The introduction to this special issue takes up the narrations and values produced by the travels of words like queer of color, race, and racial capitalism to both comobilize and retheorize queer of color critique and the content and contours of global racial capitalism. With and beyond the story of US empire and the transatlantic slave trade—from peripheral European engagements with Africa to the circulation of caste in Africa via Indian Ocean worlds—in this special issue the authors examine some of the histories and present modes of capitalist accumulation that are relevant to telling global stories of race and capitalism. A queer/trans lens keeps the authors’ attention trained as well on the arrangements and estrangements of the sex/gender systems that power such narratives of race and capitalism. So positioned, the authors enter ongoing debates on the geopolitics of queer studies, the import of queer materialism, and theorizations of racial capitalism by asking (1) What is the “racial” of racial capitalism?, and (2) What is the “of color” in queer/trans of color critique? The questions form a method for thinking global racial capitalism and queer/trans of color study together—what the authors call transnational queer materialism.
Transnational Queer Materialism
Rana M. Jaleel is an associate professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis, where she chairs the Graduate Group in Cultural Studies and is a Dean's Faculty Fellow as well as a Chancellor's Fellow. Her work examines the politics of evidence: how concepts like labor, sex/gender, race, and property are sustained or transformed through the recognition, narration, and redress of harm. Her book, The Work of Rape (2021), received a 2021 Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and was cowinner of the 2022 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Prize from the National Women's Studies Association. Other academic work has been published in places like Amerasia, Critical Ethnic Studies, Social Text: Periscope, Cultural Studies, Syndicate, and The Brooklyn Law Review. Dr. Jaleel is part of the Critical Ethnic Studies journal's editorial collective. A longtime member of the American Association of University Professors, she presently serves on the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
Evren Savcı is assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University. Her first book, Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (2021), analyzes sexual politics under contemporary Turkey's AKP regime with an eye to the travel and translation of sexual political vocabulary. Her work on the intersections of language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism, and religion has appeared in the Journal of Marriage and the Family, Ethnography, Sexualities, Political Power and Social Theory, Theory and Event, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and GLQ. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Southern California. Following her PhD, she was a postdoctoral fellow at The Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN).
Rana M. Jaleel, Evren Savcı; Transnational Queer Materialism. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 January 2024; 123 (1): 1–31. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10920741
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