Editor’s Note

This issue features the first forum undertaken since the editorial office of American Quarterly relocated to Hawai‘i. We began our editorship on the heels of the ASA resolution on the academic and cultural boycott of Israel, which generated intense debates on Israel–Palestine relations, the United States’ role in the conflict, and how American studies as an academic field and the ASA as a professional organization might engage the issue. The resolution has drawn unprecedented national and international attention to the ASA, and while many critics in and outside the academy vocally objected to the resolution, a number of academic associations followed suit in similarly endorsing the boycott of Israel. The heated debates on the issue continue, as they should. The AQ editorial team wanted to use this as an occasion to think further about the place of Palestine in American studies, both engaging the significance of the boycott resolution and also moving beyond it to frame the issue in broader historical, political, and economic contexts. We invited two scholar-activists with long involvement in and on Palestine, Rabab Abdulhadi and Dana M. Olwan, to co-convene the forum. They have done a brilliant job of soliciting essays by authors working in diverse fields who address the relevance of the question of Palestine to the projects of American studies. We thank the co-conveners for the intensive labor involved in putting the forum together and all the authors for producing their essays quickly so that the journal could address current conditions.

The essays in this issue are among the first submissions that have gone through the review process newly instituted by the Hawai‘i-based team. While dealing with different subject matters—the role of Hawai‘i in the Vietnam War, the emergence of “culture shock” discourse in the context of the Peace Corps, the body politics around Charles Stratton, and the alternative cultural politics in Encinitas, California—all the essays in this issue address the histories and practices of empire, race, nation building, and constructions of identity, the themes that our editorial team is particularly committed to. The authors have been extremely collegial in responding to the reviewers’ and the editorial board’s suggestions, and we feel that these essays represent the originality and rigor of the authors’ scholarship and the collaborative intellectual labor involved in the review and editorial process.

The juxtaposition of two very different exhibits covered in the event review—the newly opened Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg and the Hello Kitty exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles—reflects the range of the types of exhibits relevant to American studies as well as critical approaches to exhibits.

With the three ambitious book reviews in this issue, Cotten Seiler completes his term as Book Review Editor. When we began our editorship we learned for the first time the complex and demanding tasks of the AQ Book Review Editor, who must make the difficult decisions about which books, from among the over one thousand that come in annually, to review in the journal and who will write the review. We would like to express our gratitude to Cotton for his vision and professionalism in handling this important job for the last three years. Our new Book Review Editors are Matthew Basso and Laura Briggs, whose collaborative editing of book reviews will appear in AQ beginning with the March 2016 issue.