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  • Freedom Breaks
  • David Roediger (bio)
Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State. By Chandan Reddy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011. 320 pages. $84.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper).
Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Edited by Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011. 384 pages. $94.95 (cloth). $25.95 (paper).
Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. By Jodi Melamed. Minneapolis.: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 288 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $25 (paper).

I sometimes wish that American studies contemplated its own cutting edge less insistently. The love of innovation and the thrill of timeliness are all to the good, but there are costs, too. Some are not our fault, as when young scholars rightly convinced that they are pushing boundaries just as they should within our field encounter collegewide tenure committees for whom the cutting edge is anathema. But even in matters over which we exercise some control, too insistent searches for the next big thing risk being counterproductive. At times a certain self-policing undoubtedly leads scholars doing important work to hesitate to submit it to leading American studies venues if it seems somehow not “cutting edge” enough. In an interdiscipline often raising profound, enduring questions requiring sustained inquiry from many angles, we can be too ready to move on and too self-effacing when we do not.

Still, if pushed to define a body of scholarship currently making the most exciting and generative impact in our field, I would focus precisely on the area defined by the three books under review here. To say as much is not to fetishize the cutting edge, as the books assert their connections to long-standing concerns within the field. The authors, in refusing to simply be the next thing, draw powerfully and respectfully on older traditions, including even those that they revise. It is true that two of the authors reviewed here, Roderick Ferguson and Chandan Reddy, helped recently to initiate and popularize “queer [End Page 337] of color critique.” However, in doing so they insisted that their innovation drew inspiration from a long tradition of women of color feminism, a tradition animating all the works considered here. Likewise generative are supple engagements with historical materialism, and specifically with what Cedric Robinson termed “Black Marxism,” as well as critical deployments of the ideas of Gayatri Spivak, Michel Foucault, and Frantz Fanon.

The three books cohere around networks of scholars exchanging ideas. Their writers are in sustained dialogue with each other’s work. Two of the books are in Duke University Press’s Perverse Modernities series and the third, Jodi Melamed’s Represent and Destroy, is part of the newer Difference Incorporated series at University of Minnesota Press, under the coeditorship of Ferguson and of Grace Kyungwon Hong. Reddy and Melamed both contribute essays to Strange Affinities. Thus this review discusses not just exciting new work but an exciting new body of work.

The phrase “difference incorporated” especially signals how this body of work draws from the generative insights of the literary scholar Lisa Lowe, who coedits the Perverse Modernities series. In introducing her 1996 classic Immigrant Acts, Lowe demonstrated an appreciation of Marxism that nonetheless challenged the notion that capital’s desire was always and everywhere to make labor homogeneous, interchangeable, and abstract. Instead in U.S. history, she argued, “capital has maximized its profits not through rendering labor ‘abstract’ but precisely through the social productions of ‘difference,’. . . marked by race, nation, geographical origins, and gender.”1 While the call for a more-sophisticated materialism was profound, Lowe’s equally sharp challenge to how we write about diversity is what most animates the books reviewed here. Far from simply standing on the side of the angels, multiculturalism could, as Lowe showed, underpin celebrations of difference useful to capital and empire. Such celebrations helped reproduce not only identity categories but also continued oppression along lines of race, gender, and nation.

In their varied ways all of the books considered here, and Ferguson’s scintillating forthcoming study The Reorder of Things, explore complex and sometimes unexpected connections between difference and power. Melamed and...

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