Editor’s Note

By the time this issue of American Quarterly reaches the readers’ hands, it will have been over two years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This extraordinary circumstance is manifested in the inclusion of two presidential addresses in this issue. Due to the cancellation of the 2020 ASA annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, and the relocation of the October 2021 meeting scheduled in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to virtual space, the conference under the theme “Creativity within Revolt” featured the addresses of two consecutive ASA presidents, Dylan Rodríguez and Cathy Schlund-Vials.

Both presidents share the stories of their upbringing to situate themselves in the histories and conditions of American violence, and they urgently call on us to keep our eyes open in the face of multipronged forces that attack, extract, police, capture, and contain the communities and movements that resist and revolt. At the same time, they both remind us of the power of knowledge production and creativity, joy, love, and intimacy.

Reading the US Army’s counterinsurgency field manual, Rodríguez gives a sobering account of what he calls “reformist counterinsurgency” in which academics can easily be complicit actors and urges us to gather forces of abolitionist practice. Locating Rodríguez’s address in the history of academic containment of radical movements, Sunaina Maira considers what it means to call for gathering and resistance amid the conditions of the pandemic. Dorothy Roberts draws from her research on the history of child welfare to discuss how Rodríguez’s notion of reformist counterinsurgency operates in the targeting of Black families and how nonreformist reforms must pursue abolition of the entire carceral apparatus.

Schlund-Vials begins with a very different text, Thomas More’s Utopia, to consider American studies as a site of utopic critique and radical politics, in the same way that Rodríguez urges us to engage in collective study and abolition as everyday practice. Nic John Ramos reminds us of how social distancing that had long been imposed on families like Schlund-Vials’s has been exacerbated by the pandemic and contemplates the act of writing from a “known place.” Frances Tran uses an epistolary form to reflect on her own upbringing and considers what it means to act with love and resistance in the face of quotidian racial violence and white supremacy and to realize new forms of intimacy and joy.

The first two essays in this issue both address the theme of data and statistics for Black life. Laura Soderberg examines the meaning of census data in the mid-nineteenth century. She convincingly illustrates how the official census publications and predominantly white newspapers stressed the “data tourism” function of the census, while the Black press created their own census reading practice focused on registering citizenship, nongovernmental authority, and collective survival. Anne M. Brubaker focuses on Ida B. Wells’s statistical thinking in her anti-lynching pamphlets in the context of social quantification and scientific racism. Brubaker shows that Wells’s contributions to sociological research on Black life offer a blueprint for “data justice.”

Turning attention to a different sort of Black archive and thought, Sarah Winstein-Hibbs reads James Baldwin’s oeuvre as a theorization of “otherwise charisma.” She shows how Baldwin’s writing pivots from the trope of the straight, macho charismatic leader to a horizontal vision of charisma as communal affect and rethinks and queers black charismatic leadership that has been taken up within the activism of the Black Lives Matter era.

The next two essays both examine technology as a critical terrain of struggle for minoritized groups and communities. Through her study of two-way radiotelephony including citizens band, Cheryl Higashida argues that a goal of the civil rights movement was to develop grassroots technopolitical agency. She further demonstrates that while two-way radio emerged from and proliferated military and police violence, Black, Latinx, Filipinx, and Indigenous organizers reconceived the technology of surveillance to create networks of “dark sousveillant” solidarity. In the essay that follows, Max Larson critically analyzes the concept of the digital divide. Combining a case study of San José Unified School District’s attempt to address the...