Crises and the Work of Critique

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the wildcat strike at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which gave rise to the Cops Off Campus movement, and the raging fires in the Santa Cruz Mountains that darkened the sky, saturating the air with ash, were the material conditions out of which the first Critical Ethnic Studies (CES) issue under our editorship was published in open-access mode. Since the launch of that issue, the journal has served as an arena for discussions of the resurgence of fascisms on a global scale, the violence of borderland regimes and people’s resistance, and center-to-center relationalities between Pacific Island studies and transpacific studies at a time of renewed U.S. imperialism and escalating military tensions in the Pacific. Through special issues, an expanded advisory board, and online forums during the pandemic, CES has emerged in this historical juncture as a collective critical project that reflects the breadth and urgency of public scholarship within the field and related political education and solidarity-building in the United States and beyond.

On the level of content, the journal has critically engaged, even as it has symptomatically reflected, the social, political, and economic convulsions of the last three years. Yet, even as these crises have momentarily laid bare the structures of racial capitalist violence, they also have been seized to reentrench systemic social domination, often in ways far from obvious, making the critical work of this journal more necessary than ever. From the structural racism exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic, to the rebellions in cities and towns across the United States and throughout the world in the summer of 2020, to the growing momentum for Black reparations met by a rightist offensive against Black studies and “critical race theory” in U.S. schools, to powerful local Land Back movements and piecemeal official admissions of Indigenous genocide, to Native organizing on the world-shattering impacts of climate change, to global movements against fascism, and to peoples’ struggles against U.S. militarism and interventionist war, the time of now has profoundly shaped this journal. Contributors to CES have sought to grapple with some of the most pressing issues of our present. As coeditors, now located in academic institutions on opposite coasts—UC Santa Cruz and the University of Maryland—we were confronted throughout the pandemic with weighty family care, devastating losses of family and friends, and untenable overwork. Our decision to expand CES’s editorial foundations thus also reflected the exigencies of this historical moment. Last year we welcomed a new editorial collective that includes Rana Jaleel (UC Davis), Alyosha Goldstein (University of New Mexico), and Iyko Day (Mount Holyoke) and was supported by Julietta Hua (San Francisco State). Their intellectual labor has shaped this and forthcoming issues and immeasurably strengthened the journal’s theoretical moorings.

At the same time, in a historical juncture in which the uneven effects of a global pandemic, precarious work, police brutality, military imperialism, fascist violence, and climate change have amplified the urgency of critical ethnic studies as a space for socially engaged scholarship, political education, and grassroots mobilization, it has not been lost on us that we and the press have struggled to produce the journal on the usual timeline. If our first CES issue emerged from a social context shaped by the UC Santa Cruz wildcat strike and historic fires that ravaged the Santa Cruz region, this issue was placed on hold as UC graduate and postdoctoral workers went on the largest academic workers’ strike in history and torrential rains led to widespread flooding throughout Santa Cruz County, which was designated a FEMA disaster zone. Shaped in multifarious ways by contemporary crises, this issue asks the paired questions: How has the tumult of the present been seized to intensify the accumulative violence of racial capitalism? And what does it mean to do ruthless critique now?

Like our other recent issues, Issue 8.1 includes five special documents—an interview, a work-in-translation from the Global South, a curated political education document, a syllabus, and a forum around a significant work in the field of critical ethnic studies—that cast light on the struggles of organizers and nonacademic thinkers both within and beyond the United States. Among these contributions, the forum on Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray’s book, Spent behind the Wheel: Drivers’ Labor in the Uber Economy, and the early nineties’ political education materials from the abolitionist organization Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC) both center political struggles in the United States. At first glance more international in scope, the interview, the work-in-translation, and the syllabus address the relationship of Kurdish Indigeneity in war-torn northern Syria to statelessness, labor exploitation and communist organizing in Palestine, and the reverberations of the ongoing Korean War, respectively. Notwithstanding their local focus, struggles for labor rights by ride-share drivers and the grassroots mobilization of women in South Central Los Angeles against the mass incarceration of their children resonate with the other special documents. All speak to what Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in her observation that crisis and surplus are “two sides of the same coin,” describes as “dispossession in service to capital.”1 To highlight just one example of structural resonance, the Mothers ROC meeting agenda from May 12, 1993, when read alongside the “L.A. Uprising/Saigu” section of the “Reverberations of the Korean War: A Syllabus Module,” enables a grappling with the entanglements of racial capitalism beyond framings that attribute motive force to Black–Korean tensions as a driver of the 1992 rebellion. Instead, by illuminating Los Angeles as a terrain shaped by counterinsurgent violence, the juxtaposition of these two contributions points to the continuum between U.S. police and war power. If taken together, the contributions to this issue invite being read as records of regionally specific struggles against the crises of racial capitalism on a global scale. Insofar as they suggest lines of continuity across diverse movement spaces, these materials encourage us to see possibilities for internationalist solidarity. Taken from the interactive installation artwork, “우리들의 조각그림 맞추기/Our Puzzle” (2004), by Yul-san Liem and Still Present Past exhibit participants, the cover image for this special issue features at its heart a rendering of two figures central to the transnational anti-imperialist Korea peace movement: the artist’s grandmother Popai Liem and the grassroots queer community organizer Hyun Lee. Based in the United States, both diasporic Korean women were on the frontlines of international movements to bring the unresolved Korean War to an end. Each in their own time, both were ceaselessly active in solidarity activities with the revolutionary struggles of peoples around the globe against imperialism. Before passing away from breast cancer on March 7, 2022, Hyun Lee urged those around her to “push together, nobody leading and somebody following—everybody together” in the global movement against imperialism. This issue draws inspiration from Liem's and Lee's fearlessness and courage.

Conducted in Arabic and edited by Loubna Qutami and transcribed, translated, and edited by Shireen Akram-Boshar, the interview, “The Graveyard of Revolutions: An Interview with a Kurdish-Syrian Youth from Kobane,” sheds light on the political awakening and disillusionment of “N,” a Kurdish refugee originally from the Kobane region of northern Syria. Critiquing the complicity of various actors in the subjugation of the Syrian people, N notes that Kurds “have been regarded as migrants” to undermine their indigeneity to northern Syria as well as parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and “Red Kurdistan.” He describes his multiple border-crossings and furtive return to war-torn Kobane in the hopes of finding family. Discovered by Daesh while in his family home, N shatters his leg after leaping out of the window in an attempt to escape and is promptly captured. N’s broken body encapsulates the quandary of Kurds in a homeland fractured by vying sovereignties, pointing to the urgency of grappling with how the violence of partition renders an Indigenous people surplus, vulnerable to death, imprisonment, and expulsion.

To some degree, the work-in-translation, Omar Talibi’s 1972 essay, “The Palestinian and Jewish Working Class and Its Organizations, 1918–1939,” from Shu’un Filastiniyya, the journal of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s research center, picks up the question of the tendency of settler colonialism, as theorized by figures like Patrick Wolfe, toward Indigenous genocide. In an introduction to its translation of Talibi’s essay, the University of California Santa Cruz Arabic Working Group critiques Wolfe’s generalizing assertion of the native’s superfluity, pointing to the labor exploitability of the Palestinian population: “If Palestinians were frequently made marginal or surplus to Jewish capital, they were not ever superfluous. . . . In fact, Palestinian workers have remained critical in the development of the Israeli economy after 1948.” To no small degree, Talibi’s analysis demonstrates that the crisis Israeli settler colonialism faces is inherently racial capitalistic in nature, concerned at its core about its own reproducibility as an economic system. We might recall Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of genocide, published just a few years prior to Talibi’s article, in which he described French settler colonialism in Vietnam as an “underworld of misery” in which the “colonial subproletariat [were] forced to work for starvation wages.”2 As Sartre contends, “Their value as an almost unpaid labor force protects them, to a certain extent, against physical genocide.”3 This insight sheds some light on Talibi’s account of the process whereby “Jewish” and “Arab” workers were increasingly segregated, as well as the colonial state’s unsuccessful attempts to exclude Palestinians from the labor market.

The crisis of surplus shadows our political education documents, archival materials from the early 1990s from the grassroots organization Mothers Reclaiming Our Children and curated by the Southern California Library. Founded in South Central Los Angeles in November 1992 by women of color whose sons had been imprisoned or murdered by police, Mothers ROC, true to its name, reclaimed imprisoned and murdered kin not solely by protesting state violence but also by transforming the public arena into a site of mourning. Among themselves, they conducted political education, and in turn, they educated others. In a photo of organizers, one woman holds up a sign that reads, “The system murdered my son.” In addition to this photograph, the political education documents include a Mothers ROC meeting agenda with handwritten annotations and a flyer they produced, titled “Our Children Are Not Criminals,” giving moving insight into how a small group of committed organizers combated the exercise of lethal and predatory police power against their communities. As they note on their website, “The militarization of the LAPD was never about keeping the peace, but rather exploiting the fear of criminal activity, in order to maintain the subjugation of black and brown communities.”4 Alongside the guiding questions the Southern California Library poses, these archival materials highlight the power of intersectional community organizing in response to systemic racial capitalist violence and oppression.

The crisis-generating structure of permanent war is the focus of “Reverberations of the Korean War,” the first module in the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective’s ongoing rollout of their open-access syllabus, which is intended to serve as an anti-imperialist tool against permanent war. In a year that marks the seventieth anniversary of the July 27, 1953, Korean War armistice—which called for the United States, North Korea, and China, as signatories, to hammer out a lasting peace agreement in three months’ time—this syllabus module asks what the Korean War’s irresolution has enabled. Pointing not just to the war’s centrality to the national security state, the empire of U.S. bases around the globe, the military-industrial complex, and knowledge production in the U.S. academy but also to the ways in which diaspora, kinship, and memory are arenas imprinted by the violence of imperialist war, this module offers a critical approach to the lived effects and consequences of unending counterrevolutionary war. “Reverberations of the Korean War” further explores how hypermilitarization and partition affect multiple generations across geographies entangled in U.S. military empire, from the repercussions of peninsular division to the racist violence of militarized sexual labor to ideological battles over how to memorialize wartime violence. By raising to view the global and intimate scales on which the Korean War’s violence is reproduced, this syllabus project centers political education as vital to ending the war.

The four essays in this issue grapple with the historical, cultural, and political foundations that undergird the proliferation of crises in the present. Together, they contend with the radical political possibilities that may emerge from the wreckages of colonialism and racial capitalism. Sony Coráñez Bolton’s essay in this issue, “Manifest Disablement: Cripping the Frontier Thesis of American History,” apprehends the “frontier” as a disabling force of racial dispossession through capitalist property relations. Coráñez Bolton’s essay proposes “manifest disablement” as a juridical-discursive engine of U.S. imperial expansion. Building on theorizations of whiteness as property, Coráñez Bolton argues that manifest disablement works through dual modes of coloniality. “The first is the dispossession of nonwhite bodies of the ability to be owners or sovereign agents in relation to land, which augments the physical and mental ability of the white able body. The second is the presumptive heteronormativity of colonial property logics.” Thus, the essay contends, “manifest disablement as a form of colonial ableism that productively organizes the development of land through the implantation of the heteronormative homestead.”

Following Coráñez Bolton’s historical account of debility as a mechanism of racial dispossession of U.S. imperialism, Maryam Kashani’s essay, “The Wreck Itself: Between Palestine and American Indian Studies’ Sovereignty and the Surreal,” dwells on the problem of how to mobilize and activate solidarities across settler colonial contexts marked by debility and loss. The essay proposes wreckage as a medium for reanimating life and political possibilities that cannot be completely subsumed by military or institutional violence. Kashani’s essay takes up the Palestinian artists Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas’s art installation that premiered at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2018 and connects it to Steven Salaita’s “unhiring” in 2014. As Kashani writes, “By focusing on the wreck itself as place and possibility, Abou-Rahme and Abbas suggest that the political impasse of (one-state, two-state Palestinian) nation-state futurity is not the only movement or mobilization possible. To focus on the wreck itself and not the myth is to be with the land, which is ‘swarming with life’ at a ‘time where they have declared me dead or dying.’” Juxtaposing the work of reactivating thriving liveliness from the wreckages of Palestinian villages with the wreckage that Salaita’s unhiring left in American Indian studies and the University of Illinois (a hire that was supposed to create connections between Palestinian and Indigenous movements), Kashani considers how the labor of sprouting life from ruins can sprout new growth and rebuilding.

Like Kashani’s essay, Vineeta Singh’s “In the University (Archive) But Not of It: The Foundation of the Hampton Institute and the Forgetting of Abolition Democracy” contends that returning to and reactivating sites of wreckage can be a starting ground for a radical politics—in this case, abolition democracy. Singh turns to the archives of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, which was established in 1868 and became a model for vocational training in Black institutions of higher education. Rather than focus on the institute’s curriculum, Singh tells an institutional history that has, at its center, the ruins of a clandestine Black school that was a part of the refugee settlement of the Grand Contraband Camp, “a staging ground for the Black institutions that could shore up what Du Bois terms ‘the abolition-democracy.’” Singh argues that “In order to appropriate the romantic gloss of racial uplift and simultaneously renounce abolitionist thought’s threat to white supremacy, the school’s founders strategically forgot” this abolitionist history. By centering the ruins upon which Hampton was built, Singh emphasizes that “the legacies of those other practices have not been extinguished, even in the archive, and certainly not in the practice of Black students.” In contradistinction to the preponderance of gestural diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives mushrooming across U.S. universities today, Singh instead urges embedding antiracist and feminist reading practices into how institutions narrate their racial histories.

The fourth essay in this issue, Sharon Luk’s “The Asian Problem: Back toward an Analysis of the Race Concept in the Era of Black Lives Matter,” also considers the historical and political conjunctures that subsume emergent abolitionist politics. Luk returns to the recurring thematic of the so-called Asian problem, especially as it surfaces in the trials of Asian American police officers charged with the murder of Black men. Taking the debates that ensued from the U.S. state’s murder of Akai Gurley in 2014 at the hands of Chinese American police officer Peter Liang as a starting point, Luk argues that “any popular demand for criminal prosecution requires a basic degree of complicity with, or unproblematized assumptions of, both the individualization of crime (and injury) and the legitimacy of the criminal trial itself to adjudicate justice.” For Luk, the problem of ambivalence toward the criminal justice system extends beyond the “Asian case” to all contemporary racial justice movements, including reformist and even abolitionist ones that grapple with ending race violence. Ultimately, Luk argues, “rather than to move toward racial legibility or to assume management of dominant racial optics, this indeterminate trajectory of inhabiting the inscrutable” resonates with radical politics beyond state recognition.

Since 2020, the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the pandemic have increased inequality and made those most precariously positioned take on the burdens of risk, expanding the availability of on-demand contactless networks of goods and services. This process has been enabled by technological infrastructures and speculative accounts of technofuturity promoting convenience for digital consumers that had taken root before the pandemic. Kara Keeling argues in a different context that finance capital, which includes capital investments in digital platforms, “exists within a longer history of racial capitalism, itself undergirded by and maintained through the socioeconomic and cultural relations set in motion by the technological innovations and exploitation of risks that spread chattel slavery in the Americas.”5 It is thus not surprising that technology continues to act as risk management both for capital and for bodies that have always been fully human. Postpandemic speculation about high-tech futures and capital investments fueling tech giants and start-ups thus maintain what Keeling calls the “quotidian violence” that secures the existing organization of things: “In other words, quotidian violence names the violence that maintains a temporality and a spatial logic hostile to the change and chance immanent in each now.”6 This is the reproductive politics of racial capitalism.

This issue’s forum tackles the racialized and gendered reproduction of racial capitalism through digital platforms and connects these to a politics of reproductive justice in unexpected ways. As we bring this issue to publication, the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade and abortion rights has been at the center of liberal feminist organizing. Yet, as our forum showcasing Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray’s Spent behind the Wheel: Drivers’ Labor in the Uber Economy (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) suggests, the erosion of abortion rights could be an invitation to broaden the horizon of reproductive justice through solidarities rendered impossible by liberal politics. Rather than replicate more commonplace assumptions that the interests of taxi drivers and Uber and Lyft drivers are diametrically opposed, Hua and Ray follow the lead of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance union and emphasize the shared experiences of taxi and gig drivers, as well as the relationship of these drivers to passengers, police and regulatory agencies, health and safety, and urban space. In contrast to Uber and Lyft promotional materials that advertise freedom and flexibility for drivers, the book demonstrates that these apps are lucrative ventures precisely because they depend on devalued reproductive labor that enables the flourishing of consumer lives (who have the convenience of a ride at their fingertips). They argue that driver labor can best be understood as “gendered intimate service labor congruent with other, more traditionally legible forms of intimate service labor like household work.”7 Even as Spent behind the Wheel showcases how drivers’ lives are literally expended, their vitality extracted, even to the point of debility and disability due to their laboring conditions, it also considers the kinds of solidarities, such as between disabled passengers and drivers, that could be possible in spite of the apps’ mystification of the conditions of production and consumption.

Finally, in closing, we end with gratitude. For the past two years, in the midst of serial crises and tragedies, CES has had a steady and brilliant throughline in the person of Jane Komori, our managing editor. Jane has steered us forward with enormous clarity and commitment. We do not envy her the task of organizing the two of us as work-worn department chairs, but somehow, with extraordinary calm and determination, she navigated each issue to completion, always keeping the larger picture in mind, even as she attended to the nitty-gritty details of the editorial process. As Jane steps down to pursue her own academic career, we wish to acknowledge how life-giving her dedication has been both to this journal and to us.