Editor's Note

Abstract

Editor's Note Mari Yoshihara We are delighted to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of American Quarterly. In the three-quarters of a century, the field of American studies has been a site of vibrant exchange of ideas and gone through dynamic changes in terms of the agents of knowledge production and objects of study, the approaches to archives and tools of analysis, and the framing of questions and articulations of arguments. The six essays in this issue perfectly exemplify the kinds of scholarship enabled by both the accumulation of knowledge through the generations and the bold challenges to, and departures from, existing modes of analysis. The six essays all interrogate, in various contexts and through diverse approaches, the politics and expressions of the nation, state, capital, rights, body, and life. The first essay, by Emily Holloway, examines the archive of mid-nineteenth-century New York City public health administration that tracked the transit of corpses through Manhattan. Through an analysis of the intersections of biopolitics and urban space, she illuminates the layered meanings of "speculation" and its relations to surveillance and abstractions of financial value. In the essay that follows, Allan Downey also approaches New York City but through a very different lens: Haudenosaunee men who relocated from Canada and the northeastern United States to Brooklyn to work as ironworkers and their families that established the community of Little Caughnawaga. Downey demonstrates that, at a time when Indigenous peoples were removed from urban spaces and "Indian authenticity" was perceived to be the opposite of modernity, Kanien'kehá:ka citizens were central to building modernity and rearticulated their own nationhood, community, and self-determination. The next two essays look at the global circulation of text, body, voice, and their meanings in the Cold War era. In "If Books Could Kill," Mark David Kaufman mines the declassified archives of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Congress for Cultural Freedom to illuminate how these state institutions sought to manipulate the legacy of Leo Tolstoy as an instrument of the Cultural Cold War. He shows that while the US intelligence community sought to champion Tolstoy as a thinker whose individualist philosophy was assimilable neither to Marxism nor to capitalism, such appropriation conflicted with the writer's antipathy to the weaponization of culture for nationalist agenda. In the following essay, "Sonic Transness," Emmanuel David offers a reading of Christine Jorgensen's vocal performance in the 1962 Philippine film Kaming Mga Talyada (We Who Are Sexy), to analyze her voice and sonic practices in [End Page v] her self-constitution as a global, aspirational, and cosmopolitan white trans subject. By focusing on Jorgensen's performance in the Philippines, the essay also brings out the global production and extraction of value from trans and gender-nonconforming voices. The last two essays shed light on the legal mechanisms of racialization that manage knowledge, discourse, labor, and mobility of people of color. Through an interdisciplinary approach to the legal apparatuses surrounding the circulation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s image, likeness, speeches, and voice, Joseph Coppola illuminates the role of intellectual property in whitewashing King's legacy. By demonstrating how the structural commitments of the law contribute to racial hierarchy and economic inequality, Coppola addresses the power dynamics that shape the flow of knowledge production in the digital information age. In the final essay, Eram Alam traces the transformation and standardization of the first cohort of Asian physicians trained outside the United States into Foreign Medical Graduates within the United States. Analyzing the documentary regimes for verifying identity, skill, and competence, Alam shows that the documentary proceduralism operates as a racializing, disciplinary strategies across categories of immigrant labor. In Book Reviews, Paige A. McGinley discusses three recent works that advance the scholarship on the civil rights movement, and J. T. Roane examines three books on worldmaking practices, ecology, and environmental justice in the "Negrocene." In her event review, "¡No Vengan! Immigration Art in the Post-Trump Era," Maria Liliana Ramirez discusses Sergio de la Torre's exhibition put on as an artistic response to Vice President Kamala Harris's 2021 speech in Guatemala against the backdrop of the history of the history of undocumented immigrants in Santa...