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The proletarian writer H. T. Tsiang worked and lived in the US under the constant threat of deportation since arriving in the country under the Johnson-Reed Act. This article examines a cache of poetry that Tsiang wrote in the Ellis Island detention center from 1940–1941 and mailed to the painter, book illustrator, and author Rockwell Kent. These poems, which are preserved among Kent's papers in the form of a toilet paper manuscript, a make-shift chapbook, and typescript sheafs, were roundly rejected by publishers in Tsiang's time. Yet they speak to his precarious immigration status and his long-term project of constituting proletarian readerships outside US publishing. Tsiang's unpublished poems, I argue, composed a counterpublic of early Chinese American writing that grew from, and responded to, the conditions of exclusion. Having been detained on both Angel Island and Ellis Island, Tsiang was willing to take the "crooked path" into US cultural memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The positioning of movements for social and political change as forms of postemancipation abolition democracy has a long history. Abolition has been the watchword under which initiatives proceed to eradicate the death penalty, human trafficking, nuclear weapons, the hegemony of Wall Street, prisons, police, the deportation of immigrants, and more. The essays in this forum examine nineteenth-century abolitionism's complicated legacy through the prism of contemporary frameworks and agitations for justice and social transformation. The working papers reflect vital ongoing debates about abolition's afterlives while meditating upon a series of pressing current concerns: migrant justice, the humanitarian rhetoric of some anti-racist initiatives, the activism of Erica Garner following the murder by police of her father, the racialization of madness and violence, the prison-abolition movement, and climate activism. By addressing the mobilization of rhetorics of slavery and abolition in our own vexed political moment, the contributors reveal that to think abolition now is necessarily to rethink abolition then. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article recovers early Native American writing that challenges the premises of nineteenth-century mental science and its support for colonialism. It demonstrates how the manuscripts and correspondences of Irish-Ojibwe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and her brother William Johnston, particularly Johnston's translation of the Anishinaabe story of the simultaneously clever and foolish trickster Manabozho, contradict the ethnological speculations and editorial alterations made by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Jane's husband and William's employer, in his Algic Researches (1839). Henry sought to prove that Native Americans were intellectually stagnant, but Jane and William provided him with Ojibwe and Ottawa stories that promote collective adaptability and resilience. This collectivism is a useful hermeneutic through which to interpret Jane's struggle with "melancholy thoughts" expressed in two drafts of her poem "The Contrast." Instead of reading Jane as an Indigenous poet staggered by European knowledge, as Henry posits, scholars can more accurately root her mental state in the fragility of her kinship network during high-stakes treaty negotiations facilitated by her absent husband. This reexamination of the Johnston-Schoolcraft papers aids efforts to decolonize mental health, madness, and disability by piecing together Jane and William's use of stories as equipment for living during a consequential period of transition for the Anishinaabe of present-day Michigan. In contrast to Henry's project of evaluation and disqualification, William and Jane collected and shared their stories for their own project of preservation, carrying forward the recognition those tales invite that well-being and health are attributes of collectives rather than individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crises of 2020, this essay argues, demonstrated anew both the dangers and the indispensability of state power. Yet Americanist critics often display the same antistatism that characterized the nation's canonical literature as well as those who championed it in the mid-twentieth century. For an alternative, this essay turns to the work of Lora Romero, a critic who linked those canonical works to political criticism inspired by Michel Foucault. The libertarianism of both, she argued, made it impossible for critics to conceive that "resistance" and "entanglement in power relations" might go hand in hand. The Foucauldian critique of biopolitics is here shown to be inseparable from a skepticism toward an often feminized welfare state linking France's Second Left to figures in the US like Christopher Lasch. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's argument against Foucauldian "critique" is then shown to offer a more recent, albeit equally overlooked, resource for taking the necessity of institutionality seriously. Without such correctives, American Studies Association calls for papers can inadvertently echo the "romantic" rhetoric of books like Huckleberry Finn , in which an absolutized freedom and care for all will simply coexist harmoniously, rather than representing two conflicting strands of the modern polis requiring constant negotiation. In our instinctive antistatism and the conception of freedom it entails, we may share more in common than we recognize with the "American ideology" that... has formed the object of our ongoing critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]