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Resilience must be performed explicitly, legibly, and spectacularly. Overcoming is necessary but insufficient; to count and function as resilience, this overcoming must be accomplished in a visible or otherwise legible and consumable manner. Overcoming is a type of “affective labor” which, as Steven Shaviro puts it, “is productive only to the extent that it is a public performance. It cannot unfold in the hidden depths; it must be visible and audible” (PCA 49n33) In order to tune into feminine resilience and feed it back into its power supply, MRWaSP has to perceive it as such. “Look,! Overcame!” is the resilient subject’s maxim or mantra. Gender and race have always been “visible identities,” to use philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff’s term, identities strongly tied to one’s outward physical appearance. However, gendered/racialized resilience isn’t visible in the same way that conventional gender and racial identities are visible. To clarify these differences, it’s helpful to think of resilience in terms of a “Look, I overcame!” imperative. “Look, I Overcame!” Is easy to juxtapose to Frantz Fanon’s “Look a Negro!”, which is the touch stone for his analysis of gendered racialization in “The Fact of Blackness.” In both cases, looking is a means of crafting race/gender identities and distributing white patriarchal privilege. But, in the same way that resilience discourse “upgrades” traditional methods for crafting identities and distributing privilege, the “looking” in “Look, I Overcame’” is an upgrade on the “looking” in “Look, a Negro” According to Fanon, the exclamation “Look, a Negro!” racializes him as a black man. To be “a Negro” is to be objectified by the white supremacist gaze. This gaze fixes him as an object, rather than an ambiguous transcendence (which is a more nuanced way of describing the existentialist concept of subjectivity). “The black man,” as Fanon argues, “has no ontological resistance for the white man” (BSWM 110) because, as an object and not a mutually-recognized subject, he cannot return the white man’s gaze (“The Look” that is so important to Sartre’s theory of subjectivity in Being & Nothingness). The LIO narrative differs from Fanon’s account in the same way it differs from Iris Young’s account of feminine body comportment: in resilience discourse, objectification isn’t an end but a means, any impediment posed by the damage wrought by the white/male gaze Is a necessary prerequisite for subjectivity, agency, and mutual recognition. In other words, being looked at isn’t an impediment, but a resource. Resilience discourse turns objectification (being looked at) into a means of subjectificatlon (overcoming). It also makes looking even more efficient and profitable than simple objectification could ever be. Recognizing and affirming the affective labor of the resilient performer, the spectator feeds the performer’s individual overcoming Into a second-order therapeutic narrative: our approbation of her overcoming is evidence of our own overcoming of our past prejudices. This spectator wants to be seen by a wider audience as someone who answers the resilient feminine subject’s hail, “Look, I Overcame’. Just as individual feminine subjects use their resilience as proof of their own goodness, MRWaSP uses the resilience of its “good girls” as proof that they’re the “good guys” — that its social and ethical practices are truly just, and that we really mean it this time when we say everyone is equal. For example, the “resilience” of “our” women is often contrasted with the supposed “fragility” of Third-World women of color. Or, in domestic US race-gender politics, the resilience of some African-American women (their bootstraps-style class ascendance) is contrasted to the continued fragility of other African-American women, and thus used to reinforce class distinctions among blacks. There are a million different versions of this general story: “our” women are already liberated — they saved themselves —but, to riff on Gayatri Spivak, “brown women need saving from brown men.” Most mainstream conversations about Third-World women are versions of this story: discussions of “Muslim” veiling, female circumcision, sweatshops, poverty ‘development.” they’re all white-saviorist narratives meant to display MRWaSP’s own resilience. Look, I Overcame!” upgrades ‘Look, a Negro’ by (a) recycling objectification into overcoming and (b) compounding looking, so that one can profit from others’ resilience, treating their overcoming as one’s own overcoming. This upgrade in white supremacist patriarchy requires a concomitant upgrade in looking.” This shift in looking practices parallels developments in film and media aesthetics. As Steven Shaviro has argued, the values, techniques, and compositional strategies most common in contemporary mainstream Western cinema — like Michael Bay’s Transformers—are significantly different than the ones used in modernist and post-modernist cinema, and that these differences in media production correlate to broader shifts in the means of capitalist and ideological production. Neoliberalism’s aesthetic is, he argues, “post-cinematic.” This post-cinematic aesthetic applies not just to film and media, but to resilience discourse. Its performance practices and looking relations configured by the “Look. I Overcame!” imperative, resilience is, in a way, another type of post-cinematic medium. In the next section I use Shaviro’s theory of post-cinematic media to identify some specific ways in which traditional patriarchal tools are updated to work compatibly with MRWaSP resilience discourse. The looking in the “Look, I Overcame!” narrative is not the same kind of looking described by concepts like “the male gaze” or “controlling images” This looking is a type of deregulated MRWaSP visualization.

“Huh, I think I see what you’re saying, Deidre. That’s a really provocative point – and it gestures to the complicatedness of co-authorship, even with intellectual soulmates! In this case, I’m of the opinion that the thing speaks for itself, res ipsa loquitur if you will. We use practice as method in a way that follows many scholars of color. In the book Disidentifications, for example, the late José Esteban Muñoz talks about how queers of color perform in a way that negotiates the lived realities of ideology, by both acting within and remaking scripts about race and gender.9 Munoz certainly theorizes performance but he also sees unities in thinking and doing. And feminist scholars of color like Cherríe Moraga, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, and Chela Sandoval, who contemplate radical feminist methodologies, understand embodied practice as theory.10 Perhaps,we should begin by defining what we mean by methodology and why we need it? In a completely unsurprising turn of events, it seems we may have some disciplinary differences to contend with.”

“Sure! For me, legal methodology is at least two things - research methods and analytical methods. These are related but distinct. For example, for the hashtag piece I am working on,11 I need to make sure that I identify all relevant sources of law - state statutes and jurisprudence pertaining to the rights of privacy and publicity, at a bare minimum, as well as the preeminent secondary sources engaging these - McCarthy’s treatise,12 Jennifer Rothman’s work,13 etc. Sound analytical methods are about what I do with those sources. There are various ‘rules’ about that pertaining to the value of precedent and the like. I needn’t always adhere to those rules. But, in writing for law reviews and legal audiences, I do have to acknowledge the existence of those rules and explain the value of eschewing them if I choose to do so.

When the question of organization is brought up with respect to the revolution, Marxists often return to the idea of the party. The party is often approached as if the word itself has power, as if the term “party building” on its own implies all the structural and strategic information necessary for the conversation. This is a problem, because while the left does distinguish between a mass party and a Leninist party (though even this distinction is contested), there is quite a bit of diversity within these forms that are both shaped by the strategies of the trends they are born out of and the political terrain of countries they operate in. The Bolsheviks, the Communist Party of the Philippines, and the Socialist Workers Party (US) were all Leninist parties that operated on nominal democratic centralism, but the specific forms and ways they operate are all quite different. AROC in their original critique of Marxist Center gives a preliminary definition of what a party is, contending that “political parties are the institution of unitary political leadership for a class or fraction of a class.” This is still a broad enough definition that it could theoretically encompass any variety of organizational types. With all this lack of clarity over what a call to party build means, is party building desirable? In her contribution to the debate in the aftermath of Marxist Center’s founding, Alyson Escalante makes an argument for its benefit. She points out that, despite the Marxist Center’s commitment to mass work and institution building, it hasn’t committed to a strategy for revolution, and this is a major weakness. Party building provides a next step beyond building new working class institutions, and can provide a context for MC’s mass work and a basis for the development of a revolutionary strategy. While Marxist Center may fail to build the party as in past movements, this isn’t an argument against trying. Alyson’s argument isn’t completely disagreeable. In fact, this document agrees with her fundamental point: Marxist Center’s lack of a strategy for revolution is a major weakness. From here, she errs; by placing party building at the foundation of our strategy, we lose sight of the fact that the organizational forms are determined in large part by the strategy and struggles with which we engage. Elevating the ‘party’ form to the level of strategy presents the possibility of conflating utterly different visions which fall under the category of “party building”. A party that leads a guerilla war is different from a party that operates mostly in electoral politics. If we don’t have our strategy, we don’t know what type of party to build. Furthermore, by making party building a goal, we have to ask the question:at what point does a party building project become the party? A quote from the Union of French Communists Marxist-Leninists tries to answer this: …the party must be constructed in the fire of struggles, step by step, under the control of the mass political movement. In France today, this party does not exist. It is not a question of self proclaiming it. This is why we declare that we are not the Party. We are a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist political group FOR the foundation of a communist Union. This Union, having proven itself, and gathering a significant fraction of the vanguard workers, will itself have to determine the conditions and stages for the foundation of the Party. When has a party proven itself? What constitutes a significant fraction of vanguard workers? How do we distinguish between premature self-declarations and genuine foundations of the party? If a political organization has already clearly successfully accomplished all these things before founding the party, what benefit is there to founding a new organization? The pre-party formation has already accomplished the tasks that define a party in this sense. Just like the problems facing dual power theories where revolution becomes this far point in the future with no clear path from where we currently are, party building also provides little in the way of a clear path from the ‘pre-party’ to the party. If organizational forms are determined by strategy and the conditions under which we organize, then what are the organizational forms for revolutionaries that flow from the ruptural strategy for socialism? To start, one reality that needs to be confronted is that, despite the aspirations of vanguardist tendencies, the idea that we will have unitary leadership of the working class is unrealistic for the near term and might very well be completely impossible. Revolutions, while they might have a dominant organization, are often carried out by blocs of revolutionary political organizations and mass organizations (as seen in the Russian Revolution). This isn’t a weakness necessarily and, in fact, we can use this to our benefit even in the near term.

In Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance, Chinese American protagonist Candace Chen quickly distinguishes the “fevered” from a “typical” zombie as imagined by pop culture: “They don’t attack us or try to eat us. They don’t do anything to us. If anything, we do more harm to them” (Ma 29). The fevered are literal creatures of habit, stuck in loops repeating the same activity–such as folding clothes or changing TV channels–while their bodies degenerate, dying a slow and inevitable death. Their ailment is caused by Shen Fever, so named for its origins in Shenzen, China. The fever spreads rapidly across oceans through trade networks, quickly emptying Midtown Manhattan save military-contracted security guards and Candace herself, who has moved into her downtown office to work until her contract expires, apocalypse notwithstanding. Despite Candace’s insistence that the fevered are not zombies, the metaphor retains powerful valences through which the novel’s treatment of race, gender, and postcolonial late capitalism can be understood. The novel moves between timelines, tracking Candace’s time in New York City in the years leading up to the outbreak alongside her post-outbreak journey to Chicago with a band of survivors, a quasi-cult led by a former IT worker named Bob. The story spans many genres, from the urgency that marks an “outbreak narrative” (Wald 58) or a zombie apocalypse to the mundanity that characterizes workplace novels and “capitalist realism” (Fan 679). In its brief indulgence of Candace’s parents’ 1988 immigration from Fuzhou, China to Salt Lake City, Utah, Severance also displays a tenderness uncommon in the narrative forces that often dictate post-apocalyptic storytelling. As much immigration story as it is a post-apocalyptic confirmation that we’d sooner believe the end of the world than the end of capitalism, Severance points us to the ways in which Asian American racialization has always been contingent on the needs of capital. For Candace, an Asian American office worker, to be the novel’s protagonist moves us to question the durability of capital in end times. Moreover, the moments in the novel in which the fevered and Candace herself trouble capital’s structuring forces across time and space, suggest an imagined otherwise to the end of days. This essay considers both Candace’s protagonist role and these moments of spatiotemporal rupture. In this essay, I trace the overlaps of Asian American racialization with the conventions of the zombie genre to suggest that, in Ma’s novel, Orientalism and capitalism converge at the site of the fevered. I argue that the fevered and Candace’s moments of divergence from capitalism’s linear narrativity acknowledge but do not reproduce its colonial logics and provide us with a way of understanding an Asian American humanity that does not rely on labor categories or spatiotemporal constraints. The history of Asian American racialization shares many of the conventions that characterize a zombie narrative. In her book Alien Capital, Iyko Day traces how Asian subjects in North America personify “abstract processes of value formation anchored by labor” (Day 8). That is to say, Asian people give the abstract processes of capitalism material form, since they themselves are as mutable in the eyes of white settlers as is the value of their labor. Constantly resignifiable, the Asian American body echoes the flexibility of capital, constructed as cheap or efficient labor in concert with the needs of the settler nation. Similarly, zombies are subject to multiple kinds of signification under the flexibility of late capitalism’s global processes. In the novel, Bob quite literally refers to the zombies as “an abstract force” (Ma 29). While the origins of the zombie are rooted in the Haitian Revolution that began as a slave revolt (Lauro and Embry), the monster has alternatively stood in for “the alienation of capitalist extraction of surplus value,” both in its role as an endless consumer as well its expendability from the body politic mirroring the expendability of human labor to global capital (Vint 172). In her work on the intersections of zombie narrative and racial capitalism, Camille Fojas explains that the zombie narrative contains our “outrage, fear, and anxiety about capitalism in crisis” (Fojas 61) by giving the abstract processes of capitalism material form, analogous to the function of the Asian American body. Notably, the fevered in Severance do not affect others through infection or consumption, as Shen Fever is spread through fungal spores. Instead, the fevered are incorporated into the rhizomatic structure of Shen Fever’s global dispersal, which is a reminder that the decisions made under global capitalism to expel migrant laborers and outsource production to inhumane working conditions in the Global South, has already “made monsters of us all” (Vint 173). In the novel, it is both Candace and the fevered who give capitalism its material form. While the cause of Shen Fever is never explicitly confirmed, the reigning theory is that the new strain of fungal spores that caused the infection “had inadvertently developed within factory conditions of manufacturing areas, the SEZs in China, where spores fed off the highly specific mixture of chemicals” (Ma 210). Candace works in the Bibles division at a book publishing company named Spectra that contracts labor in China’s SEZs. Characterized by their reproducibility across space and time, what Candace refers to as the purest form of product packaging, the Bibles prove to be an ideal commodity to consider Asian American racialization as a malleable labor force, as well as its zombified corollaries. In a passage predating the outbreak of Shen Fever (Ma 23-25), Candace tries to explain to a client that the Shenzen manufacturer hired to produce gemstones for the Gemstone Bible cannot complete the job, as workers are inhaling glass from grinding down the gemstones. The manufacturer has shut down their plant to avoid a lawsuit. The client proceeds to convey a perfunctory sadness at this health concern, then shifts to demand that Candace merely find another contractor willing to take the job. Spectra is alienation from labor made manifest. Elsewhere, Candace describes how the Bibles she oversees are made and explains the routes of travel that they take through various economic ports. She visits manufacturers in Shenzen, speaking in fragmented Mandarin with the contractors who remark on her Chinese name, though it does not appear in the text. The Bibles’ hidden abstract value is personified through racialized Asian people: the glass-inhaling workers, the liminal contractors, Candace’s own journey across oceans. Candace’s concern for the workers, albeit immediately discounted, and her extended explanation of the Bibles’ circulation as commodity, forces the reader to gaze upon the concrete dimensions of the commodity’s hidden abstract value, and resultingly, upon the racialized Asian people that personify the Bibles themselves. Yet, like names unspoken and workers ignored, absences and incongruencies emerge in attempting to concretize the rapidly shifting metaphor of abstract labor. The response to the outbreak also reveals the historical legacies of racialized exclusion and imperial border management that underpin the abstraction of Asian Americans as a constantly resignifiable labor force. The fever spreads quickly via shipping ports, revealing the United States’ own dependence on differentiated labor on a global scale and the rapidity with which commodity flows in and out of the settler nation daily. In response to the Shen Fever outbreak, US Congress passes a travel ban to “prevent citizens of Asian countries from visiting the United States. A list of banned countries was provided. China was at the top of the list” (Ma 210). Despite the fact that Shen Fever is spread through a fungus, not through human contact, it is Asian peoples that are barred from entry. Candace continues working at the publishing company well into the days following the initial outbreaks, but when operations finally shut down, it is not due to a fear of Chinese commodities at ports of entry, but the lack of labor capital: Overseas manufacturers rapidly close as their employees succumb to Shen Fever. Ma demands that we look at capital’s racial ruin, an end-of-the-world paranoia that seems to coalesce around the Rise of China as an economic empire. It is, as Arif Dirlik appropriately puts it, a “Yellow Fever-Infected” notion of the end of the world (Dirlik 539).

DIVERSITY AND PLURALISM are the characteristics of both the Indian environment as well as Indian society. We have a rich biodiversity oplants for food and medicine. Thus, agricultural diversity and diversity of medicinal plants have in turn given rise to a rich plurality of knowledge systems in agriculture and medicine. Philosophy and History of Science are revealing that preference of one system of knowledge over others is part of the constructed superiority of the colonizing West. Under colonial influence India’s biological and 1 intellectual heritage was devalued. The priorities of scientific development, and R&D efforts guided by a western bias, transformed the plurality of knowledge systems into a hierarchy of knowledge systems. Western industrial systems of knowledge in agriculture and medicine were defined as the only scientific system. Indigenous systems of knowledge were defined as inferior, and, in fact, as unscientific. Thus, instead of strengthening research on safe and sustainable plant-based pesticides such as neem and pongamia, we focused exclusively on the development and promotion of hazardous and non-sustainable chemical pesticides such as DDT and Sevin. The use of DDT causes millions of deaths each year and has increased the occurrence of pests 12,000-fold. The manufacturing of Sevin at the Union Carbide Plant in Bhopal led to a disaster which killed thousands and disabled more than 400,000 people. As recognition of the ecological failure of the chemical route to pest control increases, the use of plant-based pesticides is becoming increasingly popular in the industrialized world. Corporations that have promoted the use of chemicals are now looking for biological options. That is why, in the search for new markets and control over the biodiversity base for the production of biopesticides and chemicals, TNCs like W.R. Grace claimed IPRs on neem-based biopesticides. The experience with agrichemicals was replicated in the field of drugs and medicines. Indigenous systems of medicine and the biodiversity of medicinal plants were totally neglected in our scientific research and health policy which focused exclusively on the western allopathic system as well as on technology transfer from the western pharmaceutical industry. Thus, the health and pharmaceutical budget was heavily weighted in favor of the development and dissemination of the western allopathic system. In spite of a lack of official support, indigenous medical systems are based on over 7,000 species of medicinal plants and on 15,000 medicines of herbal formulations in different systems. The Ayurvedic texts refer to 1,400 plants, Unani texts to 342, Siddha system to 328. Homeopathy uses 570 plants of which approximately 100 are of Indian origin. Needless to say, the economic value of medicinal plants to 100 million rural households is simply immeasurable. The failures and non-sustainability of the chemical route to agriculture and health care provides an opportunity to re-evaluate knowledge systems and move from the false hierarchy of these systems to a plurality. Such a pluralistic view of knowledge systems would imply respect for the different systems in their own logic and in their own epistemological foundations. It would also mean that one system (viz., the western) does not have to serve as the measure of scientific adequacy for all systems, and further, diverse systems would no longer be reduced to the language and logic of the western knowledge system. The integrity of our biological intellectual heritage has to be respected and preserved. The assumption of hierarchy is also the underlying basis for legitimizing piracy as invention. Western bias enters the IPR regimes and superimposes the diversity of knowledge systems which leads to appropriation of traditional knowledge, i.e., biopiracy, and is presented as ‘innovation’ and ‘invention’. This phenomenon of biopiracy and intellectual piracy is one in which western commercial interests unethically and falsely claim products and innovations directly derived from indigenous knowledge traditions as their own ‘intellectual property’, a claim protected through ‘intellectual property rights’. This is a direct consequence of the devaluation and the resulting invisibility of indigenous systems of knowledge which in turn leads to lack of protection for these systems. This devaluation is linked to the imposition of the reductionist methods of western science to the non-reductionist approaches of indigenous knowledge systems. Therefore, as the western style IPR systems are biased towards western knowledge systems which reduce biodiversity to its chemical or genetic structures, the indigenous systems receive no protection while the piracy of these systems remains protected. In the absence of a protection system for biodiversity and indigenous knowledge systems, and with the universalization of western style IPR regimes, such intellectual and biological piracy will only grow. Protecting our biological and intellectual heritage in the age of biopiracy requires the recognition and rejuvenation of our heritage, and the evolution of legal systems for the protection of this heritage in the context of emerging IPR regimes.

As Ansari puts it very clearly, “A decolonizing ontological framework must see design as a sociotechnical mechanism of inquiry, re-enunciation, and re-narration. It is a project of looking back and re-framing certain material practices, and also a project of understanding the relationality of things beyond their mere objecthood” (Schultz et al., 2018, p. 92). That can be achieved through a top-down or bottom-up approach, even though, as far as decoloniality is concerned, it is best implemented through a proper conjugation of them led by (or at the service of) the latter. The point here is overcoming modern instrumentalist reduction of technical design, which strips design from values other than the modern and capitalist hegemonic ones (Feenberg, 2010, 2017). It has to do with acknowledging the design’s relational, artistic, and caring nature, as well as its inevitable colonizing or decolonizing role. As Keshavarz (2020) critically presents concerning humanitarian design to refugees in Europe, technical design, taken and practiced as a merely (instrumental) problem-solving activity, keeps sociotechnically producing the same oppressive reality where disempowered and displaced people treated as refugees is an almost inevitable consequence (more about the critique to reducing design to problem-solving is discussed later.) Further, resuming the dialog with Simondon, the point is about (1) reclaiming to design—or invention—the harmonization it is supposed to (or can) advance between human beings and the natural environment we inhabit (and co-shape) and, to a certain extent at least, also between different groups of human beings (Simondon, 1989, p. 164; 2009, p. 129); and (2) educating the poet-technicians capable of such designs/inventions (Simondon, 2009, p. 111-112). As Jimenez and Roberts argue concerning innovations: Future research should put this in action to see in what ways innovations/tech hubs can produce values of environmental ethics, collective benefits and a strong spiritual and affective rationality, thereby promoting an alignment with such worldviews. The inclusion of indigenous viewpoints (like Buen Vivir) should not just be instrumental, it should be epistemological and ontological. In our view, the Western (neoliberal) approach to innovation represents only one possible approach among others, and we should therefore accept the possibility of a plurality of legitimate paradigms around innovation and its impact in our societies. In this sense, in a world with increasing inequality, huge environmental and ecological risks, ‘Is another innovation possible?’ (Jimenez and Roberts, 2019, p. 189

Debora Halbert writes, “The work of asserting alternatives to intellectual property is an interpretive battle. Intellectual property remains in the process of definition—there is a struggle to define the scope and meaning of the law.”1 Examining the particularities of the struggle is useful for both imagining new ways of relating to intellectual property law and mapping new strategies for activism. The question of how resistance to intellectual property’s racial scripts works is an important one—and one upon which Lawrence Liang’s concept of porous legalities sheds light.2 Liang contends that (racial) capitalism produces residual humans—including migrants, squatters, and pirates—whose labor value is rendered obsolete. In doing so, it creates space for seepages, “the action of many currents of fluid material leaching on to a stable structure, entering and spreading through it by way of pores.”3 Seepages, by way of performative acts of resistance, erode (racial) capitalism and “gradually disaggregate its solidity.”4 The romantic academic ideal of willful resistance from a conscious understanding of politics and culture is far less common than unintentional transgressions that produce anti-racist and anti-colonial effects. The latter acts, when extrapolated across urban spaces, “[create] new conditions in which structures become fragile and are rendered difficult to sustain.”5 Liang uses the concept of seepages to theorize the porousness of law, which he argues are created through “a profound distrust of the usual normative myths of the rule of law, such as rights, equality, access to justice, etc.”6 The concept of porous legalities provides a frame for understanding how alternative intellectual property worldmaking can take root in quotidian performances.7 Transgressive performances that create new “performative repertoires,”8 in Isaac West’s words, have the potential to exploit the gaps in the law in ways that produce new legalities. If (racial) capitalism and law can be eroded through the iterative performances of individuals, groups, and institutions, so too can the categories of race, national identity, and citizenship through which capitalism and law operate. This chapter focuses on understanding how creators of color have contested racial scripts around creatorship/infringement, mobilizing them in ways that undermine the racial scripts and racial feelings that animate them. Often, as Liang suggests, these strategies involve remaking capitalism or using it against itself and reorganizing public feelings in racially radical configurations. The three examples discussed here explore how individuals and institutions perform race and ownership so as to exploit the legal porosity in intellectual property law, race, citizenship, national identity, and personhood. The first example considers how Prince Rogers Nelson, when he changed his name to the Love Symbol, eroded the music industry’s monopoly over the identities and (intellectual) property rights of artists of color. While Prince explicitly confronted histories of anti-Blackness in the United States in many ways, the symbolic significance of his name change and his fight to own the copyright to his songs continues to influence generations of artists across racial identities, notably by encouraging them to own their music. The second example considers how, in response to yoga piracy, Indians and Indian Americans produced new vernacular that aided in decolonizing intellectual property law. The Indian government, which took up this new vernacular, built the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), a digital infrastructure that literally intervenes in the workings of intellectual property law by preventing the ownership of traditional knowledge through online databasing. The final example considers how Marshawn Lynch’s ownership of (intellectual) property rights in his body, specifically through the Beastmode® clothing line, erodes racial capitalism and the racial scripts around Black bestiality. Lynch functionally confronts traditional modes of claiming whiteness as property while making space for Blackness as property. Each of these cases demonstrates the existence of liminal spaces from which to remake racial scripts and racial feelings about creatorship/infringement through language and practice. Moreover, they do so from different levels of discursive engagement, including the individual, the institutional, the national, and the international. Halbert writes: “What the language of intellectual property masks is the global political economy of highly concentrated copyright and patent ownership where corporations, not people, are the beneficiaries of the system . . . resistance to the expanding idea of property is developing as people began to reimagine cultural work outside the language of property and rights.”9 Prince, Indians and Indian Americans, the Indian government, and Lynch engage in projects that fit that description, by remaking the disciplinary functions of (intellectual) property through individual and institutional discourses and performances. Such resistive endeavors, whether intentional or not, represent productive moments of hegemonic contestation through which law’s racebased suppositions can shift, particularly as they are taken up more broadly in public cultural spaces. They also serve as important lightning rods for rewriting racial scripts and moving racial feelings, in part by making them legible and intentional instead of invisible and libidinal.

The competitive interscholastic debate1 community is, and for a long time has been, quite diverse and incredibly inclusive.2 Although the diversity of the community does not reflect the various ways that society is diverse with complete precision, it is difficult to think of another community that is more diverse and inclusive. The diversity and inclusivity of the debate community opens safe spaces for those who might be, for one reason or another, excluded from other interscholastic activities. Like other interscholastic activities, competitive interscholastic debate helps to prevent students from engaging in anti-social and violent behavior such as using drugs, joining gangs, and other juvenile/criminal conduct; provides opportunities to escape poverty; and even saves students’ lives.3 The debate community’s values of diversity and inclusivity also generate opportunities for students of socially and politically disempowered identity groups. But to say the community is diverse and inclusive does not suggest the community is not fractured. With regard to the community’s diversity and inclusivity, some of the most significant, recent fracturing of the community has resulted from competitors’ attempts to capitalize upon the community’s diversity and inclusivity for personal gain by resorting to identity politics in debate under competition rules. The strategic use of identity discourse is itself a social disempowerment tactic that undermines the community’s diversity and inclusivity. Many competitive interscholastic debaters have proven quite adept at deploying identity discourse as a disempowerment tactic and then successfully guising the disempowerment tactic as a tool of social empowerment. They wrongly liken themselves to activists by citing successful examples of empowering identity politics in radically different contexts where discourse is not regulated by competition rules, including a strict win-loss structure, speech times, and exclusive community norms regarding audience nonparticipation.

So far, I have discussed the relationship of the law to performance, but I have only peripherally discussed the performativity of the law. The law is performative. It is composed of linguistic utterances and acts (statutes, policies, executive memos, judicial opinions) that do more than describe the world, because they produce a doing in it through their very utterance or inscription. In the language of J. L. Austin, Justice Harlan’s declaration that the Chinese are “a race so different” is not constative; it is performative.46 That is, Harlan did not in fact “‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at all,” because in the uttering of the phrase, he achieved the doing of something.47 Agents of the law do more than determine facts; they produce subjects through their performative utterances. As Austin observed, “a judge’s ruling makes law; a jury’s finding makes a convicted felon.”48 Harlan’s declaration must thus be understood as part of a network of performative utterances that produced and confirmed the exceptional legal status of Asian Americans by naming and simultaneously “making” them into a “race so different.” Although legal discourse masquerades as factual and descriptive, it is in fact central to the production of social meaning and reality through its enunciation. Legal discourse forgets its own performative power, transforming a court’s performative utterance into a codified reality. Whether or not the person subject to a jury’s finding committed the felony, the jury’s finding makes him or her a convicted felon as a fact of law unless and until a higher authority intervenes to overturn this determination. As Austin warned, “Of all people, jurists should be best aware of the true state of affairs. Perhaps some now are. Yet they will succumb to their own timorous fiction, that a statement of ‘the law’ is a statement of fact.”49 But the United States has a stare decisis system, whereby a decision in a given case will determine future application of the law. In such a system, a jurist may never have to succumb to this timorous fiction because a court that makes a factually erroneous determination transforms this error into a legal fact just by uttering it. Stare decisis allows a statement of law to retroactively become a statement of fact at the exact moment that a judge’s ruling exceeds the constative function of a legal declaration in order to make law, to make a convicted felon, to make an enemy combatant, or to make Asian Americans into a race so different. The law’s misrecognition of Bashir as an “enemy combatant” in Lidless may well have been a fiction, but this was cold comfort to the man as he suffered in his Guantánamo cell. In many ways, little has changed since Thomas Hobbes issued his famous maxim, auctoritas non veritas facit legem (authority, not truth, makes the law), and this has grave con- sequences for racialized subjects when they are caught up within and misrecognized by the law. Because a legal declaration announces itself as the articulation of an established legal fact at the same time that it makes the law, the legal production of subjects is neither purely constative nor purely performative but both. As Jacques Derrida argued in his analysis of the US Declaration of Independence, it is precisely the “undecidability between, let’s say, a performative structure and a constative structure, [that] is required in order to produce the sought-after effect” of giving simultaneous birth to a nation and the national subjects (“We the People”) that authorize this event.50 The law makes We the People, but, at the same time, it only comes into being as We the People play their properly cast role as We the People. In chapter 3’s analysis of performances of patriotism in the Japanese American concentration camps of World War Two, I further demonstrate how it is in performance that the people realize the constitutional being and constitutive power of the state. This occurs through embodied acts that correlate with the formal ideals of the state, such as the Constitution or the law. Performance makes the nation. It is also what makes national and racial subjects. The juridical performative can only go so far in making us into We the People or transforming Asian America into “a race so different.” As a result, the interplay between legal performativity and embodied acts, or performances, is key to understanding how racialization occurs. By now the reader has hopefully noticed that we are gliding across the slippery ground between performativity and performance, or what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Andrew Parker describe as a “generalized iterability, a per- vasive theatricality common to stage and world alike.”51 The mechanisms productive of national and racial subjects are inherently theatrical, an assertion that I can best explicate through a close reading of a classic and paradigmatic example of subject production, Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Describing “ideological state apparatuses” as the means by which the state reproduces a population’s “submission to the ruling ideology,” Althusser suggests that the state does not simply force itself on the subject but is most effective when it can seduce large masses of the people into willing submission.52 Tellingly, he defines the law as both a repressive state apparatus and an ideological state apparatus (it is the only state apparatus that enjoys this dual status).53 And as his paradigmatic example, he famously describes a “theoretical scene [la scène théoretique]” in which a police officer shouts out “hey you there,” and the hailed person turns around.54 Submitting to the recognition of the hail, “he [or she] [they] becomes [become] a subject” for the law.55 The word scène in Althusser’s descrip- tion of interpellation translates as both “scene” and “stage,” figuring the act of interpellation as a dramatic act, or a staged encounter between the law and the subject. Later, he even describes his illustration as “my little theoretical theater [notre petit théâtre théoretique].”56 If we are to take seriously the metaphors by which he explains the process of interpella- tion, we see that “one becomes” or is “made” a subject through theatrical protocols. Althusser is situated in a long tradition of Marxist criticism that relies on metaphors of performance. Marx himself describes commodities as circulating between “dramatis personae”; he refers to the market as a “stage,” narrates the tale of a table that is “dancing of its own free will,” and states that “the great events and characters of world history” occur as either “high tragedy” or “low farce.”57 But Althusser does more than simply invoke a rhetoric of theatricality to explain subject production; he shows us how subjection is itself a dramatic ritual. Elsewhere he even suggests that theatrical spectatorship can be a means for the making of a revolutionary, class-conscious form of subjectivity. In a short and oft- overlooked essay on the playwrights Carlo Bertolazzi and Bertolt Brecht, published in the decade before he wrote the essay on ideology, Althusser claimed that theater has the capacity for inspiring “the production of a new consciousness in the spectator” and, in the making of a new con- sciousness, a new mode of political subjectivity: “the play is really the production of a new spectator, an actor who starts where the perfor- mance ends, who only starts so as to complete it, but in life.”58 Through the experience of a truly revolutionary theater, Althusser’s spectator becomes an “actor” who carries the momentum of the play out into the world, performing in a fashion that will realize the play’s revolutionary ambitions, “but in life.” The language of theatricality in the process of subjection conjures a similar image, as one is made a subject for the law by performing in response and accordance to its hail. Thus, subjection is both a legal and political process as well as a theatrical and aesthetic one. Subjection occurs through performance as the legal, the political, and the aesthetic mix together across the body. But what is it that compels the subject to perform submission to the hail of the law? In Lidless, the law’s misrecognition of Bashir as an “enemy combatant” because of his racial and religious difference tautologically results in a situation in which Alice (and, by extension, US law) treats him as if he were an enemy combatant. Fifteen years after leaving Guantánamo, the only way for him to become recognizable to Alice is by playing the role of the enemy combatant—that is, the torture victim. And, as he admits, this is a role that he has come to love in order to keep “from going crazy.” Bashir’s case exemplifies the ways in which legal interpellation can be perversely seductive. As Judith Butler remarks, in her assessment of the Althusserian scene, “This turning toward the voice of the law is a sign of a certain desire to be beheld by and perhaps also to behold the face of authority. . . . [It is] a mirror stage . . . that permits the misrecognition without which the sociality of the subject cannot be achieved.”59 In Bashir and Alice’s twisted exchange, the Lidless audience is privy to Cowhig’s restaging of this “theoretical scene.” We watch as Bashir is made a subject for the law after his dominated body is seduced into performing the very subject position for which he was misrecognized in the first place. Bashir describes the simultaneously seductive and coercive process of his interpellation as an “enemy combatant” by Alice thus: “When you were hard—when you screamed, ordered boards and chains—that was simple. I could go somewhere else. But when you were soft—when you touched my ears, my neck—my body had a will of its own. My own flesh, my own muscle, betrayed me.”60 Unwilling to hear more, Alice begs him, “Stop. No more. Please.” Demonstrating the way in which the language of domination often finds its way into the mouth of the dominated, Bashir repeats her phrase but echoes it back to her with the urgency of a Guantánamo detainee during the act of torture: “Stop. No more. Please. I swear I’m an innocent man. I don’t know Osama or Saddam or Khalid. I was studying at a mosque. I just wanted to be a good Muslim. Please, I beg you. Believe me.”61 He throws a bag onto the floor before asking once more, “Please.” There is a long silence and then, as if something triggers a switch inside of her, she grabs him and wrenches his arms behind his back. She orders him, “Drop to your hands and knees. Now crawl. Go! There’s a plastic bag by your feet. Pull the bag over your head and bend forward at the waist.”62 Bashir knows the choreography and positions his body into a stress position, waiting expectantly for the next order. Alice only recognizes Bashir after he returns to the role scripted for him in the Bush administration memo. In other words, Bashir becomes a subject by performing a role for which he was cast by way of misrecognition. His subjectivity is brought into being through a performance of coercive mimeticism, a practice that Rey Chow describes by way of a revision to Althusser’s scène théoretique: It is to say, “Yes, that’s me” to a call and a vocation—“Hey, Asian!” “Hey, Indian!” “Hey, gay man!”—as if it were a crime with which one has been charged; it is to admit and submit to the allegations (of otherness) that society at large has made against one. Such acts of confession may now be further described as a socially endorsed, coercive mimeticism, which stipulates that the thing to imitate, resemble, and become is none other than the ethnic or sexual minority herself.63 In acts of coercive mimeticism, the minoritarian subject believes that by responding to the hail of minority status through self-referential per- formances, she is “liberating” herself from subordination. But while she may achieve some modicum of recognition and relief, she is inadvertently contributing to the maintenance of the dominant structures of ideology, interpellation, and racialization. This is particularly dangerous when the law is involved because, as Antonio Viego observes, “If misrecognition is a serious harm, then we must be concerned that legal recognition may go wrong, misrecognizing already subordinated groups and codifying that misrecognition with the force of law and the intractability of stare decisis, . . . [whereby] the price of protection is incarceration.”64 If Bashir demands recognition from Alice for his time in Guantánamo, the price extracted in the preceding scene is his figurative return to the interro- gation chamber. In other words, when we perform as properly situated subjects in order to be recognizable as such by the law, we run the risk of transforming our bodies into prisons.

Voice as the capacity to speak is a practice of world-disclosure, let us recall, where speech works as a political act in itself: an act by which individuals announce their presence in a political community and use their voice as a form of public intervention. The requirement for recognition, where speech is not only articulated but actually heard and acknowledged in public, lies at the heart of this politics of voice—what, as noted in Chapter 3, Couldry calls “voice as value” (2010). Yet we have seen how western economies of voice and visibility prohibit migrant speech acts from appearing in public discourse and how, in so doing, such economies dehumanize migrants as un-narratable selves. Indeed, as we discussed in Chapter 4, the systematic representation of migrants as voiceless occurs within an environment of hypermediated migration 150 | Subaltern Voice and Digital Resistance where other actors speak about or for them, namely western political elites. Reflecting on this voiceless hypervisibility of migration, Horsti (2016) points to its core contradiction, namely how such silence is not only incompatible with migrants’ own digital agency (Diminescu’s [2008] “connected migrant”), but further situates them within a hierarchical order of humanity, wherein their lack of voice is misrecognized as lack of humanity. This form of misrecognition occurs because, despite the affordances of mobile phone apps widely used by migrants (Wall et al. 2015), the global flows of voice are still subjected to historical relations of power that locate human lives within orientalist hierarchies of remediation (Chouliaraki 2013). Whose voice deserves to be amplified beyond their own intimate circles and onto western news platforms, in other words, is not a matter of access to technology but of access to power: “voice,” as Tacchi (2012) argues, “is inadequate unless there is also a shift in the hierarchies of value and attention accorded different actors and communities” (2012: 7–8). In the same spirit, Gajjala (2013), in her study of the relationships of resistance and complicity in South Asian women’s use of digital media, locates such media “in a field of power (the West) and in the production of a particular knowledge (about the East)” and contends that, within these contexts, it is not enough to listen of poor people, but it is necessary to listen to them. From this perspective, techno-determinist approaches that overemphasize migrants’ use of social media as evidence of their agency and voice ignore the structural constraints within which such use takes place: what Wall et al. call the circumstances of “information precarity” that migrants are subjected to “in terms of technological and social access to relevant information; the prevalence of irrelevant, sometimes dangerous information; inability to control their own images” (2015: 240). Rather than simply giving them voice, such technologies enable selected intermediations within migrants’ communities that simultaneously subject them to repressive practices from silencing to surveillance. Postcolonial critiques, informed by Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (2010), address this condition of systemic voicelessness by locating its roots in the reproduction of colonial power that sustains itself in contemporary structures of mobility and mediation. Such structures, including the practice of journalism, work by keeping subaltern voices Subaltern Voice and Digital Resistance | 151 outside the decision-making spaces where their lives and livelihoods are narrated. Colonial discourse, Spivak argues, does this by not necessarily silencing but by accommodating this voice in ways that reaffirm differences between the “civilized” west and the “barbarian” east. Spivak’s argument places at the center of colonial critique the impossibility of an uncontaminated subaltern voice, problematizing the vision that there can ever be “a pure form of consciousness,” articulated outside western discourse. Given, she says, that colonial subjects “never themselves had agency within the traffic of imperialism” to begin with (1996: 100), any process of translation (or indeed mediation) is inevitably also a return of the colonial voice to the position of the subaltern: a voice silenced or, when spoken, unheard. Understood as a form of violence—epistemic violence—this series of silences, omissions, and reformulations turns the colonial subject into an “other,” precisely by containing its meanings within the logic of western discourse. Referring to Spivak’s paradigmatic subaltern, the woman in an Indian immolation ritual that is reinterpreted by western discourse as the savage habit of a patriarchal society, Birla explains how “the subjectivity of the woman is not only read as a violent and unstable effect of an agency not her own, but she is revealed to us as the instrument of that agency” (2010: 89). The theme of the subaltern has implicitly informed our own analysis of migrant silencing in European media, where the migrant appears in news discourse as an abstract figure existing outside history. Various forms of subalternity naturally also occur elsewhere, too—when, for instance, migrants are framed as “problems” within technocratic, “problem-solving” discourse (Nyers 2013) or as the product of exceptional circumstances and thus as an “anomaly” that needs governmental solutions (Andersson 2019). Both these representations speak about migrants by quoting their own words but leave little space for their own voices to be heard and understood (Schwiertz and Schwenken 2020). In the process, migrants are silenced or ventriloquized, and it is western “experts” instead, whether politicians or support organizations, who become the voice trusted to speak on their behalf. In so doing, such voice simultaneously subsumes migrants’ lives into western ways of knowing (Sigona 2014)

If we take abstraction seriously as nonrepresentational, as a ren- dering that is nevertheless devoid of signifying content or context, how does it also operate as a practice of queering without reduc- ing or essentializing difference? Benning paradoxically approaches the specificities attributed to queerness and the particularities of a historical legacy through abstract aesthetics that would seem to render them invisible. Indeed, I take the destabilizing and obscur- ing effects of abstraction to be precisely generative for queer art practice. While direct representation would seem to assert and account for minoritarian bodies and lives left out of the picture, the politics of identification also functions to classify, categorize, and control through certain historical narratives and claims to objectivity. Abstraction, then, might productively refuse to render a subject legible. Operating as a catachresis, abstraction offers queer alternatives to representation and does so specifically through the wipe in Benning’s practice. Catachresis might describe both the abstracting and queering effects of the wipe as disruptions and exposures within processes of signification, simultaneously aesthetic, linguistic, and historical. Remobilized in queer and postcolonial theory, catachresis refers to an excessive use of language, a term intentionally misapplied or perverted in order to offer a different and potentially transformative description of life’s positions and conditions. Thus, catachresis offers alternative approaches to personal and historical narrative. Along these lines, David Eng has defined “historical catachresis” as a problematics of naming that works to dislodge a reified ver- sion of history by denying the possibility of any singular historical context.23 This opens up a space for difference and multiplicity within the inherent slippages in language and history, where every naming is also exposed as a misnaming and history is shown to be lacking and limited despite its ideals of presence and progress. The transitional space of the wipe, temporally stalled in Benning’s paintings, serves as a sliding fault line along which these disconti- nuities are both revealed and shifted. Catachresis, then, might also refer to the strained use of an existing formal language of abstraction that shows it to be already arbitrary or brings out its perversely ambiguous features. Its own catachrestic operation, abstraction constitutes matter without ref- erence, suggesting a version of catachresis that is visible but can- not be fully grasped. Benning’s abstraction operates as a queering catachrestic displacement, gesturing to specificities without direct identification. Yet reciting and altering the gestural strategies of white male modernist masters, Benning’s work both signifies and dislocates identity. As a radical disruption within the process of naming, queering paradoxically insists on specificity while troubling the defining and definitive regimes of normativity. Even as forms of historical and political naming also function as shaming mechanisms—and it would seem intuitive to avoid those forms of naming now—Benning’s work puts pressure on this difficult speci- ficity through aesthetic and linguistic excess.

[Deborah Cowen, professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto, April 1 2024, “Crisis in Motion”, Duke University Press, https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-abstract/123/2/297/387193/Crisis-in-Motion]//owen

Twenty twenty is marked as a year of cascading¶ global crises, yet the unfolding of time since then¶ reminds us that Gregorian temporal borders cannot contain the forces of life and death any better¶ than Westphalian spatial ones. The first week of¶ 2021 saw 80[K],300 COVID-19 deaths around the¶ world, massive bushfires burning again in Australia, and the stunning white supremacist attack¶ on the US Capitol, among other disasters. The¶ ubiquity of crises defines our present, even as¶ everyday life has long been unlivable for so many.¶ In The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, Gerald¶ Horne (2018) reminds us that even apocalypse—¶ the biggest crisis of all—is a recurring experience¶ for colonized and enslaved peoples. Yet, the feeling¶ that life cannot or will not go on, at least in this way,¶ may be shared now more widely than ever before.¶ This essay investigates a common thread to the¶ multitude of crises that constitute contemporary¶ life: circulation. In contrast to theories of crisis that¶ see its emergence in the disruption of circulation, I¶ locate crisis in the production of particular regimes¶ of motion. These forms of crisis have their genesis¶ in the organization of circulation toward expanded¶ reproduction. Motion animates all life, but engineering circulation—infrastructuring it—toward accumulation brings premature death. Following a brief engagement with¶ interdisciplinary approaches to theorizing motion through reproduction and¶ infrastructure, the article shifts to follow three contemporary crises of¶ expanded reproduction. I trace how crisis is produced by specific configurations of motion, underpinned by particular forms of infrastructure. I look to¶ crisis in three seemingly distinct realms—supply chain disruption during¶ COVID-19, blockades of colonial circulatory infrastructures, and the disastrous [logies of extractivism—to demonstrate how crisis is not simply¶ caused by disrupted circulation but by the prior and underlying organizing¶ of circulation. Each case is a thread of a wider story about the violent motion¶ of expanded reproduction. Between them are places, people, and forms of¶ power that repeat in the entangled crises of premature death, dispossession,¶ and ecological collapse. But I also suggest that circulatory crises are transformed from everyday violence against Black, Indigenous, and subaltern¶people into crisis for capitalist circulatory systems through spatial practices¶ of anti-colonial refusal. The final section of the article engages radical alternatives to racial capitalist and settler colonial circulation that abound. Looking to struggles over the imperial logistics of circulation and containment, I¶ ask what kinds of collective futures are set in motion through infrastructure’s refusal and repair.¶ Moving through Broken Worlds¶ Stuart Hall (1988) famously conceives of crisis as occurring “when the social¶ formation can no longer be reproduced on the basis of the pre-existing system of social relations.” Lauren Berlant (2016: 393) likewise locates crisis in¶ reproduction. “All times are transitional,” Berlant writes, “but at some crisis¶ times like this one, politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch¶ has appeared in the reproduction of life.” Reproduction insists that life, lifeworlds, and what Beverley Mullings (2021: 152) terms “life-work” in the tradition of feminist social reproduction theory need to be continually remade¶ at a variety of scales—at once intimate and imperial. Bodies need to be fed,¶ cells need to regenerate, populations need to be replaced, relations need to be¶ performed. Even solidarity, according to Ruthie Gilmore (2020), “needs to¶ be remade and remade and remade—it never just is.” Wherever reproduction is the linchpin, crisis is already understood as crisis in motion.¶ The notion that life is motion has myriad sources. Writing from the territory where I live, Leanne Simpson explores how Anishinaabe lifeworlds are¶ anchored in motion. Simpson (2011: 85) writes that “being enmeshed in the¶ cyclical flux of the earth lodge, Nishnaabeg people traveled throughout their localized territories in seasonal fashion. . . . Our lifeway required cyclical and¶ rhythmical movements. . . . Society and clan structure expanded and contracted like a beating heart or working lungs.” Simpson engages Vizenor’s¶ (1999: ix) seminal work on the concept of transmotion, which posits that¶ “natives have always been on the move, by chance, necessity, barter, reciprocal sustenance, and by trade over extensive routes; the actual motion is a natural right, and the tribal stories of transmotion are a continuous sense of¶ visionary sovereignty.” Octavia Butler, who has been described as “a radical¶ Black feminist theorist, historiographer, and researcher across fields and disciplines,” was also invested in motion (Streetby 2018: 720). In her extraordinary novel Parable of the Sower, life is motion. God is change. Like the biblical¶ figure who struggles to find fertile soil to sow seeds for a future, Butler’s¶ brand of “radical reproduction” requires that we cultivate change. Butler¶ (1995: 218) explains, “We can focus them, alter their speed or impact, in general we can shape change, but we can’t stop it no matter how hard we try.¶ Throughout the universe, the ongoing reality is change.” Indeed, motion is at¶ the heart of Black radical and feminist thought through figurations of fugitivity. For Saidiya Hartman (2017: 468), movement constitutes a form of deeply¶ situated faith in futurity. She writes, “The thought of what might be possible¶ was indistinguishable from moving bodies and the transient rush and flight¶ of black folks in this city-within-the-city.” Huey Newton (2018), likewise, prescribed a form of Black radicalism tethered to change, asserting, “We believe¶ that everything is in a constant state of change, so we employ a framework of¶ thinking that can put us in touch with the process of change.” C. L. R. James¶ too centers social motion in his work. Both empire and its contestation are¶ matters of motion, as he outlines in Beyond a Boundary (1963: 113): “Time¶ would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement:¶ not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where¶ you are going and the rate at which you are getting there.”¶ In these traditions, motion is constitutive of life itself, and crisis takes¶ shape through life’s disruption. Leanne Simpson (2015), for instance,¶ describes colonialism as a bomb going off in slow motion which disrupts the¶ rhythms, cycles, and movement of Nishnaabeg life. Yet, alongside these vital¶ visions of life in motion are diagnoses of the violence of colonial and racial¶ capitalist circulation. For Marx, crisis can emerge with problems in circulation, but a larger¶ kind of crisis lies in the production of specifically capitalist motion. As Nail¶ (2020: 40) writes, “For Marx, everything is in motion, not just capitalism. . . . The issue for Marx is not between capitalist movement and revolutionary¶ stasis. The question . . . is how a specifically capitalist pattern of circulation¶ works.” Capitalism, for Marx, is a regime of motion defined by dispossession¶ and exploitation. Jody Melamed (2015: 77) emphasizes the violent motions of¶ racial capitalism when she writes, “Capital can only be capital when it is¶ accumulating and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through¶ relations of severe inequality among human groups.” Marx’s extended focus¶ on motion is associated with volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, but the argument¶ that capitalism is in itself a regime of motion lies at the center of his most¶ fundamental and basic theory of value—it is his “general formula for capital.” The capitalist regime of motion is identical to what he terms expanded¶ reproduction. Here, reproduction is not characterized by a simple circuit of¶ subsistence; instead capital is accumulated, or hoarded, as it moves from M¶ money to C commodity and back to M money form. It is not magic that¶ makes expanded reproduction possible, but theft. Surplus rather than survival becomes the end game of reproduction within a capitalist regime of¶ motion. Or, as Rosa Luxemburg (1951: 34) explains, “Profit becomes an end¶ in itself, the decisive factor which determines not only production but also¶ reproduction.” Theft is typically thought of in terms of labor’s surplus, but as¶ Dene scholar Glen Coulthard (2014) argues, if we take colonialism seriously,¶ then expanded reproduction may equally or additionally entail theft of land¶ and more-than-human life. Primitive accumulation is perpetual.¶ Ruthie Gilmore (2007) reminds us that motion takes different forms¶ that are related but not identical. She insists that capital circulates through¶ captive humans, whose own motion is disrupted by their containment in¶ carceral—and, we should add, plantation—space. Physical movement is critically important, and for Marx even a source of value. And yet, Marx ([1887]¶ 1993: 226) also suggests that capital circulation can “take place without¶ physical movement. . . . A house that is sold from A to B circulates as a commodity, but it does not get up and walk.” This does not make physical motion¶ less important, only more complex. While these forms of motion are not¶ identical, they also cannot be disentangled. Physical circulation has the special capacity to accelerate the circulation of capital. The circulation of legal¶ documents and financial transactions are necessary to sanction the house¶ sale, and these are undeniably material. Luxemburg (1951: 40–41) sees these¶ two forms of motion as necessarily entangled, making expanded reproduction inherently imperial. It is driven not only by “a permanent incentive to¶ reproduction in general,” she writes, “but also a motive for its expansion, for¶ reproduction on an ever larger scale.” For Luxemburg, expanded reproduction inevitably relies on geographic expansion. But what underpins particular configurations of motion? How does the relationship between different¶ forms of motion materialize? And how does motion get organized otherwise? Infrastructures are quite literally the socio-technical systems assembled to sustain or expand reproduction. Decades ago, David Harvey (1981)¶ argued that crises of capitalist motion can be temporarily resolved through¶ the production of built infrastructure, what he termed a “spatial fix.” Ruthie¶ Gilmore (2022: 490) writes, “In the material world, infrastructure . . . speeds¶ some processes and slows down others, setting agendas, producing isolation, enabling cooperation.” Ever concerned with the complexities of materiality, Gilmore also reminds us that the infrastructures of feeling are material too, “in the sense that ideology becomes material as do the actions that¶ feelings enable or constrain” (490). Assuming a capacious materiality, Berlant (2016: 393) helpfully defines infrastructure as “the movement or patterning of social form,” and suggests that “an infrastructural analysis helps¶ us see that what we commonly call ‘structure’ is not . . . an intractable principle of continuity across time and space, but . . . a convergence of force and¶ value in patterns of movement that’s only solid when seen from a distance.”¶ Years ago, Doreen Massey (1993) argued that transportation and communications infrastructures produce “power geometries”—speeding up motion¶ and connectivity for some but in ways that erect barriers or slow the motion¶ of others. Dams, ports, roads, rails, pipelines, prisons, and cables enable and¶ constrain particular configurations of motion, of reproduction.¶ Imperial infrastructures support the flourishing of some at the expense¶ of others. Infrastructure is vital to biological and social reproduction, but, as¶ Winona LaDuke and I (2020) have argued, “insofar as they are oriented¶ towards expanded reproduction . . . infrastructures dispossess, extract and¶ accumulate.” Anti-colonial and Indigenous writers explore the infrastructural¶ underpinnings of imperialism (A. Simpson 2014; Khalili 2020; Goeman¶ 2022; Spice 2018; Estes 2019; Pasternak and Dafnos 2018; Murphy 2013;¶ Karuka 2019). For Leanne Simpson (2011), it is a colonial hydro dam that disrupts her people’s lifeways, their rhythms and motions, by fragmenting the¶ movement of waters and fish. Walter Rodney (1981) provides a breathtaking¶ account of the back-breaking enslaved labor that built the system of dikes¶ and canals, which made the plantation (and human habitation) possible along¶ the Guyanese coast. Omar Salamanca (2020) explains how construction of¶ road systems that segregate Palestinian and Israeli mobilities are vital to land¶ dispossession and the re/production of the wider apartheid system. Even nasty¶ old imperialists can help us to think about imperial motion as infrastructural Alfred Thayer Mahan—a founding father of classic geopolitics—suggested¶ that the geography of British colonies could be mapped according to a simple¶ logic: the fueling of maritime forces. Mahan (1890) writes that “useful harbors¶ and the conditions of the communications between them constitute . . . the¶ main strategic outlines of the situation.” Infrastructure materializes imperial¶ circulation, and as such becomes a critical site of anti-colonial struggle. Blockades of infrastructure serve as embodied practice of refusal in the arsenal of¶ anti-colonial struggle. Deliberate disruption of rail lines and roads, of pipelines and ports, by Black and Indigenous people is an enactment of refusal¶ that brings the “objective” and “subjective” dimensions of crisis onto common¶ ground through spatial practice. In their spatial and temporal precision,¶ refusal through blockade transforms the ongoing crises lived by colonized¶ people—what Eugene Brennan refers to in the introduction to this special¶ issue as “crisis as tendency”—into a general and temporally precise crisis “as¶ event,” of and for expanded reproduction.¶ The sections that follow ground these ideas in particular times and¶ places where crises in the realm of circulation translate into crises in the¶ reproduction of life. While these stories trace seemingly distinct worlds, they¶ cannot be pulled apart. The promise of an infrastructural analysis of the crises of motion that constitute our collective predicament is derived from reading them together, as crises of expanded reproduction.¶ Crisis 1—Logistics of the Pandemic’s Path¶ As the last month of the wretched year of 2020 drew to a close, a dramatic crisis of circulation unfolded at the British/French border. As many as ten thousand truckers transformed hundreds of kilometers of roads in southern¶ England into a massive linear parking lot when the Channel crossing closed.¶ France’s refusal to allow usual traffic through was officially prompted by¶ attempts to contain the second COVID strain. Truckers from across Europe¶ who had carefully planned transnational itineraries to make it home for winter holidays were left stranded. No food, no services, and no medical tests were¶ initially on offer. Despite the dependence of national economies on transnational supply chains, little thought has been invested in planning for disruption of this kind or at this scale. For the first few days of the crisis, truckers¶ relied on small provisions they kept in their cabs, and the few filthy restrooms¶ they could find nearby. Eventually, the British army was deployed to manage¶ the scene. Only as COVID tests were processed did the French allow the backlog to ease, but this crisis in motion diagnosed some elements of the power¶ and precarity of supply chain capitalism in our pandemic present.¶ From panics over toilet paper and the hoarding of essentials, to concerns about shutdowns in China creating disruption to supply for Western¶ consumption, to the geopolitical crisis of PPE, pandemic pedagogy involved¶ mass education about basic tenets of supply chain capitalism. Labor scholar¶ Kim Moody (2020) suggests that “the pandemic has graphically demonstrated the centrality of the ‘human networks’ that keep the global supply¶ chains moving. That is, all those who produce the goods and those that bring¶ them to the factory, the hospital, the supermarket, or your self-isolating¶ home.” Fears of disrupted supply chains led to the designation of “essential¶ worker” that offered a brief opening for the valorization of hyper-exploited¶ precarious workers of color. Instead, corporate public relations stunts performed gratitude to essential workers while refusing meaningful shifts in¶ financial compensation, sick leave, or even access to PPE. It is telling that¶ Amazon’s Jeff Bezos—the world’s first trillionaire—is a leader in the logistics sector. Bezos grabbed even more wealth through the pandemic and the¶ hyper-exploitation of essential workers, also prompting an explosion of labor¶ actions in the sector. This is critical, but the problem of logistics and disruption speaks to how this calculative management and martial science has¶ remade society and space beyond just transportation and distribution. In¶ fact, the crisis in motion of this moment lies not only in matters of physical¶ distribution but also in the production of life in imperial motion.¶ Logistics has long been about making live and die by making and containing motion. Logistics had its ancient genesis as an art of war, supplying¶ and sustaining the battlefield. Modern logistics emerged through gruesome¶ imperial circulations such as the transatlantic slave trade (cf. Harney and¶ Moten 2013) and the “movements westward” that devastated Indigenous¶ societies and ecologies on Turtle Island. The “revolution in logistics” took¶ shape in the post-WWII period and saw the harnessing of military methods¶ of “supplying the front” for corporate operations. Before the revolution, logistics was a martial art of moving and provisioning “men and munitions.”¶ After the revolution, “logistics” emerged as a management science of materials movement across production and distribution in both the corporate and¶ military sector (Cowen 2014). Logistics transformed not just “distribution”¶ but racial capitalism itself, its relationship to questions of circulation and¶ containment and to matters of life and (premature) death.¶ To further ground these arguments, we return to Turtle Island/North¶ America, to a scene of backlog far more gruesome than the first. This brutal¶ backlog took shape at a border of sorts—the border between animal life and¶ meat product at the slaughterhouse gate. Along with prisons, care facilities,¶ and distribution centers, meat processing plants have been ground zero for¶ pandemic outbreaks, with striking impacts on precarious, often migrant,¶ workers, mostly of color. After decades of corporate consolidation, a small¶ number of American slaughterhouses process billions of pounds of meat¶ each year. One single Smithfield’s plant in North Dakota produces 5 percent of¶ the nation’s pork products, while 98 percent of beef products are processed by¶ just fifty slaughterhouses (Corkery and Yaffe-Bellany 2020). COVID outbreaks occur because of working conditions and productivity demands that¶ make meaningful distancing impossible, because of a lack of provisioning¶ of PPE, and because of the social determinants of health. The outbreaks led¶ to plant closures, creating enormous bottlenecks in the profoundly industrial and logistical meat sector. In the US and elsewhere, the infection and¶ premature death of processing plant workers (not only their labor actions)¶ have been a source of “supply chain disruption,” and the massive “culls” of¶ animal life have been one of the gruesome costs. Millions of nonhuman¶ lives have been prematurely extinguished—sometimes by turning off ventilation systems, the critical infrastructures that support livestock breath, to¶ produce slow, mass suffocation.¶ As the crisis of corporate killing deepened, Trump responded by issuing an executive order that deemed meatpacking plants to be “critical infrastructure” under the Defense Production Act of 1950. The executive order¶ prohibited their closure by state health authorities and provided meatpacking companies with a legal defense from liability claims by their employees.¶ Perhaps predictably, the order worked to protect infrastructures of expanded¶ reproduction for corporations while sacrificing the social reproduction of¶ essential workers. Yet plants continue to close when outbreaks cannot be discursively contained.¶ While this crisis is horrific, logistics comes into play long before the¶ movement of livestock from the farm to the slaughterhouse. Today, logistics¶ drives the very design of the pig or cow itself. The Ikea “flat pack” has¶ reshaped furniture to facilitate low-cost, long-distance movement, shifting¶ the labor of assembly onto the consumer. Likewise, the logistics of swine and¶ cattle production have reshaped the very form of the pig and cow to enhance¶ the efficiency of the supply chain toward expanded reproduction. For supply¶ chain management, “the pig” is one stage of pork (as commodity) in the¶ cycle of value realization. The logistical pig has been refigured as a life-form¶ toward that end. In the corporate meat sector, every aspect of the cycle of life¶ has been reorganized by supply chain management and its software so that¶ the animal fits the system of motion. As one industry textbook explains,¶ “Logistics not science is the underpinning of a successful breeding policy”¶ (Knap 2012: 7972). This includes everything from ovulation synchronization for reproductive efficiency to the timing of insemination and the weaning of sows and cows to fit trucking schedules, themselves organized to¶ maximize efficiency at processing facilities. Swine hips are standardized to¶ fit the machines of slaughter.¶ In the meat supply chain, livestock is subject to more and more logistical refashioning, though this sector was also a key innovator in modern¶ industrial logistics. Henry Ford did not invent the assembly line, but witnessed a system where carcasses were suspended from a moving trolley in¶ Gustavus Swift’s Chicago slaughterhouses. Swift’s “disassembly line” accelerated the circulation of meat and capital before being adapted to the auto plant.¶ Meat processing has long been at the forefront of corporate logistical life. The¶ invention of cold storage rail cars provided a mobile spatial fix to the distance¶ between settler cities and the feed lots on the Plains. Cold storage allowed for¶ cattle to be moved after slaughter, making transport more efficient and accumulation more expansive; frozen packages of beef are easier to move than¶ living, breathing cattle. But with a corporate meat supply chain organized as¶ a conveyor belt—not only after animal death but for the production of animal¶ life—any significant disruption can quickly become system failure.¶ This dreadful example suggests that logistics makes forms of life and¶ death in motion. Logistics organizes movement into, through, and beyond production. Both a management and martial science of movement, logistics aims¶ to maximize the circulation of capital through materials movement. Crisis in¶ motion takes shape not only in the crucially important sector of “distribution.”¶ Rather, logistics produces forms of life in motion that are defined by crisis.¶ In arguing for a productive conception of logistical power, I am also¶ inviting us to think about the logistical crisis of the COVID pandemic differently. Jennifer Terry (2009) has argued that all wars have their “signature¶ injury”—the particular damage to soldiers’ bodies that derives from widespread use of historically specific weapons technologies. Similarly, we might¶ question how the organization of motion through logistics and its infrastructures produces signature injuries at a planetary scale. Could this pandemic be a signature injury of logistical life? Did the novel coronavirus have¶ its genesis in habitat destruction, rapid global suburbanization, industrial¶ agribusiness, and supply chain infrastructures that constitute racial capitalism today? To consider this question more carefully and to attend to the profoundly colonial contours of crises in motion, the article now moves to look¶ at infrastructure’s imperial afterlives. The second story of crisis also begins¶ in the summer of 2020.¶ Crisis 2—Infrastructure’s Afterlives¶ On August 29, 2020, the head of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A.¶ Macdonald, hit the ground. Montreal activists “toppled and decapitated” his¶ statue during an action calling on political leaders to defund police services¶ (Rudin 2021). A few weeks earlier, Black Lives Matter activists in Toronto¶ queerly covered their Macdonald in pink paint, eliciting a formal public¶ thank-you from Indigenous leaders in a show of anti-colonial movement solidarity. Local media reported that Toronto’s Macdonald “has been covered up¶ ever since, and inside this enclosure, you can see a bag over the father of¶ Canadian Confederation’s head” (Warmington 2020). East coast activists in¶ Charlottetown doused their Macdonald in blood-colored paint as did organizers out west in Victoria, while in the capital city of Ottawa, Macdonald¶ was placed under state surveillance, with CCTV cameras and police patrols¶ to protect his body (and the settler colonial body politic) from disfiguration.¶ As monuments to colonial and racial capitalist violence came crashing¶ down around the world, entangled movements for Indigenous Land Back¶ and Black Lives Matter on this territory too had had enough. They insisted¶ that Canada’s first prime minister could no longer be allowed to stand—neither physically as statue in the city, nor symbolically as heroic figure in history. In official pedagogy, Macdonald is remembered as the nation’s founding father, but the patriarch’s decapitation announces another biography of¶ an engineer of genocide.¶ These competing accounts collide on the railway tracks. Macdonald¶ insisted that a transcontinental railroad would be the “spine” of his new colonial state—the skeleton for a new body politic. At the height of what Karuka¶ (2019) calls railroad colonialism, Macdonald took to build an iron road from¶ coast to coast, connecting scattered British colonies of North America. First¶ envisioned in the mid-1800s as a key link in British imperial circulatory systems to the Far East, the rail would compete with the growing westward¶ reach of the rising US empire, unload surplus population, and maintain¶ imperial hegemony. More than metaphor, this socio-technical spine would¶ support a vast continental reach of settlement and circulation and become¶ the vital physical backbone upholding settler economy and legal jurisdiction.¶ MacDonald’s iron spine indeed became the backbone of a new settler colonial body politic, but what kind of beast did it build?¶ Rail infrastructure made the settler state possible, and it did so¶ through imperial logistics of creative destructive anchored in dispossession,¶ displacement, and hyper-exploitation. In this era of the railway barons, infra¶ structure expansion became an extraordinarily lucrative means of expanding reproduction. A massive public-private partnership, the railroad was¶ financed by land theft. Enormous tracts of Indigenous land were granted by¶ the Dominion government to the railroad companies. The railroad recruited¶ settlers through their own Department of Colonization, as well as by selling¶ land to private colonization companies. White settlers were incentivized to¶ settle, with proximity to whiteness the means for sorting settler racial hierarchies. Black migration was specifically and actively discouraged by both¶ informal and formal means. Banks and bankers feasted on this infrastructure of enclosure. Through it they circulated capital extracted from the theft¶ of bodies, labor, and lands throughout the colonized world. Banks like Barings, with capital accrued through slavery and colonialism, provided critical¶ capital for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in its final stages of construction and to this day are commemorated in the name of one of its premier stations. Revelstoke station—now a world-famous ski resort—was named after¶ Lord Revelstoke, also known as Edward Baring, to acknowledge the bank’s¶ crucial capital injection into the infrastructure (Cowen 2020). In a strange¶ and delicious coincidence, Revelstoke ski resort features a famous hill called¶ “kill the banker.” The railroads were also bound up in complex racialized¶ labor regimes that particularly impacted Chinese and Black workers. As in¶ the US, the most dangerous parts of construction were assigned to Chinese¶ workers. Underpaid and relying on their own provisions and medical care,¶ Chinese workers died at a rate of two per kilometer in the treacherous Rocky¶ Mountains. Black workers were recruited as porters with conditions of work¶ that rivaled those of slavery (Matthieu 2010). The rail carried white passengers into intimate fantasies of racial subservience, and it carried racialized¶ workers to premature deaths.¶ Across Turtle Island, railroads became the key infrastructure in the¶ colonial war against first peoples. On both sides of the medicine line, the¶ railroads enabled land theft. A key rationale for the Canadian rail was its role¶ in asserting the border against American invasion. Lands were cleared for¶ the coming railroad, while the railroad also became a colonial weapon to¶ clear the land. Rail was critical in the extermination of the buffalo that had¶ roamed Turtle Island, from Alaska and the Yukon Territories down through¶ Georgia. In just a few decades, herds were hunted to near extinction with¶ devastating consequences for Indigenous peoples whose lifeways were profoundly entangled with the buffalo. Settler states saw the buffalo slaughter¶ as logistical warfare to clear the plains through extermination of Indigenous¶ peoples’ food supply. This is painfully clear in US Colonel Richard Irving¶ Dodge’s directive to “kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian¶ gone” (Smits 1994). Daschuk (2013: 162) has further documented how, with¶ the disappearance of the buffalo, officials “denied food, as a means to ethnically cleanse a vast region from Regina to the Alberta border as the Canadian¶ Pacific Railway took shape.” Deliberate starvation was used to force Indigenous peoples off their territories and into reserves. When organized resistance¶ to colonial dispossession took shape in the 1885 Uprising, the transcontinental¶ railroad transported Canadian militia forces to the front lines of colonial wars¶ against Cree and Metis people, providing the definitive logistical advantage.¶ The construction of this massive colonial infrastructure demanded¶ assembly of another. Colonial circulatory infrastructure required colonial security infrastructure. What is now the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)¶ was created in 1873, initially as the North West Mounted Police, a paramilitary¶ force created to protect the colonial order both “internally” where settler¶ jurisdiction had already been asserted and “externally” where it remained an¶ ambition. In fact, the name change indexes that achievement. Dhillon (2015:¶ 8) argues that the Mounties have carried out “genocidal extermination, subjugation, and physical containment of Indigenous communities.” They were¶ deployed on the Canadian frontier to “ensure the negation of Indigenous¶ sovereignty and to implement effective policies of containment and surveillance” (Nettelbeck and Smandych 2010: 357).¶ The force was also specifically created to clear the way for the railroad¶ and to protect the infrastructure as it was built. Protecting the infrastructure¶ of colonization was thus a critical means of conquest. In 1885, Mounties saw¶ their jurisdiction expanded at the direct request of the president of the¶ CPR—to protect the infrastructure as it laid new tracks west of the Rockies.¶ Mounties were also deployed to break the strikes of rail workers laying tracks¶ through the mountains. Later, in 1920, when Macdonald’s genocidal residential school system became compulsory, Mounties were charged with¶ ensuring attendance. Mounted police were also a part of transnational imperial struggle. Precisely because of their expertise in “counterinsurgency”¶ warfare against Indigenous people on the plains, they were deployed to fight¶ the Boers in the 1899–1903 South African war. Today, the RCMP website¶ proudly proclaims, “The two regiments consisting of North West Mounted¶ Police members had experience dealing with counter-insurgency during the¶ North-West Rebellion. Consequently, they achieved many successes in battle.” Colonial infrastructure required the protection of martial force, and—¶ as Mahan insists—martial force required infrastructure to enhance and¶ extend that force.¶ Over 150 years later, these same railroad tracks remain a site of acute¶ struggle over colonial violence. Just a few months prior to Macdonald’s¶ decapitation, the railroad became the stage for a momentous standoff¶ between the settler state and Indigenous peoples. On February 6, 2020, the¶ same Mounted Police formed to protect the infrastructures of settler “civilization” violently raided the unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en Nation to¶ clear the way for corporate construction of a natural gas pipeline. Arresting¶ land defenders and leadership, destroying community infrastructure, and¶ interrupting ceremony, the raid went on for days. Under Wet’suwet’en law,¶ authority over the nation’s unceded territory lies with hereditary chiefs from¶ five clans in a system of governance that long predates colonization. All five¶ hereditary chiefs rejected the construction of the pipeline on their territory.¶ In direct response to their calls for support, dramatic and sustained actions¶ proliferated. Indigenous people and their allies blockaded the national rail¶ network, launching the #ShutDownCanada movement. Coast to coast occupations of rail lines and ports, highways and bridges, and central city streets¶ by Indigenous land defenders and their allies had impact. Flows of commuters and commodities that rely on rapid circulation ground to a halt. Standing¶ in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en and standing immediately atop the transcontinental tracks, Mohawk land protectors offered teachings about the original treaties that past and present infrastructures trespass. Materially invoking the infrastructural violence at the heart of Canada’s colonial problem,¶ Mohawk land protectors created the space and opportunity for moving forward differently.¶ If the contemporary crisis of colonial violence circulates through imperial infrastructures, how might a reckoning with this ongoing unfolding of¶ infrastructural injustice lay the tracks for a different road forward? And how¶ might we draw out the wider imperial ecologies in these accounts of crisis?Crisis 3—Imperial Ecologies¶ In the summer of 2020, as city streets were alight with demands for a racial¶ reckoning and as the pandemic continued to devastate and mutate, the Amazon burned at an unprecedented pace as part of our deepening climate crisis. This extraordinary ecosystem had been in the unmaking for many years¶ and is now projected to collapse later this century, yet summer 2020 marked¶ dramatically increased rates of destruction. Protection of the Amazon, 60¶ percent of which is claimed by Brazil, is crucial to the continued existence of¶ life on earth as we know it. Home to Indigenous and African descendent peoples who are fiercely defending their homelands, the Amazon—“the¶ lungs of the earth”—is the source of a fifth of the world’s oxygen supply¶ (Gonzales 2019). The moisture that evaporates from the Amazon rains on¶ farmlands across South America and up to the US Midwest. The species¶ diversity within the Amazon is unparalleled on the planet. It is the extraordinary scale, ecological complexity, and abundance of the rainforest and its¶ main river that led Jeff Bezos, in 1994, to rename his fledgling distribution¶ platform from “Cadabra” to Amazon. You can find untold riches and¶ resources in the Amazon, or at least you could. But it is not just the rest of us¶ earthlings that rely on the critical Amazon ecosystem; Amazon the corporation does too.¶ In the Amazon, a geopolitics of infrastructure is remaking critical¶ planetary ecologies. The fires themselves have garnered global media attention, but less prominent in the coverage is the way that deforestation is taking shape to make way for an extractive industrial economy financed and¶ underpinned by infrastructure development. Deforestation closely follows¶ the development of new road and rail infrastructure; satellite images show¶ how roads cut into and fragment forest canopy and intensify traffic in the¶ Amazon. Infrastructure serves as vector for deforestation, with 95 percent of¶ it taking place within five and a half kilometers of roadways. Infrastructure¶ furthermore enables development of more infrastructure; energy, industrial¶ agriculture, and extractive systems become possible when transportation¶ makes new lands accessible. Cattle ranching has become the largest land use¶ driving of deforestation in every country with jurisdiction in the Amazon,¶ accounting for 80 percent of the current deforestation rates, but it is transport infrastructure that underpins this industrial transformation. Amazonian infrastructure expansion was a linchpin in Bolsonaro’s broader economic plans (Holmes 2019). Brazil is planning “to build a series of big new¶ hydroelectric dams and webs of waterways, rail lines, ports and roads that¶ can overcome logistical obstacles standing in the way of exporting commodities and other goods.”¶ Brazil is arguably a key stage for US and Chinese imperial competition¶ through infrastructure. Brazil recently signed on as a member state of the¶ Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (Ennes 2020), and Chinese banks¶ are already heavily invested in Brazilian infrastructure projects (“Chinese¶ Banks Expand in Brazil Eyeing Infrastructure” 2015). China’s presence is¶ growing, while it is also “shifting from a focus on extracting raw materials¶ toward financing infrastructure necessary to produce and transport them.”¶ Key plans and deals for infrastructure expansion in the Brazilian Amazon have also been unfolding in the United States. New trade deals were established in 2019 between the American and Brazilian governments, and infrastructure investment is the vehicle for economic cooperation. In September¶ 2019, Brazil’s infrastructure minister reported on talks with the US: “We¶ have major programs of concessions in all areas that will transform our¶ infrastructure, logistics and competitiveness” (Wemer 2020). A year later, a¶ $1 billion (USD) MOU was signed between the two countries. An interim¶ report from March 2020 described a key goal of the agreement being to¶ close the gap between China and US investment in Brazil’s “growing infrastructure construction,” of which China accounts for 7 percent and the US¶ only 2 percent.¶ US finance is heavily implicated in the development of Amazonian¶ infrastructure. Grim (2019) goes so far as to name US-based Blackstone—¶ the world’s largest asset management firm—as the “driving force behind¶ Amazon Deforestation,” with major stakes in an enormous terminal and¶ highway project to support industrial agriculture expansion. BlackRock—an¶ offshoot of Blackstone that manages more than $6 trillion in investments—¶ has invested heavily in industrial Brazilian cattle. JBS (n.d.), “the world’s¶ largest animal protein producer” (as the website proudly proclaims) and,¶ after Nestle, the world’s largest food corporation, is implicated in both the¶ destruction of the Amazon and working conditions that are “akin to slavery.”¶ Despite its loud claims to invest in sustainable supply chains, BlackRock¶ increased its stake in JBS in 2016 by $41 million, and again in 2018.¶ This infrastructural incursion into the Amazon is fueling the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian people and provoking widespread resistance. Pereira da Silva and Cordoba (2020) write, “The¶ strategy of Bolsonaro’s government and its allies in congress is very clear: to¶ take 9.8 million hectares from Indigenous and traditional territories in the¶ Amazon to seize more land for agribusiness.” When it comes to the Amazon’s¶ peoples, that Brazil blatantly undermines their self-determination appears to¶ be more the rule than the exception. Dias (2019) writes, “For more than a century, a series of Brazilian governments have sought to move into the country’s¶ interior, developing—or, to be more precise, colonizing—the Amazon.” In¶ 2019, while the fires burned, Bolsonaro’s presidential spokesperson tried to¶ allay concerns about Indigenous peoples of the Amazon while recentering¶ the focus on “national interest” when he explained that “the Indians will be¶ consulted, but national interest must prevail.” This colonial stance is¶ unchanged from the Brazilian state in 1975, when road construction through¶ the Amazon saw the murder of thousands of Indigenous Amazonian people. In 1975, Col. João Tarcísio Cartaxo Arruda explained, “This road is important and must be constructed, whatever the cost. We will not change its layout, and the only burden for our battalions will be to pacify the Indians”¶ (Dias 2019). Perhaps more surprising than the colonial continuity within¶ Brazil is the extraordinary convergence in colonial discourse between Brazil¶ and Canada. While Canada’s Justin Trudeau is often cast as the progressive¶ boy toy of leaders on the world stage, his words—almost interchangeable¶ with the Bolsonaro regime—should give pause. At the height of Indigenousled resistance to the Transmountain pipeline, Trudeau insisted, “[The Transmountain pipeline] is in the national interest and it will get built” (Global¶ News 2018).¶ These transnational ties forged by colonial infrastructure and its protection are precisely what prompts this circuit in the south. Today in Brazil,¶ bovine life is implanted into the Amazon landscape in a process of agro-industrial colonization underpinned by infrastructure. But this is not the first time¶ a massive infrastructural incursion has served to replace Indigenous peoples¶ and ecosystems with settlers and extractive bovine industry. It is not even the¶ first time in this article. As in the Amazon, colonization of the central plains¶ transformed complex ecologies into landscapes of capitalist agribusiness, and¶ here too, this colonial transformation relied on infrastructure. Winona¶ LaDuke (2017) emphasizes the scale of nineteenth-century colonial ecological¶ destruction: “There were then more than 250 types of grass, along with profusions of prairie dogs, purple corn flower, prairie turnips, mushrooms, and a¶ host of other species listed today as endangered or protected. . . . Those 50 million buffalo have been replaced by farms and 45 million cattle.” Karuka (2019:¶ 40) describes how “railroad colonialism transformed bountiful prairie lands¶ into massive monocrop areas for beef, pork, and grain production.” The railroads were critical here but so were logistical innovations in their use. Gustav¶ Swift may have inspired Ford with his disassembly line, but it was his refrigerated railcar that allowed processed beef rather than live cattle to be shipped¶ east—linking the industrial cities of the east with increased efficiency to the¶ farms of the western frontier.¶ The deep entanglements between these three stories of crisis continue¶ to unfold. In 2007, JBS, the Brazilian global meat giant, already financed by¶ US investment firms, entered the US livestock market through a buyout of¶ Swift and Co., the firm founded by Gustavus Swift. In another extraordinary¶ convergence, COVID-19 outbreaks at their Greeley facility have been among¶ the largest in the United States. Gilmore argues that all life is geographical,¶ and perhaps so too is death. The geography of COVID outbreaks in the meat supply chain points to a much longer and larger crisis of sovereignty and food¶ systems in the imperial logistics of social reproduction. The plant, which¶ employs more than three thousand workers, is located in the northeast corner¶ of Colorado, on Indigenous lands that remain deeply contested to this day.¶ In 1803, in what Nick Estes (2017: 117) describes as the “largest real¶ estate transaction in world history,” known today as the Louisiana Purchase,¶ the US “bought” an enormous tract of land from France. It was, in fact, Barings Bank (of Canadian railroad fame) that financed this deal. The Sioux¶ Nation or Oceti Sakowin eventually signed peace treaties with the invading¶ American settler state to bring an end to the wars against them. Greeley is¶ within the lands of the Fort Laramie treaties, which provided this “temporary reprieve” and a “25-million-acre territory” for the Oceti Sakowin. With¶ the buffalo slaughter and settler invasion, Estes describes how this vast land¶ base was steadily diminished. By 1876, Congress abolished treaty making¶ with Native Nations, and in 1877 it illegally ceded the Black Hills and created¶ the present-day reservation system. Foregrounding the invasion of rail and¶ hydro dams historically and oil pipelines more recently, Estes traces how settler violations of the Fort Laramie treaties provide context for the extraordinary Standing Rock uprising, and the ongoing legal action to restore these¶ Indigenous lands. Indeed, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 remains at the¶ center of a land dispute that the Smithsonian suggests “brings into question¶ the very meaning of international agreements and who has the right to adjudicate them when they break down.” They report on the 1980 Supreme¶ Court ruling that awarded more than $100 million in reparation to the Sioux¶ Nation, on the grounds that the US had illegally appropriated the Black¶ Hills. The payment was refused, and Chief Spotted Tail instead insisted,¶ “We’d like to see that land back.”¶ These specific lands figured in all three stories of crisis—as the site of¶ COVID outbreaks in processing plants, as Indigenous homelands subject to¶ the violent dispossession of railroads and police force, and as a vital complex¶ ecology that has been devastated and remade into a zone of extractive corporate agriculture. The beef, the bankers, and the borders also repeat. Multiple¶ threads of entanglement in fact make it impossible to pull these crises apart.¶ The borders of these stories of crises in motion deliberately give way—they¶ wind through and into each other. They are all stories of the crisis of expanded¶ reproduction.¶ Imperial logistics may be able to manage more circumscribed crises of¶ distribution. With ready access to disposable “essential workers” and to¶ Indigenous and Afro-Amazonian people’s lands, the sector can even thrive in a context of quarantine, as Bezos’s trillions suggest. But logistics cannot¶ manage the crisis of life that its own logics and infrastructures produce.¶ Anti-colonial movements are organizing to interrupt lethal circulation and to¶ organize motion otherwise. The final section of this article shows how they¶ are regenerating reproduction through refusal.

As a feminist scholar of the British Empire who grew up intellectually in the 1980s, I am grateful for the ways that these articles allow us to revisit some of the keywords and critical concepts that animated histories of race, gender, conjugality, and un/lawful sex in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in both metropole and colony. Work by Deborah Gorham, Judith Walkowitz, Tanika Sarkar, Mrinalini Sinha, Philippa Levine, and others illustrate how and why legislative projects such as the original Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885), the Age of Consent Bill (1890), the Ilbert Bill (1891), and the Contagious Diseases (CD) Acts (1864 at home; 1886 and following in the empire) were not simply acts of disciplining and punishment but also enculturation devices aimed at managing the global project of racial respectability and its governors, whether white, brown, or black.1 Lest we take it for granted, that work opened up heretofore frankly unimaginable spaces, historiographically speaking, of politics and culture shaped by legal strategies designed at once to call out and restrain the sexual energies that were seen to threaten a civilized and civilizing anglophone order. What Ann Stoler identified as the links between “carnal knowledge and imperial power” were legible thanks in part to these feminist cultural historians, who took sex seriously even as they refused the narratives that polite society told itself about why the sexual desire of some men required the “protection” and constraint of some girls and women.2 The articles collected here build on these earlier studies but bring new lenses, specifically a focus on the operation of legal regimes of consent as they were produced through struggles about, over, and for the adolescent girl’s body. Although each author deals with specific cases in particular local, regional, national. and imperial contexts, there are a number of patterns that are striking.

The first is a process of depersonalization, in which the specificities of the victim’s or victims’ circumstances and identities drop out in favor of a more abstract concept of legal personhood. This is, of course, a common procedural effect of the law itself, which is grounded in a case or cases and moves to broader principles that can be appropriated as precedent or as universal principle. Even so, the trials here reveal historical processes that tend toward discourses of abstraction that are notable. Rukhmabai, whose celebrated case came before multiple judges and turned on the question of conjugal rights and their restitution, was sensationalized to such a degree that in certain metropolitan and colonial circles her name stood in for the scandal of reform. Her legal trials, although immersed in these questions, narrowed the focus to the legitimacy of restitution and “intelligent” consent. The details of Rukhmabai’s story were never far from the surface; but even when the court engaged them, it was always in the service of producing a legal account that rose above the facts of her case. Given the perceived dangers of respectable women appearing in public at all, let alone a woman appearing in public whose conjugal life was on trial, it is hardly surprising that Rukhmabai herself participated in this process of abstraction. As Kanika Sharma shows, her public plea—which drew as much on the Shastras as on contemporary notions of women’s education—effectively made a case for the girl/woman as a Hindu person capable of informed consent through knowledge.

After Choudhury copyrighted the Bikram Yoga sequence, Indians, Indian-Americans, and officials in the Indian government expressed their outrage, offering a variety of strategies for reclaiming traditional knowledge. The objections of all three parties are evident in the news media: major Indian newspapers, US publications, and the statements by Indian government officials demonstrated significant criticism of yoga piracy specifically and biopiracy more generally. One example of this vehement outcry unfolded in the Huffington Post. In 2010, The Hindu American Foundation started a campaign called “Take Back Yoga,” focusing on the inherent links between yoga and Hindu identity and sparking a kind of global nationalism about the practices. Aseem Shukla, Co-Founder of the Hindu American Foundation, argues that “[t]he severance of yoga from Hinduism disenfranchises millions of Hindu Americans from their spiritual heritage and a legacy in which they can take pride.” 387 Claiming that Hinduism suffers from “overt intellectual property theft, absence of trademark protections and the facile complicity of generations of Hindu yogis, gurus, swamis and others that offered up a religion's spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism,” Shukla concludes that “Hindus must take back yoga and reclaim the intellectual property of their spiritual heritage--not sell out for the expediency of winning more clients for the yoga studio down the street.”388 His blog post elicited a vehement response from Oprah-endorsed new ager Deepak Chopra, who historicizes 387 Aseem Shukla, “On Faith Panelists Blog: The Theft of Yoga,” Washington Post, April 18, 2010, http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/aseem_shukla/2010/04/nearly_twenty_mi llion_people_in.html. 388 Ibid. 147 yoga as before Hinduism and claims that “enlightenment has always been outside the bounds of religion.”389 While he respects the “Take Back Yoga” campaign as an “innocent attempt by the Indian diaspora to get some respect” he admonishes the Hindu American Foundation to “lighten up” because “Indian pride is getting more than its share of strokes.”390 Chopra embraces the Western practice of yoga as part of the globalization of the South Asian philosophy. Unlike those who seek acknowledgment of the origins and spiritual context of the practice, he is unbothered by the transformation of yoga into a new cultural form. Together, the positions of the Hindu American Foundation and Chopra prompted hundreds of thoughtful comments from the public, including self-identified Indian nationals, Indian ex-pats, and Indian-Americans, igniting a dispute about the state of yoga in America. One yoga instructor proclaims that “[n]obody owns yoga”391 while one Indian doctor comments that Shukla’s position is “characterized by a pseudo-nationalist claim to a non-existent purity of composite, often contradictory and disparate beliefs originally associated with people living on the banks of the River Indus (Sindhu in Sanskrit), now in Pakistan!”392 Shukla fires back to Chopra’s response, calling him “a principle purveyor of the usurpation I sought to expose” and “the most prominent exponent of the art of ‘How to Deconstruct, Repackage and Sell Hindu Philosophy Without Calling it Hindu!”393 Reports of comments of Indians in India were significantly more in line with Shukla’s than Chopras. Ashok Jain, a lawyer for the Indian Supreme Court, said “[t]he government of India should be filing for cultural patents…Why have 389 Deepak Chopra, “Who Owns Yoga?,” Huffington Post, December 1, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/who-owns-yoga_b_790078.html. 390 Ibid. 391 Paul Vitello, “Hindu Group Stirs Debate in Fight for Soul of Yoga,” New York Times, November 27, 2010, Comment 156, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/nyregion/28yoga.html?pagewanted=all. 392 Ibid. 393 Shukla, “On Faith Panelists Blog: The Theft of Yoga.” 148 we failed? The cost of filing patents is nothing. We must take action now. In 10 years, copyright will be a big issue.”394 Sudha Gopalakrishnan, the Mission Director for the National Mission for Manuscripts, said about indigenous knowledge that “[o]ur ‘intangible’ heritage is in grave danger and needs to be protected.”395 The end result of the debate was the creation of the TKDL, a digital database designed to catalog prior art in a manner that prevents the continued patenting of traditional knowledge.396 The database itself is a collection of information about over 1,500 asanas and ayurvedic treatments as well as their past and present histories in an attempt to prevent the appropriation of indigenous knowledge. 397 Because both the US Patent Office and the European Patent Office agreed to recognize the contents of the database as proof of prior art, the cataloging of traditional knowledge in it offers a means of preventing the grant of patents on already-existing information.398 Though, as the conversation between the Hindu American Foundation and Chopra as well as Fish’s ethnographic research demonstrates, not all Indians or Hindus see eye-to-eye on the issue of the ownership of traditional knowledge. Nonetheless, the pushback against yoga’s commodification is real and significant. In discussions about the ownership of yoga, assertions of Indian and Hindu identity perform two important rhetorically disidentificatory roles. First, individual acts of renaming reconceptualize copyright and patent law, prompting new conceptions of the fundamental principles of the legal regime. Terms such as “cultural patents” and “intangible heritage” indict the boundaries of the intellectual property system, identifying its inability to account for the role of racial Others in knowledge production. In the spirit of disidentification, these rhetorical acts simultaneously deconstruct and critique the intellectual property system while engaging in reconstructive and reconstitutive acts of worldmaking.399 For Muñoz, the term worldmaking “delineates the ways in which performances—both theatrical and everyday rituals—have the ability to establish alternative views of the world…they are oppositional ideologies that function as critiques of oppressive regimes of ‘truth’ that subjugate minoritarian people.”400 In this case, positing alternatives to intellectual property law is an act of reimagining which conceives of a new regime for governing knowledge that considers and recognizes racial Others. Second, the desire to connect intellectual property with national identity acts as a mechanism for rethinking the world in a manner that recognizes marginalized groups. While the accuracy of the absolute link between Hinduism and yoga may be in doubt and the deployment of key concepts of intellectual property law, such as patent and copyright, inaccurate, the attempt to reclaim yoga’s heritage is a nationalistic maneuver which refuses the narrative of the practice as undifferentiated knowledge in the public domain, owned by no one. The assertion of national identity constitutes yogic knowledge, linking it with Indianness and Hinduness and refusing the narrative that there is a single, undifferentiated public domain in which individual contributions cannot be identified. Indeed, the prevailing narrative of traditional knowledge, which I discuss in greater depth in the following section, posits Western colonizers as the civilizing forces which refine and polish the haphazard mass of information that colonized peoples cluelessly possess.401 Succinctly stated, 399 Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, 195. 400 Ibid. 401 Halbert, Resisting Intellectual Property, 136-137. 150 through the nationalistic discourses of the Bikram Yoga controversy, “a national identity for a new type of political subject was born.”402 This political subject confronts the erasure of racial Otherness from the landscape of intellectual property, rendering visible the links between otherwise ahistoric raw materials in the public domain and particular social identities. Indeed, rhetorical disidentification renders visible racial histories in the manner Gilroy advocates, disallowing erasures of marginalized groups which make exploitation possible. Moreover, the historicized Indian subject is one capable of contributing to a global phenomenon—far from being powerless, the Indians and Hindus who contributed to yoga are forces to be reckoned with and the creators of an increasingly valuable commodity form. The manner in which Indians and Indian Americans perform their discontent with the regime of ownership which governs yoga confronts the dehistoricization of the practice and forces consideration of the individuals who contributed to its creation, formation, and evolution. While Coombe identifies the circulation of racially derogatory trademarks as a way of constituting national identity, erasures of racial histories in discourses of invention is an equally important means of racialization. Refusing to acknowledge the contributions of marginalized groups and categorizing traditional information as “undiscovered” or an ahistoric part of the public domain effects the same type of constitutive process that occurs through trademarks. Moreover, the forced recognition of Indian and Hindu identity interrupts white and Western narratives of invention, particularly as they define the nation. American national identity is built around the inventor—from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison, the American Dream is embodied by individuals who demonstrate the ingenuity of their inventive forefathers. This narrative is marked by the erasure of bodies of color and their labor. The linking of yoga and 402 M. Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Quebecois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987): 134. 151 Indian national identity operates as a counternarrative American-style objectification and commodification of yoga. The history of yoga told by some Indian government officials, Indians, and Indian Americans and foregrounded here demonstrates the myth of the originality of patented knowledge and makes visible the role of marginalized groups in the process of creation. Patentability, prior art, and the public domain Marginalized groups are rendered visible in the discussion of the ownership of traditional knowledge through the redefinition of the very landscape of copyright and patent law and the concomitant rewriting of the public domain.403 Dr. V. B. Gupta, Head of the IT Division of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the creator of the TKDL, explains, “[y]oga was created in India as early as 2000 B.C. Copyright doesn’t exist on anything after 50 years, and it is in the public domain…So someone claiming yoga as their own and charging franchise money is not acceptable.”404 A recent research paper on the TKDL explained the topic similarly: “Once the traditional knowledge is recorded in TKDL, it becomes public domain knowledge. Under patent law, this means that it is considered to be prior art and hence is not patentable.”405 The statements of Gupta, Hirwade, Jain, and Gopalakrishnan and the actions of the Indian government intervene in a Western narrative of the public domain, recasting the concept to reflect knowledge and practices of those who are racially different. In doing so, they force rereadings of intellectual property’s most central terms from the vantage point of Otherness. In asserting the voice of the Indian people in constituting the public domain, contesting the meaning of prior art and patentable, the individuals cited here break the Western monopoly on defining 403 While the use of the term patent in the context of yoga is inaccurate, the discourses I identify here still prompt the reevaluation of patent law’s scope and relationship to traditional knowledge. 404 Susanne Hiller, “Hottest Yoga in Town: At 100 Degrees You Feel the ‘Bikram Glow.’ It’s Not Pretty.,” National Post, March 12, 2003. 405 Hirwade, “Protecting Traditional Knowledge Digitally: A Case Study of TKDL.” 152 the boundaries of intellectual property. Moreover, they implicitly and explicitly demonstrate public domain’s tendency to ignore questions of difference and erase racial histories, functionally critiquing the omissions of marginalized groups in the work of Lessig and other free culture advocates. As Kimberly Christen points out, Lessig, in particular, fails to acknowledge that “[i]ndividual creators are privileged even as they build on knowledge sets from the past and work from biased (not neutral) technologies, knowledge practices, and economic structures. The rhetoric of freedom—free of restrictions—replays the structure of enclosure, open for some closed for others.”406 Gupta, Hirwade, Jain, and Gopalakrishnan direct attention to free culture’s omissions, centering the concepts of patentable, prior art, and public domain on issues of race.

As noted earlier, the first wave of immigrants from South Asia to the United States came in the early 1900s and settled on the West Coast. Although the majority of them were Sikh faith, they were referred to as “Hindoos.”463 Racialization of early South Asian immigrants generally appealed to religion, employing Christianity to draw a contrast between South Asians and Europeans. When justifying its position against South Asian immigration, the Asiatic Exclusion League (AEL) appealed to Biblical creation and the Protestant ethic.464 It claimed that while South Asians were of the same race as Europeans, significant differences had emerged between the two groups: the Aryan race was divided, such that Western Aryans, who represented modern Europeans, were “Lords of Creation,” and the Eastern Aryans, representing modern South Asians (or at least those from northern India and Pakistan), were “slaves of Creation.”465 Accordingly, while the founders of America “pressed to the west, in the everlasting march of conquest, progress, and civilization,” those who went to South Asia “became enslaved, effeminate, caste-ridden, and degraded.”466 Hence, while AEL conceded that Europeans and ‘Hindoos’ were members of the same racial group, it depicted the latter as a degraded form of the European races, not worthy of citizenship and equal status in America. In creating this racial characterization, AEL linked Christianity to notions of “progress” and “civilization.”467 Negative sentiment towards these early immigrants soon began to build, spurred by economic competition with other groups. Asian Indians were widely described as cheap,468 filthy laborers who took jobs away from working class whites. In September 1907, there was a major riot against South Asian immigrant workers in Bellingham, Washington.469 The San Francisco Chronicle reported this incident as “Workingmen Driving Out the Hated Hindoo.”470 Subsequently, there were similar uprisings in several cities along the West coast.471 These riots foreshadowed later acts of violence against South Asian Americans, which occurred after the post-1965 rise in the South Asian American population. The most infamous set of incidents involved the “Dotbusters,” an anti-South Asian gang in the Jersey City, New Jersey area. During 1987 and 1988, the Dotbusters were responsible for several hate crimes against South Asian Americans, including the well-known murder of Navroze Mody.472 The “Dotbusters” specifically targeted Asian Indian Americans for violence, motivated by jealousy of Indian economic success and by the perception of Asian Indians as a “separate, alien group.” Buchanan’s essay was actually more sympathetic to the plight of these early South Asian American immigrants than many others. 469. Dotbusters drew upon the bindi, a “traditional red dot worn by some Hindu, married women”474 as a sign of fidelity, for their name. Professor Vijay Prashad discusses other well-known hate crimes that targeted South Asian Americans even prior to September 11, 2001; for example, in September 1998, Rishi Maharaj, a South Asian American of Caribbean descent, was beaten by a racist gang in South Ozone Park, Queens, New York.475 Of course, more such attacks occurred after September 11, 2001.476 What is noteworthy about these incidents here is that many of them have occurred in areas where South Asian American populations are particularly large and visible, such as Jersey City, New Jersey and Queens, New York. The visibility of South Asians in these racial microclimes probably offsets their racial ambiguity to an extent; I doubt that I would have been referred to as “Japanese Beetle” in Jersey City, as I was in Newark, Delaware.477 However, having a defined racial identity comes at a price: increased risk of specific (as opposed to general) racial targeting and hate crimes.478 More broadly, these incidents illustrate the importance of racial microclimes. 2. New Age Orientalism: South Asians as Mystical, Exotic Foreigners South Asians in America have also been racialized informally as mystical, exotic foreigners, also based on Hindu and Buddhist religious symbolism. Professor Prashad describes how notions of South Asian spirituality and exoticism have been used to reinforce the image of South Asians as foreigners.479 This began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Indian spiritual leaders such as Swami Vevekananda and Swami Abhedananda introduced India’s spiritual traditions to American audiences.480 In more recent years, various “New Age Orientalists,” such as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and his most famous student, Deepak Chopra, have capitalized on this practice, marketing faith as a means to obtain profit. In contrast to the Hindu/Indic-centered organizations and the Hindutva movement, to unify Asian Indians or Hindus, but rather to market Eastern spiritual traditions to a Western audience. According to Professor Prashad, their presentation of South Asia as a land of spirituality and wonder neglects the immense material poverty and suffering present on the subcontinent, not to mention the adverse material conditions faced by ethnic minorities in America.482 Moreover, Professor Prashad contends that New Age orientalism can actually reinforce the social systems that perpetuate this poverty, by emphasizing harmony and individual change rather than the social upheaval necessary to bring about systemic changes.483 Nevertheless, the New Age Orientalism that Professor Prashad describes also illustrates South Asians’ agency in their own informal racialization. The various spiritual leaders have drawn upon their “foreignness” as a form of “racial capital”484 to market their faith as an exotic commodity to a largely white liberal audience. Moreover, such commodification is not limited to South Asian spiritual leaders. Mass consumer outlets such as Urban Outfitters have, in the recent past, sold “clothing and artifacts . . . with Hindu religious symbols, gods and goddesses, and even mere random Hindi letters that amount to [g]ibberish.”485 Media images such as that of the “Swami” as a sports prognosticator—popularized by ESPN’s Chris Berman—also perpetuate this exoticism.486 As these examples illustrate, racialization of South Asians as mystical foreigners, via religious symbols, involves both agency and ascription.

WASHINGTON (AP) — All of a sudden it’s Kamala Harris ' economy — a major opportunity as well as a possible risk for the likely Democratic presidential nominee.

Shortly after President Joe Biden left the race a week ago, Harris began to craft her own narrative around the economy by putting an emphasis on ending child poverty, promoting labor unions, reducing the costs of health and child care and protecting “dignity” in retirement.

Logistically, Biden would likely be deployed in ways that could maximize his strengths and allow Harris to expand her voter base.

Democrats boasted that he could appeal to working-class voters, seniors and independents -- all demographics he performed well with in 2020 who would need to be kept in the fold as Harris regains ground with younger voters and voters of color who were drifting away from Biden

The Biden administration may soon endorse a proposal before the World Trade Organization (WTO) that would suspend patent protections on Covid-19 treatments and tests and, in doing so, thwart existing WTO standards. This move would be enormously unpopular with American voters, according to a new poll released today by the Bayh-Dole Coalition.

Seven in ten voters believe that it is important for the Biden administration to preserve WTO standards for protecting IP. And 77% are at least slightly concerned that the pending proposal would stifle medical research and kill American manufacturing jobs.

U.S. voters favor strong international IP protection, poll finds

Most Americans want the Biden administration to protect intellectual property rights at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and express concerns about waiving those rights, finds a new poll commissioned by the Bayh-Dole Coalition.

Polling at the state level is limited at this point, with no more than four polls conducted in the past month in any battleground state. But based on the state-level polls we do have, things don't look any more rosy for Harris there, as she lags behind Biden's margin against Trump in the key battleground states for which we have data. In our aggregate of this limited set of polls, Harris trailed Trump by around 3 points in Wisconsin (Biden trailed by about 2 points), by almost 5 in Pennsylvania (Biden was down around 4) and by 5 in Michigan (Biden was behind by about 2). This raises the possibility that she could have a harder time than Biden winning the Electoral College and thus the election.