Editor’s Note

This is the first American Quarterly issue of 2012. During 2011, around the world, people witnessed state violence against student activists and protesters. Higher education budgets in all states within the United States continue to be slashed drastically, which make it seem untenable for higher education to function in productive ways. But while many of these protests were perhaps explicitly directed against university administrations and state budgets, they were also part of broader social movements in the United States and globally, where the “99%” occupied financial districts, streets, buildings, and state administrations around the country to call attention to corporate greed, vast inequities in financial resources, systemic poverty, rising student loans, unfair business practices, and general economic betrayal. During the October 2011 American Studies Association annual convention in Baltimore, MD, the ASA council collaboratively formulated the following statement about these events (read by incoming ASA president Matthew Frye Jacobson before the Presidential Address and worth repeating here):

Political Dissent in a Time of (Economic)
Crisis A Statement by the Council of the American Studies Association
20 October 2011

We are the public. We are workers. We are the 99%. We speak with the people here in Baltimore and around the globe occupying plazas, parks, and squares in opposition to failed austerity programs, to oligarchy, and to the unequal distribution of wealth and power. The loss of jobs, healthcare, and homes, the distressing use of mass incarceration, mass deportations, and the destruction of environments have brought so many households and individuals to crisis. We join with the people re-claiming commons rights to public resources. We join in the call against privatization and for a democratic re-awakening.

As educators, we are experiencing the dismantling of public education, rising tuition, unsustainable student debt, and the assault on every dimension of education. As American Studies scholars, our work considers, among other things, the problems and challenges societies face, to draw lessons from the past, to compare across polities, and to make informed recommendations that will spark open debate. We draw inspiration from earlier social movements that have challenged the unequal distribution of power, wealth, and authority. Today’s movements continue this necessary work. The uprisings compel us to lift our voices and dedicate our effort to realizing the democratic aspirations for an equitable and habitable world. We are the 99%.

Innovative forms of scholarship are necessary to keep in time with fast-paced changing social, political, technological, and economic conditions. We are dedicated at AQ to publishing non-traditional forms of writing and scholarship, and are delighted to say that we have had a dramatic increase in submissions for our “Forum” and “Currents” sections. The “Forum” feature is typically a version of conference or event proceedings, where issues that are relevant to American studies scholars, teachers, and activists are presented in varied forms: as conference papers, roundtables, and workshops. The “Currents” section is designed for timely presentations of important events or conversations bringing to our attention key issues in a way that are not burdened by the typical lengthiness of timelines for academic publication. We hope that the presence of these kinds of publications in AQ, different from more conventional peer-reviewed scholarly essays, offers the American studies community an imaginative and flexible forum for conveying ideas, theories, political goals, and ideals, and suggestions for social change and justice. In this issue, we have a “Currents” feature edited by Eric A. Stanley, “Queering Prison Abolition, Now?,” on transgender issues and the prison industrial complex. This “Currents” piece will also be featured on the AQ website, americanquarterly.org.

The AQ website additionally features “Teaching Tools” (highlighting AQ articles along with authors’ “teaching templates” that offer suggestions, such as sample syllabi, discussion questions, and related media links, for how articles might be taught in class). Currently, the “Teaching Tools” includes a March 2011 article by Erica R. Edwards, “The Black President Hokum,” and an essay published in this issue, Jana K. Lipman’s, “Give Us a Ship: Vietnamese Repatriates on Guam, 1975.”

Also in this issue, and along with five excellent book reviews, Koritha Mitchell has written a compelling essay on the role James...