Editor's Note

Abstract

Editor's Note Sarah Banet-Weiser, Editor As Robin Kelley notes in his response to the ASA Presidential Address by Ruth Wilson Gilmore on November 19, 2011, in San Antonio, Texas, the packed house was energized and electrified by Gilmore's remarks. She covered a wide range of themes in her address, from the current state of the neoliberal state to a poignant and important autobiography to a rousing call for the members of the American Studies Association to organize, organize, organize. The address was given in the midst of a labor protest of hotel workers in the city of San Antonio (as well as elsewhere) and Gilmore creatively and imaginatively engaged the audience to participate, reminding us in many varied ways that academics are also, and crucially, workers. Gilmore's address in this issue of American Quarterly could not be better timed, with worldwide eruptions against the state and global capitalism. Gilmore's call to American studies scholars to remind ourselves that we are workers, that the work we do must continuously involve organizing, and that we must think more expansively about worker solidarity is creatively relayed as an essay in the following pages, and is further engaged by two responses to the address from Robin D. G. Kelley and Sara Clarke Kaplan. Indeed, in response to recent events, the American Studies Association has issued the following official statement, "Intellectual Freedom in a Time of (Economic) Crisis": The American Studies Association condemns all efforts to criminalize freedoms of speech and association. We condemn attempts to intimidate and silence scholars whose work engages them in matters of public concern and policy. The United States pays its scholars in public and private tax-exempt institutions to consider, among other things, the problems and challenges societies face, to draw lessons from the past, to compare across polities, and to make informed recommendations that will spark open debate. At the end of the day all not-for-profit education is underwritten by, and therefore must be consistently made available to, the people. Recent events around the country mock provisions in the modern world's most durable constitution, and displace the difficult work of thoughtfulness and remedy to surveillance and punishment. We view the attacks as part of the orchestrated assault on all public sector workers. While the character of the attacks on our colleagues is not surprising, given the US's decades-long embrace of criminalization as an all-purpose response to social, economic, and other problems, it is long since time to say: Enough. We are workers, and we are the public. [End Page vii] In this issue, we also have three articles that represent the theoretical and methodological range of American studies scholars. The first, by Sean Metzger, is an exploration of the theater of Naomi Iizuka, and offers a unique and important reconsideration of theater and Asian American critique through a complex, Deleuzian theoretical framework. Next, Kevin Lewis O'Neill gives us a compelling analysis of the intersectional relationships between the state and the entertainment industry with his examination of a Guatemalan reality television show cosponsored by the United States Agency for International Development. The show, which features former gang members who are enlisted to create a sustainable business within Guatemala's formal economy, is a fascinating and revealing glimpse into the deep interrelations among the state, political economy, religion, and entertainment. Finally, in this issue Jane Simonsen writes about the varied uses by indigenous people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of images of themselves. Much attention has been paid to the ways in which white communities used, appropriated, and retooled images of indigenous people during this time; Simonsen reminds us that images are taken up in a variety of ways, by different communities, to generate meaning about history, identity, and power. We also feature six book reviews in this issue, as well as an event review of Dave LaChappelle's "Rape of Africa" exhibit. The labor of these contributors engages carefully considered and varied conceptions of power—state-centered, diffuse, and subaltern, to name a few—and the ongoing struggles against the cementing of a disaster-driven, globalized capitalist economy. [End Page viii] Copyright © 2011 The American...