itself known. 

Each person who has that desire – ever more freedom for ever more people – can only begin if they’re going to begin in a holistic way exactly where they are. That’s part of why I am so inspired by abolitionist scholars and thinkers. Those organizers and leaders who have been working to do exactly that kind of holistic work in concert with and as a crucial part of the work of carceral abolition, to name our most prominent example, have been thinking in modes of compounding, interlocking scales and repair for decades. I’m inspired by their work, their thought, and their praxis of bringing more capacious worlds, more livable worlds into being through and in every relation in order to continually become that other world now.

Read the introduction to Magical Habits for free and save 30% on the book using the coupon code E21HRTA. 

Jamaican Independence Day: Norman Washington Manley’s “The Assets We Have”

Jamaica gained its independence from the United Kingdom on August 6, 1962. This year Diana Paton and Matthew J. Smith, the editors of The Jamaica Reader, invite us to look back on how the nation has conceived of its self-governance with this speech from former Jamaican premier Norman Washington Manley.

If independence meant a triumph for the struggle for self-government that began in the 1930s, for its architects it was also an occasion for reflection on that journey and the path ahead. Norman Manley offers such a rumination in his September 1962 address to the People’s National Party (PNP)’s national conference. Manley led Jamaica through the federation years and shepherded the discussions with the British government on the terms and timing of constitutional decolonization. As premier of Jamaica—a post that ceased to exist after 1959—Manley introduced several far-reaching policies intended to improve Jamaica’s institutions. His strong support for federation suffered a blow with the referendum he called in September 1961. In the wake of that loss, and with the discussions for independence well underway, Manley called a general election for April 1962. He was defeated by Alexander Bustamante, his cousin and opposition leader. Manley continued to lead the PNP, which was again defeated in 1967. The 1962 loss was most upsetting for him and his followers. As he implies in the speech, it denied Manley the “privilege” of being the first prime minister of an independent Jamaica.

Nevertheless, amid the excitement over independence, Manley accepted that the legacies of three centuries of colonial rule would take time to dismantle. The way ahead would depend less on him and the party’s founders. The generatino of independence had to accept the charge of making Jamaica a truly free nation defined by greater levels of social equality and economic sustainability. Manley’s inspiring words in the face of two major defeats reflect his insistence that nationalism be placed above party political victory.

Comrades, I thank God that I have lived to see twenty-four years of the work of the party crowned with the achievement of independence for our blessed and beloved country (applause).

I look back on the long years of our struggle. I look back to the days of our early beginning when we first began to rouse Jamaica to her destiny as a nation in the world. I remember the hard and bitter struggles of the past. I remember the small handful of comrades that joined us. I remember the sacrifices they made. I remember the mockery they endured. I remember the suffering they withstood. I remember how some of them, nameless today and unsung, gave their lives that Jamaica might throw off 300 years of colonial bondage, might lift up their hearts to aspire to all that independence means and freedom for a people.

It is true that we have been denied the privilege of achieving power at this moment, but no one can deny us the accomplishment of our work in this country (applause). And many marveled how it was that we who were not in the seats of power acknowledged as the authors of the greatest of our land at this time (applause).

And now I am going to speak to you about the challenge of this time as we close one book of our history, a book which from the beginning could foresee its own end, and open another book in our history, the end of which no man can foresee, but it will roll on from generation to generation as we seek to build a nation worthy of our sons and daughters in this land.

Comrades, it is one thing to become free; it is another thing to build a real nation of your country (applause).

But, comrades, we start our nationhood with some great assets. One of the good things is the long time that it has taken us to evolve our life into freedom as a people. We have learned much over the past half a century. We have learned most of all over the last twenty-four years in this country; and we have only got to remember the lessons we have learned to make sure that we can find the right way for the future.

We gave this country for seven and a half years a Government that knew how to use power with restraint and respect for human decencies in the land. We gave this country for seven and a half years a Government which believed in the realities of democracy, which allowed all men to walk the land free from fear and free from oppression.

We have one third great asset in this country, moving into nationhood, and this is the quality of the people of the land, a people tough and resilient, taught by adversity to endure hardship with patience, given some special spirit of loyalty to inspire them in their devotion to the causes they espoused, a people well understanding right from wrong, well understanding decency in government, well understanding justice and the rule of law. And those are great assets for a country to start with. And I say what I have so often said, if Jamaica fails it is Jamaica’s leaders that have failed, not Jamaica’s people.

Comrades, we must never forget that we start with all the legacies of 300 years of colonial rule. We would be foolish if we did not understand that you don’t throw off all the patterns of behaviour and thought that colonialism brings upon a people merely by becoming free. We have tried hard in this country to overcome them, but they are not yet overcome. In the old days each man sought his own good in the country and each man that made his way up turned his back on where he came from, and each man who achieved a high place on the ladder went steadily striving to bow the knee to wherever power was to be found in the Colonial Empire. Those patterns prevail in this country today and there are still men who in true colonial style serve one party only, the party in power—the pips who bow the knee and scrape and cringe and deny and falsify principles so as to protect themselves and their positions. Maybe it is common all over the world, but it is particularly common in societies that have known colonial rule for generations.

And I say one last thing. When I look into the future of Jamaica, I ask you to remember the three great tasks that confront us at this time as people. First, foremost and above all, to make come true this great motto that I am proud of having played a part in formulating when I was Premier of Jamaica: “Out of many, one people.” We are not one people today. We are many. That is history. That is colonialism. That is our particular history. That is the problem before all Jamaica today—how to make “out of many, one people.” That is a problem that we have understood for many years and that is something that our party must dedicate itself to achieving in this country.

We have another basic, fundamental problem, and that is how to continue to build our economy so as to create a society which offers the reality of equal opportunity to all people and offers the opportunity of decent Christian lives to every man, woman and child in the land.

As a nation our third great problem, and it would mean so much to us, is to present ourselves to the world so that we can mean something in the world of free peoples and free nations. In other words we want a meaningful foreign policy in Jamaica as a nation.

History now gives us the role to create the new things which will make that nation live and endure in the world to come. So let no man quarrel with history or question the judgments of the Architect of the universe.

Read the introduction to the The Jamaica Reader and save 30% on the paperback edition using the coupon code E21JAMRD.

New Books in August

Don’t miss all our exciting new releases in August!

In three long-form poems and a lyrical essay, fahima ife speculates in Maroon Choreography on the afterlives of Black fugitivity, unsettling the historic knowledge of it while moving inside the ongoing afterlives of those people who disappeared themselves into rural spaces beyond the reach of slavery.

Rachel Zolf activates the last three lines of a poem by Jewish Nazi Holocaust survivor Paul Celan—“No one / bears witness for the / witness”—to theorize the poetics and im/possibility of witnessing in No One’s Witness.

In Amkoullel, the Fula Boy, Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ—one of the towering figures in the literature of twentieth-century Francophone Africa—tells in striking detail the story of his youth, which was set against inter-ethnic conflict and the arrival and installation of French colonialism.

In The Politics of Decolonial Investigation Walter D. Mignolo provides a sweeping examination of how colonialty has operated around the world in its myriad forms between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries while calling for a decolonial politics that would delink from all forms of Western knowledge.

Laurence Coderre explores the material culture of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in Newborn Socialist Things to show how it paved the way for rampant commodification and consumption in contemporary China.

Carolyn Hardin offers a new way of understanding arbitrage—the trading practice that involves buying assets in one market at a cheap price and immediately selling them in another market for a profit—as a means of showing how its reliance upon taking on risk is fundamental to financial markets in Capturing Finance.

Monica Huerta draws on her experiences growing up in her family’s Mexican restaurants and her life as an academic in Magical Habits to sketch out habits of living that allow us to consider what it means to live with history as we are caught up in it and how those histories bear on our capacities to make sense of our lives.

The contributors to Long Term, edited by Scott Herring and Lee Wallace, use the tension between the popular embrace and legalization of same-sex marriage and the queer critique of homonormativity as an opportunity to examine the myriad forms of queer commitments and their durational aspect.

In Domestic Contradictions Priya Kandaswamy brings together two crucial moments in welfare history—the advent of the Freedmen’s Bureau during Reconstruction and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996—to show how they each targeted Black women through negative stereotyping and normative assumptions about gender, race, and citizenship.

In Policing Protest Paul A. Passavant explores how the policing of protest in the United States has become increasingly hostile since the late 1990s, moving away from strategies that protect protestors toward militaristic practices designed to suppress legal protests.

In A Black Intellectual’s Odyssey Martin Kilson—the first tenured African American professor at Harvard—takes readers on a fascinating journey from his upbringing in a small Pennsylvania mill town to his experiences as an undergraduate to pursuing graduate study at Harvard before spending his entire career there as a faculty member.

In Whiteness Interrupted, Marcus Bell presents a revealing portrait of white teachers in majority Black schools to outline how white racial identity is constructed based on localized interactions and the ways whiteness takes a different form in predominantly Black spaces.

Jennifer C. Nash examines how the figure of the “Black mother” has become a powerful political category synonymous with crisis, showing how they are often rendered into one-dimensional symbols of tragic heroism and the ground zero of Black life in Birthing Black Mothers.

Transnational Feminist Itineraries, edited by Ashwini Tambe and Millie Thayer, demonstrates the key contributions of transnational feminist theory and practice to analyzing and contesting authoritarian nationalism and the extension of global corporate power.

In Reimagining Social Medicine from the South Abigail H. Neely explores social medicine’s possibilities and limitations at one of its most important origin sites: the Pholela Community Health Centre (PCHC) in South Africa.

Disability Pride Month Resources

In July we honor Disability Pride Month to commemorate the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. Read on to learn more about our recent titles that explore the state of contemporary disability studies.

In Exile and Pride genderqueer activist/writer Eli Clare weaves together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home, all the while providing an intersectional framework for understanding how we actually experience the daily hydraulics of oppression, power, and resistance over the course of several personal essays, .

Drawing on the radical black tradition, process philosophy, and Felix Guattari’s schizoanalysis, Erin Manning explores the links between neurotypicality, whiteness, and black life in For a Pragmatics of the Useless.

The contributors to Long Term, edited by Scott Herring and Lee Wallace, use the tension between the popular embrace and legalization of same-sex marriage and the queer critique of homonormativity as an opportunity to examine the myriad forms of queer commitments and their durational aspect.

“Crip Temporalities,” a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly edited by Ellen Samuels and Elizabeth Freeman, brings together explorations of crip temporality: the ways in which bodily and mental disabilities shape the experience of time. More than just a space of loss and frustration, crip time also offers liberatory potential: the contributors imagine how justice, connection, and pleasure might emerge from temporalities that center compassion rather than productivity.

In Black Madness :: Mad Blackness Therí Alyce Pickens examines the speculative and science fiction of Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due to rethink the relationship between race and disability, thereby unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive.

In this revised and expanded edition of Medicine Stories, Aurora Levins Morales weaves together the insights and lessons learned over a lifetime of activism to offer a new theory of social justice, bringing clarity and hope to tangled, emotionally charged social issues in beautiful and accessible language.

In Sexuality, Disability, and Aging, Jane Gallop explores how disability and aging are commonly understood to undermine one’s sense of self and challenges narratives that register the decline of bodily potential and ability as nothing but an experience of loss.

Q&A with Shaoling Ma, author of The Stone and the Wireless

Shaoling Ma is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. In The Stone and the Wireless, she examines late Qing China’s political upheavals and modernizing energies through the problem of the dynamics between new media technologies such as the telegraph the discursive representations of them.

Is The Stone and the Wireless a history of the late Qing period, a work of media theory, or a media history? How are the concepts of media and history interrelated here?

It is all three, though interestingly, The Stone and the Wireless started out as none of them. The first version of the book, which was my Ph.D. dissertation, actually focused on utopia. I began with some seminal texts of early Chinese science fiction, and realized only quite late in my research process that what communicated the fantasies of national and individual rejuvenation in these writings were fantasies of communication themselves. So, then, communicative technologies came into the picture, but only by moving beyond fiction and finding a similar trajectory in the political and social histories of the period—that is, after diving into late Qing history proper—was I convinced that the interrelation between media, history, and theory is so integral to necessitate a thorough investigation.  

The history of media, perhaps even more so than other histories, directly concern who reported what, when, and through which specific medium. Scholars like Lisa Gitelman, Thomas Mullaney, and Andrew Jones, to name just a few, have admirably wrested global media history from the dominant perspective of inventors and established users. In learning from their work, I also became convinced that a retelling of media history is the incipient theorizing of what media do. The last piece of the puzzle came when I realized that precisely because the late Qing men and women were “recording,” “transmitting,” and attempting their versions of “connectivity” – to use the three key terms that structure my book—without a clear conception of what media are, they were media theorists before their time. 

Is translation a literal process or a metaphor in this book?

I see linguistic and cultural translations as one kind of mediation, which if used too generally to refer to the negotiation of differently opposing categories of thought, does risk becoming a metaphor. Of course there is nothing wrong with metaphors, unless we forget that concrete, historical processes also undergird the very distinction between the literal and the figurative. Keeping an eye on technological media serves as a way to remind someone like myself trained in comparative literary studies on this important distinction, which is really another way of saying that subtle difference between literal and metaphorical translations depends on the priority that an analysis gives to including actual communicative processes. 

In your conclusion you point to a dystopian turn in contemporary Chinese science-fiction, in contrast to the utopian period you describe in the late Qing Dynasty. Has the role of media changed alongside the tone of more contemporary Chinese fiction?

One period’s utopia easily becomes another century’s dystopia, but even within a single utopian work, the perfection of an all-powerful nation-state, for instance, can spell the end of a utopia for free, individual inquiry. Hence in Wu Jianren’s recognizably utopian New Story of the Stone (1905), which I discuss in Chapter 2, Jia Baoyu realizes there is nothing left for him to discover, let alone accomplish, in the perfected, Confucian technocracy, and departs. This gives the novel a slight, nuanced dystopian edge. The contemporary Chinese science-fiction writers who lambast social-economic inequality and disastrous environmental consequences of China’s post-socialist reforms can be seen as rejecting the utopia of national wealth and power bequeathed by their late Qing predecessors. But it may well be around the question of media where the contemporary dystopian turn converges with the earlier historical utopianism. By this, I mean that there is a risk when the dream of perfect communicability—as variously embraced by followers of design-thinking, innovation, disruption, and entrepreneurship—and its promise to do away with mediation altogether, become the substitute for collective action and the actual redress of injustice. This is my point in the conclusion: once the heroine of The Waste Tide, is construed as the disembodied, virtual consciousness—the literal, perfect medium—between the downtrodden e-waste workers and the privileged classes, the novel also reaches a too-easy resolution of the conflict that it otherwise carefully depicts. The tricky balance, as I see it, is always between the means-and-end relation. Can we have a satisfyingly dystopian critique without risking an utopian instrumentalizing, which in the case of The Waste Tide and its continuation of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century scientific and cultural imagination, manifest in the form of the female medium, who gets killed off in the end?   

There are many figures in this book. Why are the stone and the wireless the ones that made it into your title?

The stone refers to the mythological surface bearing the inscribed records of history, but also the lithographic process; the wireless figures in the late Qing period’s obsessions with interconnectivity through electricity and neuroanatomy. The stone and the wireless, more so than the other figures in the book, most vividly contest the supposed teleology of technological progress, and other related conceptual oppositions between the primitive and the modern, the visible and the invisible, and materiality and immateriality. The challenge of keeping all these terms in dynamic tension arose when I had to choose an image for my book cover: one finds plenty of appropriate stone figures, but the same can’t be said for the more abstract figure of the wireless. In the end, Wang Sishun’s “Apocalypse, 2015-19” came closest to capturing the abstractions of the concrete and the materiality of the abstract, which the book seeks to embody. I owe much to the artist and Duke’s art department for this, of course!

What can “Western” media theory learn from the Chinese media history you outline here?

I am glad that the question, too, puts “Western” in quotes without jettisoning the term altogether. We have tried to exorcise the “West” versus the “Rest” for so long, but the catch-all term remains useful when the historical materials one examines rely on them. A central argument of my book is that late Qing thinkers also attempted to negotiate the distinctions between China and the “West” through unhinging the same troubling associations these terms have with history and theory, respectively. And what effected such an unhinging but the communicative devices and processes of the time? To return to my answer for the first question above, I don’t believe it is possible to do a rigorous job of non-“Western” media history without also retheorizing media: this is both the challenge and bonus of working with cultural difference and within the still codified “area” studies. So, the first thing that “Western” media theory can learn from Chinese media history is that the active mediations of national, cultural, and epistemic distinctions, far from being some unintended consequences, are part and parcel of what media do. In other words, the history of early Chinese communicative processes consolidated the late Qing’s views of the “West,” as well as its theory of media. 

I am constantly aware that “China” and “Chinese” are equally problematic terms. It falls beyond the scope of my study to contribute to the rich field of scholarship that examines the complexities of ethnicity, race, and language policies of the period. I try to allude to some of these issues when I can, and I hope to do them better justice in my new project on contemporary China.

Read the introduction to The Stone and the Wireless and save 30% on the paperback edition using the code E21MASLG.

Religion in the Making of South Sudan by Christopher Tounsel

Christopher Tounsel is Catherine Shultz Rein Early Career Professor in the College of the Liberal Arts and Assistant Professor of History and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University. In his new book book Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan he investigates the centrality of Christian worldviews to the ideological construction of South Sudan from the early twentieth century to the present.

On July 9^th, the East African nation of South Sudan will celebrate its tenth anniversary of independence. One may expect that customary nationalist symbols will be on full display in the capital city of Juba and throughout the country. The red, green and black-striped national flag adorned with its shining yellow star will wave; public officials will make commemorative speeches; and the following lyrics from the national anthem will fill the air:

“Oh God

We praise and glorify You

For Your grace on South Sudan,

Land of great abundance

Uphold us united in peace and harmony…

Oh God, bless South Sudan!”

The first stanza of ‘South Sudan Oyee’ is indicative of another foundational element of South Sudanese nationalism: Christian theology. This became apparent to me when I was in the capital city of Juba in July 2012, when raucous festivities marked the first anniversary of independence. In a speech made in the shadows of the city’s All Saints’ Cathedral, one speaker shared that after liberation hero John Garang’s death ‘God in his mercy [gave] us a Joshua with unique talent and wisdom who took us through the days of difficulty’. Joshua, in this paradigm, was President Salva Kiir. Another speaker alluded to the Hebrew captivity in Egypt by thanking God for giving them independence, leading His children across the river, and ending their slavery. In these ways and more, it was evident that independence was more than a political occasion; it was a religious moment as well.

In Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan, I explore how Southern Sudanese intellectuals used Judeo-Christian Scriptures to frame their struggle for political self-determination. Included in the “Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora Peoples” series, the book examines how clerics, soldiers, refugees and others laid the ideological foundations of the South Sudanese nation-state. During Sudan’s lengthy postcolonial civil wars, Southern Sudanese envisioned themselves as a “chosen people” destined for liberation while Arabs and Muslims were likened to oppressors in the Biblical tradition of Babylon, Egypt, and the Philistines. South Sudan presents a unique case in African Christianity whereby ideologues aimed liberatory, nationalist Christian thought against non-white and non-Christian co-citizens.

Even after the country crossed the proverbial Jordan to entered the Promised Land of nationhood, various clerics, politicians and bloggers continued to employ Biblical framings to issues of social and political concern. These individuals, ranging from recently-deceased Archbishop Paulino Loro to President Kiir himself, articulated political theology despite the absence of Northern Sudanese Arab Muslim ‘oppressors.’ Such discursive behavior showed that South Sudanese religious nationalism is—and never was—based exclusively in anti-Islamization.

Independence, however, has been far from ‘milk and honey.’ The national anthem’s plea for God to uphold the nation in harmonious peace struck with particular irony when the young nation became embroiled in an ethnically divisive civil war in December 2013. Tens of thousands lost their lives, and hundreds of thousands were forced from their homes. What became of the liberation theology that was supposed to reach its poetic conclusion with political sovereignty? While the conflict debunked any notion that Southerners felt a sense of pan-Christian solidarity strong enough to subsume ethnicity or prevent ethnic tension, it also produced a dynamic crucible of religious thought. Religious thought still functioned as a political technology despite the changed scope of who and what constituted us and them, good and evil, heroes and villains. Despite the trials that have characterized freedom’s first decade, South Sudanese have not forsaken the idea that the spiritual is intimately connected with the material, or that Scripture is a useful political resource with a pertinent word for every situation. 

As South Sudan prepares for its decennial next month, the prospects for the country’s second decade are filled with uncertainties. Though the civil war is officially over, will relations between the Dinka and the Nuer—the two primary ethnic groups engaged in the conflict—improve or decline? How long will it take for the country to healthily emerge from the COVID-19 crisis? How will South Sudan relate to its former enemy Sudan now that its longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir is no longer in power? Though the answers to these questions remain to be seen, history suggests this South Sudanese will continue to inject theology into public, political discourse. While the United States has displayed how destructive and divisive Christian nationalism can be, South Sudan may offer a more constructive interplay of religion, state, faith and politics.

Read the introduction to Chosen Peoples free online and save 30% on the paperback edition with the coupon code E21TNSL.