Thinking Resistance, “Emergency,” and Kismet: A Response to Dylan Rodríguez’s Presidential Address

Dylan Rodríguez’s presidential address in October 2021 was delivered at a virtual conference, in that not-quite-new but still strange digital space that we have inhabited for our work and collective gatherings since the onset of COVID-19. Rodríguez begins his eloquent talk by acknowledging Indigenous Peoples Day and issuing an urgent call for “collective study” and a “gathering force” expressed through insurgent knowledge production. He shares a radical vision of forms of “revolt, insurrection, creativity, self-determined community” that could realize “abolitionist, liberated ways of being.” In the wake of Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprisings across the US and globally in 2020, and in the context of border violence targeting Haitian refugees and other migrants, this powerful call is one that American studies scholars needed to hear.

At the beginning of his talk, Rodríguez comments briefly that it has been an “extraordinary couple of years” due to the pandemic and global uprisings but does not mention the virtual nature of the conference or of teaching during the lockdown nor elaborate on the convergence of “pandemic with police power.” I want to consider what it means to call for resistance to the US state at a moment when the ravages of medical apartheid and vaccine nationalism were—and are—still wreaking havoc in Black and Brown communities and inflicting mass deaths on vulnerable populations, within and beyond the US. Furthermore, what does a “gathering force” represent when many could not, or were not supposed to, gather in person and are excluded from or struggling in the new Zoom world?

Counterinsurgency/Counterrevolution

Rodríguez draws our attention to an ongoing crisis of “oppressive violence” that preceded the unequal suffering produced by the pandemic, incisively focusing on the necessity of challenging reformism as a recuperative response to the national state of emergency. He offers several important examples of such responses to police terror and BLM protests, including corporate co-optation of antiracist frameworks as well as opportunistic appropriation by the university. In his brilliant analysis, the work of American studies is defined in relation to the imperial state’s need for “infiltration of ideas” as well as pedagogy in order to reform, rather than radically transform, the state apparatus, thus the need for a complex and militant “anti-‘American’” dissent. He highlights Black study as a source of abolitionist praxis but also indigenous, anticolonial, feminist, and queer thought as part of a culture war that operates through “counterinsurgency.”

I think it is important to note that the larger, if implicit, context for this critique is also the debate unleashed by “domestic warfare” in the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The attacks by Trump supporters were generally framed by a nationalist narrative of “emergency” for the US state and a momentary disruption of stable democracy, a temporal deviation provoked by an exceptionally authoritarian, right-wing populist leader, thus reinscribing the state of exception.¹ Coups presumably never happen in the US, so there is a spatial exceptionalism in this “progressivist narrative” as well. This state of emergency was also reinscribed on the mass deaths of Americans during the pandemic, as defenders of US exceptionalism attempted to contain the embarrassing crisis of public health and neoliberal capitalism in order to rewrite the decline of US empire (given the scale and racial specificity of fatalities due to COVID-19, perhaps they could also be described as “proto-genocidal”?). The battles over masking only amplified preexisting culture and race wars in which entrenched libertarianism and neoliberal individualism evaded the economic and existential precarity caused by degraded social welfare and state health care. Nationalist slogans, including liberal ones by those working remotely, about essential workers as “heroes” on the frontlines of the pandemic have obfuscated the material realities of precarious labor and worker struggles that erupted during the pandemic.² Social distancing protocols also transformed the terrain of organizing, making it difficult to do community outreach and transforming the “public.”

While Rodríguez does not mention these struggles during the pandemic, he rightly argues that racial and class wars entail not...