Editor’s Note
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On November 22, 2013, American Studies Association President Curtis Marez gave his presidential address, “Seeing in the Red: Looking at Student Debt,” at the ASA annual meeting in Washington, DC. In an unusually fraught conference atmosphere due to the proposed resolution on an institutional boycott of Israel, Marez outlined in his address what he calls “an American Studies version of Critical University Studies,” where he argued that “the contemporary regime of university debt constitutes a form of racialized and gendered settler colonial capitalism based on the incorporation of disposable low-wage workers and complicity in the occupation of indigenous lands.” In this issue of AQ, we include Marez’ address along with two excellent responses from Jodi Melamed and Miranda Joseph. As both respondents point out, while Marez astutely points out the ways in which debt works as a dominating force in contemporary global society, he also points to a critical practice of dissent; as Joseph concludes her response: “if we understand debt as the product of practices of knowledge production – accounting – then we can imagine the university helping to organize collective dissent, to articulate relationships and galvanize collective dissent, through our use of critical American Studies tools to develop, disseminate, and deploy alternative accounts of who owes what to whom.”
We also include four compelling essays in this issue, each approaching American Studies from a different vantage point. First, Vi t Lê’s “Representation and Traumatic Memory in S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Refugee,” examines two documentaries that feature Cambodian and Cambodian American subjects, and focuses on the unspoken and repeated gestures of the films as “eternal melancholics.” Next, Jennifer Helgren moves to the early 20th century to examine Native American and White Camp Fire girls as a way to examine racialized performances of modern girlhood in terms of a rescripted racial history. Then, in “Peculiar Sovereignty: Antifacist US Literature and the Liberal Warfare State,” Jonathan Vincent traces mid-twentieth century literary culture’s investment in the liberal warfare state and the rise of a national security paradigm, and adds an important contribution to the scholarship on Popular Front resistance. Our final essay in this issue also contributes to scholarship on the Popular Front; Benjamin Balthazar’s “Travels of an American [End Page v] Indian into the Hinterlands of Soviet Russia,” traces the movement of Nez Perce anthropologist Archie Phinney, who he argues represented a crucial link between Native American intellectuals in the 1930s and 40s to other radical intellectuals of color. He focuses on the presence of Native Americans in socialist organizations and movements.
The book review section of this issue of AQ speaks, as usual, to the incredibly rich interdisciplinarity of the field of American Studies. The five book review essays cover the practice, representation and material reality of the “transnational;” empire connections within the transpacific; new histories of performance; the presence of radio scholarship in American Studies; and post-urban renewal and gentrification in the United States.
Finally, in this issue of American Quarterly, we feature a tribute to our cherished friend, scholar, and member of the AQ Advisory Board, José Esteban Muñoz, who we lost unexpectedly on December 4, 2013. The AQ Event Review Editor, Karen Tongson, has organized a beautiful collection of poetry, images, and memories to celebrate José’s life and to give expression of our deep, searing loss.
As a reminder to our readership, American Quarterly will have moved from the University of Southern California to the University of Hawaii at Manoa by the time of this publication. All submission inquiries should be sent to the new editor, Mari Yoshihara and the new managing editor, Stacy Nojima, at aqhawaii@hawaii.edu. The new editors will be putting in place a slightly different publication process, so please look at the American Quarterly website (americanquarterly.org) for details. Authors who have already submitted to our submission pipeline should have already received notice on the new manuscript review details. However, the University of Southern California editorial team will be responsible for the next two issues, the special issue in September, Las Américas Quarterly, guest edited by Macarena Gómez-Barris and Licia Fiol...
