ISRN Condensed Matter Physics

Scapp R.

This interview highlights Samantha Antione-Purcell’s work in bringing a new educational model to Grenada. Antione-Purcell describes her journey into teaching and educational leadership, and the creation of a new collaborative school, The St. George’s Institute. The interview is conducted by Ron Scapp.

Vaught S., Sojoyner D., Wun C.

The authors outline their development of an abolitionist and anti-carceral syllabus, to be shared as a “model in process” for relational learning and activism. The article provides a number of resources intended as community knowledge building and the development of applied and community-based practices.

Covarrubias A., Soldatenko M.

The authors examine the successful efforts to set up the first department of Mexican American Studies, possibly the first Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) in the California State University system, the establishment of a community center, and a Black and Brown House on the campus. The article details the negotiations among administrators, students, faculty, staff, and community. The goal is to highlight how the background of the East Los Angeles Blowouts, the response to the Vietnam War, the reaction to police violence, and the rise of La Raza Unida Party were central to the success of establishing these academic and university programs. At the same time, the essay underscores how these constituencies, given their divergent interests, were able to shift the institution. The authors use archival documentation and oral histories to demonstrate their points.

Walkington L.

The author writes a “letter” to White feminists and academic allies in order to demand greater modes of solidarity, and to draw attention to the ongoing and too-often ignored work of Black feminists in protecting and creating space for collective and social freedoms. The commentary recalls the legacy of Black feminist thinkers and activists, and positions their insights in a new era of legalized reproductive rights restrictions in the United States.

Jaime-Diaz J.

Ethnic Studies emerged as an academic discipline in the late 1960s during the epoch of protest to challenge ideologies of racialized social class deeply normalized within Eurocentric knowledge that had historically depicted oppressed minoritized groups from an inferior perspective within the history of the United States. Chicana/o Studies would be one of the original four pillars of the discipline that furthered the epistemologies of Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) perspectives at the forefront of a knowledge base that represented a counter-narrative to the lived experiences of such communities from their standpoint.In Las Hijas de Juan: Daughters Betrayed, Dr. Josie Méndez-Negrete utilizes autoethnography within a sociocultural context as a tool for describing her family’s survival. She incorporates mind as a methodology, as she relives her early experiences through a theory in the flesh (see Roediger III and Wertsch’s “Creating a New Discipline of Memory Studies”). Such theoretical positionality conceptualizes the body as the material site being a Chicana woman of color. Thus, serving as a foundation for intellectual knowledge rooted in the politics of resistance and liberation (as discussed by Cervantes-Soon in “The US-Mexico Border-Crossing Chicana Researcher”). Seldom in Mexican culture are those who are willing to shatter traumatic realities of sexual victimization, physical, mental, and emotional abuse that occur within the nuclear familia. Some previous critical strands in respect to Chicana/o autobiographies where such community speaks their truth as they lived them includes Maria, Daughter of Immigrants, by María Antonietta Berriozábal (2012); Always Running La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. (1993) and It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addictions, Revolutions and Healing (2012) by Luis J. Rodreguez; and Street Life: Poverty, Gangs, and a Ph.D. by Victor M. Rios (2011). Such body of literature is centered on the Chicana/o struggle against intersectionalities of injustice that has provided future generations tools to draw upon in critically understanding oppression, thus seeking liberation through inspiration from those whom have struggled with a courage of consciousness in the spirit of social justice for the common good.For some, such treatment becomes normalized and accepted as an unfortunate experience along the journey of life. By utilizing testimonio in its most provocative form, Méndez-Negrete erases boundaries from Mexican post-colonial patriarchal culture in confronting the stigma of “el que diran.” The author organizes the book into seven sections with multiple short reads within each section to share the painful reality of a family enduring a violent patriarch.In “Prologue: Sin Padre,” Méndez-Negrete reflects on her father never having love for her, she was the child that he did not want. “Juan wanted to show us what it was like to feed us, but it wasn’t the fact that he had to support us that fed his ire, he was angry because we were girls. He needed boys to work with him” (2). In “Mexíco Lindo y Querido/Dearest and Beloved Mexico,” Méndez-Negrete relives her early years in “El Pueblo de Tabasco Zacatecas, Mexico.” Méndez-Negrete critically recalls stereotypes ascribed in her community to the people of the Huichol indigenous tribe. She recalled the shoes they wore, the traditional huarache. She also looked back at how the community was taught to depict the Huichol people as robachicos or child abductors. The author critically explains how the fear of the Other serves as a testimonio to the legacy that Spanish colonization left deeply imbedded in Mexico. This recalls Emily Keightly’s work “Remembering Research,” which suggests that remembering is not solely an articulation of individual psychologies, but a performance deeply rooted in lived contexts of collective memory.Méndez-Negrete also writes of the strength she would inherit from her beloved Tias, Herme and Chenda. She symbolically named them saints and revolutionaries. According to Méndez-Negrete they were “saints” because they survived through a life under difficult circumstances on a daily basis. Méndez-Negrete shares one cuento of how her Tias both lost their husbands when struck by lightning. Both of these women had married hombres del campo-rancheros (men that work out in the fields of agriculture tending to crops or to cattle). When their husbands perished, her aunts would take upon the difficult life of tending to the duties that men would traditionally do. Méndez-Negrete pulls this memory together through a song they both loved: “De piedra ha de ser la cama De piedra la cabecera La mujer que a mi me quiera me ha de querer de a deveras Ay, ay Corazon, por que no amas (Longing. They lived. Suffering. They overcame. Surrendering they gave us love)” (32). The harnessing of knowledge to survive and overcome came from observing the perseverance of strong influential women in her life. Here Méndez-Negrete points to the unconditional love of her tias, which would plant seeds of resilience and self-determination.“Estas chingadas Viejas tan solo sirven para parir hijas. (Damned hags, only good for birthing girls)” (83). Méndez-Negrete recalls a string of forgotten abuses by her father. She describes painful memories of having installed latches in their bedroom to keep her father out of their bedroom at night. In “Epilogue: Purging the Skeletons, Bone by Bone,” Méndez-Negrete concludes by imparting the message that she did not consciously set out to expose evil manipulation, or decadence of power, and depravity of male control over powerless women and girls. She argues that with the book she seeks to reveal the social power vested by a society that sanctions and ignores men’s violence against women and children. At some point, Méndez-Negrete uses the text to question herself as to why she wrote the book and yet walks us through her lived experience using writing as a tool for coming to terms with the violence experienced by her family, as well as for her social work aimed at preventing the abuse of the most vulnerable in society. She is a realista about healing through the process of writing and relocating wounds to where they belong. Through her writing she finds words of consolidation to smooth pain, heal, and to reclaim her lived experiences.Las Hijas de Juan: Daughters Betrayed serves as a culturally relevant therapeutic tool in the healing of traumatic instances that have been normalized as rules and ascribed behaviors within Mexican patriarchal cultures where el que diran, or a stigma of shame, prevents and inculcates abuses deriving from incest and sexual abuse. This book is not limited to Mexican culture, or to Latina/o cultures, but addresses the potential harms that can find space within collective cultures that share and intergenerationally reproduce such ascribed patriarchal norms. Dr. Méndez-Negrete’s autoethnography serves as a catalyst for confrontation in shattering such silences. As suggested by Chicana feminist scholars such as Aida Hurtado (“Theory in the Flesh: Toward an Endarkened Epistemology”), a just society requires making a home that portrays the holistic human experience and considers all human activity. Such frameworks suggest that ignoring the spirit leads to illness both physical and psychological. This book is a contribution in challenging traditional colonial methodologies in academic research and incorporating Chicana feminist methodologies within academia, even when they present the hard truths of resilience, self-determination, dignity, and the spirit of being a mujerista.

Gotzler S., Singh V., Risam R.

In June 2021, we participated in a roundtable at the annual conference of the Cultural Studies Association (US) that explored the potentialities—and the limitations—of abolitionist politics within the university. Bringing together several scholars whose work sits at the intersection of radical history, decolonial critique, and critical university studies, our contributions responded to abolitionism's anti-capitalist and anti-racist demands for transformative justice. These demands seek to recognize and redress the ongoing social consequences of the university's historical provenance within, and continued profit from, the practices of settler colonialism, enslavement, and monopoly capital. The contributions reflected on questions such as: What does it mean to take an abolitionist approach to the university? What gets lost if we don’t see the university from the perspective of abolitionism? And what is to be gained?We framed our discussion around a set of common readings drawn from scholars and critics such as Sandy Grande, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and the Abolition University Project (Abigail Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein).1 Like the participants in the roundtable, these readings came from different disciplinary backgrounds and political positionalities. They represented abolitionist, undercommoning, decolonizing, anti-carceral critiques of higher education. Roundtable participants drew on these texts to explore the ways US institutions of higher education have organized the labors of teaching and learning.As we constructed a conversation at the intersections of these different trajectories, we saw both overlaps and potential for coalitional action and questions about what solidarity and mutuality might mean for education. For instance, we hear resonances between Sandy Grande’s call for academic workers to refuse “the cycle of individualized inducements” and the Abolitionist University Studies collective’s call for academic workers to take up the intellectual and political genealogies of a “left abolitionist tendency.”2 Grande’s encouragement to strive for collectivity, reciprocity, and mutuality as principles for building “social relations not contingent upon the imperatives of capital—that refus[e] exploitation at the same time as [they] radically asser[t] connection, particularly to land” aligns with the Abolitionist University Studies advocacy for creating higher education institutions that give substance to the freedom legally recognized in the Emancipation Proclamation and Reconstruction amendments (and in doing so, would render the prison and the perceived need for prisons obsolete).3 In both of these calls to action we see a vision of using the machinery of the university against its historical role as what Grande calls “an arm of the racial settler state”; that is, to take the relations made possible/proximate by the institution and use them to pre-figure an institution that does not rely on the relations of dispossession, exploitation, surveillance, and, ultimately, policing that our current institutions do.4 At the same time, we saw tensions in these readings and their understandings of pedagogy. On the one hand, our own praxis gestures toward the liberatory potential and promise of radical pedagogies, while the work of Harney and Moten and la paperson leads us to question whether, and which, pedagogical transformations might be “reformist reforms,” or changes that ameliorate a measure of the harm done by the institution but ultimately preserve its endurance.5Building on the work of the roundtable and the texts it engaged, we wish to create space for a conversation that responds to questions concerning the practical realization of abolitionism in the university today in the context of our pedagogies. The conversation can include exploring the unique challenges that the pedagogical terrain of an institution such as the university presents when compared with other state apparatuses subjected to abolitionist critique, such as repressive regimes like prisons and policing. Or, what pitfalls might await demands for abolition in the wake of the renewal, since the outbreak of COVID-19, of long-standing and widespread austerity measures sweeping higher education that directly impact teaching? Further, how might we share ideas about realizing university abolition in practical terms, especially through our work as instructors? To that end, we are convening an asynchronous conversation that invites colleagues (students, faculty, staff, administrators) to think out loud through these impasses and to share visions, resources, and even failures in our journeys away from carceral and colonialist pedagogies.In this “distributed special issue” of Ethnic Studies Review, we envision expanding the space for conversations where we might imagine together creative and agile strategies that, as Grande puts it, “cleave study and struggle” for an anti-capitalist politics in pursuit of abolition.6 Such spaces are crucial prerequisites if we hope to build durable bonds of collective coresistance, allowing us to reappropriate our life and labor as subjects, “in but not of the university.”7 A distributed special issue, as we envision it, departs from the traditional style and structure of a special issue, in which editors solicit and select essays published simultaneously as an issue. Rather, we begin with this essay, outlining our conceptual and editorial vision, and invite interested participants to propose critical and creative responses. The essays will be published over the course of two years, so we envision that subsequent essays may respond to ones that follow ours. The purpose of this structure is to promote a dialogic approach to conversation at the intersections of ethnic studies praxis and pedagogical practice.Following Grande, we propose that institutional spaces—particularly our classrooms—can be spaces of refusal. In her essay “Refusing the University,” Grande argues for the need to refuse the institutional inducements to mere recognition offered by liberal ideological paradigms of justice that promise an individualist redressing of grievances without a structural reorganization of power.8 In the wake of the uprisings in response to the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, university spaces have been awash in inducements to recognition that emphasize individual accountability and that offer what we might call “social justice solutions” meted out on a case-by-case basis. For example, universities have been quick to put out statements in support of Black Lives Matter and to make half-hearted attempts to operationalize them through individually awarded internal grants and fellowships. This shifts responsibility away from the organization, putting the burden on individual actors. Of course, it would be counterproductive to refuse these kinds of inducements in toto especially as many of them, at least in word if not in deed, directly address the real and ongoing harm caused by decades of non-recognition and misrecognition. Such individual labor is a crucial, if only first, step in cultivating safer and more inclusive campus spaces and academic workplaces. However, Grande’s work reminds us to cast a critical eye on who receives such inducements now while many Indigenous faculty and faculty of color have been doing this work without credit or compensation for over a century—often from contingent positions in which their labor is exploited. It further begs the question of how best to ensure that university initiatives that rely on individuals are held accountable to systemic change—and how refusal can be mobilized to shift the frame from individual to institutional accountability.Despite the immutable finality of the term refusal, academic life is not a zero-sum game. There are other ways that we might construe the posture of refusal besides the kind of irrevocable disengagement that the term might otherwise connote. The refusal of the university might just as easily be figured as a refusal to settle for its polite concessions and institutional inducements when contesting our claims as its primary stakeholders and value producers. That is, refusal might be realized through a politics of “yes and…,” a refusal to grant our consent to the institution’s attempts to contain the cries against its complicity, while continuing to struggle for more radical efforts at transformative and redistributive change.One way to insist on more transformative forms of justice is to articulate the politics of refusal through a specifically labor-oriented analysis that, in turn, might engender a foundational shift in our definitions of the university, seeing it as a historically convergent site of several modes of accumulation for capital (i.e., as land, people, labor, intellectual property, financial speculation, etc.). As Kathi Weeks has noted, the politics of refusal have been a valuable resource for autonomist labor traditions precisely because they rely on a vision of capitalism that does not solely privilege the institutions and relations of private property, but rather conceptualizes the substance of capitalist relations as “the imposition and organization of work.”9Perhaps the most immediate site for the imposition and organization of our work as instructors in the university is the classroom. Several of the contributions in our session turned toward the possibilities of abolitionist pedagogy, examining classroom practices such as evaluation and assessment, or resisting the ways that our application of digital technologies for the purposes of remote learning can motivate our engagement with students along principles of surveillance or compliance. These provocations asked us to reevaluate the classroom as a site of accumulation, and to consider how that accumulation proceeds, not only through our labor process as teachers and instructors, but through the unpaid work of our students as well. Shifting our view in this way reveals the classroom as a potential site of new forms of what Michael Denning has called “wageless life.”10 As the notion of “wageless life” has historically signaled, “the only thing worse than being exploited” for individuals under capitalism is “not being exploited,” designating “those dispossessed of land, tools, and means of subsistence” and whose life-making activities within the logic of capital are rendered as, and reduced to, “bare life, wasted life, disposable life, precarious life, superfluous life.”11 Within the context of the university, we might repurpose this notion of “wageless life” to describe the layer of unpaid and shadow work that sits within the university's relations of waged-labor: as graduate waste products, disposable at will staff members and precarious student workers, or casualized teaching faculty.The conditions of pedagogical labor are at once the conditions of learning for our students. One such example is the frequent debate over the value of providing “flexibility” to our students on deadlines. Such flexibility is often positioned as an unqualified good, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. While we recognize that flexibility is a cornerstone of making learning accessible for students, it is not without its limitations. For student labor, endless flexibility is delimited by course dates, so students may eventually end up buried under a pile of unfinished work. For faculty labor, the clear inequities in instructional labor make flexibility inherently unequal. A contingent faculty member teaching large introductory courses may find that unmitigated flexibility magnifies the exploitation of their labor. The refusal to do so—and, instead, to configure one’s teaching differently—is one such example of resisting the capitalist underpinnings of the university.Vineeta’s contribution to the 2021 roundtable took up these issues through the poles of pedagogies of surveillance and pedagogies of solidarity. The former expects and invites faculty to enforce the gatekeeping mechanisms and the yardsticks of compliance we call “academic integrity” and “academic rigor” and to sort students into compliant and trustworthy, troublemakers, and lost causes. Vineeta juxtaposed this pedagogy of surveillance to the coalitional practices of solidarity and shared governance that animates the political and intellectual projects of the interdisciplines (Black Studies, Gender Studies, etc.). Her reflections on inviting students to become active participants in designing learning outcomes, assignments, and evaluation criteria concluded with an urgent articulation that the instructor’s role is not merely managing and surveilling students but preparing them to be workers who are theorists of their own experiences and fields of work; who, as workers deserve a say in how they are evaluated and assessed; who as workers have a right to self-determination in setting the conditions of their labor and demanding accountability from decision-makers.Thinking of the classroom as a space of wageless life highlights the coercive character of the pursuit of higher education as a necessary pathway toward social success, economic survival, or both. In this sense, it mirrors Denning’s attempts to “decentre wage labour in our conception of life under capitalism,” and locate the foundation of the capital-labor relation not in “the offer of work” but in the “imperative to earn a living.”12 While many of our students remain engaged in low-waged employment outside of the classroom, all of them are impelled to undertake a regime of full-time unpaid work as students. The imposition of this mode of work, and the attendant cycles of reproduction that are its necessary accompaniment—both as consequence and precondition—provide the terrain upon which value is generated and realized through the activities of student life. But it is also increasingly the circuit through which value is requisitioned from future life in the form of student debt. These relations of future-exploitation that underwrite the otherwise wageless lives of so many students position the indebted yet “free”—and in reality, unpaid—labor of students as the primary driver of accumulation within the higher education industry, fueling the expansion of capital returns on student life, and quantified in the tuition-price index of the market place of professional credentials and cultural prestige.Current and former students who have become teachers for the university continue to have their work and lives structured by these relations of debt and unpaid labor. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) reported last year that more than 60 percent of all faculty in the United States are contingent workers, reliant on annual or semi-annual contracts for employment. Only 10.5 percent of working faculty were in tenure-track lines in 2019, while another 26.5 percent already held tenure.13 In addition to their teaching work, most contingent faculty take on the unpaid labor of research, peer review, and other “service” to their discipline and profession, which is neither required in their contracts nor assessed in their contract renewal evaluations. Kathleen Kuehn and Thomas Corrigan call this type of work “hope labor”: “un- or under-compensated work carried out in the present, often for experience or exposure, in the hope that future employment opportunities may follow.”14 Regardless of whether the motivations behind taking on unpaid labor are tied to the cruel optimism of the belief that their positions might be converted to tenure-track lines (at the present institution or the next) or whether they are driven by an earnest belief in the value generated through this praxis, they produce value for stakeholders, ranging from institutions and university presses to academic organizations, at the same time that they subsidize cheap teaching labor for the student debt regimes fueling undergraduate degree programs by providing aspirant scholars with access to professional networks and research materials through institutional affiliations and database subscriptions.In our own work, organized as it is through the uneven and extremely inequitable relations of the academic labor market, we must find ways to refuse the regulatory functions that learning is made to play within the university’s circuit of capital accumulation—refusing the roles that we are hailed to, as floor managers of the wageless life of student labor, and as accessories to the profiteers of indebtedness. Refusing our roles as regulators within this circuit need not mean that we deny students the actual resources of our critical practice as teachers, whatever we may understand those to be (e.g., as aesthetic sensibility, historical knowledge, theoretical acuity, cultural competency, communicative efficacy, technical mastery, or political fluency) nor does it require that we hamper their progress up-and-through the ladders of achievement and attainment that the university often provides. Instead, we might develop practices in our work that refuse the logic of accumulation and the organization of our work that it imposes. We recognize that part of this work involves returning the “ivory tower” to the larger landscape of education in the context of settler racial capitalism. We know our BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) colleagues in early childhood and K–12 education have long histories of organizing and are currently engaged in anti-fascist resistance to counter attacks on anti-racist pedagogies and queer life within and outside their classrooms. We hope this distributed conversation invites and engages scholars, teachers, students, and activists working in these spaces and gives them resources and connections that can be useful in our shared struggles. And in doing so, we may push instead for a pedagogical approach that works against the material traces left by the historical processes of the university as an institution—one that is both unremitting in its historical vision and generative and unsettling in its political ambition.

Risam R.

The author describes and presents her model of contract grading, a teaching strategy and practice that shifts student learning and pedagogy away from carceral and colonialist learning methods. The article provides a brief explanation of the value of this technique for teachers and students, and offers concrete assessment tools.

Bhattacharjee A.N.

Many scholars of immigration and diasporic studies have explored the question of how South Asians have settled and formed communities in North America. As a result, any new monograph on South Asian Americans shoulders the onerous responsibility of justifying its presence in an already crowded subfield. In Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World (2020), Tahseen Shams (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto) compels readers to stop and wonder why a book like this one was not written earlier. Written over the course of five years, the title under review equips readers with innovative ways to interpret and theorize the lived experiences of the community that is central to its analysis—South Asian American Muslims—in the post 9/11 period. As such, transposing its findings to other transnationally sited social formations may also generate profitable yields.The key contribution of this work is the fresh approach it adopts to rethinking the processes of identity-making among immigrant groups. To do so, it foregrounds globality as the paradigmatic scale of analysis in inquiries of immigrant experiences. As Shams observes early on, studies of identity formation among immigrants have long been “constrained within the dyadic homeland-hostland framework” (5). In other words, the question of how immigrants develop their identities has been reduced to one that centers on national belonging in their country of origin (the there) and/or their new national setting (the here). Shams’s intervention enhances this two-dimensional model of understanding immigration narratives by suggesting a third element—the elsewhere—that plays an equally decisive role in the shaping of immigrant selfhoods. The elsewhere refers to global locations beyond those of the home and hostland that influence not only how immigrants perceive themselves, but also how they are perceived by others (3). While an immigrant may neither come from nor have any intention of traveling to the elsewhere, their investment in happenings over there bears resoundingly affective properties. Consequently, global events that occur in these faraway places have spillover outcomes in the lives of immigrants. Shams uses this information to demonstrate that immigrant identities are produced through interconnections between the here, there, and elsewhere. The author labels these three sites as linked as part of a multicentered relational framework (3). In the case studies that her project explores, the “elsewhere” site is alternately the Middle East itself, or European countries that have significant Muslim populations. Hence, an ISIS attack in France is as relevant to the life of a Bangladeshi Muslim residing in New York as would be news of violence occurring in Dhaka in the aftermath of Bangladeshi national elections.Shams compares the repercussions of elsewhere-affairs on immigrant lives to an exogenous shock, a concept that she borrows from economics. In that discipline, the term refers to unanticipated events with origins that are external to an economic model, but that “nonetheless affect the overall system, either positively or negatively” (36). The author writes that unexpected events that originate in “a foreign place outside the state’s borders…[nonetheless have] impacted society within the state by disrupting the larger international order” (36–37). She supplies a concrete example of this phenomenon by recounting the impact of Boko Haram activities in Nigeria on her own South Asian Muslim interlocutors in Southern California. While most of them knew very little about Nigeria and were unaware of its relationship with either the United States or their homelands, its association with a group affiliated with globalized Islamist terror networks provoked concerns that their already-stigmatized religious identities as Muslims could come under increased scrutiny. Hence, a seemingly distant event can have immediate consequences for immigrants such as those featured in Shams’s study and can be used to amplify divisions between themselves and the natives of their hostland.Distributed over seven chapters, the book’s main findings are based on data gathered in Los Angeles—home to one of the highest concentrations of South Asian Americans—during a three-year period while the author pursued her graduate studies in sociology at UCLA. Born and raised in Bangladesh, Shams has fluent command of Bangla, Urdu, and Hindi, all of which allow her to conduct at least sixty in-depth interviews with a wide range of participants. These testimonies are supplemented by her astute ethnographic observations, content analyses of social media posts, and assessments of organizational documents produced by various Muslim American institutions (24–25). Shams lays out the book’s main arguments and delivers abbreviated vignettes of her experiences conducting fieldwork in Chapter 1. Aside from enumerating some of the key challenges ethnographers encounter during their professional forays, the latter accounts are particularly helpful in animating Shams’s personal investment in the goals that this work wishes to accomplish. Chapter 2 sets up the intellectual context for readers to unpack the multicentered relational framework. Here, the author situates her project within the broader literature of immigration studies and details the mechanisms that transform “anywheres” into “elsewheres” (36–38). Chapters 3 through 5 provide an empirical structure to the multicentered relational framework by describing the global ties of some of Shams’s interlocutors. These descriptions enable readers to trace the connections between the religious and social dynamics in South Asian homelands, North American hostlands, and globally dispersed elsewheres. Chapter 6 explores the concept of the elsewhere in greater depth, paying close attention to the question of why some parts of the world are more salient to immigrant identities than others. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses the book’s limitations and offers a roadmap for future research directions.All in all, Shams presents readers with a monograph that capably challenges existing paradigms for interpreting patterns of migration, transnationalism, and globalization. Written in refreshingly accessible prose, the book’s arguments are solid and backed by sensitively conducted primary research and rigorous analyses of secondary sources. Its subject matter is certain to attract a diverse medley of scholars and nonspecialists alike. Assuredly, it will become a standard reading for undergraduate classes and seminars addressing immigration and diasporic religious communities.

Messer-Kruse T.

In the years between the end of the Revolutionary War and the beginning of the nineteenth century American statesmen attempted to pressure the British to return the thousands of people who had fled American slavery. These efforts, which included risking renewing the war itself, have been systematically suppressed by historians of this era. This essay traces the historiography of this subject and shows several ways that the true importance of patriot efforts at re-enslavement have been silenced.

Schönfeldt-Aultman S.M., Klein E.B., Viola M.J., Healey J.

This transcript shares a May 2019 conversation with Josh Healey, an Oakland-based writer, artist, and filmmaker, about his work with the independent web series The North Pole. The interview was conducted with several members of the Ethnic Studies faculty from Saint Mary’s College of California. Healey explains the connections he sees between politics, humor, and storytelling, and delves into the strategies and struggles of the creative process, including the value of personal relationships, collaboration, and representing real people and real life.

Vasquez Ruiz M.

Khan S.

T.J. Tallie’s book Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa is focused on a fairly small region of the world. In this context, “Natal” refers to a British colony that is now part of the country of South Africa. Tallie applies queer theory and critical Indigenous studies to British policies in Natal over the period from 1843 to 1910. Despite the specificity of Tallie’s subject, his analysis is rich. Using examples from a different aspect of colonial life in each chapter, Tallie shows how the British officials in Natal appraised certain Zulu practices as queer, or deviations from acceptable standards of behavior, to establish the supremacy of white men and rationalize their rule over the Indigenous people of Natal.Anyone who is interested in combining queer studies and ethnography, as I am, should read Tallie’s introductory chapter. In this section, titled “Ukuphazama iNatali: Queerness, Indigeneity, and the Politics of an African Settler Colony,” Tallie meticulously and succinctly describes the places and peoples he examines in the rest of the book. He points out a distinguishing feature of Natal: unlike in most other British settler colonies, the British were never able to replace the Indigenous population, despite their repeated efforts to do so. Tallie describes these efforts throughout the book, with fascinating excerpts from officials’ letters and written arguments as they debated the best ways to control the Zulu people. In Chapter 1, “‘That Shameful Trade in a Person’: Ilobolo and Polygamy,” he shows the tensions between Zulu leaders, missionaries, and British officials—and the internal disagreements among those officials—as the British attempted to solve the supposed problem of unacceptable Zulu marriage practices.Tallie’s analysis of relevant social dynamics is especially skillful in this chapter. He first describes the utility of polygamy and ilobolo, or “the ceremonial offering of cattle from one family to another at marriage” (8–9), in Zulu society. Tallie explains that, among other functions, polygamy allowed Zulu men in certain positions of power to control “access to women of marriageable age” (19), and it enabled families both to raise children and to maintain their homesteads in Natal’s particular agricultural economy. Missionaries, who came to Natal from the United States and several countries in Europe, were generally opposed to polygamy. British officials had more varied stances on the matter. Some officials expressed disgust at the “despotic forms of masculine authority” (24), others believed that polygamy allowed Zulu men to be idle while their wives managed their homes, and still others suggested that prohibiting polygamy would push more Zulu women into sex work and thus further destabilize British control over the colony. Tallie complicates the question of plural marriage in Natal even more by recounting a few cases of British men who married multiple Zulu women. Among British officials’ goals was to maintain a morally upstanding, properly ordered colony that would attract more British women and families to Natal. By “queering” polygamy, the early settlers created a dichotomy in which British standards for relationships (i.e. opposite-sex, monogamous marriages) were contrasted with all other modes of relationships, including non-monogamy and same-sex relationships among British men, to render them uncivilized and therefore suited to eradication from the society of Natal.As a professor of history and African Studies, Tallie is clearly accustomed to explaining complex political systems to readers who are unfamiliar with a particular situation. In Natal, as Tallie tells his readers, Indians co-existed with British officials and Zulu people in a complicated hierarchy that would vex the British during the entirety of their rule. This hierarchy is especially relevant in Chapter 2, “Sobriety and Settlement: The Politics of Alcohol,” in which Tallie examines the colonial law in Natal that allowed only white people to consume alcohol. The British constructed Indigenous masculinities as lacking in self-control, whereas white men were strong-willed and able to drink responsibly. Tallie reveals a difficulty the colonists encountered in maintaining this law: while Indians were legally allowed to drink in their homeland, they were prohibited from doing so in Natal. Indians and some British officials argued that, unlike Zulu people, Indians were citizens and not subjects of the British Empire and should therefore not be limited by the laws that applied to the Indigenous people of Natal. Using quoted material from officials, Indian citizens, and Zulu people who opposed the restriction on their drinking, Tallie explores the issues of race and gender that the British both reified and attempted to navigate in Natal.The remaining three chapters address, respectively, the question of proper social interaction between the British and Zulu people, missionaries’ attempts to show the superiority of white Christian culture through their outfitting Zulu parishioners in British clothing, and the race- and gender-based hierarchies that the British created by controlling access to education. Throughout the book, Tallie’s style is clear and elegant. When each chapter ended, I found myself wanting more of his commentary and analysis of the intricate race and gender dynamics that permeated nearly every part of life in Natal. Because of the complexity of the subject material, this book is probably best suited to upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses, as readers may need some familiarity with colonialism, imperialism, and theories of race and gender to fully comprehend Tallie’s arguments. Tallie does, however, explain the queer and critical Indigenous theories through he which interprets his source materials. Therefore, a strong background in queer theory or critical Indigenous studies may not be necessary for readers who pick up this book. In addition, each chapter presents a cohesive argument and could be read or taught on its own. Although Queering Colonial Natal investigates dynamics within a southern African colony over a century ago, in this text, Tallie illuminates white supremacist attitudes and tactics that do not seem so far away in time or space.

This document provides a transcript of the documentary video produced by the Asian American Studies Project at Brooklyn College in 2021. The documentary was created through student research, led by faculty member Cherry Lou Sy, which interrogated the lack of Asian American Studies at their institution. The video collects reflections and observations from numerous students, faculty, and alumni advocating for the development of an Asian American Studies program and curriculum. Participants also reflect on their experiences as Asian Americans, their support for the program, and/or their understanding of why the college has not developed this area of study.

Manon C.