When does racial description become racism? Critical race studies has not come up with good answers to this question because it has overemphasized the visuality of race. According to dominant theories of racial formation, we see race on bodies and persons and then link those perceptions to unjust practices of racial inequality. Racial Worldmaking argues that we do not just see race. We are taught when, where, and how to notice race by a set of narrative and interpretive strategies. These strategies are named “racial worldmaking” because they get us to notice race not just at the level of the biological representation of bodies or the social categorization of persons. Rather, they get us to embed race into our expectations for how the world operates. As Mark C. Jerng shows us, these strategies find their most powerful expression in popular genre fiction: science fiction, romance, and fantasy. Taking up the work of H.G. Wells, Margaret Mitchell, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick and others, Racial Worldmaking rethinks racial formation in relation to both African American and Asian American studies, as well as how scholars have addressed the relationships between literary representation and racial ideology. In doing so, it engages questions central to our current moment: In what ways do we participate in racist worlds, and how can we imagine and build one that is anti-racist?

In this bold, innovative work, Dorinne Kondo theorizes the racialized structures of inequality that pervade theater and the arts. Grounded in twenty years of fieldwork as dramaturg and playwright, Kondo mobilizes critical race studies, affect theory, psychoanalysis, and dramatic writing to trenchantly analyze theater's work of creativity as theory: acting, writing, dramaturgy. Race-making occurs backstage in the creative process and through economic forces, institutional hierarchies, hiring practices, ideologies of artistic transcendence, and aesthetic form. For audiences, the arts produce racial affect--structurally over-determined ways affect can enhance or diminish life. Upending genre through scholarly interpretation, vivid vignettes, and Kondo's original play, Worldmaking journeys from an initial romance with theater that is shattered by encounters with racism, toward what Kondo calls reparative creativity in the work of minoritarian artists Anna Deavere Smith, David Henry Hwang, and the author herself. Worldmaking performs the potential for the arts to remake worlds, from theater worlds to psychic worlds to worldmaking visions for social transformation.

Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this important new account of decolonization reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world. Adom Getachew shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order. Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, Worldmaking after Empire recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today’s international order.

How transatlantic thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted the unification of Britain and the United States Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War an ocean-spanning network of prominent individuals advocated the unification of Britain and the United States. They dreamt of the final consolidation of the Angloworld. Scholars, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and science fiction writers invested the “Anglo-Saxons” with extraordinary power. The most ambitious hailed them as a people destined to bring peace and justice to the earth. More modest visions still imagined them as likely to shape the twentieth century. Dreamworlds of Race explores this remarkable moment in the intellectual history of racial domination, political utopianism, and world order. Focusing on a quartet of extraordinary figures—Andrew Carnegie, W. T. Stead, Cecil J. Rhodes, and H. G. Wells—Duncan Bell shows how unionists on both sides of the Atlantic reimagined citizenship, empire, patriotism, race, war, and peace in their quest to secure global supremacy. Yet even as they dreamt of an Anglo-dominated world, the unionists disagreed over the meaning of race, the legitimacy of imperialism, the nature of political belonging, and the ultimate form and purpose of unification. The racial dreamworld was an object of competing claims and fantasies. Exploring speculative fiction as well as more conventional forms of political writing, Bell reads unionist arguments as expressions of the utopianism circulating through fin-de-siècle Anglo-American culture, and juxtaposes them with pan-Africanist critiques of racial domination and late twentieth-century fictional narratives of Anglo-American empire. Tracing how intellectual elites promoted an ambitious project of political and racial unification between Britain and the United States, Dreamworlds of Race analyzes ideas of empire and world order that reverberate to this day.

A comprehensive study of how American racial history and culture have shaped, and have been shaped by, American literature.

In recent years, studios like Marvel and DC have seen enormous success transforming comics into major motion pictures. At the same time, bookstores such as Barnes & Noble in the US and Indigo in Canada have made more room for comic books and graphic novels on their shelves. Yet despite the sustained popular appeal and the heightened availability of these media, Indigenous artists continue to find their work given little attention by mainstream publishers, booksellers, production houses, and academics. Nevertheless, Indigenous artists are increasingly turning to graphic narratives, with publishers like Native Realities LLC and Highwater Press carving out ever more space for Indigenous creators. In Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: Studies in Genre, James J. Donahue aims to interrogate and unravel the disparities of representation in the fields of comics studies and comics publishing. Donahue documents and analyzes the works of several Indigenous artists, including Theo Tso, Todd Houseman, and Arigon Starr. Through topically arranged chapters, the author explores a wide array of content produced by Indigenous creators, from superhero and science fiction comics to graphic novels and experimental narratives. While noting the importance of examining how Indigenous works are analyzed, Donahue emphasizes that the creation of artistic and critical spaces for Indigenous comics and graphic novels should be an essential concern for the comics studies field.

Discrimination, stigmatization, xenophobia, heightened securitization – fear and blaming of "aliens within" – characterize the world infected by COVID-19. Such fears have a long cultural history, however, particularly in connecting pathology with race, poverty, and migration. This volume explores theory and narratives of disease, danger, and displacement through the lenses of cultural, literary, and film studies, historical representation, ethnics studies, sociology and cultural geography, classics, music, and linguistics. Investigations range from, for example, illness discourse in the ancient classics to images of perilous intruders in the Age of Trump, from the Haitian Revolution and subsequent zombie stereotypes to current, problematic refugee resettlement in the US South and Greek islands, from the urban underworld in nineteenth-century sensation novels to ethnic women "on the stroll" in coronavirus times. The collection is organized into three thematically intertwined parts: Stigmatizing the Racialized Underclass; Pathologizing the Other; Constructing and Countering Collapse. It examines changing or recurrent aporias in tropes of belonging and exclusion, as well as the birthing of new forms of identity, agency, and countercultural expression.

An original and provocative exploration of the relationship between contemporary art, politics, and activism Artists Remake the World introduces readers to the political ambitions of contemporary art in the early twenty-first century and puts forward a new, wide-ranging account of art’s political potential. Surveying such innovations as evidence-driven art, socially engaged art, and ecological art, the book explores how artists have attempted to offer bold solutions to the world’s problems. Vid Simoniti offers original perspectives on contemporary art and its capacity as a force for political and social change. At its best, he argues, contemporary art allows us to imagine utopias and presents us with hard truths, which mainstream political discourse cannot yet articulate. Covering subjects such as climate change, social justice, and global inequality, Simoniti introduces the reader to a host of visionary contemporary artists from across the globe, including Ai Weiwei, Olafur Eliasson, Wangechi Mutu, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, and Hito Steyerl. Offering a philosophy of contemporary art as an experimental branch of politics, the book equips the reader with a new critical apparatus for thinking about political art today.

The contributors to New World Orderings demonstrate that China’s twenty-first-century rise occurs not only through economics and state politics but equally through the mutual entanglements of overlapping social, economic, and cultural worlds in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They show how the Chinese state has sought to reconfigure the nation’s position in the world and the centrality of trade, labor, religion, migration, gender, race, and literature to this reconfiguration. Among other topics, the contributors examine China’s post-Bandung cultural diplomacy with African nations, how West African “pastor-entrepreneurs” in China interpreted and preached the prosperity doctrine, the diversity of Chinese-Argentine social relations in the soy supply chain, and the ties between China and India within the complex history of inter-Asian exchange and Chinese migration to Southeast Asia. By examining China’s long historical relationship with the Global South, this volume presents a non-state-centric history of China that foregrounds the importance of transnational communicative and imaginative worldmaking processes and interactions. Contributors. Andrea Bachner, Luciano Damián Bolinaga, Nellie Chu, Rachel Cypher, Mingwei Huang, T. Tu Huynh, Yu-lin Lee, Ng Kim Chew, Lisa Rofel, Carlos Rojas, Shuang Shen, Derek Sheridan, Nicolai Volland

This book argues that the catastrophe of COVID-19 provided a momentous time for groups, institutions, and states to reassess their worldviews and relationship to the entire world. Following multiple case studies across dozens of countries throughout the course of the pandemic, this book is a timely contribution to cultural knowledge about the pandemic and the viral politics at the heart of it. Mapping the various forms of global consciousness and connectivity engendered by the crisis, the book offers the framework of "viral worlding," defined as viral forms of relationality, becoming, and communication. It demonstrates how worlding or world-making processes accelerated with the novel coronavirus. New emergent forms of being global "went viral" to address conditions of inequality as well as forge possibilities for societal transformation. Considering the tumult wrought by the pandemic, Bui analyzes progressive movements for democracy, abolition, feminism, environmentalism, and socialism against the world-shattering forces of capitalism, authoritarianism, racism, and militarism. Focusing on ways the pandemic disproportionately impacted marginalized communities, particularly in the Global South, this book juxtaposes the closing of their lifeworlds and social worlds by hegemonic global actors with increased collective demands for freedom, mobility, and justice by vulnerable people. The breadth and depth of the book thus provides students, scholars, and general readers with critical insights to understanding the world(s) of COVID-19 and collective efforts to build better new ones.