Journal of Transnational American Studies

Introduction: Transnational American Studies in the Time of Covid-19

Special Forum Editors

In “The Making of the American Calorie and the Metabolic Metrics of Empire,” Athia Choudhury develops a far-reaching critical genealogy of caloric biocitizenship that reframes her personal experiences with calorie counting and fat-phobic discourses that stigmatize the bodies and pleasures of racialized, working-class people, especially female bodied and fem-identifying people. Tracing practices of energy management and bodily discipline from colonial military outposts, nineteenth-century domestic manuals, dietetic discourses in the Philippines, and Native American Boarding Schools to a range of reform projects that framed calories as a tool for inculcating responsible eating through the domestic practices of white, bourgeois women, Choudhury highlights continuities between colonial subjection and modern biocitizenship, as well as the ways in which the putatively objective metric of the calorie positioned the New American Woman as a powerful catalyst for policing race in the intimate domain of the home.

This article invokes the “molecular intimacies of empire” to illuminate the links between the superfood status of coconut oil and plantation labor in the American colonial Philippines. Prior to the American occupation in 1898, coconuts were a local crop that offered small growers a degree of protection from capitalist agriculture. A mere two decades later, coconut plantations occupied more than two million acres of land; copra – the dried kernels from which oil is pressed – was the archipelago’s third major export industry; and the industry employed at least four million people along a commodity chain that included prisoners, landed planters, and oil refiners. Transimperial tropical research stations, economic botany, and penal farms propelled this change. US-run prison plantations in the southern Philippines served as living laboratories for the racial management of labor and the bioengineering of trees bearing fruit all year. Though the copra trade comprised production of modern extractive capitalism, American dairy farmers and vegetable oil producers racialized copra imports as a tropical threat to the white body politic during the global Great Depression. Yet this conflation of coconut oil and the imagined tropical primitive positioned coconut oil for its rerendering as an unrefined natural health food. By connecting the colonial planation to the coconut’s superfood status, the article shows how discourses of risk are racialized and consumed. Indeed, is not the body of the laborer who risks exposure to fertilizers and pesticides nor the loss of biodiversity that North American consumers consider when asked if coconuts are a health food.

In 1947, the US National Academy of Sciences established the Atomic Bomb Casualty Com­mission (ABCC) and sent American scientists to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to investigate the delayed effects of the atomic bombs among survivors. James Neel, medical professor at the University of Michigan, headed the genetics team of ABCC whose mission was to measure the possible genetic mutations caused by radiation. After the conclusion of the ABCC studies, Neel and his scientific team continued to use the resources and subjects in southern Japan to conduct research on the genetics of consanguineous marriages in Japan. This article explores how both the ABCC genetic studies and consanguinity studies reflected American fears about rising mutations in an apocalyptic atomic age. Studies on inbreeding illuminated the nature and extent of mutations in a “pure” genetic population. Furthermore, the Japanese data were used for genetic counseling back in America, helping to address the American public’s concern about increasing interracial marriages between whites and Asians. Despite the attempts of Neel and other American geneticists to disassociate their work from previous, racist, eugenics studies, postwar genetic studies took on the same practices, institutions, and goals as their predecessors—to ensure the wellbeing of the white race. Neel’s ABCC and subsequent studies, all bankrolled by the US Atomic Energy Commission, exploited American military and financial power to take advantage of the “intimate” relationships with nonwhite, “deviant” subjects.

In 2019, I published Shared Selves: Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism (University of Illinois Press), in which I discuss contagion as a metaphor for embracing our shared materiality with others. Six months later, during the Covid-19 pandemic, neighbors were crossing streets to avoid each other.  Social distancing is, counterintuitively, asking us to view separation and seclusion as forms of solidarity. But how can we be solid if we are oriented against each other? Isolation itself has become contagious: sharing repulsion and rejection, measuring six feet of “social” distance from others. These spaces are made up of a variety of immaterial entities—ideology, fear, caring, and faith—and material ones like invisible microbes. This essay revisits my writings about radical kinship and shared materiality in the works of Tim Dean and John Rechy in light of this emerging ethics of distance. This focus is particularly important today as contagion, following history, is realigned with racism and xenophobia. Latinx communities are disproportionately affected by inadequate healthcare and disproportionately labor in “Covid clusters” such as meat-packing plants and automobile facilities. To rethink my earlier insights about Rechy, I turn to Rafael Campo (whose queer perspective as both poet and physician during the AIDS epidemic has something to teach us about the erotics, aesthetics, and microbiotics of risk) and Julia Álvarez (whose novel Saving the World shows how care and risk might intersect).

During the height of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2014, US military bases featured an amenity both familiar and unexpected: name-brand fast food (NBFF), such as TGI Friday’s, Burger King, Subway, and Pizza Hut. Drawing on firsthand accounts from soldiers, journalists, and bloggers, as well as academic literatures on critical food studies and cultures of imperialism, this article analyzes the circulation of NBFF in Iraq and Afghanistan as a mechanism by which to sustain US imperialism. It argues that NBFF generates the intimacy of “home” for US soldier-consumers and is deployed as enticing inducement for an all-volunteer military force to perform the necessary labor to maintain US empire across two war zones. NBFF simultaneously provided a profitable opportunity for the expansion of US corporations and capital, as contractors and subcontractors from across the global supply chain were mobilized to provide easy access to these comfort foods. Thus, the article traces the ways in which the chemosensory experience of consumption has served as a way of inducing some bodies to serve—to maim and kill other bodies—while requiring still other bodies to serve in mobilizing and facilitating the logistics of these encounters.

In this article, I explore care work outlined and performed as emotional and erotic support labor in Ocean Vuong’s novel, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous (2019). The illnesses around which Vuong stages salient scenes of care work are not those easily addressed by surgery or a course of antibiotics. Instead, the novel focalizes those who are “[sick] in the brains” (122)— formally diagnosed with a mood disorder like bipolar, observed for behaviors of PTSD, addicted to narcotics, or grieving the loss of a body part. The unique contribution of Vuong’s novel to those interested in health and environmental humanities, disability studies, and reproductive labor, I argue, requires noticing that its portraits of care work come interleaved with its depictions of atmospheric dangers. Those atmospheric dangers include weather effects as well as sequelae from military weapons deployment and the un(der)regulated circulation of slowly violating chemicals. In relation to the theme of molecular intimacies, I introduce several heuristic terms: molecular entreaty, affective chemistries of care, hypo-interventions and intimate or slow activism, the latter two building on the work of science and technology scholars. Drawing out On Earth’s focalization of irruptions of care in atmospheres dense with chemistry, this essay both models a humanistic, decolonial and intersectional method that (re)values crip practical knowledge, and limns the novel’s provocation as to the political limits of queer interracial intimacy.

A conversation with the artists Beatrice Glow and Sandy Rodriguez, whose work reckons with the imperial and colonial histories that underlie conventional materials of art and aesthetic experience. Glow and Rodriguez share insights about their artistic processes, their experiments with pigment-making, scent production, field research, and collaboration, and how they have reflected on and enacted alternatives to the transnational sourcing of pigments, dyes, scents, and tastes.

Short commentary on the the volume Famine Pots: The Choctaw–Irish Gift Exchange, 1847–Present , edited by LeAnne Howe and Padraig Kirwan (Michigan State University Press, 2020).

Winner of the Fishkin Prize 2021.

Bios