Editor’s Note

Editor's Note Mari Yoshihara, Editor For the past three decades, it has been a tradition for American Quarterly to publish the presidential address delivered at the ASA annual meeting the previous fall. Following the practice, this issue would have included the address Sharon P. Holland gave at the annual meeting in Montreal, Quebec, in November 2023, along with a couple of responses from scholars with pertinent expertise. However, the annual meeting took place amid a great deal of turmoil in global geopolitics—many conference participants chose to walk out in solidarity with the national day of action in support of Palestine—and changes within the organization, prompting many members to rethink some of the long-held practices of the association. The publication of the presidential address and responses to it has been an important part of documenting the state of the field, the association, and the world; yet the time may also be ripe for considering alternative approaches to and forms for this historiographical recording. Holland has thus chosen to opt out of publication and to instead release a podcast discussing her address. Interested readers should look for the podcast in the summer of 2024 on the ASA website and other podcast platforms. The five essays in this issue represent a wide array of subjects, objects, histories, memories, places, and spaces as well as approaches and methods to analyze them. In "The Oil Paintings in the Department Store," Joshua Schulze examines the promotion of the film The Robe (1953) through Dean Cornwell's oil paintings in Detroit department stores as an example of racialized taste-making amid the formation of the white suburban middle class. Schulze illustrates that the city's film culture reflected and enacted the ongoing issues of property ownership, racialized topographical boundaries, and class aspiration in the postwar period. "Edgework and Excess," by John Brooks, discusses fuzz as an entry into the politico-theatrical scene of Black sociality through an analysis of Jimi Hendrix's debut album, Are You Experienced (1967). By listening to Hendrix's fuzz tone as an enactment of fugitivity born from a tradition of radical Black aesthetics, Brooks develops a theory of "rehearsal" as a future-oriented Black performance sensibility. Crystal A. Parikh considers a transnational feminist literary practice that explores the meaning and possibilities for the right to self-determination through the 1995 short story "My Elizabeth," by the Arab American writer Diana Abu-Jaber. Analyzing the story's rewriting of self-determination from the perspectives of Native peoples in the United States and Palestinians, Parikh [End Page v] shows how Abu-Jaber's depiction of intimacies between subjects in transit points to alternative communities and futures. In "Pertenencia Mutua," Brenda Nicolas demonstrates the ways in which Indigenous Oaxacans disrupt settler colonial renaming of land by engaging in their community's collective understanding of mutual belonging. By analyzing Indigenous Oaxacan young adults' practices on the ground and on social media, Nicolas points to the contestation of settler colonial grammar of place. Kiri Miller investigates audio "sleepcasts" designed to present mindful listening as sonic self-care. Miller shows how these sedative audio journeys follow tourist itineraries shaped by colonialism and align "mindfulness" with the privileges of cosmopolitan mobility while tethering the listeners as productive participants in the attention economy even as they fall asleep. In the Book Review, Nathan Leach reviews four books that examine historical and contemporary drug use and the entrenched nature of race, racialization, colonialism, and imperialism in the political economy of drugs and its uneven terrain of criminalization and medicalization. In the Event Review, Beenash Jafri discusses the exhibit Cowboy at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, which explored the iconography of the cowboy as a symbol of American colonial-imperial violence, individualism, and tough, solitary masculinity. [End Page vi] Copyright © 2024 The American Studies Association

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