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Manly Colors: Masculinity and Mobility among Globalizing Korean Men
No full textSouth Korea and its mobile citizens provide a fruitful point of entry for observing how US-based racial hierarchies shift and circulate through and against transnationally and locally inflected ideologies of race, nation, gender, and sexuality. This article explores how the Korean state’s aspirations for global significance and regional dominance express themselves as staged presentations of ostensibly superior Asian masculinity at home (in Asia) and abroad (in the West). Against the backdrop of the South Korean state’s zealous globalizing efforts, cisheteronormative Korean men increasingly assert aspirational Korean masculinities within a transnational field of ranked races and nations. Korean males’ complex and contingent proximities to whiteness demonstrate how state efforts to transform the image of South Korea from a notoriously inhospitable “backward country” (hujin’guk) to a welcoming “advanced country” (sŏnjin’guk) play out in diverse everyday contexts. In making this claim, I follow recent scholarship on men in contemporary Asia that stresses the need for analyzing masculinity through the lens of sexuality and desire. Additionally, this article extends the analysis of practices that transgress the socially constructed boundaries of heteronormative masculinity (e.g., homosocial bonding) beyond the realm of sexuality-defined gay masculinities
Your Life Is a Fraction of a Journey
No full textOn March 1, 2019, the Transformative Arts Network at the University of California, Santa Barbara, held a two-day “Art, Activism, and Imagination” symposium. One memorable and infinitely generative part of the symposium came at the start of the second session, which was dedicated to the collaborative work between artists affiliated with the Alliance for California Traditional Arts and the Building Healthy Communities project in Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles. Altar makers Ofelia Esparza (a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellow) and her daughter Rosanna Esparza Ahrens (graphic designer and cofounder of the artist collective Tonalli Studio—A Place of Creative Wellness) began the afternoon with an instructional session on “how to arrive” followed by a presentation about their work as altaristas.
As participants gathered on a verdant lawn next to a peaceful lagoon near the ocean, the altar makers burned sage and spoke about our obligations at a meeting convened on unceded Indigenous land. Rosanna outlined the four-part process that has guided the process of making altars. This consists of (1) arriving with full awareness of ourselves, our ancestors, and the powers of the natural world; (2) connecting fully with the natural and human world; (3) making agreements for collective conduct; and (4) affirming the possibilities produced by our collective practice. This process guided all the subsequent deliberations of the symposium and has informed much of the subsequent work that has emanated from it. One reason for its impact and influence stems from the extraordinary presentation about altar making that Ofelia and Rosanna presented, which enacted the ideals that the four parts of “learning to arrive” envision. With their permission, we reprint here a transcript of part of their inspiring and enlightening presentation
Education Is Improvisation: Improvisation Is Art
No full textArt, Activism, and Imagination are pillars of our justice, freedom, and peace. Everyone has multiple means to express themselves artfully. In this day and time, if truly educated, everyone should be an activist on issues of equality. Imagination is the vehicle of knowing oneself, and creating art offers ownership
The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, by Monica Muñoz Martinez
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Cultura Panamericana: Toward a Hemispheric Imaginary
No full textI am writing this analytical appreciation of cultura panamericana, or pan-American culture, to propose a wider recognition of how its historical linkages and contemporary manifestations confront colonialism, honor indigenous roots, and reflect multiple, mixed-race identities. Although often mediated by transnational pop-culture industries, expressive cultural forms such as art and music articulate resonant themes that connect US Latinos and Latinas to Latin Americans, pointing the way toward a hemispheric imaginary. In US murals, for example, whether in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen or the Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park, pan-American expressive culture offers alternative representations by embracing indigeneity, and it creates a sense of place by tropicalizing urban spaces
Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño, by Alex E. Chávez
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The Marginalization of Harriet’s Daughters: Perpetual Crisis, Misdirected Blame, and the Enduring Urgency of Intersectionality
No full textDonald Trump’s ascension to the presidency has plunged the already demoralized advocates for racial and gender justice into a state of near-perpetual crisis. In the midst of never-ending war, both at home and abroad, it is almost impossible to recapture the sense of hope, or the buoyant celebration of American exceptionalism, that accompanied the election of the first African American president. It was just a decade ago that pundits and neoliberal celebrants of that landmark moment declared the advent of a new moment in US history—one to which the hopeful term “postracial” was attached.
For most of us who casually follow the day-to-day course of our country’s political life, it seems impossible to understand how quickly and fully this reversal has taken place. Yet this very lack of understanding is what we must reckon with as a baseline condition for gearing up for the fight ahead. Buried beneath this cacophonous discourse—the celebration of the unexpected that soured into the profound retrenchment currently underway—are the dangerously compromised and uninterrogated baseline assumptions that would ultimately metastasize, via the well-documented alchemy of strategically repressed demands for justice, into the Trumpian moment. These intersectional failures of our movement set the stage for the weakened position that we are in today.
If it is true that the lessons of history are bound to be repeated until they are learned, there is good reason to think that a full understanding of events today is subject to the same logic. But achieving such an understanding presents a difficult moment of reckoning—an internal confrontation with ourselves
Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming
No full textRejecting the binaries of life versus not life and humans versus nature, as well as other more graduated Eurocentric hierarchies of life, I foreground an everyday Dakota understanding of existence that focuses on “being in good relation.” This analytical framework is at the center of my critique of the grand narrative of American exceptionalism. It is also translatable (not perfectly, of course) among different Indigenous traditions, and I welcome conversation with other Indigenous frameworks of relationality. Thinking in terms of being in relation, I propose an explicitly spatial narrative of caretaking relations—both human and other-than-human—as an alternative to the temporally progressive settler-colonial American Dreaming that is ever co-constituted with deadly hierarchies of life. A relational web as spatial metaphor requires us to pay attention to our relations and obligations here and now. It is a narrative that can help us resist those dreams of progress toward a never-arriving future of tolerance and good that paradoxically requires ongoing genocidal and anti-Black violence, as well as violence toward many de-animated bodies. The path toward the supposed democratic promised land of settler mythology is in everyday life a nightmare for many around the globe. American democracy not only “dies in darkness,” as the Washington Post claims. It is ever formed of hierarchical violence
The White Possessive and Whiteness Studies
No full textAileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive performs its own important truths through evidence, ideas, and arguments about property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty. Its arguments about the links between Indigenous dispossession and whiteness are compelling in themselves, but they also serve as provocations to think more generally about how scholarly truths are forged through often uninterrogated deployments of temporality, causality, universality, and particularity. The book’s challenges to the naturalization of the racial state in US whiteness studies, and to the institutionalization of sovereignty and cultural difference in Indigenous studies, are part of a broader pattern in the study of social identities and power. The defeats suffered by the egalitarian and democratic movements of the mid-twentieth century and the rise of neoliberal regimes of racialized austerity and (in)security have given rise to the realization that it is not enough to change leaders and laws: a more radical transformation of social relations and identities, culture, and knowledge needs to take place. Critical race theory and feminist studies, postcolonial critique and decoloniality, queer and disability studies, animality studies and Afro-pessimism, subaltern studies and poststructuralism all emanate from similar frustrations about the gap between the structures of domination and our understandings of them. Moreton-Robinson’s work helps us see the important role in that trajectory of placing Indigenous dispossession at the center of our studies. Doing so will not be easy, but it can no longer be avoided.
 
The Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt T. Walker Collection
No full textWyatt Tee Walker died in January 2018. Deservedly celebratory obituaries in major newspapers noted his heroic efforts as a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, as an aide and confidant to Martin Luther King Jr., as an internationally renowned activist against South African apartheid, and as chair of the Central Harlem Local Development Corporation. Yet they barely scratch the surface of the networks of accompaniment, instruction, apprenticeship, and affiliation that made his life meaningful. Fortunately, there is a full archive of the rich complexity of Walker’s life at the University of Richmond Boatwright Library. It contains a treasure trove of works of visual art, recorded music, audio- and videotaped speeches, books, miscellaneous objects, and the remarkable Music Tree image that Walker created to depict visually the history of Black music. Kalfou solicited a description of that collection from archivist Taylor McNeilly. We publish it in this issue in the hope that the archive will be accessed regularly and fully by the academics, artists, and activists who read this journal, and that they will find in it ways to appreciate the range and scope of Walker’s achievements and to emulate them through immersion in the plural and diverse activities that make the Black Radical Tradition possible