Friends,
I’m sharing three new articles I’ve written that have come out in the last month or so. They cover a broad range: from a close reading of an A&E reality show to Trump’s contemporary assault on immigration activists, from personal memoir to international analysis.
But there are some through-lines between these pieces and much of my work in general. All grapple with the way individual lives shape and are shaped by the power of state and capital. Each also contends with specific state technologies of collective displacement, from mass incarceration to white supremacist violence to transnational adoption.
I hope you’ll take a look at these pieces and share them if you find them compelling. All are available to read, just like this Substack, without a paywall. If you’re able to able to support me making my writing freely available on the world wide web, please consider becoming a paying subscriber or sharing this newsletter with your community.
In struggle,
-A
The New Inquiry: The Life-Changing Magic of Hoarding
“To be poor in the United States is exceptional in that, thanks to the efforts of the good people of Dhaka and Juarez and Shenzhen, you can die in any of these ways at the very same time as you accumulate an immense volume of stuff.”
The hit reality show Hoarders didn’t cure its subjects, but maybe that was always besides the point. I look at Hoarders as a neocolonial morality play. Along the way, we interrogate St. Augustine’s ethics, Mark Zuckerberg’s closet, and a neo-Nazi mass shooter’s manifesto. Here in the empire, the hoard calls to us all (link).
Truthout: These Dallas Residents Are on the Front Lines of Trump’s War Against “Antifa”
“Noise demonstrations, or noise demos, are loud, raucous protests held outside jails, prisons, or detention centers. Participants try to make enough noise to let those inside know they aren’t forgotten, using anything from loudspeakers to fireworks. They’re an attempt to disrupt the isolating, carceral logic of the state. They do not, however, typically lead to terrorism charges — until now.”
They attended a pro-immigrant protest outside an immigration detention center. Now they’re being prosecuted as terrorists and attempted murderers, trapped at the center of the Trump administration’s witch hunt for “Antifa operatives.” I spoke with one of the currently-incarcerated protesters facing the first-ever Antifa-related terrorism charges in the United States—a case the National Lawyers Guild calls “unchecked political repression” (link).
Psyche: My Cousin Anna
“Even learning these facts as an adult felt dirty, subversive, like a kind of intellectual ingratitude. And there is nothing worse for an adoptee to be than ungrateful. But this is the nature of the system that I and my adoptive father were both victims and beneficiaries of.”
I haven’t mentioned it in this newsletter before but I, like 200,000 of my siblings, am a transnationally adopted person from the Republic of Korea. We’re the products of an unprecedented system invented during the Cold War to denaturalize and transfer masses of children from peripheral, postcolonial nations to the imperial core of the United States and Western Europe. I’ve previously written about the politics of international adoption for The New Inquiry, but this is by far the most personal piece I’ve ever produced. I dive into my changing understanding of community and myself as my adoptive family disintegrated and I found new family in an unexpected place (link).
This post has been syndicated from In Struggle, where it was published under this address.