Refiguring Race and Risk: Counternarratives of Care in the US Security State
Autor Roberta Wolfsonen Limba Engleză Hardback – 12 iul 2024
In Refiguring Race and Risk, Roberta Wolfson turns to novels, memoirs, and other cultural works to debunk the false sense of national security rooted in positioning people of color as embodiments of risk. Considering output by Miné Okubo, Sanyika Shakur, Abraham Verghese, Khaled Hosseini, Helena María Viramontes, and others, Wolfson demonstrates how these authors disrupt racist security regimes and model alternative strategies for managing risk by crafting stories of collective care and community building. Chapters discuss, among other examples, how gang members defy the mass incarceration of Black and Latinx Americans by committing to self-education and self-advocacy; how an Asian immigrant doctor offers a corrective to the pandemic-era trend of allowing xenophobia to inform public health decisions by providing human-centered medical services to HIV-positive patients; and how Latinx migrant farmworkers battle ongoing precarity amid the increasing militarization of the US-Mexico border by bartering life-sustaining resources. In revealing how these works cultivate love as a mode of political resistance, Wolfson relabels people of color not as a source of risk but as critical actors in the push to improve national security.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814215692
ISBN-10: 0814215696
Pagini: 244
Ilustrații: 10 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.43 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814215696
Pagini: 244
Ilustrații: 10 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.43 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Whereas many books merely critique the security state, Refiguring Race and Risk reframes risk management in terms of care and community, rather than trauma and racialization, looking to literature and culture as repositories not only of critiques of power but also of potential remedies.” —David Vázquez, author of Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity
“Making compelling connections among surveillance, identity, and aesthetics, Wolfson illuminates an exciting archive of works by writers of color, including immigrant writers, to bring together critical race studies, comparative literature, critical security studies, art and aesthetics, and political studies.” —Kumarini Silva, author of Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State
Notă biografică
Roberta Wolfson is Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. Her articles have appeared in College Literature,American Literature, and MELUS.
Extras
Refiguring Race and Risk is principally concerned with examining how writers of color like Miné Okubo challenge the affective politics of the contemporary US security state’s national defense policies even as they are being vilified by the state as embodiments of threat. Throughout this book, I take up a series of questions to excavate the role of literature and its accompanying affects in antiracist efforts to disrupt the violence of the contemporary US security state: How do public feelings, racism, and national defense policies intersect in the US security state? What possibilities exist for literary narrative to engage with and possibly redirect the affective politics of securitization? How do US writers of color use affect to reconceptualize notions of risk and threat in the face of state-sanctioned forms of militarization and carceral violence that oppress their communities? As I explore these questions, I show that authors of color engage in critical forms of antiracist resistance against the contemporary US security state by giving counterhegemonic testimonies designed to both disrupt state-sanctioned narratives that characterize people of color as security threats and imagine alternative strategies for managing risk that are fueled by care rather than fear. These counterhegemonic testimonies reveal that, contrary to the state’s claim that national insecurity finds corporeal form in racial bodies, people of color in fact critically support the security of the US nation by cultivating and circulating positive affects like love, empathy, trust, hope, and care, which intersect and converge to defend powerfully against precarity.
I define the contemporary US security state as a set of institutions and ideologies dating from the Cold War period to the present that are designed to defend the nation against threats imagined to be located in the bodies of Black and Brown people. The security state is so empowered to cast people of color as embodiments of risk because it can draw on one of the nation’s most powerful cultural narratives—the belief that the United States is necessarily white and racially homogenous, a myth that forms the bedrock of a country made possible through the genocidal dispossession of Indigenous land and built on the backs of enslaved Africans. This foundational myth justifies the contemporary security state’s practice of reading those who are excluded from whiteness as potentially threatening to the safety (read: cultural sanctity and racial purity) of the country. One of my principal goals in this book is to show that allowing this cultural narrative to fuel the security state’s operations in fact further imperils the nation. I assert that the security state’s understanding of the relationship between race and risk must be reconceptualized; instead of locating risk in raced bodies, we must recognize that an individual’s risk of experiencing harm increases as a direct result of the state’s racism, which is fueled (and thereby potentially disrupted) by rhetoric and narrative. Put differently, in discursively constructing people of color as embodiments of risk, the state is empowered to enact violent security measures that in turn actually place US residents, particularly those of color, at greater risk. Such security measures include policing and mass incarcerating Black and Latinx Americans, allowing xenophobia to inform public health decisions during disease epidemics, militarizing the US-Mexico border and criminalizing Latinx migrants, and profiling people who are racialized as Muslim in the post-9/11 era—all measures that are rooted in white supremacist, anti-Black, settler colonial, and Orientalist beliefs that have informed US society since nation formation.
The counternarratives that I explore in Refiguring Race and Risk reimagine the forms that securitization can take by offering alternative models for risk management that are based in care and community building rather than—as is the basis of the current security apparatus—suspicion and mistrust. I term these models care-based forms of risk management because they stem from the foundational premise that the most empowering and humanity-affirming ways to defend against precarity in a white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, and neoimperialist society are to demonstrate care by building community, expressing empathy, and exchanging love. These care-based forms of risk management contrast sharply with the security practices perpetuated by the state that I term fear-based forms of risk management, which are built on the foundational premise that the best and only way to ensure national security is to stoke fear, which in turn breaks down community and strips people of their agency and humanity. Such fear-based forms of risk management ultimately fail to secure the nation because they further terrorize the people rather than grant them true protection and peace of mind.
I define the contemporary US security state as a set of institutions and ideologies dating from the Cold War period to the present that are designed to defend the nation against threats imagined to be located in the bodies of Black and Brown people. The security state is so empowered to cast people of color as embodiments of risk because it can draw on one of the nation’s most powerful cultural narratives—the belief that the United States is necessarily white and racially homogenous, a myth that forms the bedrock of a country made possible through the genocidal dispossession of Indigenous land and built on the backs of enslaved Africans. This foundational myth justifies the contemporary security state’s practice of reading those who are excluded from whiteness as potentially threatening to the safety (read: cultural sanctity and racial purity) of the country. One of my principal goals in this book is to show that allowing this cultural narrative to fuel the security state’s operations in fact further imperils the nation. I assert that the security state’s understanding of the relationship between race and risk must be reconceptualized; instead of locating risk in raced bodies, we must recognize that an individual’s risk of experiencing harm increases as a direct result of the state’s racism, which is fueled (and thereby potentially disrupted) by rhetoric and narrative. Put differently, in discursively constructing people of color as embodiments of risk, the state is empowered to enact violent security measures that in turn actually place US residents, particularly those of color, at greater risk. Such security measures include policing and mass incarcerating Black and Latinx Americans, allowing xenophobia to inform public health decisions during disease epidemics, militarizing the US-Mexico border and criminalizing Latinx migrants, and profiling people who are racialized as Muslim in the post-9/11 era—all measures that are rooted in white supremacist, anti-Black, settler colonial, and Orientalist beliefs that have informed US society since nation formation.
The counternarratives that I explore in Refiguring Race and Risk reimagine the forms that securitization can take by offering alternative models for risk management that are based in care and community building rather than—as is the basis of the current security apparatus—suspicion and mistrust. I term these models care-based forms of risk management because they stem from the foundational premise that the most empowering and humanity-affirming ways to defend against precarity in a white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, and neoimperialist society are to demonstrate care by building community, expressing empathy, and exchanging love. These care-based forms of risk management contrast sharply with the security practices perpetuated by the state that I term fear-based forms of risk management, which are built on the foundational premise that the best and only way to ensure national security is to stoke fear, which in turn breaks down community and strips people of their agency and humanity. Such fear-based forms of risk management ultimately fail to secure the nation because they further terrorize the people rather than grant them true protection and peace of mind.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1 Gangsters at Risk: Refiguring the Threat of Urban Violence in Contemporary Gang Memoirs Chapter 2 Community in Contagion: Modeling Holistic Care in the AIDS Medical Memoir Chapter 3 Militarized Borders, Toxic Fields: Affirming the Value of Migrant Lives in Latinx Environmental Justice Literature Chapter 4 Feeling One’s Way out of Terror: Affective Guidance in Post-9/11 Muslim Cultural Production Conclusion Speculative Visions of Race and Risk: Imagining the Future of National Security Works Cited Index
Descriere
Illuminates how writers of color disrupt the racialized policies of the US security state and reimagine risk management through counternarratives of care and community building.