In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editor’s Note
  • Mari Yoshihara, Editor

This issue of American Quarterly begins with Lisa Duggan’s presidential address delivered at the ASA annual meeting in Los Angeles on November 7, 2014. With the theme “The Fun and the Fury: New Dialectics of Pleasure and Pain in the Post-American Century,” this conference engaged in critiques, analyses, reflections, dialogues, performances, and practices of pleasure and pain in a dizzying array of forms. Two events that took place in the course of preparing for this conference—the ASA’s adoption of the resolution on the academic boycott of Israel and the sudden death of a beloved colleague and comrade, José Esteban Muñoz—heightened the urgency for uncompromised critical inquiry into the interconnectedness of multiple structures of oppression as well as for new visions of intimacy, kinship, solidarity, and community, both in our academic institutions and in global politics. In her address, Duggan articulates and performs these impulses of the conference with her unrelenting sharpness, affect, and pizzazz. Foregrounding the ways in which queer studies and affect studies have shaped the optics and practices of American studies in recent years, she demonstrates what is enabled by reading archives like Ayn Rand’s novels and hate mail sent to Duggan, using the tools of American studies. In response to Duggan’s address, Cynthia Franklin, Eng-Beng Lim, and Scott Morgensen—writing from diverse standpoints and with expertise including feminist studies, queer studies, performance studies, and Indigenous studies, and with the spirit of fun and fury matching Duggan’s—illuminate, contextualize, and push the interventions made by Duggan and the scholars and activists she exemplifies.

Although the essays included here were accepted for publication prior to the 2014 annual meeting, they address the theme of “fun and fury” through analyses of diverse political, social, and cultural practices like tourism, photography, and literary activism. We are delighted that these essays also represent diverse analyses of local, national, and transnational sites and routes in a broad historical span. The book reviews similarly feature scholarship interrogating oppression, violence, and exploitation as well as imaginaries, connections, and solidarities at both local/regional/national and transnational/global sites and routes.

This issue of AQ also carries the first event review published under the editorship of the Hawai‘i-based team. Marita Sturken’s timely review of the National September 11 Memorial Museum is a perfect illustration of the type of scholarly analysis and critical reflection called for by the “Fun and Fury” conference and Duggan’s address. Sturken examines the physical setting, [End Page v] architectural design, and curatorial practice of the 9/11 memorial museum to illustrate the difficult relationship between affective reflection and critical inquiry of political meanings. The review also articulates the critical importance of interrogating the narratives of exceptionalism in post-9/11 United States. [End Page vi]

...

pdf

Share