The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for March 25, 2023, is Three Registers of Destitution, the introduction of Destituent Power, a recent special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (122:1), by issue editors Kieran Aarons and Idris Robinson.

From the Introduction:

“Herein lies the great merit of those theorists working to develop the concept of destitution outside of and beyond the logic of revolt, in long-term experiments in autonomous anti-institutional collective life, whether among the Mohawk warriors in Tyendinaga or the Zapatistas in Chiapas or in the strategies of urban survival amidst the ruins of the Anthropocene, from Mexico City to the exurbs of America. If it is possible to collectively constitute ourselves as destituent, if neighborhoods or entire regions can self-organize autonomously against the rule of money, without succumbing to the temptation to reinstitute the political as a sphere separate from everyday life, then we need not await the Great Evening in which “another end of the world” becomes possible, for there are already glimmers of a life in common within the passing away of this world, here and now.”

Read the article for free here, and buy the issue using coupon code SPRING23 to save 50% through April 17th.

Explore this topic more by listening to a panel conversation (in Spanish and English) featuring the issue editors, Kieran Aarons and Idris Robinson, as well as Diego Sztulwark, Sonali Gupta, Francesco Guercio, Rodrigo Karmy, and facilitated by Gerardo Muñoz via Conversaciones a la intemperie–a platform for presenting publications on contemporary thought–a collaboration between Arthaus artists’ residence and the 17/institute.

The South Atlantic Quarterly, founded amid controversy in 1901, provides bold analyses of the current intellectual scene, both nationally and worldwide. Published exclusively in guest-edited special issues, this award-winning centenarian journal features some of the most prominent contemporary writers and scholars tackling urgent political, cultural, and social questions. Some issues grow out of current academic debates, concerning, for example, the growing power of finance, narratives of black leadership, and the politics of austerity.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for March 18, 2023, is Tong Yan Gaai: A North American Chinatown Vernacular, a conversation between critic Brandon Leung and photographer Morris Lum, appearing in Trans Asia Photography, Volume 12, Issue 2.

“For more than a decade, the Toronto-based artist Morris Lum has been photographing Chinatowns throughout North America in his series Tong Yan Gaai. Since 2012 the Trinidad-born photographer has searched for clusters of Chinatown communities built across Canada and the United States for the purpose of settlement and growth. Using a large-format camera, he has documented Chinatowns in Victoria, Calgary, Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, with the aims of focusing on and directing attention to the functionality of Chinatowns, exploring the generational context of how “Chinese” identity is expressed in these structural enclaves, and recording the rapid architectural and economic changes that communities have been facing”.

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Image 1: Golden Happiness Plaze, Calgary, 2015.
Image 2: Lao Tsu Mural, Vancouver, 2013.
Image 3: Fresh Egg Mart, Vancouver, 2017.
All images © Morris Lum. Used with permission. www.morrislum.ca

Read this article, and the full issue of Trans Asia Photography, for free!

Trans Asia Photography is an international refereed open-access journal based at the University of Toronto. It provides a venue for the interdisciplinary exploration of photography and Asia. The journal examines all aspects of photographic history, theory and practice by centering images in or of Asia, conceived here as a territory, network, and cultural imaginary.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for March 11, 2023, is Sense and Consent in Cocreating with Earth Others by Harlan Morehouse and Cheryl Morse, an article from Environmental Humanities, Volume 15, Issue 1.

Environmental Humanities is a peer-reviewed, international, open-access journal. The journal publishes outstanding interdisciplinary scholarship that draws humanities disciplines into conversation with each other, and with the natural and social sciences, around significant environmental issues.

Introduction

“Despite living on their land for several decades Aaron and Phyllis never enjoyed a full harvest from their seven mature cherry trees in Charlotte, Vermont. Each year, birds ate the cherries before they had a chance to gather them. Wanting to enjoy a harvest of the tart fruits at least once, the couple invited a dowser, Gerald, to see if he could establish dialogue with the birds to communicate Aaron and Phyllis’s wishes. Gerald arrived, settled into position amid the cherry trees and explained the couple’s dilemma to the birds. It’s understandable, Gerald reasoned, that they would want to feast on the cherries, but so did the humans. Since Aaron and Phyllis were unable to safely climb ladders, they would be willing to grant the birds full access to the out-of-reach cherries. Would the birds, inquired Gerald, accept this deal? After some back-and-forth clarification of interests and terms, the birds agreed and would leave the lower cherries untouched. That summer, Aaron and Phyllis harvested cherries for the first time. In an interview about his work as a dowser, Gerald located the origins of his cross-species communication skills in his family’s multigenerational history of divinatory practices. He mentioned his mother used the same method in her orchard in Scotland. She would designate specific fruit trees the birds could have on the condition they leave the remaining trees for humans. These giveaway plants, as Gerald called them, were switched each year in a process that required a yearly contract renewal and dialogue between humans and birds.”

Read this article, and the full issue of Environmental Humanities, for free!

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for March 4, 2023 is Crip Genealogies edited by Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich. The contributors to Crip Genealogies reorient the field of disability studies by centering the work of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and trans scholarship and activism, showing how a white and Western-centric narrative of disability studies enables ableism and racism.

Crip Genealogies is part of the series ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise, edited by Mel Y. Chen, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román, and Jasbir K. Puar. Books in this series bring together queer theory, postcolonial studies, critical race scholarship, and disability theory to foreground the oft-occluded import of race and sex in the fields of posthumanist theory, new materialisms, vitalism, media theory, animal studies, and object-oriented ontologies. ANIMA emphasizes how life, vitality, and animatedness reside beyond what is conventionally and humanistically known.

Prefer the print version? Buy the book and use coupon code E23CRIPG at checkout for a 30% discount!

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for February 18, 2023, is Bearing the Intolerable: Analytic Love, an essay by Ronjaunee Chatterjee from a recent special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.

Psychoanalysis and Solidarity (differences volume 33, issue 2-3) was edited by Michelle Rada.

To commit to love in the various ways I have sketched out here is to commit to something of a different order than tolerance: to bear the intolerable.

Ronjaunee Chaterjee

Article Abstract

This essay considers psychoanalytic theories of love in the work of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Jacques Lacan. Though there is no coherent theory of love in psychoanalysis, paying attention to love in the analytic situation—that is, to transference—allows us to read analytic love as a transformative practice through which subjects affiliate with one another as subjects rather than as objects. In considering the importance of love to solidarity, the work of Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Black feminist theory is mobilized to offer two short readings of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved and the autobiography of Dorothy Day. Across these theoretical and narrative works, the author formulates an account of analytic love as a site of negative plenitude that rearranges conventional accounts of identity and difference.

Buy this issue and use coupon code SAVE30 at checkout for a 30% discount!

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

The Weekly Read

It’s New York Fashion Week, so what better time to explore Fashion’s Borders, a recent special issue of English Language Notes edited by Jane Garrity and Celia Marshik.

“Fashion, we assert, is the cultural medium through which borders shift and move—in which place can be understood as a state of mind or a geographic location.”

Jane Garrity and Celia Marshik

Fashion’s Borders: An Introduction is The Weekly Read for February 11, 2023.

Introduction Abstract

The introduction traces the long history of fashion’s movement across cultural, national, and political borders. After brief case studies of early twentieth-century French and Spanish styles imagining fashion as an engine of transnational amity, the introduction highlights how fashion navigates some of the most troubled borders of recent years, including the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and racial violence. Fashion forces viewers and consumers to choose sides, whether through national identification or through recognition of the long history of black and brown bodies producing fashionable objects. To advance the global history of fashion, the introduction briefly discusses the work of designers Rawan Maki (Bahrain), Laurence Leenaert (Belgium), and Kim Jones (Great Britain), examining how each upends gender, race, class, or fashion binaries, and analyzes how LVMH and Uniqlo, brands at opposite ends of the contemporary style spectrum, underline the very different ways in which fashion traverses the globe in the twenty-first century. The introduction concludes with the hope that this issue will raise questions about fashion’s articulation of the relation among the local, the national, and the global, as well as about the human experience of interacting with the fashion industry in one national context while living in a globalized world.

Buy this issue and use coupon code SAVE30 at checkout for a 30% discount!

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for February 4, 2023 is Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment by Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart. In this fascinating book, Hobart charts the social history of ice in Hawaiʻi, showing how ice and refrigeration underpinned settler colonial ideas about race, environment, and the senses. Paige West calls it “a beautifully written, genre-bending contribution that is one of the only truly transdisciplinary books I have ever read.” From now until April 6, you can download it for free.

For a preview, catch Hobart’s interview on Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for Saturday, January 28, 2023 is “The Politics of Abortion 50 Years after Roe,” a special issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, edited by Katrina Kimport and Rebecca Kreitzer. The introduction, and all articles, are freely available as advance publication articles.

Introduction Abstract

“Abortion is central to the Amerian political landscape and a common pregnancy outcome, yet research on abortion has been siloed and marginalized in the social sciences: in an empirical analysis, we find only 22 articles published in this century in the top economics, political science, and sociology journals. This special issue aims to bring abortion research into a more generalist space, challenging what we term the “abortion research paradox” wherein abortion research is largely absent from prominent disciplinary social science journals but flourishes in interdisciplinary and specialized journals. After discussing the misconceptions that likely contribute to abortion research siloization and the implications of this siloization on abortion research as well as social science knowledge more generally, this essay introduces the articles in this special issue. Then, in a call for continued and expanded research on abortion, this essay closes by offering three guiding practices for abortion scholars—both those new to the topic and those already deeply familiar—in the hopes of building an ever-richer body of literature on abortion politics, policy, and law. The need for such a robust literature is especially acute following the United States Supreme Court’s June 2022 overturning of the constitutional right to abortion.”

Katrina Kimport and Rebecca Kreitzer

Available articles:

“Introduction: The Politics of Abortion 50 Years after Roe,” by issue editors Katrina Kimport and Rebecca Kreitzer

“Undue Burdens: State Abortion Laws in the U.S., 1994–2022,” by Louise Marie Roth and Jennifer Hyunkyung Lee

“Unlimited Discretion: How Unchecked Bureaucratic Discretion Can Threaten Abortion Availability,” by Orlaith Heymann, Danielle Bessett, Alison Norris, Jessie Hill, Danielle Czarnecki, Hillary J. Gyuras, Meredith Pensak, and Michelle L. McGowan

“A Mixed Methods Approach to Understanding the Disconnection between Perceptions of Abortion Acceptability and Support for Roe v. Wade Among US Adults,” by Beyza E. Buyuker, Kathryn J. LaRoche, Xiana Bueno, Kristen N. Jozkowski, Brandon L. Crawford, Ronna C. Turner, and Wen-Juo Lo

“Self-Sourced Medication Abortion, Physician Authority, and the Contradictions of Abortion Care,” by Jennifer Karlin and Carole Joffe

 “History and Politics of Medication Abortion in the United States and the Rise of Telemedicine and Self-Managed Abortion,” by Carrie N. Baker

“Activism for Abortion Rights and Access Is Global: What the United States Can Learn from the Rest of the World,” by Anu Kumar

“State Courts, State Legislatures, and Setting Abortion Policy,” by Jeong Hyun Kim, Anna Gunderson, Elizabeth Lane, and Nichole M. Bauer 

“Abortion as a Public Health Risk in Covid-19 Anti-Abortion Legislation,” by Saphronia Carson and Shannon K. Carter 

 Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law

A leading journal in its field, and the primary source of communication across the many disciplines it serves, the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law focuses on the initiation, formulation, and implementation of health policy and analyzes the relations between government and health—past, present, and future.
Jonathan Oberlander, editor

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for Saturday, January 21, 2023 is The Curious Case of Oscar Lorick: Race, Markets, and Militancy during the Farm Crisis, by Rebecca Shimoni-Stoil. The article appears in The 1980s Farm Crisis Reconsidered, a recent special issue of Agricultural History.

Abstract

“In 1985 Oscar Lorick—an aging and illiterate Black farmer clinging to seventy-nine acres of land and burdened with massive debts—turned to local farm activist Tommy Kersey to help stave off foreclosure. The ensuing mobilization tied together the NAACP, Black church networks, white supremacist militants, corporate sponsors, a millionaire benefactor, and even the Atlanta Falcons in the ultimately successful attempt to save his farm. Lorick’s story serves as a point of departure to assert that the Farm Crisis facilitated the convergence of anti-federal and federal-skeptic ideologies, both radical and conventional, in the fertile ground of rural America. Relying on court records, news reports, and organizational documents, this article reconstructs a story that grabbed national attention during the Farm Crisis to demonstrate the importance of free-market narratives, racial discrimination, and the legacy of civil rights mobilization in understanding the complexity of agrarian activism in the crisis-era South.”

Oscar Lorick’s story remains inscribed in the countryside outside of Cochran, Georgia, today. The faded inscriptions read “Live Free or Die,” and “FED RES SYS” with superimposed prohibition sign. (Photograph by Bert Way, April 17, 2022.)

The Weekly Read is a new weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

Introducing The Weekly Read

We are pleased to announce a new weekly feature, The Weekly Read, in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels.

Today we offer a book, Sami Schalk’s 2018 title Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, newly made open access.

Writing on Twitter, Schalk said, “As a Black feminist disability studies scholar, I believe that #AccessIsLove & I try to practice that in all I do in the classroom, my writing, & how I share my work. I’m so grateful to be able to do my intellectual & political work in ways that feel right to me.”

Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.