Editor's Note

Abstract

Editor's Note Mari Yoshihara The essays in this issue all address, in different ways, how borders, places, cities, and life are managed, controlled, and represented by the possessive logics of the state, empire, and capitalism as well as how they are radically imagined and lived otherwise by those who refuse those logics. Alana de Hinojosa's "El Río Grande as Pedagogy" examines the Chamizal Dispute that purportedly ended when the 1964 treaty returned el Chamizal to Mexico and displaced 5,600 Mexican American residents of South El Paso. Through the pedagogical lens of the unruly river, de Hinojosa illustrates the terrain's refusal of white possessive logics as well as the residents' complex response to the treaty. Jennifer Ponce de León takes a different approach to the border in "After the Border Is Closed," which analyzes Ricardo A. Bracho's dystopian science fiction play Puto set in a near future in which the US has closed its border with Mexico. Ponce de León shows the play's depiction of the racialized social hierarchies, state and parastate violence, militarism, and authoritarian modalities of social control that are systematically produced by US capitalism and imperialism. Introducing the neologism of "transmilitainment," Waleed Mahdi examines Morocco's role in the production of Hollywood's "war on terror" films. Through a rich empirical study, Mahdi discusses not only the monetary relationship between Hollywood producers and Moroccan partners but also the multifaceted infrastructure for such support, arguing that transmilitainment's commodification of Morocco for pleasurable global consumption of US state violence is itself an act of neocolonial violence. Turning our attention to the other end of the spectrum in the imagination of places, Chandra Russo's "Cities of Fruit" examines how art activism can promote popular education and mobilize radical collectivity in the face of eco-social alienation. Russo focuses on the Guerrilla Grafters, an activist artist collective whose members surreptitiously graft fruit onto sterile city trees in the San Francisco Bay Area, as an example of how creative arts can contest dominant social-spatial arrangements and forge alternative imaginaries of the city. Danielle Haque also discusses an alternative imagining of city space and life in "Collective Care and Human Rights Cinema." Through an analysis of Musa Syeed's 2016 film A Stray, Haque examines the film's portrayal of the improvised and communal spaces and sustaining networks created by Muslims in Minneapolis. Finally, in his essay that turned out to be an excellent tribute to the late Lauren Berlant, Chad Shomura presents a reading of Jennifer Egan's short story "Found Objects," to show that [End Page v] Berlant's notion of "impasse" points to the life otherwise by opening modes of being that are irredeemable to the good life founded on "animacy hierarchy." Aria S. Halliday reviews three books that examine how Latina and Black girls make sense of themselves in a society built on their objectification, consumption, and familial connection as well as the appropriation of their creativity for neoliberal consumerism. Hōkūlani Aikau discusses three important works that center Hawai'i as the site of settler colonialism and cultures of US imperialism and use indigeneity as a critical analytic. In a digital project review, Dylan Rodríguez engages Edmund T. Gordon's online exhibit Racial Geography Tour that guides the visitor through the University of Texas at Austin campus and the university's institutional foundations in racial, colonial history. [End Page vi] Copyright © 2021 The American Studies Association