Editor’s Note

On October 21, 2011, ASA president Priscilla Wald addressed the annual American Studies Association meeting. Through a retelling of the story of Henrietta Lacks and the invention of the HeLa cell line, Wald brilliantly and convincingly asked American studies scholars to not just rethink but also reimagine how stories are told and are circulated about what it means to be human. She insisted on the connection between biological narratives, structural and institutional racism, colonialism, the commodification of human life, and the differential valuation of human bodies in social and cultural life. In this issue of AQ, we have included Wald’s presidential address, as well as two probing responses to the address by David L. Eng and Jonathan M. Metzl.

Part of the cultural backdrop to Wald’s address was (and continues to be) the global Occupy movements and student protests on college campuses around the world. By delineating genealogies of racism and inequity as they structure the arrangement of human lives, Wald connects this organization of life to the contemporary political and social movements that also call urgent attention to marginalized bodies and communities. What is illuminated, and what seems especially pressing to address, is how these marginalizations constitute the structuring of states. As Eng points out in his response, “Wald’s retelling of the story of Lacks allows us to reexamine the problematic relationship between civil and human rights in American studies and, more specifically, to reconsider what is at stake in their shifting relationships.”

Indeed, in this issue we ask readers to reconsider what is at stake in the shifting relationships between civil and human rights not only in American studies but also in communities and populations worldwide. In the “Currents” section, which presents important events or conversations on key issues in a timely fashion, the focus is on student protests on college campuses. As Wald was giving her presidential address to the American Studies Association, students were protesting the continuing marketization of higher education, which comes with not only egregious tuition and fee hikes (thus pricing out much of the student population from the opportunity for higher education) but also a devaluing of research and pedagogy, and the transformation of students into “consumers.” A few weeks after the annual ASA convention, during a student protest on the campus of the University of California, Davis, on November 18, 2011, students were pepper sprayed by the police in a now infamous and widely circulated event. The issue of the university administration and police involvement in the incident was heavily critiqued in the Reynoso Task Force Report. We urge you to read the report which you can access on the UC Davis website. The “Currents” feature in this issue offers insightful and urgent comments by Dylan Rodríguez, Sunaina Maira, and Julie Sze, each one a professor on University of California campuses, to consider the crucial stakes these protests, and the politics that mobilize them, have for a broader consideration of civil and human rights. We also include, as part of “Currents,” the recent statement by the ASA executive council on student protests and the neoliberalization of higher education.

The issue’s three main essays address the social and cultural value of human life in different historical periods. Each essay draws from varied sites, contexts, and objects as a way to understand the relationship between the state and the production of difference. Ellen Scott, in “Black ‘Censor,’ White Liberties: Civil Rights and Illinois’s 1917 Film Law,” offers a new and compelling perspective on the thorny issue of censoring racialized representation in film. Scott gives us a view of some of the complex, and often contradictory, power dynamics involved in the legally sanctioned regulation of racial representations on-screen. Adrián Pérez Melgosa also focuses on representation, and examines the practices of looking at and representing hemispheric politics in theater and film by assessing how performance and spectacle have articulated an “inter-American utopia” that framed both the Good Neighbor policy and continues to frame iterations of Latin American identity. The final essay, by Kyla Schuller, provides us with an important accompaniment to the presidential address in her focus...