Editor’s Note

As most ASA members know by now, the American Quarterly will be moving institutional homes at the end of my editorial term, June 30, 2014. AQ has been housed at the University of Southern California for 12 years, and in a few months will move to the University of Hawaii. The editorial boards at AQ congratulate editor-designate, Mari Yoshihara, and the University of Hawaii’s American Studies consortium on their excellent proposal to succeed USC as the institutional home of American Quarterly for a ten-year term beginning July 1, 2014. The ASA executive committee was especially impressed by the consortium’s forward-looking vision for American Studies, by the energy and care of their proposal in its many details, by the personnel they have assembled, and by the institutional support they have mustered and secured. The orientation and the intellectual strengths at UH and its US and international partnerships will expand the purview of AQ and the ASA in important and exciting ways, and we look forward to the next iteration of the journal.

In the interim, the AQ Associate Editors and Managing Editorial Board have continued to work on engaging and intellectually stimulating quarterly issues of the journal, and will work to make as smooth a transition as possible for the new editor and the journal’s new home. At this time, the AQ special issue for 2014, “Las Américas Quarterly,” guest-edited by Macarena Gomez-Barris and Licia Fiol-Matta, is well underway. In this issue of AQ, please find the call for submissions for the first AQ special issue from the University of Hawaii, “Pacific Currents,” which will be guest edited by Paul Lyons and Ty P. Kāwika Tengan. This special issue will focus on the intersections of American Studies and Native Pacific Cultural Studies, examining histories and social movements in which Pacific Islands and Islanders are central, and submissions are due August 1, 2014. See the CFP immediately following this note for more information.

In this issue of AQ, we lead off with Herman Gray’s compelling essay, “Subject(ed) to Recognition.” In this essay, Gray argues that we have reached the political limit of what our cultural investment in media recognition and representation might deliver with respect to social and cultural justice, and situates the triumph of the market as a key index for media visibility and recognition. Next, Britt Rusert offers a provocative argument about what she calls “fugitive science,” a history of experiments and practices that linked racial science to abolition in the antebellum period. Jeannie Shinozuka, in her essay “Deadly Perils: Japanese Beetles and the Pestilential Immigrant, 1920s-1930s,” tells a fascinating tale about the ways in which Japanese beetles and bodies were demonized as mutually constitutive. We then turn to music, with Marco Cervantes’ essay on Esteban Jordan’s Texas Conjunto performances, where he uses Jordan’s music and performances as lens through which we can see the overlap of mestizaje and African diasporic imaginaries. Our final essay in this issue, by Stephen Vider, is a lively and compelling investigation of the history of “The Gay Cookbook” (1965), which allows us to rethink the role of domestic space in shaping gay male identity, community, and politics in the post–World War II period.

We also feature an event review in this issue on the limits of the 2013 Film Festival circuit, as well as four excellent book review essays, on topics ranging from disability studies to black visual culture to fat studies to the vexed issue of “when” the “Postwar” actually is.

Finally, we encourage all our readers to visit the AQ website for information regarding publishing, new issues, archived issues and features on our “Beyond the Page” section. With every special issue, we have a supplementary webpage that features multi-media from the authors; please take a look at the amazing media on the supplementary page that accompanies the recent special issue Race/Sex/Species, edited by Claire Jean Kim and Carla Frecerro.