Abstract: "On (Our) American Ground" traces the relevant genealogies, and itineraries, of a song and a site whose various symbolic and practical constructions have helped to determine what a transnational American historical past can allow us to imagine of a postnational American future. The song "Guantanamera" is a quasi-officially Cuban cultural and national artifact, though in fact its history of composition, performance, and recording reveals it to be a remarkably unstable and fluid text. The site, the U.S. naval base on Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, continues into 2007 to challenge political and legal theorists to worry the limits of what is politically thinkable and doable. Together, these two decidedly "local" institutions have historically drawn into themselves an impressive procession of political and cultural figures (from José Martí to Celia Cruz to Wyclef Jean), a procession that has collectively embodied, and performed, the complex careers of the nation, the transnation, and the postnation through their engagements of the matter of Guantánamo/"Guantanamera." The piece then implicates in that procession populations that bear no simple relationship with any of the more available categories (national, racial, cultural) according to whose terms we conventionally organize ourselves and others. The piece concludes by suggesting what new forms of knowledge can come out of a critically engaged, "postnational" American studies, and in turn out of a "postnational" Latino studies, a still-emerging disciplinary field that understands its own organizing category as strategically historical, contextual, and critical.

Abstract: Analyses of globalization usually ignore the category of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) to focus instead on transnational migrants. This essay argues that a close look at the humanitarian conceptualization of IDPs provides an understanding of the operations of global sovereignty. Global sovereignty is here taken as the enmeshing of three forces: the neoliberal state and its abdication of fundamental responsibilities to citizens, the hand of the global economy in civil war, and the role of international law. The author suggests that contemporary global sovereignty is fundamentally bio-political insofar as it engenders the conditions of possibility for displacement through the transformations it effects on the traditional nation state, and then offers a salve for displacement through the empty form of humanitarian law. Between the abdication of national responsibility and the emptiness of humanitarian law, the displaced person, who is a complex political actor, is entirely depoliticized and rendered unintelligible. The largely ignored program of ethnic cleansing in Gujarat, India, in 2000 provides an example of this now routine process of sovereignty.

Abstract: This selection of recent artwork explores the disquieting and overwhelming silence regarding those who have disappeared and been detained since 9/11. Through music and drawing, low-tech art and text, artists Jenny Perlin and Visible Collective/Naeem Mohaiemen and Aimara Lin question in multifarious ways the war on terror and its effects.

Abstract: The transition to democracy in South Africa promised a new equitable social order that would be responsive to the needs of "the people." These hopes were very quickly eclipsed by a transition to neoliberalism and by the HIV/AIDS crisis. An examination of the HIV crisis provides insights into how responses to the disease are situated within the landscape of neoliberal discourses and policies, revealing the fissures and inconsistencies of neoliberalism. As communities mobilize varied local, national, and international networks of support to reshape the fields of power, they draw on old and new modes of organizing. These struggles have yet to result in widespread transformations of structures of governance, but they reveal the ways people work within and against them. We can begin to map and link the diverse local practices and transnational solidarities that are deployed to contest and disrupt neoliberal and other forms of governmentality, in order to assert individual and communal rights. Activists and academics seeking to shift policy and public health practice, in particular, would do well to examine more closely the ways in which HIV/AIDS discourse and activism in South Africa challenges the neoliberal biomedical framing of the disease and offers alternate approaches.

Abstract: This essay focuses on the controversy incited by Thabo Mbeki's comments at the Thirteenth International AIDS Conference, held in Durban in 2000, which unleashed a deluge of opprobrium that has inundated the South African president since then. By analyzing the ensuing discursive conflict, it makes visible and intelligible some unarticulated and unarticulable assumptions about bioscience as a natural and exclusive framework for comprehending and addressing HIV/AIDS. In particular, it suggests that the bioscientific paradigm "immunity," which lies at the very center of HIV/AIDS, might not transparently reveal the material processes of the living organism as it coexists with other living beings in shared environments. Instead, "immunity," which existed as a powerful juridical and political concept for almost two thousand years before it was applied to vital contexts, construes the individual as a "natural unit" and thereby renders the social and political milieu within which this individual necessarily lives extrinsic or epiphenomenal with respect to life itself. To the extent that the bioscientific imagination of HIV/AIDS enfolds this individualizing and self-isolating framework as an essential truth, that is, as a "natural fact," it necessarily represents the phenomena it describes as an inevitable consequence of the political and legal assumptions that it unreflectively incorporates. By considering the controversies about HIV/AIDS in South Africa as conflicts of values, we might illuminate how the "concerns" of health care get construed in bioscientific accounts of HIV/AIDS and reconsider what the salient biopolitical dimensions of health and life actually are.

Abstract: The two most dominant twentieth-century theorizations about the exchange of daughters are Freudian psychoanalysis, which theorizes the psychic, libidinal exchange performed by the daughter of the mother for the father, and Lévi-Straussian anthropology, which theorizes the exchange of the daughter by her brothers and fathers through marriage. In both theories, the daughter's exchange is a founding moment in the institution of culture. In this essay, I interrogate the relevance of these paradigms of daughter-exchange to the phenomenon of transnational adoption, where the daughter loses her mother even before she can exchange her mother for her father, and where the daughter is exchanged precisely not to extend kinship ties between the biological and adoptive families. Through a reading of Jane Jeong Trenka's 2003 The Language of Blood, a memoir of growing up as a Korean adoptee in Minnesota, I explore the meaning of the failure of these kinship paradigms in transnational adoption and propose that the psychic and political economies of kinship need to be examined together in light of the growing global diaspora of transnational adoptees.

Abstract: "British Troops Conduct Counter Taliban Operations," Mario Di Lauro. Courtesy Getty Images.

Abstract: Free Time is a collection of collaboratively written experimental prose fragments on topics primarily involving labor and leisure. The form of the project (Denkbilder) is taken from Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Included in this selection is a theorization of the form ("Denkbild Denkbild"). A Denkbild can range from an aphoristic fragment to a mini-essay. Although these Denkbilder experiment with critical form and challenge conventional modes of academic writing, they continue to follow conventional scholarly citation procedures. The neologism chronotistics is meant to describe practices and ideologies of time management and expenditure. Topics discussed in the cycle range from the vocabularies of temporality ("Time Consuming" and "Killing Time") to discussions of gender and labor ("Mars and Venus in the Workplace") to time spent viewing Internet pornography ("Polymorphous Pornygamy"). Inspired by the Frankfurt school and by the late work of Michel Foucault, these Denkbilder attempt to update and expand an interdisciplinary approach to questions of ideology critique and practices of the self.