To Hear the Call and Respond: Grounded Relationalities and the Spaces of Emergence

In his 2018 presidential address, Roderick Ferguson gives us a vision for the American Studies Association that not only activates radical traditions but places them within the temporal, spatial, and sonic cacophonies of the land and histories, the stories and songs, from which they emerge. Entangling his own familial genealogies with the intellectual and literary antecedents that shaped the Georgia that shaped him, Ferguson offers us a windowed reflection on the now-required reading practices through which to make meaning in Donald Trump’s America, where truth has finally lost its grip and resistance often reinscribes the racial regimes instantiated by ongoing settler colonialism. With eyes on the classed, gendered, and racial divisions that have always accompanied the dispossession of lands and bodies in what is now the state of Georgia, Ferguson lays out for us in three different arcs a deeply intimate and entirely reflective mode of engagement that looks back to find a forward. It is an address that is both moving and revelatory in its quiet injunction to meet him in the contradictions, antagonisms, and possibilities that have always accompanied the familial, racial, spatial, and temporal dispossessions that produced not just the South but the islands and continents of US imperial capitalist control. Ferguson further tempers the recent pessimistic turns within Black and Indigenous studies with a steadfast reminder from the land itself that acknowledges that the struggle is ongoing, and that though “the sky is gray and cloudy, and the storm is coming, . . . you have everything you need.” His address was less an academic argument about the current repressive state of the America(s) we each study than a manifesto for taking stock of the battles already fought that augur those still ahead.

In the hallways of the Westin Peachtree Hotel and in the streets between the American Studies and the National Women Studies conferences, I watched and listened as friends and colleagues repeatedly attempted to convey and then hold the reverberations that followed Ferguson’s address. Rural, Black, Indigenous, and queer were words that jostled against and bumped into each other in the heady adrenalin rush of scholars revitalized by aspects of a piece that is at turns both beautifully oratorical and profoundly generous as it sets the stage for the work ahead. On everyone’s mind was the state of (failed) democracy in a republic that had only ever been white settler supremacist. Moments of w(e)ariness jutted starkly against the threads of hope that promised things should and could change and the despair that insists they won’t ever. With the results of the highly activating midterm elections still contested in many states and Stacey Abrams continuing her fight against Brian Kemp on the ground in Georgia to halt rural and urban Black voter disenfranchisement in her historic bid as the first Black woman to run for governor of the state, scholars at both conferences were focused on the increasing repressions targeting everyone not upper-class Christian cis white male. On everyone’s mind and lips were detention centers, shootings in synagogues, migrant caravans, Supreme Court confirmations, and the fraying racial and gendered politics of the left as it holds its center.

For many, attending a conference in Atlanta comes with no small sense of historical scale and no slight feeling of precarity, with its “first” coasts of genocidal landings and where chattel slavery gave way to reconstruction, Jim Crow anti-Black repression, and then the enduring fight for civil rights in a settler nation predicated on racial and gendered dispossessions alongside Indigenous removals. In the days leading up to the conference and in a moment where civility is only required of Black, Brown, and Indigenous folks as they move through what has always been a hostile nation, social media feeds were replete with status updates by faculty and graduate students girding themselves through humor or through sarcasm for the expected and assumed overt if not wholly southern expressions of misogyny, xenophobia, racism, and homophobia that would greet them on arrival. Reports of the TSA targeting queer and trans scholars for...