Editor’s Note

At the ASA annual meeting in Atlanta in November 2018, Roderick Ferguson delivered a moving narrative of his family history in rural Georgia, intellectual coming of age and political awakening, and the emergence of his understanding of black nationalism, internationalism, and feminist and queer formations. This presidential address takes us to the site of a heterogeneous, mixed population of Native and black people whose relationships to each other and to the land were apprehended by the logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. It also points to the power of education—intellectual, creative, political, social—that charts the long and careful journey to equality and freedom. It calls on us to activate “being-in-difference” as the source and power to use the land in the way the land intended and to achieve grounded interconnectivity. The powerful and beautiful address is published in this issue.

Jodi A. Byrd responds to Ferguson’s address by placing it in the time and space in which it was delivered. She pushes us to think further about the agency of southeastern American Indian women in the transformation of Indigenous traditions and relationships, and asks us to ponder the political possibilities when land is understood like bodies, as life itself. Shona N. Jackson turns to the Anglophone Caribbean, where settler colonial logics of land and labor became the basis for Creole Indigeneity and antiblackness. She insists that Ferguson’s call for grounded relationalities must engage the futurity of specific sovereignties of people whose rights and identities have been placed in tension with each other.

Therese Quinn and Erica Meiners have convened an important and timely forum, “Defiant Memory Work,” which draws on Chicago’s rich history in using cultural forms to foster liberation and engages myriad projects in other sites where artists and activists, particularly from marginalized groups, have used culture to resist erasure and dispossession. The essays display diverse forms of cultural expression to document, archive, memorialize, exhibit, interpret, remember, and counter forms of state and other violence. Contributors, many of whom are situated outside the academy, offer us profound engagements with American studies through their cultural practices and self-reflections. The Board of Managing Editors thanks the two conveners for their bold and original conception and deft execution of this important forum.

The essays in this issue are particularly rich in the originality and rigor of each work as well as in the diverse ways in which they engage the interrelated issues of racialization, state power, surveillance and policing, citizenship and identities. Shedding light on the role of the Syrian American defense attorney George Shibley in the well-known Sleepy Lagoon murder trial of 1942, Sarah Gualtieri raises important questions about interethnic solidarity and Arab American activism in Southern California. Celeste Moore looks at Ray Charles’s 1961 performance in Paris against the backdrop of the killing and detention of North African demonstrators against the French-Algerian War to examine the racial meaning, global popularity, and political potency of African American music in the postwar Atlantic world. In “Sensing ‘Wetbacks’: Race and the Cybernetic Border,” Iván Chaar-López examines the encounter between cybernetics and border control during the 1970s, which drew electronic boundaries both on the ground and on human bodies and built infrastructure of technology and knowledge around racialized Latinx bodies. In her provocative account of the history of the Office of Public Safety, a US federal body created to train foreign police from 1962 to 1974, Micol Seigel argues that understanding “military” and “civilian” as distinct categories or imagining the police as civilian serves to justify state violence and US Empire and military action abroad. Through an analysis of Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley’s new policing ordinance issued in 1984 amid the convergence of the community mental health movement and inner-city neighborhood activism, Nic Ramos demonstrates how the new discourses of multiculturalism created the basis for new forms of surveillance and policing and renewed violence on queer, homeless, trans, and disabled people of color and their spatial segregation in skid row. Finally, Cassius Adair traces the development of driver’s licenses in the Progressive Era embedded in antiblack...