Project MUSE®: American Quarterly - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/13
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in American Quarterly.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 48 (1996) through current issueLatest Articles: American QuarterlyTWOProject MUSE®American Quarterly1080-64900003-0678Latest articles in American Quarterly. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editor's Note
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984518
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The four research essays that make up this first issue of our seventy-eighth volume represent exciting new work on wildly disparate subjects. In "The Sexual Life of Blight," René Esparza examines the impacts of urban renewal on homosocial and queer spaces in mid-twentieth-century Minneapolis, providing a fascinating case study for the politics of urban space and sexuality. In a very different but equally compelling essay, Francesca Sawaya investigates the somewhat surprising history of the mermaid as an imperialist trope, especially when she took the form of an Undine, which is the eponymous title of a text with some unexpected connections to European narratives of the Haitian Revolution. An image from this essay
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/13/image/coversmallEditor's Note2026-03-05text/htmlen-USEditor's Note2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®39822026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05The Sexual Life of Blight: Queer Domesticity and the Policing of Intimacy in the Postwar City
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984519
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Downtown Minneapolis, circa 1942, did not impress Sinclair Lewis. "Minneapolis is so ugly," he wrote. "Parking lots like scars. Most buildings are narrow, drab, dirty, flimsy, irregular in relationship to one another—a set of bad teeth."1 He did not specify, but he likely wrote of the Gateway District, a twenty-five-block section of downtown at the convergence of Hennepin, Nicollet, and Washington Avenues that had become the city's unofficial skid row. Others went further, with one travel guide from the period lamenting that not only had the buildings deteriorated but so had the character of its residents, describing them as "transients—railroad workers, migratory farm hands … roughneck woodsmen" and "drifting
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/13/image/coversmallThe Sexual Life of Blight: Queer Domesticity and the Policing of Intimacy in the Postwar City2026-03-05text/htmlen-USThe Sexual Life of Blight: Queer Domesticity and the Policing of Intimacy in the Postwar City2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®1351172026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05The European-Atlantic Mermaid and the Shadows of Empire
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984520
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In "The Law Concerning Mermaids" (2010), the poet Kei Miller writes that as the British empire encircled the globe, it "decreed" by law that if any mermaids "were … to be found in their usual spots, showing off like dolphins, sunbathing on rocks—they would no longer belong to themselves." The mermaids, Miller continues, decided "to never again enter our dry and stifling world." "Maybe this is the problem with empires," Miller writes, "how they have forced us to live in a world lacking in mermaids."1 Miller's prose poem serves as a useful springboard for this essay. If mermaids chose to disappear from the human world in the face of imperial regulation, as Miller asserts, their departure paradoxically led in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/13/image/coversmallThe European-Atlantic Mermaid and the Shadows of Empire2026-03-05text/htmlen-USThe European-Atlantic Mermaid and the Shadows of Empire2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®1168842026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05The Color of Travelers Cheques: American Express and Black American Capitalism in 1930s Europe
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984521
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Two young and wealthy cousins arrived in Saarbrücken from Paris in 1936. When Flaurience Sengstacke and Fay McKeene Hershaw, both Black American women, entered the city, it had only the previous year been restored to German control.1 Their authorization to enter Germany, notably, followed both the establishment of the Nuremberg Laws that codified Nazi racial theories and the creation of a legal framework for the persecution of Jews.2 It was the presentation of financial documents—Travelers Cheques—that smoothed their entry into Germany. The American Express Travelers Cheque was evidence enough to the Germans to demonstrate the women's independence and prove that they were "prepared financially" to travel.3 The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/13/image/coversmallThe Color of Travelers Cheques: American Express and Black American Capitalism in 1930s Europe2026-03-05text/htmlen-USThe Color of Travelers Cheques: American Express and Black American Capitalism in 1930s Europe2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®1176722026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Moral Injury: The Soul at Work and War
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984522
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Beginning in 2020, a wave of strikes hit the healthcare industry.1 As global citizens in lockdown banged on pots and pans to express gratitude for health workers' sacrifice in the initial phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses in the United States demanded material change. Registering their low pay, inadequate staffing, and murderously unsafe working conditions, care workers across the US struck hospitals and nursing homes, leading to unprecedented victories.2 Beyond calls for improved working conditions and concern for the sheer loss of life among caregivers and their patients alike, a growing number of healthcare unions began including a platform about "moral injury" as part of their collective grievances. These
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/13/image/coversmallMoral Injury: The Soul at Work and War2026-03-05text/htmlen-USMoral Injury: The Soul at Work and War2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®1614482026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Cuir/Queer Américas: A Dispatch from the Working Group
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984523
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In this forum, seven leading scholars in the fields of US Latinx and Latin American gender and sexuality studies discuss interdisciplinary relationships between sexuality studies and archival praxis. Together we form part of the international Cuir/Queer Américas Working Group (Grupo de Trabajo Feminista/Queer/Cuir de las Américas)—an initiative begun in 2015—which fosters hemispheric feminist, cuir, trans, and antiracist research collaborations.1 Our collective work examines and curates historical, ethnographic, and aesthetic archives of feminist, gender, sexual, racial, and class formations across the Américas. Over the past decade, the working group has made various scholarly interventions, including the GLQ
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/13/image/coversmallCuir/Queer Américas: A Dispatch from the Working Group2026-03-05text/htmlen-USCuir/Queer Américas: A Dispatch from the Working Group2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®1055032026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Ten Years of "Indigenous Circuits": A Conversation Between Lisa Nakamura and Ashlee Bird
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984524
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Since American Quarterly published Lisa Nakamura's "Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronics Manufacture" in our December 2014 issue, it has consistently been one of the journal's most read and cited essays. "Indigenous Circuits" immerses readers into the history of the Fairchild Semiconductor plant on the Shiprock reservation in New Mexico, where Navajo women were employed as chip manufacturers in the late 1960s and '70s. Nakamura's archival research revealed how the Fairchild company relied on progressive narratives that framed the plant as an economic opportunity for Shiprock's Indigenous community and presented Navajo women as uniquely capable of assembling microprocessors
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/13/image/coversmallTen Years of "Indigenous Circuits": A Conversation Between Lisa Nakamura and Ashlee Bird2026-03-05text/htmlen-USTen Years of "Indigenous Circuits": A Conversation Between Lisa Nakamura and Ashlee Bird2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®401662026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Chasing Queer Latinidad: Feelings, Senses, Desires
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984525
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If queerness appears as a blueprint on the horizon, as an echo of what José Esteban Muñoz imagines as a distant dream, then how does a queer life handle the debts paying for the here and now? While shyly entertaining the redemptive politics of a queer utopia, the titles examined in this essay grapple with felt, affective, and sensual ways of confronting the unending violence experienced across the bodies of queer Latinidad. In this sense, the emerging scholarship on queer Latinx studies delves into the mundane, the performative, the underground, and the latent to make sense of the ugly feelings, the disappointments, and the heartbreaks that, as queer and trans Latinxs, we endure every day and every night to soak in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/13/image/coversmallChasing Queer Latinidad: Feelings, Senses, Desires2026-03-05text/htmlen-USChasing Queer Latinidad: Feelings, Senses, Desires2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®392632026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Revisiting the "Time of the Toad"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984526
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All nations in the course of their histories have passed through periods which, … might be called the Time of the Toad: an epoch long or short as the temper of the people may permit, fatal or merely debilitating as the vitality of the people may determine, in which the nation turns upon itself in a kind of madness to deny all in its tradition that is clean, to exalt all that is vile, and to destroy any heretical minority which asserts toad-meat not to be the delicacy which governmental edict declares it.In a 1949 pamphlet, Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter, describes the arrival of what he terms "the time of the toad" in US public life.1 Drawing upon an article by Émile Zola in which the French
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/13/image/coversmallRevisiting the "Time of the Toad"2026-03-05text/htmlen-USRevisiting the "Time of the Toad"2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®482302026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Monica Miller and the Characteristics of Black Tailoring
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984527
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Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, curated by Monica Miller with Andrew Bolton of the Costume Institute, is an ambitious exhibit that connects the rebellion and resistance of the Black dandy with current Black fashion of the last two decades. Presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from May to October 2025, it was the Met's first exhibit to focus on Black men's fashion, showing visitors how enslaved and free people constructed identity through fashion and style. Superfine takes its cue from Miller's Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (2009), a study "of transhistorical and transatlantic moments in literary and visual culture in which black male subjects can be seen
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/13/image/coversmallMonica Miller and the Characteristics of Black Tailoring2026-03-05text/htmlen-USMonica Miller and the Characteristics of Black Tailoring2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®412182026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05The Networks of an Overlooked History of Slavery in the United States
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984528
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During the early Anglo-American settlement of what is today the US Southeast, the US government gave the title "Five Civilized Tribes" to the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminoles, and Muscogee communities as an act of assimilation. The Anglo-American definition of "civilized" in the early 1800s was driven by an agenda to control Native land and impose capitalistic social values of both the United States and the US South onto Native American communities. Ultimately, "civilized" was what Anglo-Americans deemed as similar to White cultural and social values. Among some of the values was the growing of cotton and wheat, as well as the practice of chattel slavery. The aftermath of this complex and understudied
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/13/image/coversmallThe Networks of an Overlooked History of Slavery in the United States2026-03-05text/htmlen-USThe Networks of an Overlooked History of Slavery in the United States2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®246232026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Labs in the Humanities and Social Sciences: A New Methodological Model to Study the Lived Experiences of Black Athletes
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984529
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In the preface to his cricket memoir, C. L. R. James asks, "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?"1 This question encourages his readers to consider how the real world and the world of sports are so intertwined that understanding one means understanding the other. James, and other thinkers who agree with this statement, insist on an important line of questioning. There is something to be said—critically, scholarly, and generally—about the ways that occurrences on playing fields bleed into and influence actions that take play far away from those sporting spaces. With this in mind, it is also important to consider how those of us in the academy can talk across our disciplinary, institutional, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/13/image/coversmallLabs in the Humanities and Social Sciences: A New Methodological Model to Study the Lived Experiences of Black Athletes2026-03-05text/htmlen-USLabs in the Humanities and Social Sciences: A New Methodological Model to Study the Lived Experiences of Black Athletes2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®315502026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05In Memoriam: Lauren Rabinovitz
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984530
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Lauren Rabinovitz was a pioneering scholar of American avant-garde film, feminist television studies, and American popular and food cultures. Although her monographs, articles, and edited volumes are key texts in their respective areas, she also consistently invested time and energy in many projects other than the solo-authored book or marquee article that has traditionally determined academic success and influence. Lauren was as interested in, and valued as highly, creating venues where feminist scholars could come together to explore the nascent field of television studies; building digital technologies to allow students and scholars alike to reencounter canonic Hollywood texts and their critiques; and compiling
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/13/image/coversmallIn Memoriam: Lauren Rabinovitz2026-03-05text/htmlen-USIn Memoriam: Lauren Rabinovitz2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®202612026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05