American Quarterly

The first three essays in this issue all deal with the scripts, frames, and boundaries prescribed on racialized subjects in different contexts and the ways in which those subjects maneuver and assert their agency and subjecthood. Camille S. Owens discusses the scrapbook archive created by George and Josephine Schuyler about their daughter, Philippa, the black pianist and composer known as "the Harlem Prodigy" of the 1930s. Reading the scrapbooks as the Schuylers' contradictory engagement with eugenics, Owens also identifies Philippa's practices of subversion and self-invention, or "anarrangements" of the archive and narrative. The subject of Nathaniel Mills's essay is the poet Margaret Walker, who attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1939–40. Analyzing Walker's encounter and conflict with her teacher Paul Engle over the proper form and content of African American poetry, Mills compellingly illustrates the dialectically constructive and restrictive role the academic writers' workshop has played in African American literary history. Moving in geography and chronology, Malathi Iyengar looks at the 1950s State Department–brokered "sisterhood arrangement" between the University of Illinois and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. She sheds light on the imbrications of race and education in Indian postcolonial nation-building and US Cold War empire-building and discusses the role of racialized gender in the daily operations of the sisterhood relationship.

The next two essays look at different forms and uses of media in addressing politics and affect. Deborah Thurman traces the popular narratives about race, gender, and feeling following Title VII of the Civil Rights Act through an analysis of episodes of TV sitcoms that deal with sensitivity training. She shows how these depictions rebuke attempts at feminist and antiracist interventions into the workplace while featuring resistance to the increased demands for affective labor that accompany deindustrialization. Joseph Whitson examines Indigenous activists' use of Instagram to address and intervene in environmental injustices perpetrated by the US outdoor recreation industry. In doing so, he calls attention to the Indigenous environmentalists' merging of social media systems with grounded Indigenous praxis to push against the narrative of erasure and create the foundations for Indigenous-centered outdoor recreation and social media activism.

This issue also features an important forum, "Against Empire: Taiwan, American Studies, and the Archipelagic," convened by Wendy Cheng and Chih-Ming Wang. Taiwan's complex relationship with the US reached a new [End Page v] height under the Trump presidency. The forum's conveners and contributors place Taiwan in the historical and contemporary US imaginary to engage the triangulated politics of the United States, the People's Republic of China, and Taiwan that have been overdetermined by US military empire. As the essays not only illuminate the implications of coalition politics in the larger Asian and Pacific island worlds but also reflect on the origins of American studies in Cold War politics, the forum has a great deal to teach for American studies scholars beyond those specializing in Taiwan, Asia, or the Pacific.

In the first book review, Leon Hilton discusses three recent works that deal with psychopower and psychopolitics and especially speak to current political struggles over policing and the criminalization of racialized communities. Michelle Vasquez Ruiz reviews three books that explore how colonization in Latin America continues to be deployed through racial and gender violence as well as neoliberal policies and economic structures. [End Page vi]