Category
Essays
-
Can the River Debate the Suburb?
Firms like Philip Morris hold rights that exceed those of most humans. Estates speak for the dead. Trusts speak for the unborn. Legally, we can devise new ways for nature to be legally represented within our human world.
-
The Uninhabitable Front
“Israeli military aircraft flew low over the Lebanese villages of Ras Naqoura and Aita al-Shaab, spraying agricultural fields with a fine mist… Within days, the green of fields, orchards, and olive groves turned brown. Farmers who had worked the same soil for generations watched their trees die.”
-
Remember Them: Palestine Scholars Murdered in the Gaza Genocide
“In Palestine, some 87,000 students have suffered a near total disruption of their studies for the duration of the genocide, and more than 1200 have been killed. Upwards of 200 academic staff have perished, many in targeted attacks.”
-
Manufacturing Goodness: What Administrators Really Do and Why
“When trying to rectify or at least understand the administrative, and thus, the university, problem, it is the logic of goodness—and in particular the manufacturing of goodness—that is most necessary to expose.”
-
The Saddest Cattle in the World: Atahualpa Yupanqui, Empire, and the Sound of Stolen Land
“He only needed that couplet. Two lines that conjure the story of an entire social order.”
-
How I Learned to Fear AI
“This encyclical lacks the force of a papal bull and carries no claim of papal infallibility. Instead, Leo made his case with words and words alone.”
-
Every Novel Is Boring—Until It Isn’t
“If you didn’t get into novels at a young age—and organically discover that, at some point, a switch would flip, and then you couldn’t stop reading if you tried—there is no reason to intuit that this is how novel reading goes.”
-
The Ableism of Kings, the Fury of Trump
I usually flinch from swashbuckling claims, but let me make this one at least: No hero from ancient myth feels as human as Odysseus. No one as relatable in their indomitable will to survive. Is it any wonder, then, that the Odyssey is having a moment, as humans seem barely to be surviving at all?…
-
A Tale of Two Families: Birthright Citizenship and Family Reunification for Chinese Migrants in 1925
“As the families in Cheung Sum Shee v. Nagle and Chang Chan v. Nagle went to court to establish their right to reunite, these men and women also sought the answer to a core question that is still under debate today: Whose families belong together?”
-
Documenting Birthright Citizenship under Chinese Exclusion
Following the Wong Kim Ark decision in 1898, ethnic Chinese, other Asians, and almost all individuals born on U.S. soil secured the right to jus soli birthright citizenship. They could not, however, secure recognition of their citizenship without documentation, the key that linked birth to birthright. At a time when birth registration was not common,…
-
The Right to Return: Chinese Merchants, the Scott Act, and Legal Knowledge in an Era of Exclusion
“For the first time, customs officials were authorized not only to block newcomers from China but also to turn away long-resident Chinese migrants returning from abroad.”
-
The Struggle for America’s Ballot Box and the Making of Wong Kim Ark
“While the Supreme Court settled the issue of birthright citizenship in Wong Kim Ark’s case, lawmakers, lawyers, and civil organizations in California (and elsewhere) routinely tried to strip citizenship from the children of Asian immigrants throughout the twentieth century.”
-
The Meaning of Alienage for Wong Kim Ark
The Fourteenth Amendment transformed American citizenship in the nineteenth century, but for Chinese immigrants and their American-born children, exclusion persisted.
-
The Historical Paths to and from Wong Kim Ark
“The decision in Wong Kim Ark’s case marked the culmination of a three-year legal battle and reflected two decades of sustained efforts to deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of Chinese immigrants following the Fourteenth Amendment.”
-
“Dear Syria … ”
“Here I was, crossing from Lebanon into Syria and from the realm of other peoples’ stories into that of lived experience, including my own.”
-
Who Benefits from Distorting American Studies?
“There is a movement undermining, constraining, and eradicating those who document, understand, and name the experiences of systematically marginalized communities in US history.”
-
Edward Said, My Grandfather, and the Problem of Home
“Said’s ‘Reflections on Exile’ summoned to mind the only 7 words my grandfather ever said to me about Ireland, where he had cousins he never knew: ‘I don’t think I’ll go back there.’”
-
Rash Reading, Slow Watching with Virginia Woolf and Chantal Akerman
In the hands of this writer and this filmmaker, “the mother” is someone with whom to have a lifelong conversation, a contested perspective through which to read the world.
-
To Reach Beyond Ourselves Is Key to Our Survival
“We wanted to make a book that began to answer the questions Muriel Rukeyser asked. We wanted to make a book that continued to ask the questions she asked, of ourselves, of each other.”
-
France’s Art Museums Remain Silent on Haiti
“It wasn’t that we expected an exhibition on Charles X’s coronation to be turned into an exhibition on the double debt. But we did expect the show to complicate the narrative around France’s last king.”
-
Solo el pueblo: Migrant Justice Against Fascism in the Americas
Thanks to the politics of sanctuary and abolition, the multiracial city is, perhaps, challenging authoritarian power, even as liberal democratic institutions have faltered utterly against the rise of right wing, white ethnonationalism.
