Recent ucd_gsws items

Assemblages of Asian Settler Colonial Critique: Twenty-Five Years of Transnational Place-Based Analytics

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In this special issue introduction, co-editors Katherine Achacoso, Josephine Faith Ong, Beenash Jafri, and Candace Fujikane consider the multiple place-based genealogies of Asian settler colonial critique, amplifying its transnational, place-based dimensions while also identifying new directions for study. Rather than laying claim to Asian settler colonialism as a field ripe for institutional reproduction, they name Asian settler colonial analytics as an assemblage of multiple approaches, methods and points of departure, signaling their investments in forging ethical relationships and connections with Indigenous peoples, communities, and struggles inside and outside the university.

From Vietnam to Palestine: Transcending Solidarity Building Within Social Movements

Wed, 2 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper will analyze the linkages between student-based decolonial and anti-war movements in solidarity with Palestine and Vietnam. I will be doing a close reading analysis of the student newspaper, Third World News, which was published by students of color at UC Davis from the 1970s to early 2000s. The newspaper was created because students of color felt they weren't being represented by their university and created a platform to voice their ideas, concerns, and cultures. The newspaper allowed students to recognize their shared struggles and to spread awareness of different forms of oppression from around the world. In particular, my study will focus on the work of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), which was founded in the late 1960s when US-based non-white communities felt a strong connection between struggles of Third World peoples, and US communities of color. TWLF focused on collective action in pursuit of collective liberation and self-empowerment. This...

From Myth to Market: A Hybrid Masculinity That Incorporates Sexual Responsibility and Contraceptive Risk

Tue, 1 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From Myth to Market: A Hybrid Masculinity That Incorporates Sexual Responsibility and Contraceptive Risk

Conversations With Strangers: Analyzing Bathroom Stall Graffiti as a Form of Queer Mentorship, Space, and Ephemera

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Public bathrooms have historically and consistently been sites of societal tension and discourse, used as symbols of isolation, discrimination, and shame for many people in marginalized communities. Whether through racial segregation in public facilities up through the Jim Crow Era (Wade, 2015, 1), or current anti-trans bathroom ban legislation that prohibits the use of gender-congruent bathrooms for trans or gender-nonconforming individuals (MAP, 2025, 1), the public bathroom remains at the center of many racist, transphobic, and colonial discourses. It has been socialized as a space that enforces colonial systems of oppression, such as gender and race binaries, allowing others the privacy needed to enact violence against these marginalized communities. With this context, it is imperative to recognize forms of resistance and resilience within these spaces, such as bathroom stall graffiti. In my research, I will analyze bathroom stall graffiti found in the first-floor women’s...

: The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

: The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning

Native Survivance and the Violent Pleasures of Resignifying the Cowboy

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Native Survivance and the Violent Pleasures of Resignifying the Cowboy

“Blessed are the Beloved”: On Trans and Asian American Suicide

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“Blessed are the Beloved”: On Trans and Asian American Suicide

Refusal/film: diasporic-indigenous relationalities*

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Refusal/film: diasporic-indigenous relationalities*

Black Representations of Settlement on Film

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article develops a method for analyzing Indigenous erasure in popular film that focuses not on the representations (or lack thereof) of Indigenous peoples but on representations of settlement. Whereas much of the scholarship on Native representations in film has been concerned with Hollywood’s promulgation of the “mythical Indian,” I argue that a focus on settlement—rather than on bodies—is significant in the context of the ongoing, unfinished processes of colonialism, which continue to structure life in white settler states. Cultural representations that reconfigure colonial-occupied life as settled life naturalize settler colonialism while erasing and displacing Indigenous claims to land. I illuminate this method by analyzing how the 1974 “blaxploitation Western” Thomasine and Bushrod imagines settlement. The film features a pair of lovers who are on the run from the law in America’s Southwest from 1911 to 1915. Because it is a film that speaks back to historical constructions...

Extraction

Wed, 8 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In Victorian studies, the term “extraction” helps us express the nineteenth-century emergence of a society fully reliant on finite underground materials and thereby describe the material and value relations at the heart of imperialism and at the heart of the provincial-metropole dynamic. Much of the recent attention to extraction in Victorian studies and beyond returns us to the sites of removal, to the extraction zones or sacrifice zones left behind when commodities of value are withdrawn, tallied, and sold. In Victorian literature, England's coal mines, copper mines, quarries, and other sites of extraction left a hefty footprint, but so did the British extractive industry that was increasingly moving to the colonial frontier. Written in the aftermath of the emergence of the first fossil-fuel-based society, Victorian literature is a crucial archive for understanding extractivism and how it was both normalized and challenged across the British imperial world.

Conrad and Nature: Essays, edited by Lissa Schneider-Rebozo, Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, and John G. Peter

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Conrad and Nature: Essays, edited by Lissa Schneider-Rebozo, Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, and John G. Peter

Response

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Response

Reframing SuicideQueer Diasporic and Indigenous Imaginaries

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract What can narratives of suicide tell us about diasporic and Indigenous relationships to the white settler state? This article engages relational critique to examine trans/femme/bisexual South Asian Canadian filmmaker Vivek Shraya's short film I want to kill myself (2017) and queer Cree/Métis filmmaker Adam Garnet Jones's feature film Fire Song (2015). Both films challenge the spectacularity of suicide, effectively situating suicide on a continuum of “slow death.” However, the films also stage distinct relationships between suicide, community, and the state that emerge from diasporic and Native positionalities within a white settler society. Whereas Shraya's diasporic struggle with suicide is alleviated by forging community within settler spaces, Fire Song counters pathologizing depictions of reserve communities by emphasizing resurgent Indigenous practices and their refusal of settler logics.

Drill, Baby, Drill: Extraction Ecologies, Open Temporalities, and Reproductive Futurity in the Provincial Realist Novel

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The temporal structures of provincial realist novels set in extraction landscapes convey the new understanding of futurity that attended the nineteenth-century rise of an industrial system powered by a nonrenewable, diminishing stock of underground resources. Focusing on Joseph Conrad'sNostromo(1904), George Eliot'sThe Mill on the Floss(1860), and Fanny Mayne'sJane Rutherford; Or, the Miners' Strike(1853), this article demonstrates how these works adapt the provincial realist novel's emphasis on social renewal by way of marriage, reproduction, and inheritance to the extraction-based society of industrial Britain, undergirded by a trajectory of depletion and exhaustion rather than renewal. These works' deviation from novelistic chrononormativity expresses a new understanding of an extraction-based present that is claimed at the expense of future generations.

William Morris, Extraction Capitalism, and the Aesthetics of Surface

Wed, 6 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

William Morris’s literary and political writings offer a prescient eco-socialist analysis of extraction capitalism and coal combustion, suggesting a geocritical dimension to what I will call his aesthetics of surface. An early adopter of the position that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with Earth’s ecological balance, Morris was attuned not only to the way that the idea of free exchange obscures the market’s remainder of surplus value, but also to the way that the idea of unregulated natural balance denies environmental remainders such as pollution and waste. Morris’s aesthetics favor surface and exteriority over depth, registering a value shift away from excavated underground commodities and toward surface resources such as sunlight and air.

Climate Change and Victorian Studies: Introduction

Fri, 11 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Climate Change and Victorian Studies: Introduction

Ecology

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Short essay on "Ecology" for special keywords issue

Reading in Review: The Victorian Book Review in the New Media Moment

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Reading in Review: The Victorian Book Review in the New Media Moment

Dendrography and Ecological Realism

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The term dendrography here describes a form of ecological realism that strives to inhabit the scale and perspective of the arboreal. While a tree embodies bioregional rootedness, it also reaches up into the atmosphere, often obtaining a height and distance from the earth that exceeds the scale and duration of the human. Dendrography thus attempts to move away from the individuated human life that is primary in most nineteenth-century realisms. Thomas Hardy’s second novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), attempts just such a dendrographic reach from the perspective of the regional novel, and yet, it is simultaneously a study of the limitations of human perception and representation in the face of an ecological medium of which we are also a dialectical part.

Collections and Collectivity: William Morris in the Rare Book Room

Wed, 17 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Collections and Collectivity: William Morris in the Rare Book Room

TWILIGHT OF THE IDYLLS: WILDE, TENNYSON, AND FIN-DE-SIÈCLE ANTI-IDEALISM

Wed, 17 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In the climactic finale to the first act of Oscar Wilde's 1895 play An Ideal Husband, Gertrude Chiltern convinces her husband, a Member of Parliament, not to support the construction of a boondoggle Argentinean canal. Gertrude, not her husband, is the ostensibly moral character here, since the canal's only purpose is to create wealth for its stockholders, but the language she uses in this impassioned speech quotes Guinevere, the contrite fallen wife in Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Near the end of the Idylls, recognizing that her infidelity has occasioned war, turmoil, and the end of Arthur's reign, Guinevere laments: Ah my God, What might I not have made of thy fair world, Had I but loved thy highest creature here? It was my duty to have loved the highest: It surely was my profit had I known: It would have been my pleasure had I seen. We needs must love the highest when we see it (G 649-56) Repeating these words and ideas under drastically different circumstances, Lady...