Abstract: This article examines forms of queer (non)sociality I call near life that are forced to exist, as nonexistence, outside the bounds of possessive humanism. Through a reading of the brutal murders and disarticulation of a number of trans/queer people, I suggest the legal category of "overkill" as a way of apprehending a queer ontology that stands in contrast to the security of an LGBT identity. That the murdered were working class and largely people of color and/or trans/gender nonconforming marks this interpersonal violence as a restaging of larger iterations of necropolitical state violence. As antiqueer violence is written in the social as an outlaw practice, I argue, via Frantz Fanon's reading of Hegel, that these forms of violence are not an aberration but are central to the reproduction of liberal democracy in the United States. Against redemption--violence is the province of the queer, but this does not signal the totality of negation nor the end of queer resistance.

Abstract: This essay supplements a growing body of work on domestic television in China by exploring some histories of the screen outside the home. Rooted in Olympic-era Beijing, this discussion converges around three intermedial contexts: (1) contemporary art and exhibition; (2) nondomestic and unhomely space; (3) contemporary cinema. These disparate assemblages reimagine the space of television and the medium's role as a form of social communication. The primary focus is the intersection of television and the city in articulating the social body in transition. Focusing on artists, audiences, state media, and elided spaces of electronics production, the essay develops the notion of "screen postsocialism" to explore the logic of development in contemporary China. In particular, it argues that the Olympic era consolidates a transitional imaginary around outside television forms. This emphasis on a particular technology of reception, moreover, acts to screen out the broader textures of postsocialist cultural and economic production.

Abstract: Since their emergence as a novel form of justice, truth commissions have magnetically drawn writers into their orbit. This essay explores one literary response that seems both logical and provocative: the thriller's shadowy world of conspiracy theories, cover-ups, and coups. As a subgenre associated with popular culture, the thriller has rarely been considered a serious player in discussions of literature in the aftermath of atrocity. However, as a space in which the mystifications of conspiracy meet the imperatives of transitional justice, the newly emergent subgenre of the truth commission thriller challenges pervasive assumptions about the necessary gravitas of literature in the aftermath of violence. Looking closely at this genre allows us to ask how its forms may help the novel envision productive alternatives to the narrative of silence so intimately linked to the writing of catastrophe. These representations emerge within the increasing globalization of transitional justice, a context that seeks intensifying degrees of communicability as it turns local legacies of violence into ones with international implications. Gillian Slovo's account of a South African amnesty hearing, Red Dust (2000), imagines itself as a competitor for the production of truth; Canadian novelist Alan Cumyn's Burridge Unbound (2000) serves as an analogue prone to similar forces of fragmentation; and David Park's vision of a fictional commission in Northern Ireland, The Truth Commissioner (2008), decenters the truth commission into a private space of multiple meanings. These novels challenge the ideal of national disclosure before the law but nonetheless hold out the hope of communicability in a global sphere.

Abstract: In Palestine/Israel, different colored identification cards are mandated by the Israeli state apparatus to Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and those who are citizens of Israel. The article traces the development of the bureaucracy of the Palestinian ID card since the establishment of Israel and suggests that modern-day ID cards in Palestine/Israel are physical and visible instruments of a widespread low-tech surveillance mechanism to control mobility and a principal means for discriminating, both positively and negatively, subjects' privileges and rights. ID cards are both the spaces in which Palestinians confront, tolerate, and sometimes challenge the Israeli state, and a mechanism through which Palestinian spatiality, territoriality, and corporeality are penetrated by the Israeli regime. Vital in the control and differentiation of Palestinian populations, what makes ID cards unique in the Palestinian/Israeli case is that their materiality is one of their most important and resonant aspects. The article describes various representations of the ID cards, for example in poetry and in murals, to show how they also function as sites of remediation, spaces and moments of renegotiation for their bearers, subject to counter-hegemonic representations, interpretations, and uses. As a special kind of material object, ID cards are an effective and low-tech means of surveillance and differentiation and an important nexus of Israeli power, demonstrating the institutional materiality of the state apparatus's constitution in subjects' everyday life; but they have also become important because they allow a poetics of political resistanc

Abstract: The presence of Filipinos as corporeal and discursive subjects within both America and Asian America has long been contested. On one hand, the dynamic juridical status of Filipinos in America has ranged from American colonial subjects and American nationals to naturalized and native-born citizens. On the other hand, the presence of Filipinos in America has provided labor in key industries from agriculture to nursing. Filipino America has always been a transnational social formation whose history, economy, and culture reflect the interrelated histories of the Philippines and the United States. This essay explores Filipino American aesthetic practices that engage with the corporeal and discursive production of the "Filipino" in both America and Filipino America. The essay investigates the implications of Filipino American visual art and artists "returning" to the Philippines and argues that a cultural logic of "fictions of return" forms a central part of the production of Filipino America as a transnational sociospatial formation. The first section discusses the production of Filipino America in the context of America's exhibitionary complex. The article proceeds to trace exhibitionary practices in the transnational art project Galleon Trade Arts Exchange. The article then discusses works by Christine Wong Yap, Stephanie Syjuco, Reanne Estrada, and Gina Osterloh to highlight how Filipino American visual art has critically engaged with the multiple contradictions within Filipino and Filipino American experiences. The article ends with a rumination on the relationship between cultural production and desire to return and belong.

Abstract: This article explores matters of health and illness through a consideration of questions of temporality. Approaching health as a liminal stage and as a practice of freedom and potentiality, the seesaw between well-being and disease, or the thresholds between life and death, are considered in the light of the figures of turns and returns. Questions of exception, emergency, and suspension of the law are addressed by evocation of the concepts of medical diagnosis and prognosis. The poetics of illness and malaise are explored through the temporal allegory of the eternal recurrence of the same: as moments and movements of ellipses. Writing itself is considered here as a series of turns and returns around the (im)possible inscription of memory: as a toxic yet healing suppleme