Periscope articles and content
The promise of a voluptuous encounter with the past is arguably one of the most seductive aspects of Time Binds. Emboldened by a refusal to “give up on sex and sociability” (xxii) in the face of what she identifies as … Continue reading “‘Erotic Effusions’ in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories”
Susan Stryker’s 1993 performance piece, “Transgender Rage” later became “My Notes to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (Rage). Sometime later, after queer theory had been declared dead, resurrected, dismembered and sutured together again several times, … Continue reading “Trans Forming Time”
One of the many achievements of Beth Freeman’s Time Binds is its persistent interrogation of how temporality produces subjectivity, as opposed to the other way around. This preoccupation which is defined by Freeman as “queer temporality” is a queer project … Continue reading “Après-Coup in extremis: Futurism and A-Historicity in the Work of Freeman, Lacan and Woolf”
Analyzing the sexual citation of chattel slavery in interracial S/M role play, Freeman reaches a hopeful conclusion from what might seem unpromising material, given the structural racism that has endured into the present as one legacy of colonial dispossession and … Continue reading “Dead Time: Queer Temporalities and the Deportation Regime”
Elizabeth Freeman admits that in this book she is committed to overcloseness, to an overreading practice as overdetermined as queerness itself. She explains that “’Queer’ cannot signal a purely deconstructive move or position of pure negativity” because that would “risk … Continue reading “Time’s Tangles”
I’d like to begin with Ben Davies’s concept of “slow reading” as a way of marking the deep pleasures, anxieties, and inspiration I felt reading these responses to Time Binds. “Through reading slowly,” Davies writes, “we put ourselves at risk … Continue reading “Response”
I never met Stuart Hall, or even saw him speak in person, which seems surprising now that he is gone — there must have been opportunities I missed — but also somehow appropriate. I only knew him through his … Continue reading “All Blues”
Rumor has it that the American Studies Association is going down in flames. Since our membership voted by a 2 to 1 margin last fall to join the academic boycott of Israeli universities, the mainstream and tabloid press have … Continue reading “Circuits of Influence”
The Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie says, “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want … Continue reading “Rethinking the Single Story: BDS, Transnational Cross Movement Building and the Palestine Analytic”
The following appears reprinted from Tidal Occupy Theory. We present this pamphlet at an historic moment in the United States, and by extension the broader geopolitical order over which the United States presides. In recent months, the shackles that … Continue reading “Palestine, Boycott, and Beyond: The Time is Now”
It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist. — Golda Meir in 1969, … Continue reading “Conversation and Its Discontents”
As an Asian American studies scholar informed by Critical Indigenous studies and American studies, I attend the annual meetings of the American Studies Association (ASA), Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association … Continue reading “Alternative Futures Beyond the Settler State”
A boycott is a difficult and demanding political tactic. To understand the logic of boycott politics, especially in relation to the Palestinian campaign for a cultural and academic boycott of Israel, one needs to locate it within a broader … Continue reading “Historicizing Palestinian Boycott Politics”
The archives of Howard University’s student newspaper The Hilltop might seem an unlikely place to find evidence of a revolutionary Iranian student movement in the U.S. Yet the rowdy bunch of Iranian foreign students enrolled in the 1960s and … Continue reading “New Directions in American Studies”
Serving as ASA President since the boycott has convinced me that U.S. national belonging is increasingly predicated on identification with Israel and disavowal of the violence made possible by its “special relationship” with the U.S. In “Academic Freedom with … Continue reading “Occupation Spin”
