CES as Open Access Platform for Politically Engaged Scholarship

In the spirit of enacting ethnic studies not just as an intellectual formation but also as political education, we have chosen to move the journal to an online open access platform. By transforming CES into a hub for internetworked intellectual and political convergence, we hope to catalyze the journal as a lively forum for generative conversations between and among scholars at all ranks, activists, organizers, and artists engaged in critical ethnic studies and racial justice work, thus bridging academic research and community organizing and activist-scholarship here and around the world. To this end, we have introduced several innovations. First and foremost, each issue now opens with features seldom recognized as scholarship in academic peer-reviewed journals, rather than positioning them as supplements or postscripts to more traditional academic research. CES issues will now open with (1) interviews with activists and activist collectives conducted by us as editors or guest editors, (2) curated political education documents (including pamphlets, manifestos, and community archives), and (3) syllabi that mark pressing, emergent, or undertheorized areas of concern in the field of critical ethnic studies. In other words, texts used for political mobilization and teaching, as well as exchanges with activists and organizers committed to racial justice, frame the featured peer-reviewed academic articles. Our belief is that this journal can begin both to disrupt what has historically counted as intellectual labor by recognizing these documents as publications in their own right and to extend the reach of these documents beyond the original contexts—academic in some cases, organizational in others—in which they first emerged.

In our highlighting of critical ethnic studies syllabi as contemporary collective tools of liberatory political education and thus dynamic documents for critical ethnic studies praxis, CES draws inspiration from the remarkable recent wave of collectively authored, broadly disseminated, open access syllabi—#StandingRockSyllabus and #IslamophobiaIsRacismSyllabus, among others—that have refused the proprietary, exclusionary logic of the academic paywall by compiling or linking to downloaded or scanned PDFs of academic journal articles and book chapters as well as online publications. With the aim of furthering the reach of radical syllabi organized around racial justice, we also draw from past pedagogical trajectories that intersected with the field of ethnic studies during and shortly after its Bay Area emergence under an internationalist Third Worldist banner. We recall, for instance, that the journal of radical criminology, Crime and Social Justice, in addition to featuring scholarship and movement updates from around the globe under a section titled “Struggle for Justice,” included course outlines and bibliographies—both as stand-alone academic publications and as documents with far-reaching political potential—under the rubric of “People’s Pedagogy.” Perspicaciously remarking the rise of what they termed “the police-industrial complex” consequent to Nixon’s sweeping “law and order” push, UC Berkeley’s radical criminologists organized their gateway course, Criminology 100 A-B, around “crimes of imperialism,” “crimes of exploitation,” “crimes of sexism,” “crimes of survival,” “crimes by the state,” and “people’s justice.” As Barry Krisberg argued in an introduction to the Criminology 100 A-B syllabus that he, Tony Platt, and Paul Takagi collectively authored and taught in 1972—that is, prior to the university’s dismantling of the School of Criminology because of its anticapitalist critique—the very definition of criminality required fundamental reconceptualization: “In our view, legally defined ‘criminals’ were really victims of the larger system crimes such as imperialism and racism which denied whole classes of people (and even countries) their full human potentiality and their right to survival, self-determination and dignity.”11

In the first instance, the criticality of ethnic studies resided in the revolutionary challenge that it posed as a mode of political education to what Frantz Fanon dubbed the “bewilder[ing]” effects of mass education in capitalist countries—education designed to “separate the exploited from those in power.”12 Yet the formalization of programs dedicated to ethnic studies in US universities and the field’s professional consolidation have also been shadowed by horizontally structured arenas of dissentient knowledge-making, both central and adjacent to organizing spaces, above ground and otherwise. If “it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge,” as Moten and Harney have argued, by contrast, these subterranean arenas of political education and resistance, located outside academic enclosures, have signaled refuge from the university-as-refuge, looping back in circuitous, often neutralized ways into academic settings. We recall, for example, the 1970s’ Bay Area study sessions on Marxism and racism helmed by Harry Chang and their profound, if often unacknowledged, influence on “the theory and practice of racial justice in the United States,” not just in movement contexts but also in ethnic studies as a then emergent field.13 That the Third Worldist internationalism of ethnic studies contracted as the field institutionalized—resurfacing in the politically neutralized form of the 1990s’ mandate to go transnational—speaks volumes about the inhospitality of the US university to anti-imperialist and antiracist political education. Critiques of US empire leveled from within ethnic studies have confronted first a Cold War and then a post–Cold War area studies establishment consolidated by “astonishing levels of collaboration between the universities, the foundations, and the intelligence arms of the U.S. state.”14 In stark contrast to the securitized internationalism of area studies, the promise of ethnic studies has been located in the imagination and practice of political collectivity beyond borders.

CES will continue to publish politically relevant interdisciplinary scholarship in as well as on the edges of critical ethnic studies. Yet with the aim of fostering the internationalism of critical ethnic studies, we have introduced, as a feature of each issue, research produced within or about the Global South, including non–English language scholarship. The inclusion in the Anglo-American academy of multilingual, globally multisited ethnic studies research that is all too often marginalized by dint of geographic location and language opens up discussion about how conceptions of difference, power, opposition, and even solidarity “translate” in settings beyond North America. By bringing attention to work published in other languages that is then translated for CES or a piece produced in or about geopolitical locations not typically studied in critical ethnic studies, we proceed from an understanding of translation as a political act—one that not only moves the field in critically transnational directions but also potentially galvanizes its internationalist possibilities.

Finally, CES has abandoned the standard book review format. While useful in furnishing an overview of major contributions of particular books, this format falls short of generating emergent conversations in the field around not just new academic research but also creative provocations in a variety of media. To foster lively exchange around such work, each CES issue, starting with this one, will feature a forum on a recently published book or cultural work that marks new directions in critical ethnic studies. Several scholars in ethnic studies or affiliated fields will provide commentary on the featured work from various perspectives; the author(s) or creator(s) will then be invited to respond to the short commentaries. In this regard, our forum follows in the footsteps of existing book fora like those in the Syndicate Network and the Black Agenda Report. It will revolve around not only single-author monographs, coauthored books, and anthologies but also cultural works in a variety of media.

Collectivity beyond Borders as a Critical Ethnic Studies Project

As we assembled this first issue of the journal under our coeditorship, we considered how the unbridled reactionary politics of this historical moment—the sweeping far-right populism across the globe, the militarized securitization of everything existing, and the reintroduction of fascism into the common idiom—has required new analytical and political tools beyond those specific to prior critical ethnic studies preoccupations with the violence of liberal incorporation as racism’s defining dynamic in multicultural capitalist societies. In a juncture in which the imagination and practice of solidarity are more pressing than ever, there are few ready political paradigms “from below and to the left” that galvanize collective anticapitalist world-making across borders or identity formations.15 Even as global interdependence, as Harsha Walia states in our interview with her in this issue, “is completely structured by violence” and indeed is linked in often subterranean, border-crossing ways as the basis of extractive and exploitative regimes, we have an impoverished political vocabulary and set of tools with which to realize solidarity. Yet as a practice of anticapitalist collectivity, solidarity is precisely what has made ethnic studies, past and present, critical. If, in its TWLF emergence, ethnic studies refused the “here” and “there”—the divided-world logic—essential to imperialist consciousness, we ask, How does critical ethnic studies, positioned as it largely is in the belly of the beast, cognitively map the global political economy of racial capitalism? If older models of envisioning solidarity are inadequate to the current moment, what alternative visions has critical ethnic studies proposed or enacted?

In an illuminating keyword essay in this journal’s very first issue, Jodi Melamed suggested that critical ethnic studies undertake racial capitalism as “an activist hermeneutic” by analyzing how it engenders “social separateness—the disjoining or deactivating of relations between human beings (and humans and nature)—needed for capitalist expropriation to work.”16 Precisely by producing social separateness as the necessary order of things and “reducing collective life to the relations that sustain neoliberal democratic capitalism,”17 racial capitalism encodes the grounds for solidarity. Taken as an activist hermeneutic, the brutal conjunctures of racial capitalism and imperialism, mapped as a cartography not just of violence but also of resistance, animate the internationalism of the Native liberation organization The Red Nation and its principles of unity, the left-legalism and anticolonialism of Sanctions Kill, and the US university–focused abolitionism of Abolition University, to name some organizations whose powerful analysis and organizing we wish to call attention to. Within critical ethnic studies, anticapitalism and anti-imperialism thus require committed conjunctural analysis, bringing to view the linkages between “distinct yet densely interconnected geographies.”18 In the structural joints between abolition and militarism, Native decolonization and US military empire, migrant justice and Indigenous sovereignty, and Black freedom and Native decolonization are the basis for imagining and enacting solidarity against the differentiations of racial capitalism.

The Itinerary

The current issue opens with a conversation between the CES editors and Harsha Walia, an activist who cofounded No One Is Illegal (NOII), an anticolonial, antiracist, and anticapitalist migrant justice organization with a long history of political solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty and Native land defense struggles. In this exchange, Walia, the author of Undoing Border Imperialism (AK Press, 2013) and the forthcoming Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Haymarket, 2021), delves into the illuminating back history of NOII’s formation in the immediate wake of 9/11 as, in the first instance, an antiwar organization, thus pointing to the necessity of critically situating the movement for migrant justice within a broader anti-imperialist framework. She reminds us in her interview of the gatekeeping settler colonial nation’s imperialist role in creating, on a global scale, the destabilizing conditions of expulsion that lead to migrant flows: the policies of neoliberal austerity, the free trade agreements that displace Indigenous agricultural producers in the Global South, and the depredations of US militarism and outright war. The production of exploitable migrant labor is one intended outcome of border imperialism. The “limited inclusion of migrant bodies into Western states through processes of criminalization and racialization,” she makes plain, “justif[ies] the commodification of their labor.”19 Drawing on organizing ethics from feminist/trans communities, prefiguration, or the building of “movement cultures and . . . left institutions in the model of the world we are seeking to create,” is central to NOII’s practice of interdependence based on “abundance and care.”

This issue of CES brings the manifesto of the Beyond Borders Caucus (BBC) of the Indigenous liberation organization The Red Nation, which we republish here, in conversation with Harsha Walia’s activist work. As Hope-Siihasin Alvarado, BBC founder and Southwest point person for the Coalition to Close the Camps, articulates in an introduction to this political education document, the purpose of this caucus, whose emergence coincided with the wave of border crossings by Central American migrant children, is “to mobilize solidarity and support to our refugee and migrant relatives that are impacted by colonial borders, border militarization, and border imperialism.” As a decolonized “embodiment and affirmation of a coming Indigenous future, a future in which many worlds fit,” BBC has mobilized in extraordinary ways around migrant justice, organizing to stop deportation on stolen Indigenous lands. In its cognitive mapping of the imperialist violence that precipitates migrant flows and the racial capitalist logic of caging migrants as an intentionally produced surplus population, the manifesto states, “We demand an end to U.S. foreign policies that subvert democracy abroad and create the conditions in which poor and colonized migrants are exploited for their labor [and] incarcerated alongside Indigenous and Black peoples in private detention centers that profit off their bodies.” In its globally far-reaching analysis of the border as itself a violent settler-colonial construction, Beyond Borders stands in firm solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and sovereignty.

This CES issue also hosts Ma Vang’s curated syllabus for an upper-division critical refugee studies course she designed for the CRES program at UC Merced. As the inaugural chair of CRES (the newest ethnic studies program in the UC system), a former executive board member of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association (CESA), and a founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, Vang has been central to collective activist-intellectual efforts to galvanize dialogue, both within the broader University of California and beyond, around the “ethical reconceptualiz[ing] refugee lifeworlds to make apparent processes of colonization, war, and displacement.” As coeditor of the Critical Refugee Studies website, which hosts a public archive of refugee oral histories, artwork and other forms of creative expression, photos and films, as well as story-map platforms that enable refugees to share stories, Vang has been vital to political education through the sharing of pedagogical resources and the creation of material culture. This website also fosters community convergence around first-person narration of refugee lifeworlds and the all-too-often obscured histories of world-shattering geopolitical violence they reference. Vang’s syllabus frames its introduction to critical refugee studies, an emergent field she has been vital to establishing, through a critical ethnic studies lens. The challenge of teaching materials around the figure of the refugee, as she incisively observes, is how to “humanize . . . displaced peoples” without reinscribing the imperial amnesia of the liberal internationalist human rights regime.

Following from these critical perspectives on solidarity in the face of border imperialism, ongoing and intensifying forms of military imperialism and settler colonialism, mass displacement and migration, and innovations in racial capitalist modes of exploitation and appropriation, the first three peer-reviewed articles in this issue offer prismatic reflections on recent discourses of crisis around emergent figurations of the refugee. Trung Nguyen’s contribution, “The Labor of Absolution: National Detritus and the Op-Ed Form of the Vietnamese Refugee,” opens this issue’s full-length articles section by shifting focus away from the geographic displacement of the Vietnamese refugee to the latter’s temporal travel as a de facto national spokesperson for contemporary refugees. Nguyen asks, What ideological work do Vietnamese refugees perform when they speak or stand for Syrian refugees in the present? Shedding light on the op-ed as a genre linked in collusive ways to the violence of US foreign policy, Nguyen shows how “displaced events” of the past and the ongoing significance of the Vietnamese refugee Cold War racialized formation frame the United States as a reformed nation, absolving it of past and present imperial violence—including that violence that coerces the movement of Syrian refugees.

The next article, Neel Ahuja’s “Weather as War: Race, Disability, and Environmental Determinism in the Syrian Climate War Thesis,” takes up a figure that is often cited as an illustration of what is “new” about the contemporary refugee crisis but is rarely critically examined for its ideological and historical obfuscations: the figure of the climate refugee. Analyzing a range of journalistic and environmental media accounts, Ahuja’s article contends that framings of the Syrian war and Arab uprisings as induced by climate-induced drought rehearse neocolonial accounts of “failed” postcolonial states, including racialized narratives of the Global South’s incapacity to manage resources and the predisposition of Muslims to insurgency. This piece further contends that the preponderance of the figuration of Syrian war veterans as tragically disabled by violence caused by climate change in fact obscures the transnational operations of racial capitalism that structure patterns of coerced migration and debility.

Yet what shape do discourses about the current refugee crisis take, and what do they do, outside a US imperialist context? This issue’s contribution from a scholar outside the Anglo-US academy, Firat Kurt’s “The Rise of Sovereign Subject: The Syrian Refugee Crisis, Islamist Universalism, and Populist Mobilization in Turkey,” approaches the Syrian refugee crisis by examining its mobilization by Turkey’s ruling party, the AKP (Justice and Development). While there has been much focus on the rise of rightist populism in the United States, Britain, France, and other sites in the Global North, less attention has been paid to its ascendancy in places like Turkey. Kurt analyzes how the AKP, through populism and neoliberal Islam, has exploited the Syrian refugee crisis to implement a sovereignty that turns on the right of the pious/righteous to decide who belongs to the polity and who falsely claims such belonging. With regard to the refugee crisis, this translates into a distinction between deserving (truly Muslim) migrants and those who claim Islam in name only, thereby corrupting Turkey. Kurt thus contends that in Turkey, the refugee crisis manifests “as a nexus between populist politics and sovereign practices,” granting those disadvantaged by the AKP’s neoliberal reforms a form of sovereign power that can best be described as “a right to suspend the rights of others.”

Rana Jaleel’s article, “Two Title IXs: Empire and the Transnational Production of ‘Welcomeness’ on Campus,” continues the line of inquiry around sovereignty, but rather than exploring how precarity and power coalesce in the refugee body, as do the first three articles, the essay instead focuses on the juridical and political work performed by the sexually victimized/violated body. Jaleel compares two Title IXs (which coincidentally share a name): the first, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded education, and the second, Title IX in the 2013 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), subtitled “Safety for Indian Women.” She contends that the narrow focus on consent and coercion in the first, based on principles of the contractual relationship between individuals in liberal law, and the inadequacy of the second in relation to Indigenous women, limit what counts as justice (or remedy) within the framework of the two Title IXs. As Jaleel demonstrates, the narrow adjudication of sexual violation that establishes permissible sexual arrangements also serves as a proxy for “permissible property arrangements, realized through gendered, racialized, and colonial intimacies of governance.” Put otherwise, the article insists that we must consider how settler-colonial conceptions of property and sovereignty are routed through the sexualized body.

In the closing full-length article of this issue, “Radioactive Intimacies: The Making of Worldwide Wastelands in Marie Clements’s Burning Vision,” Lou Cornum returns us to the urgency of envisioning and enacting solidarity through the activist hermeneutic of racial capitalism. By examining the web of lethal relations specific to what they term the “networked apocalypse” of US nuclear war, Cornum offers a powerful conjunctural analysis of “the obscured bonds and binds created in the invisible force of radiation.” Central to their account of these radioactive intimacies—drawing here on Lisa Lowe’s theorization of the structural intimacies of imperialism—is the centrality of Native labor to the extractive and expropriative supply side of the world-destroying, genocidal US nuclear colonial regime. Examining the representation of the irradiated Sahtu Dene uranium ore miner in Métis playwright Marie Clements’s Burning Vision, Cornum dwells on the epithet “coolie,” used to describe this figuration of Native labor. Bound in historically inexorable relations with the hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Native labor-as-coolie, Cornum contends, points to the significance of not only thinking beyond the equation of indigeneity with land but also considering Native dispossession as the condition for Native proletarianization. Central to this profound account of how networked mass destruction encodes the paradoxical possibility of life in common, they ask, “How do shared grounds of nuclear apocalypse make possible broad-based global solidarity?”

We follow up on our featured full-length articles with our inaugural forum discussing Manu Karuka’s Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019). The book, which offers significant new insight into the history of the transcontinental railroad by centering the relationship between the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee peoples on the one hand and Chinese migrant workers on the other brings together the thematic threads of this issue, including migration, labor, militarism, imperialism, settler colonialism, sovereignty, and solidarity. As Amy Lee writes, Karuka’s book compellingly makes the case that “railroad colonialism forged the linkages between the military functions of the state and finance capitalism, enabling territorial expansion through corporate financing, infrastructural logistics, unfree labor, and state violence.” Lee draws attention to Karuka’s emphasis on speculation as method and thinks through what solidarities could accordingly be imagined. Four other respondents—Denise Khor, Sandy Grande, Anjali Nath, and Jaskiran Dhillon—reflect on Karuka’s text as an entry point into broader questions around racial capitalism, empire, and the ways in which particular conditions of work shape modes of anti-imperialist internationalist working-class coalitions, anti-imperialism as pedagogy and an epistemology of curiosity, and non-US imperial formations of exploitation and expropriation.

There is, as Walia powerfully reminds us, “no liberation in isolation.” In the hopes of generating far-reaching dialogue and collective political possibility beyond the limits of traditional academic journal protocols and formats, we have inaugurated CES’s move toward a dialogic, open source platform. We invite you to contribute analysis and research, to curate your syllabi or political organizing documents, to share resources and ideas, and to engage in lively exchange with others in this space—in short, to help forge this journal as a site of political education committed to racial justice.

Neda Atanasoski is a professor of feminist studies and critical race and ethnic studies and the chair of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (coauthored with Kalindi Vora; Duke University Press, 2019). She is also the coeditor of a 2017 special issue of the journal Social Identities, titled “Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution.” Atanasoski is the founding codirector of the Center for Racial Justice with Christine Hong at UC Santa Cruz.

Christine Hong is an associate professor of literature, director of critical race and ethnic studies, and codirector with Neda Atanasoski of the new Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz. She is author of the book A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific (Stanford University Press, 2020). Along with Deann Borshay Liem, she codirected the Legacies of the Korean War oral history project. As a former steering committee member of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, she helped launch the three-year 2010–13 Teaching Initiative to End the Korean War, and as part of the Ending the Korean War Collective, she has worked to launch a new Teaching Initiative to End the Korean War. She served as a guest coeditor of Reframing North Human Rights, a thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies, and The Unending Korean War, a special issue of positions: asia critique. She serves on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational institute.

Notes