The nation of Guyana is sometimes literally left off maps of Caribbean countries. You ask in your book, “why Guyana, and why now?” What has propelled the nation of Guyana onto the global stage?

If we are concerned with the economic, environmental, and social costs of fueling our cars and heating our homes, we need to pay attention to Guyana. Since ExxonMobil’s 2015 discovery of a supergiant oilfield off its shores—one of the most valuable petroleum and natural gas findings in decades—it has transformed into the world’s fastest-growing economy. The significance of Guyana’s oil boom cannot be overstated. Within seven years of that initial 2015 discovery in the country’s Stabroek Block, ExxonMobil made a string of additional discoveries, raising Guyana’s recoverable oil and gas potential to nearly eleven billion barrels—about a tenth of the world’s conventional discoveries. The amount of petroleum that stands to be recovered off Guyana’s coast is unmatched across the globe; experts suggest it will replace Kuwait as the largest oil producer per capita. The country’s transformation into an “oil hotspot” has garnered international attention from industry insiders and geopolitical observers. The oil boom has also brought with it the threat of war: In a move to annex Guyana’s oil-rich territory, Venezuela is amassing troops along the Guyana/Venezuela border and is attempting to claim two-thirds of Guyana’s territory (that’s most of the country!). A regional war between these two countries would destabilize Latin America and the Caribbean, and the U.S. government has already taken an interest. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken affirmed the United States’ “unwavering support for Guyana’s sovereignty”over the disputed territory, and both The Guardian and the Associated Press reported that the U.S. agreed to provide military assistance to Guyana in the form of aircrafts, drones, and radar technology.

While Guyana’s oil has made headlines, sand extraction in this country and elsewhere remains the worldwide crisis that nobody has heard about. Guyana has been quietly replenishing beach sand in other Caribbean tourist-dependent nations since the 1990’s. So, if you’re sunbathing on a powdery white sand beach in Jamaica, you may in fact be relaxing on Guyanese sand.

As the site of both high-profile oil extraction and invisible sand mining, the nation is becoming a generative prism through which we can radically reformulate how we understand the dynamics of capitalism and ecology in the Americas. And across all extractive industries, we find devastating effects for women and children, including sex trafficking, contaminated water, and insufficient food supplies. Guyana has something valuable to teach us about the interplay between violence against women and environmental catastrophe.

You talk about how the New York Times reported on the Guyanese oil boom, and how various television shows—HBO’s Lovecraft Country, Netflix’s Indian Matchmaker, and National Geographic’s Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted—depict Guyanese people. How is Guyana portrayed in the Western media?

Guyana is everywhere and nowhere in reductive representations across American newspaper articles and popular television programs. In the wake of the oil discovery, a now infamous front page New York Times article represented Guyana as a “vast, watery wilderness.” The article’s marred depiction was pointedly critiqued by Guyanese, who took offense at its descriptions of children who “play naked in the muggy heat” and of Guyanese workers assumed to have a lackadaisical attitude towards safety on Exxon’s oil rigs. The article portrays Guyana as a backwater, stuck in the past.

On television, HBO’s Lovecraft Country portrayed an Indigenous Guyanese intersex character being ogled in a full nude shot before being summarily murdered by the show’s protagonist. Netflix’s global hit, Indian Matchmaking, represented the only Guyanese woman in the series as a misfit who was ill-matched with “respectable” Indian suitors because of her social frivolity and independent nature. In one scene, she orders alcohol on a date, which turns off a young man of Guyanese and Punjabi ancestry, and her mother wonders if all of her years spent practicing Bollywood dancing distracted her from pursuing a partner.

If Guyanese are annihilated in Lovecraft Country and unmarriable in Indian Matchmaking, they are exotic and hard to reach in National Geographic’s Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted. The celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay presents Guyana as among “the most incredible and remote locations on Earth” (even though it is located at the northern tip of South America, and there are direct flights to the country from New York, Miami, and Houston). In Uncharted, Guyana is depicted as a dense, savage frontier, brimming with an exotic but treacherous food culture. On his trek to the country’s interior, Ramsay first travels by plane, jeep, and boat. He then boards a helicopter from which he “channels his inner Tarzan” and repels down to a beach to meet an Amerindian fishing guide. The Tarzan reference situates Ramsay as a neo-colonialist and mirrors the pillaging referenced in Lovecraft Country. By literally stepping over the coastal region where the nation’s vibrant, interethnic food culture thrives, Ramsay promotes a notion of Guyana as little more than rainforest and menacing, if tasty, eats, while casting Indigenous Guyanese as quintessential exotic others.

Across all of these representations, nuanced portrayals of Guyanese people’s cosmopolitanism are nowhere to be found. In fact, Guyana has an outsized presence in America’s largest city—New York. It is a country of less than 800,000 people but it has experienced a massive out-migration. Guyanese represent New York City’s fifth-largest foreign-born and third-largest Caribbean-born group. And the country has long been at the center of global capitalism—the book tells this story.

In your book, you put into conversation the Barbadian stereotype that Guyanese women are homewreckers, with the music and persona of the popstar Rihanna, whose mother is from Guyana. Do you think this stereotype represents global gendered racializations of Guyanese women?

I do. Guyanese women are marginalized at home, exoticized within the region, and rendered nearly invisible beyond. If, for example, we look at the TV show Indian Matchmaking, we see colonial-era stereotypes of the Indian indentured women who journeyed to Guyana transplanted onto Nadia, the Indo-Guyanese contestant. These tropes frame these women as dangerously independent, lacking in respectability, and headstrong in comparison to their “more respectable” Indian counterparts. These negative stereotypes pigeonholed indentured women across two continents—in India as they boarded ships to British Guiana, they were, by virtue of their castes, their unmarried status, and the regions from which they came, stigmatized as sex workers, troublemakers, and rebellious women. These pernicious brands followed them to British Guiana, even though, contradictorily, in the colony they were cast as more subservient than Black women. In the colonial period, women of African descent were represented as the opposite of the dutiful Indian housewife—there, it was Black women who were pegged as headstrong and too independent. And the supposed differences between women from these two ethnic groups framed Indians and Blacks in Guyana as incompatible. The book tells the story of intermarriage between Black and Indian people in Guyana with the example of my great-great grandparents, an indentured woman from India and an Afro-Guyanese man, who had a child when such a union was deemed taboo by British colonial officials. These officials stood to benefit from keeping formerly enslaved Africans and Indian indentured laborers at odds with each other.

When we look at the Barbadian stereotype of Guyanese women as homewreckers, we can unpack these stereotypes of Guyanese women that have endured from the colonial era. Intersectional race/gender formations and migratory processes come to a head in Guyana in ways that we don’t usually consider. Rihanna is known primarily as a Bajan or Barbadian superstar. But her mother, Monica Braithwaite, and her maternal grandmother are Guyanese. In fact, Rihanna credits her maternal kin with shaping her worldview and with inspiring her cosmetics empire. When we look into Rihanna’s family ties in Guyana, we begin to see that her family story is part of a long history of intermarriage between Bajan men and Guyanese women. These familial ties are connected to global racial capitalism. After slavery ended, Barbados had a large labor force,  but a dearth of land. Bajan men began migrating to Guyana to find work, and they often married Guyanese women while they were there. This started a long process of intermarriage between the two countries.

In interviews, Rihanna compares the treatment of Guyanese women in contemporary Barbados to that of Mexican immigrants in the US. They have both faced threats of deportation, with immigration agents separating mothers from their children. In an interview with Afua Hirsch in British Vogue, Rihanna says, “The Guyanese are like Mexicans in Barbados…I know what it feels like to have the immigration come into your home in the middle of the night and drag people out. My mother was legal…but let’s say I know what that fight looks like…I was probably, what, eight-years-old when I experienced that in the middle of the night. So I know how disheartening it is for a child—and if that was my parent that was getting dragged out of my house, I can guarantee you that my life would have been a shambles.” Here, Rihanna alerts us that Guyanese women face deportation in Barbados and are seen as foreign menaces. In order for the Barbados government to celebrate Rihanna as a national hero and as a symbol of Bajan tourism, it has had to ignore the superstar’s Guyanese ancestry.

There are Guyanese immigrant communities living around the globe, from London to Toronto. You mentioned that Guyanese immigrants represent New York City’s fifth-largest foreign-born and third-largest Caribbean-born population. Interestingly, women are disproportionately represented in New York, outnumbering men at a ratio of 100 to 79. How are Guyanese women making their mark in New York and around the globe?

Guyanese women’s larger numbers in New York are an apt indicator of their presence across the global Guyanese diaspora in which women are at once central and invisible: if we look closely, we see them as leaders in artistic production, entrepreneurship, and activism, and we witness their objectification across popular registers.

As a child, Rihanna spent time with her Guyanese grandmother in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. There, RiRi would have been witness to the outsized presence of Guyanese in the borough. In the book, I make the case that Rihanna’s song, “Birthday Cake” is a clear nod to the Guyanese creole term for vagina, “pattacake”—the word Guyanese mothers use when teaching their young daughters about their bodies. That song is now a birthday anthem at Miss Lily’s, a popular Caribbean restaurant with outposts in New York City, Negril, and Dubai. So even though Miss Lily’s is not owned by a Guyanese woman, Rihanna’s sonic presence provides the soundtrack for the restaurant.

And we know that “Little Guyana” in Queens is the home of a multitude of Guyanese eateries, many of them women-owned or founded by women, such as Sybil’s Bakery and Restaurant, which also has a location in Flatbush. Also in New York, Guyanese women such as the curator/scholar, Grace Aneiza Ali (author of Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora) and the photographer, Keisha Scarville (whose photograph, “Within/Between/Corpus” is the cover image for Global Guyana), are leaders in the global art scene.

All too often, we overlook the Guyanese ancestry of famous women such as Shirley Chisholm, who was the first Black congresswoman and the first Black woman to run for president of the United States (her father was born in Guyana), or the celebrated actress CCH Pounder (who was born in Guyana, and starred in NCIS: New Orleans, Avatar, and HBO’s Full Circle, which portrayed Guyanese immigrants in New York City). Globally, Guyanese actresses are increasingly visible—there were two Guyanese actresses in Black Panther! The blockbuster franchise stars Letitia James (who played Shuri in Black Panther and took on the lead role in the sequel,  Black Panther: Wakanda Forever), and Shaunette Renée Wilson (who starred in Fox’s The Resident and played a member of the warrior women—the Dora Milaje—in Black Panther).

What is a pointer broom? How does this metaphorical image represent women’s lives in Guyana?

The pointer broom, or “pointa” broom is a handleless Guyanese yard broom traditionally homemade from the dried spines at the center of coconut leaves, then tied in a tight bundle with a small strip of cloth or twine. It is an everyday tool that generations of Guyanese girls and women have used to sweep up dust, sand, and debris in yards and homes. With continuous sweeping, the dried spines truncate, rendering the instrument shorter and shorter and necessitating that the sweeper bend closer to the ground, repeatedly stamping the top of the broom against a hard surface in order to realign the individual spines. The Anglophone Caribbean saying “new broom sweep clean, but old broom know corna” positions the broom as a metaphor for the value of experience and as a symbol for recovering the past. With origins in Africa and Asia, the “sweep, sweep, stamp” of the pointer broom resonates across the Caribbean and the African and Indian diasporas. The kinetic interplay between sweeper and broom mirrors the movement of women and resources across continents, and reverberates in the transnational sonic routes of African Diasporic music.

The women in my family coil their pointer brooms in suitcases, bringing the brooms along when they settle in other countries. Wielded in a sweeping motion, the pointer broom becomes an apt metaphor for my approach in Global Guyana, which is both gendered labor and a historiography that susses out morsels of cultural knowledge and history that have long fallen into seemingly inaccessible cracks and crevices. The pointer broom approach positions Guyanese girls’ and women’s understandings of their own social worlds as uniquely efficacious for uncovering a more nuanced ethnographic engagement with Guyana. My pointer broom analytic employs a number of interdisciplinary methodologies, including autoethnography, archival research, and oral history, to offer an unconventional portrayal of “the land of many waters” and its global connections. My reliance on autoethnography, a genre that eschews the traditional anthropological fallacy of the distanced researcher, was once virtually tabooed in the discipline. Autoethnography is now increasingly utilized by scholars within and beyond the field of anthropology. It enables me to place my own genealogy within a social context while destabilizing the tenacious dichotomies between insider and outsider. This approach is most heavily influenced by Black feminist anthropologists, including a trailblazing group of scholars such as Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham, and a more recent cohort that includes Irma McClaurin, Faye Harrison, A. Lynn Bolles, Leith Mullings, Gina Athena Ulysse, and others. Black feminist anthropologists fuse theory, politics, and the arts, drawing from their own personal identities and experiences to write from perspectives in which the researcher and the “subjects of study” are not separate.

Oneka LaBennett is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. She’s the author of She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn and co-editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century.

How was the Trump presidency a symptom of a long and enduring history of systemic white power in the US?

During his presidency, Trump was continually depicted as an anomaly. People described him as everything from a racist to the second coming of Hitler. While those sorts of characterizations have a grain of truth, they are also dangerous because they misdirect us. If dramatic, Trump’s presidency was continuous with a history of systemic white power that dates back to the origins of this country. In other words, Trump was a symptom of this history, not an aberration.

Who are the white power extremists who suddenly became visible in Trump’s America and how do they fit into the country’s history of systemic white supremacy?

Many people were shocked to see white power extremists suddenly marching in the streets of Charlottesville near the start of the Trump administration in 2017. But they shouldn’t have been. Far-right extremists, including a range of white power groups and militias, have long been active in the U.S. Their origins date back to the beginnings of this country, including the early slave patrols. These groups, perhaps most famously the KKK, sought to enforce white supremacy through extrajudicial means that supplemented the larger formal system of white supremacy. The two are intertwined, of course, as illustrated by how the KKK not just collaborated with police but at times included police and government officials among their ranks.

How did white power views move closer to the mainstream during Trump’s presidency?

From start to finish, Trump brandished white nationalism in a loud and open manner that was the stuff of white power extremist dreams. White power extremists were delighted and celebrated it. Many view themselves as locked in a battle to shift “the narrative” and make their ideas more mainstream and event acceptable. Trump gave them an enormous assist. What was once considered outrageous or taboo became increasingly commonplace, a point underscored regularly on Fox News and even members of the GOP.

You were an expert witness at Khmer Rouge’s Nuon Chea’s trial.  How does Trump, white power extremism in the US, and the Khmer Rouge regime use hate speech and fear mongering in similar ways to achieve their goals?

At the time, in March 2016, Trump was just about to take the lead in the race to become the GOP presidential nominee. As he would throughout his presidency, Trump was already invoking white nationalism themes and racist dog whistles, warning against immigrants and other non-white “threats.” The Khmer Rouge used a very similar strategy of playing on grievance, fear, and hate speech to gain recruits, seize power, and ultimately commit atrocity crimes. I was struck by the parallels at the time and became increasingly alarmed as the parallels continued to grow during the Trump administration. By the time of the election, the alarm bells were ringing. The Capitol Insurrection is bad. But things could have ended up much worse.

Could white supremacists commit a genocide in the US?  What buffers and safeguards are in place to stop this from happening today? 

Of course. It has happened here before. It can happen again. I prefer to discuss genocide as one among several possible atrocity crimes, which also encompass crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes. U.S. history is filled with atrocity crimes committed on U.S. soil and abroad. As I noted before, prevention begins with understanding and acknowledgment. You can’t prevent something you ignore and deny. With understanding and acknowledgment, it becomes possible to move forward with redress as well as the creation of buffers such as education, government training, and even the creation of a domestic atrocity crimes mechanisms of the sort that some other countries have developed. Perhaps this also brings us back to the issue of critical self-awareness, a sort of grassroots prevention mechanism that enables us to speak out in the public sphere in the face of looming atrocity crimes.

How can genocide and atrocity crimes be prevented?  What can we do as individuals and as a society?

After the Holocaust, the world gained a host of new instruments meant to prevent mass human rights violations, including the United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and UN Genocide Convention. Today we have international courts, monitoring groups, and doctrines like the responsibility to protect that help prevent atrocity crimes. Each country has its own sets of mechanism to help in the fight to prevent genocide. President Obama was a strong advocate of prevention and helped strengthen related government infrastructures. And, during the Trump administration, Congress passed the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention act. What the U.S. has not done such a great job of, however, is grappling with its own past and also setting up official domestic monitoring mechanisms. This is one key way all of us can contribute to the fight to prevent genocide – putting pressure on our government to account for atrocities crimes in our country’s past and establish new mechanisms to prevent them in the future.

What questions do you consider in Comics and Stuff?

How have the values (economic, cultural) associated with comics shifted as they move from disposable to enduring artifacts?

What stories do comics tell about our relations with “stuff” — our material belongings and the meanings we bestow on them?

How do graphic novels visually display meaningful objects in ways that communicate from one collector to another?

What different kinds of stories do male and female graphic storytellers share about their relationship with stuff (i.e. collecting vs. inheritance)?

How has the relationship between culture and comic books changed since the heyday of comics in the 60s? How has its audience changed?

Art Spigelman talks about the “Faustian bargain”  comics creators and artists have made as they seek cultural respectability and acceptance within the literary/art world. Once a disposable medium, printed on cheap paper and meant to be tossed after read, comics have become “graphic novels” printed and bound as enduring objects, meant to go on library shelves. Today, there are two comics industries — genre entertainment  intended for specialized shops serving  hardcore fans and literary fiction intended for a general reading public. As this shift in status takes place, comics creators find themselves reflecting on what should be preserved and what should be discarded from their legacy and these reflections find their way into the books themselves.

In your introduction, you talk about how comics became “graphic novels.” What does this transition say about the culture around the medium?

The term graphic novel reflects this ongoing struggle over cultural status, borrowing prestige through analogy with another expressive tradition. It reflects the emergence of alternative comics — not the epic adventures of the superheroes, but autobiographical and fictional reflections on the everyday life world. Graphic novels often incorporate ordinary cultural practices and materials, including those involving our relationship with our “stuff.” What gets handed down from one generation to the next? What do we intentionally seek out as materials for our collections? What kinds of meanings do we map onto the things in our lives?

What are some of the comics covered in this book?

The works I discuss include: Ghost World, Day Trippers, Asterios Polyp,  the works of Seth, Waldo the Cat, Alice in Sunderland, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, You’ll Never Know, Special Exits, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? And Bayou.  Each represents a very personal work which reflects, one way or another, the artist’s own relationship to objects in their lives. These works are highly intentional — nothing exists in the panel which was not drawn there with a purpose and often, the objects depicted offer us keys into larger structures of meaning.

You titled the book Comics and Stuff. What is the “stuff” you are referring to?

By stuff, I mean our material belongings and the emotional baggage and personal memories they carry for us. The term, belongings, already implies that the things we own are strongly attached to our personal identities. How we manage our stuff has become a central problem of the modern world as we accumulate so many meaningful objects. Whole genres have emerged — from unboxing videos to programs appraising antiques — which speak to our ways of sorting through and ascribing meaning and value to such things. We ask ourselves what “sparks joy” as we cull through the clutter, curating the materials of our own lives.

If you were to pair Comics and Stuff with particular comics or graphic novels, what would they be?

The most meaningful comics I own are my father’s battered copies of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, printed in paperback book form in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Pogo itself is meaningful to me because it is set in Georgia, my home state, and thus reflects my heritage. But while I have the content in multiple formats, these particular editions matter to me because they belonged to my father, because they connect his cultural interests to my own, because I have memories of him reading them, etc. These books, thus, illustrate my central interest in stuff as the bearer of both cultural history and personal memory.

Who did you write this book for?  

Well, first of all, I wrote it for myself. This is probably my most personal book to date. I wanted to sort through my own relationship with “stuff.” Each of the works I chose speak to aspects of my own cultural identity.  But beyond that, I wanted to encourage others to reflect on their material objects and to foster greater critical engagement with some of these remarkable graphic artists. This work will speak to the emerging field of comics studies but I believe it will find interests beyond those already engaged with graphic novels, speaking to a larger interest in material artifacts that runs from anthropology and sociology to art history and literary studies.

Where do you see the future of graphic novels heading?

Graphic novels are becoming increasingly central to our culture. We are seeing an expansion of who gets to tell their story through this medium as alternative comics become more and more inclusive. We are seeing graphic novels adapted for both film and television, not only the highly visible superhero films but smaller independent films reflecting the intimate storytelling that dominates the realm of alternative comics. The question which remains is whether graphic novels can enjoy this level of artistic respectability without losing the pop vitality which made many of us fans fall in love with the medium in the first place.

What is new to the book in the 2021 updated edition?

SW/MA: We are honored that NYU Press chose to reissue Privilege Revealed as part of their “classics” series, though it is a little daunting to be old enough to have one’s work regarded as classic. More somberly, the issues the book addresses remain relevant today although we wish they did not. As the preface explains, “politicians attack diversity training and critical race theory with the goal of suppressing discussions of privilege and racism in order to maintain the status quo.” Nonetheless, significantly more people in the U.S. recognize the white supremacy that undergirds that status quo, and have come to understand the harms of microaggressions, which collectively are not very micro. The new “Moving Forward: From Colorblindness to Color Insight” offers some vocabulary and methodology for more meaningful conversations about the imbedded systems that undermine the democratic ideal.

How has the discussion on race and privilege changed in America since the original release of Privilege Revealed 25 years ago?

SW/MA: The dialog about privilege in this book inspired examination of privilege in other contexts beyond the major identity categories, bringing a particularity to the examination of privilege as “the unseen partner of domination and subordination,” as Lisa Ikemoto describes. [BioPrivilege, 42 Wash U. J. L. & Pol’y 61 (2013)]. Professor Ikemoto’s article appears in a 2013 Washington University Journal of Law & Policy symposium issue: Privilege Revealed: Past, Present, & Future. There, scholars discussed the relevance of a privilege analysis to responsibility, property, biomedicine, race/ethnic specific law student organizations, contract law, and autonomy.

So the discussion has broadened. As we note in the preface: “At the time of this book’s original publication, if one Googled ‘privilege,’ the top hits were evidentiary privileges.’ Today, societal privileges, such as white privilege, appear before those evidentiary privileges.”

Who is the intended audience in Privilege Revealed? Has that answer changed since the book was originally released?

SW/MA: Our goal was to reach a broad audience – particularly white people who might be unaware of racial privilege, but also people of color, to support them in arguments they might make to explain their reality.

The intended audience hasn’t changed. The book is for anyone who is interested in participating in current dialogues about privilege, race (including whiteness), and the many other identity categories. Stephanie has had white readers tell her that this book altered the way they saw the world.

This book’s authorship says “Stephanie Wildman with contributions by Margalynne Armstrong, Adrienne Davis, and Trina Grillo.” Can you tell us about that collaboration?

SW/MA:  Initially, Trina, Adrienne, and Stephanie met regularly to talk about discrimination law and its failures to address societal disadvantaging. We three published some of this work in essay form. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, the series editors for Critical America approached Stephanie about writing a book proposal expanding on this work and on privilege as the unexamined obstacle in legal analysis. They suggested that Margalynne Armstrong’s work on housing would be essential to the volume. Additionally, Margalynne worked on the book’s conclusion. Stephanie and Margalynne later became colleagues at Santa Clara Law and began writing together regularly about whiteness and the legal academy. Some of that work informs the new material in the re-release of this book.

Privilege Revealed resulted from a multi-racial collaboration. Writing across racial lines can create a trust that enables a deeper examination of these issues.

Privilege Revealed brings up the term “color insight” and juxtaposes it with “colorblindness” early on in the introduction. Can you define what “color insight” is?

SW/MA:  Rather than suppressing an awareness of race, as an aspiration to colorblindness does, color insight encourages further exploration of the impact of race in society. Color insight recognizes that most of us do see race and underlines the need to understand what that racial awareness might mean. Color insight does not assume that people or groups have any specific traits or propensities.

Why is privilege so hard to see, even for those with good will? How does this book go about exposing privilege?

SW: I had to laugh when I saw this question since NYU Press had originally wanted to use the title “Privilege Exposed,” which I thought was too pornographic sounding. But seriously, by providing a vocabulary about systemic privilege, the book gives people a tool to examine the many ways they are each privileged and not privileged regarding identity categories.

DE&I or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are corporate buzz words at the moment, and one chapter describes how the “dream of diversity” has yet to be fulfilled. What drives this “cycle of exclusion” that you describe?

SW/MA: Diversity was a buzz word twenty-five years ago, so the recognition of equity and inclusion now is a step forward. Diversity populated workplaces with a smattering of folks outside the typical white mainstream, but kept them as window dressing on recruitment catalogs without actually listening to the valuable contributions that they could make. The addition of equity and inclusion and equity moves structural actors beyond listening – beyond voices and faces. Equity in outcome is too often missing from civil rights discourse.

As law professors yourselves, you speak extensively to privilege as it exists in the law school setting. How have legal education institutions changed in their attitude towards addressing privilege and the idea of “legal liberalism” in the 25 years between editions of Privilege Revealed?

SW/MA: Not enough would be the short answer. But the development of critical race theory as a discipline beyond the legal academy has meant that many students come to law school with a familiarity concerning privilege and whiteness. These students are interested in pursuing substantive justice studies.

What are a couple of action items you would suggest for Privileged Revealed readers who experience privilege and want to take active steps to challenge the hierarchical status quo?

SW/MA:  If you hear a remark that is racist, sexist, homophobic and you are in the privileged thread of that identify, speak up – don’t wait for the person without privilege to do the work. Educate your compatriot in privilege about why the remark is not appropriate. Look around your workplace, your meeting place, your social group and ask yourself who isn’t there? Why aren’t they there? Can you act affirmatively to change that? Noticing is a first step; outreach is a second. Keep working towards action that includes those previously excluded.

Stephanie M. Wildman is Professor Emerita at Santa Clara Law and a member of The Writers Grotto. Margalynne Armstrong is Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University. Their book Privilege Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America is available as an NYU Press Classic.

1. If being straight makes life easier, why would queer people spend any time feeling worry or sympathy about the effects of straight culture on straight people’s lives and relationships? 

Because being straight does not actually make life easier! One of the ways that heteronormativity has survived is by convincing both gay people and straight people that being straight makes for a happier, healthier, easier life. This has made people fearful to explore queer desire by depicting gay life as tragic and difficult. But more to the point of my book, it has masked over how much misery straight people—straight women, in particular—actually experience. 

2. Is heterosexuality easier than queerness?

No, at least not for women. If we take misogyny, violence against women, and the daily inequities of straight relationships at all seriously, we start to see that gendered suffering is a core part of many straight women’s experiences. And men’s too. We also start to see that this kind of suffering is as tragic—if not more—than the kinds of suffering that homophobia produces. The difference is that straight people are expected to be made wildly happy by the very relationships that actually cause them to be miserable. Straight culture promises women the world, but, in reality, offers women very little. Queer culture, on the other hand, is a source of joy for most queer people; it’s homophobia and straight culture, not queer culture, that is the source of most queer suffering.   

3. Conservatives have long promoted the belief that queer relationships are unnatural, damaged, and fraught with dysfunction.  Why are you raising similar questions about the health and sustainability of heterosexual culture?

One of the things that is clear when you track the social science research on women’s experiences in relationships with men over the past century—and I am talking about women around the world, and across race and socioeconomic class—is that modern heterosexual relationships have been damaged by many centuries of patriarchy. It actually should not be controversial or surprising to say this, because of course when you have people in intimate relationships with one another, who genuinely love one another, those relationships are still deeply influenced by the institutions that distribute gendered power and authority unequally and that tell us who men and women are. But there is a reluctance to acknowledge the ways that patriarchy infuses straight culture and straight relationships, because to recognize this requires that we turn to the necessary corrective: feminism. And feminism, still, carries a lot of stigma.

4. What is the “misogyny paradox” and why is it one of the core dysfunctions of straight culture?

I use the term misogyny paradox to describe the ways that boys’ and men’s desire for girls and women is expressed within a broader culture that encourages them to also hate girls and women. We see the evidence of this paradox everywhere, and women are certainly quite familiar with it. For instance, men shout so-called compliments about girls’ and women’s bodies on public streets—like “You are looking mighty fine today!” or “You’re a beautiful woman. Why don’t you smile?”—and then, just a moment later, when they are not met with the response they hoped for, these same men hurl violent and misogynistic threats, like “fuck you bitch!” We are also led to believe that straight men love women’s bodies, but at the same time we teach girls and women that their bodies are deeply flawed and that they need to spend an inordinate amount of time whipping their bodies into a lovable shape—by dieting, shaving, waxing, dying, perfuming, covering with makeup, douching, and starving them.  Perhaps no one is a more brazen and high-profile example of the misogyny paradox than President Donald Trump himself, a man who has bragged publicly that “no one loves women more” than he does and also bragged about sexually assaulting women. But in mundane everyday life, the misogyny paradox takes the subtler form of straight men claiming to love women and yet speaking over them, explaining things to them with no regard for women’s knowledge or expertise, and training their sons to reproduce this kind of behavior.

5. You define heterosexuality as a “patriarchal institution.”  What does that mean and how has it affected men and women differently?

Patriarchy is a system in which men hold economic and cultural power over women, and straight relationships are the most daily and intimate sites where men have economic and/or cultural power over women. This power can take many forms, from actually having more wealth and economic mobility than women (which causes a lot of trouble for straight women in cases of divorce), to expecting women to treat men like the king of the castle—and to do this regardless of how much men are contributing, financially or otherwise. It can look like men’s physical and emotional violence against women, and/or it can look like men doing less parenting and household labor than women, whether or not women work fulltime in the paid labor force.  It can look like men expecting a tremendous amount of emotional labor from women that they do not provide in return, like relying on wives and girlfriends to be their therapists and best friends, or requiring women to express immense gratitude for men’s basic contributions to their relationships and families.    

6. Is all heterosexual suffering the same?   How do women’s positions within hierarchies of race, socioeconomic class, and immigration status impact the effects of heterosexuality on women?

All heterosexual suffering is intersectional, and shaped by race, socioeconomic class, immigration status, and other significant factors. Black feminists like Brittney Cooper, Beth Richie, Michele Wallace, Angela Davis, the members of the Combahee River Collective, and many others have been arguing for years that the violent forces of misogyny bear down on Black women more harshly than on white women, that the expectation of loyalty to Black men is especially intense for Black women, and that so-called privileges of heterosexuality are promised to, but often elude, Black women. Research on heterosexuality and socioeconomic class demonstrates that heterosexual relationships are often expected to be a site of suffering and self-sacrifice for poor and working-class women. We also know that the more economically and legally vulnerable women are, the harder it is to escape heterosexual misery without fear of violence, poverty, or loss of custody of children.  

7. What is the relationship between heterosexuality and misogyny?  How can heterosexuality be liberated from it?

Misogyny, or men’s hatred of women, was an accepted fact of heterosexual relationships when the American self-help movement began in the early twentieth century. The physicians, sexologists, and psychologists who were considered experts on heterosexual courtship and marriage took for granted that men’s first impulse towards women was disdain and even violence, and that husbands found their wives’ ideas, conversation, and emotional and sexual needs to be unimportant and irritating. Later, by the 1980s and 1990s, self-help for straight couples, like the profoundly successful Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, still accepted this basic premise, but really doubled down on the idea that the gap between women and men was innate and therefore unavoidable. The best men and women could do was learn a few tricks—or “skills”—to get what they wanted from the opposite sex while minimizing conflict. This same approach still persists today, as self-help books, webinars, dating coaches, marriage therapists, and whole slew of what I call “hetero repair” professionals teach straight couples to work around gender inequality, rather than undo it. But the only way for heterosexuality to actually be liberated from its dysfunction is to address it at the root, through a recognition that feminist healing is the way forward.

8. How are girls and women groomed by straight culture to desire relationships with men despite the overwhelming evidence that heterosexual relationships are unequal?

Research shows that this starts in early childhood, with sexist and hetero-romantic Disney/Pixar films and other media marketed to young children. Interestingly, as themes in these films have begun to change, the kind of media marketed to teens and young adults has often deepened in its bold embrace of misogyny and dehumanization of women.  One of the ways we know that misogyny is still quite normalized and even revered is that half of American voters elected a misogynist—with a well-documented track record of sexual harassment and dehumanizing comments about women—to the office of President of the United States.  This sends a very powerful message to girls and women that misogyny is a normal part of life. 

9. You write that a love/hate relationship is successfully marketed to straight people as a source of happiness, despite overwhelming evidence that it is a primary contributor to straight people’s misery.  Is heterosexuality optimal for women when it requires so much coercion and cultural propaganda?

Straight culture discourages us from seeing the suffering associated with heterosexuality, but actually the evidence is everywhere. We see it in the media, where stories of girls and women surviving, and forgiving, disappointing men is offered up as the ultimate hetero-romantic tale.  But one realm where it becomes really crystal clear is the last century of marriage advice and self-help books and seminars for straight couples.  Here is where we can see that, over and over, straight people are told that women and men are fundamentally different and do not naturally like one another. Experts in the early 20^th century advised straight couples to settle for this state of affairs by learning to tolerate and manipulate one another, and—amazingly—experts in the 21^st century continue to offer this same advice! 

10. Some might argue that the problem inherent in straight relationships is because of patriarchy, not heterosexuality.  Why do you disagree?

The problem for straight relationships is patriarchy, but heteronormativity is one of patriarchy’s main ingredients, and vice versa. Heterosexual culture does A LOT of work for patriarchy by making it seem not only natural and biologically inevitable, but also romantic and sexy. So, both systems rely on the other, and yet we rarely address heterosexuality as a system at all—instead we are taught to believe that it is a just biological impulse. If we look at it as a culture and a system, the way queer people look at it, we are better able to see that it is a dysfunctional system that could be anchored in collective joy and freedom, rather than eroticizing patriarchy. 

11. What is “straight culture” as seen through a queer, feminist lens?

I define straight culture as the romanticization and eroticization of presumably essential, and hierarchically organized, gender differences. 

12. In an ideal world, would straight men love women like a lesbian feminist?

Absolutely; this is the way forward. One of the things we know from research and writing on lesbian feminists is that loving and desiring women, and even vulgar lust for women, is an inseparable experience from being invested in women’s collective freedom and happiness. In lesbian feminist culture, to be sexually oriented toward women is also to like women, to identify with women, to want to hear women’s voices, follow women’s leadership, and see women lead full and authentic lives. This is why, from a lesbian feminist perspective, many straight men seem to have only a half-baked desire for women, feeble version of what lesbians feel. This swirl of desire and feminism is what lesbian feminists meant when they said they were “women identified,” and there is no reason straight men cannot also be “women identified” too. 

13. Are you out to romanticize queer life and relationships?  Don’t queer people also suffer from unhealthy relationships marked by abuse, violence and traumatic breakups?  What’s the difference with what heterosexuals deal with in relationships?

There is no doubt about it, queer relationships also have problems! Queer people cheat on, lie to, and hurt the people they love. These are human flaws. The difference between queer culture and straight culture is that queer culture is not structured around a presumably biological and unavoidable gender binary. We are not set up from the beginning in a way that someone risks being a nagging wife, an old ball and chain, or worrying about how to catch a man and keep him, or needing to buy self-help books like He’s Just Not That Into You, or believing that our gender means we will likely do most of the parenting and housework, or needing to convince our dating pool that we aren’t bitches, irrational, or available to be grabbed by the pussy. And if we look more specifically at lesbian feminist (and not just queer) relationships, we can see what it looks like to have an eroticism that isn’t about sexism at all. This does not mean lesbian feminist relationships are perfect; it means that lesbian feminist relationships are not rigged from the start by a straight culture that romanticizes women’s self-sacrifice and diminishment.

14. Why do you say that the narrative about “the tragedy of queerness” is more a story about gay men’s experience rather than queer women’s experience?

Many people believe that being gay makes for a sad and difficult life. Even people who claim to be gay-friendly or allies to LGBT people often discover they have these feelings when their child comes out to them as queer. But this belief in the “tragedy of queerness”—like many of our ideas about homosexuality—is anchored in a very male-centric, and inaccurate, understanding about queer life.  It is based on the idea that being queer means giving up a lot of privilege and acceptance in exchange for discrimination and hardship. In many ways, it does mean this. Homophobia, heteronormativity, and transphobia are alive and well – especially for queer and trans people of color. But, if we return to the lesbian feminist canon, or to our lesbian feminist foremothers like Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, we see that their writing is about how beautiful and liberatory it was to break from heteropatriarchy and be part of lesbian feminist communities and relationships. They describe the discrimination and hardship they experienced in heteropatriarchal families and communities, and the relief and joy they experienced in queer communities of color.  This story about how it is a tragic loss of ease and privilege to be queer is one that has ignored the lesbian feminist experience. If we consider patriarchy at all in our thinking about these questions, if we can think intersectionally, we can start to see the tragedy of heterosexuality.

15. You make the point that women get a raw deal in relationships with men.  Should straight women consider lesbianism or celibacy as preferred alternatives?

No, I am not arguing that straight women should become lesbians or celibate! Not unless they are sexually attracted to women or feel like they might be asexual! What I am arguing for is what I call deep heterosexuality, wherein straight men learn to like women so deeply that they actually like women. I am arguing for straightness to take its own impulses even deeper, to make them more authentic.

16. Why do you think it’s important to redefine heterosexuality to expand its basic ingredients to include more attachment and identification between men and women?

Psychologists have been arguing that men and women are fundamentally different, with different emotional and sexual interests, since the inception of the discipline of psychology. This approach, and the way it has been tethered to heterosexual romance, has gotten us nowhere. I strongly believe that it is possible to shift gears, and to imagine what it would be like if men thought of themselves not just as “sexually attracted” to women, but powerfully oriented towards ALL women’s well-being and liberation. I believe this will not only be good for straight women, but also tremendously healing for men. 

Jane Ward is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of California Riverside, where she teaches courses in feminist, queer, and heterosexuality studies. She is the author of Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations, as well as Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men and The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, both available from NYU Press.

What do you do in “Documenting the Stonewall Riots” that you didn’t do in your book?

Marc Stein: My book reprinted 200 primary documentary sources from 1965 to 1973 and provided an introduction to the multiple ways that these sources can be interpreted. One chapter covers bars and policing from 1965 to 1969; two address LGBT protests and demonstrations from 1965 to 1973; two focus on LGBT activist agendas, philosophies, and visions from 1965 to 1973; two cover the Stonewall Inn and Stonewall Riots; one addresses pride marches, parades, and protests from 1970 to 1973.

The idea of the book was not to provide another narrative account of the Stonewall Riots; I wanted instead to encourage readers to explore historical sources for themselves, to understand and appreciate the historian’s craft, which necessarily involves extensive work with primary sources.

In the course of producing the book, I collected thousands of primary sources, most of which were from newspapers, magazines, and newsletters; out of these, I selected the 200 that were reprinted in the book. For the book’s two chapters on the Stonewall Inn and the Stonewall Riots, I reprinted most of the documentary sources I collected, but for the other chapters I could only reprint a very small selection. In order to encourage further research and interpretation, I thought I would share citations for the other materials I collected.

What might a researcher learn by looking at additional sources?

MS: I can answer that with a few examples. For a particular protest or demonstration that took place in the years just before or just after Stonewall, my book generally reprinted one media story, but other stories might have provided other details, alternative perspectives, or conflicting information. For a specific vision statement, exploring additional sources might help a researcher consider the development of the author’s perspectives over time. For pride marches, parades, and protests, looking at multiple accounts can help a researcher develop stronger conclusions about crowd size, political conflicts, and logistical challenges. More generally, researchers might benefit from comparing accounts in mainstream, alternative, and LGBT media, and by comparing accounts in lesbian, gay, trans, feminist, and African American media. These materials could be useful in particular for teaching students about historical methods and practices.

Why didn’t you include these bibliographies in the book?

MS: The book primarily functions as a documents reader, though certainly there’s lots of interpretation going on in my introduction, my topical coverage, my chapter organization, and my selection and editing of texts. In this genre, it’s not necessarily expected that the author will provide extensive references to additional materials or annotations that “correct” mistakes in the original texts. Had I done either of those things, the book would have been much, much longer!

In addition, as I was working on my book, I began thinking about new bibliographic possibilities that are created by online technologies. One advantage of an online bibliography is that it can be updated as new sources are discovered, identified, and shared. I very much hope that “Documenting the Stonewall Riots” will be a living bibliography. If users send me additional citations that I can authenticate, I will make them available to the public. There are probably thousands of additional primary sources that could be added to my chapter bibliographies. I hope I’ll receive many recommendations at marcs@sfsu.edu.

Are the primary sources in your bibliographies accessible for general readers?

MS: Some are; some are not. Many LGBT periodicals have now been digitized. Some of these are open access; many more are available primarily via college and university libraries through databases such as LGBT Life with Full Text (EBSCO) and Archives of Sexuality and Gender (Gale).

As I’ve argued elsewhere, we have to be very careful in using these databases; for example, they tend to exclude more sexually explicit and sexually radical publications. For alternative/left periodicals, I most often rely on Reveal Digital’s Independent Voices project, which is now open access. For mainstream and African American newspapers and magazines, some are open access and some are not. With respect to mainstream periodicals, we couldn’t afford the permission fees for reprinting many relevant stories in my book, which was a shame and an outrage. Some of these newspapers and magazines have offensive histories of covering LGBT topics, and yet they wanted to charge me and other queer studies scholars thousands of dollars in permission fees.

Are they really trying to profit from their history of anti-LGBT media bias? The least they could do is make these stories available for free to LGBT archivists, educators, historians, journalists, librarians, and scholars. In the meantime, the online bibliographies provide citations for these items and individual researchers can find them.

The world is a different place in June 2020 as compared to when your book was released last year. How does the book and the online bibliography speak to today’s moment?

MS: Right now, historical research is even more dependent on digitized sources than it was before; research trips to historical archives are severely constrained. In that context, my book and the online bibliography could be useful for historians, students, and others who are working from home.

With respect to the topics covered, this year there’s been lots of interest in commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the first gay pride events in 1970. My final chapter bibliography references hundreds of media accounts of gay pride marches, parades, and protests from 1970 to 1973. Most are illuminating; many are fun; some are funny!

More generally, I’m struck today even more than I was last year by the number of items in my book that relate to police abuse, harassment, and violence. The bibliography in particular opens up new possibilities for research on dozens of police assaults, attacks, and killings, many of which have been long forgotten.

Finally, in the last few weeks we’ve been witnessing a powerful revival of the Black Lives Matter movement, which of course relates to ongoing struggles against systemic racism and police violence. In solidarity with that movement, I’ve compiled a partial list of items in my bibliography that relate to African American LGBT history (see below). Note in particular that we will soon be marking the fiftieth anniversary of Black Panther leader Huey Newton’s August 1970 letter about women’s liberation and gay liberation (Document 118 in my book).

Chapter 1: African American participation in the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, 1965 (see bibliographies related to Documents 2-3, including references to A. Cecil Williams)

• Chapter 1: African American media stories, 1965-1969 (see bibliographies after Document 18)
• Chapter 2: African American views on gay rights demonstrations, 1966 (see bibliographies related to Documents 19-26, including references to Ernestine Eckstein)
• Chapter 2: African American influences on and support for gay power, 1965-1969 (see bibliographies related to Documents 29-30, 42-45, including references to A. Cecil Williams)
• Chapter 3: African American media coverage of LGBT demonstrations, 1965 (see bibliographies related to Documents 46-47, and 50, including references to the Philadelphia Tribune)
• Chapter 3: African American and LGBT protests against Los Angeles police, 1967 (see bibliographies related to Document 59)
• Chapter 3: Sir Lady Java demonstration in Los Angeles, 1967 (see bibliographies related to Document 60)
• Chapter 6: African American lesbian feminism, 1971-1973 (see bibliographies related to Documents 109-113 and 118-122, including references to Anita Cornwell and Elandria Henderson)
• Chapter 6: African American trans liberation, 1972 (see bibliographies related to Documents 114-117, including references to Marsha P. Johnson)
• Chapter 6: Anticolonial, antiracist, Black, and third world LGBT liberation manifestos, 1970-1973 (see bibliographies related to Documents 118-122, including references to Huey Newton, Black Panthers, Young Lords, Third World Gay Revolution, Black Gay Caucus, James Baldwin)
• Chapter 7: police killing of Laverne Turner (see bibliographies related to Document 123)
• Chapter 7: protests against Sanford and Son (see bibliographies related to Document 131)
• Chapter 7: protests against racism in gay bars (see bibliographies related to Documents 149-151)
• Chapter 7: African American marriage activism (see bibliographies related to Documents 169-170)

Marc Stein is the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of History at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement (2012), Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (2010), and City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia (2000), and the editor of the Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History in America (2003).

Tell us what your book is about in one sentence.

The Race Card argues that games have been instrumental in the development and entrenchment of racial hierarchies and have shaped egalitarian fictions about America as a “level playing field.”

Can you give us an example of a certain game’s influence on Asian racial stereotyping?

The book traces the long history of a social dynamic I call “ludo-Orientalism,” wherein American stereotypes about Asians develop around the way the latter play games, which is often characterized as “gaming” the system. In Chapter 1, I examine how Bret Harte’s poem “The Heathen Chinee” dramatized a “stacked” game of Euchre between a Chinese immigrant laborer and two Irish American workers to decry the rise of “cheap Chinese labor.” Euchre was widely considered “America’s national card game” in the late 1800s; although Harte’s poem was written as a satire of arguments to ban Chinese workers, the metaphor of the “cheap” playing, cheap working Chinese laborer was so powerful as to become a major rallying cry of support behind the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

Chapter 6 tracks this same ludo-Orientalist dynamic into the digital age, where an online multiplayer game like World of Warcraft (WoW) became, in the first decade of the 21^st century, a virtual battleground for Chinese Exclusion. The same racist rhetoric about Asians’ “unnatural” relation to gameplay was now deployed to oust century Chinese “gold farmers,”: workers in China, largely young men, employed to play WoW for hours on end to accrue virtual, in-game currency, which was in turn sold for “real” money to those wishing to accelerate the tedious leveling-up process. As in the 1880s, focus shifts from those purchasing in-game currency or developing the tedious “grind” mechanics of WoW toward Asian laborers who were ostensibly “ruining the game” by turning it into work. (Although, as anyone who has ever played games for any extended period of time knows, the line between “play” and “work” is nowhere near as clear cut as we would like to think. That false binary is another one I discuss at length in the book.)

What inspired you to study this topic?

I grew up playing a lot of games. Like many young women of the video game era, I fell off the gaming train at some point – nobody ever said so explicitly, but there was a sense that video games “weren’t for girls.”

But it wasn’t video games that led me to this book; it was Asian American literature. Some incredible professors I had in college piqued my interest. I was struck by how Asian North American narratives consistently framed immigration as a high-stakes game – one simultaneously strategic and chance-ridden – in which the prize was, ostensibly, the American Dream. This was completely at odds with the myth of the American Dream as the epitome of “fair competition” and “equal opportunity,” and I began to value those minority narratives for giving the lie to the notion that American success was due to hard work and the putative end of racism and structural inequality.

My own family’s immigration and assimilation experience concretized these issues. It made me realize that games–rhetorically and materially—were powerful precisely because they were so incredibly flexible. Games are used to justify racist rhetoric and legislation in the name of “fair play,” while simultaneously offering an avenue to “beat the odds.” My grandmother, for example, who fled Shanghai and later immigrated to the US from Hong Kong in the 1960s as a domestic servant, was never naturalized, in part because she was illiterate, having never been allowed to pursue her schooling in China. Gaming remained an alternate venue of social participation and identity for her as a “resident alien.” She couldn’t read or write, but she played, and she taught me to play: mahjongg, solitaire, poker, and especially – the lottery. Gaming was a form of survival for her, a way of controlling at least some small part of the world. And this, I found in my research, is a fundamental, but often overlooked, part of the model minority myth: the stereotype of Asian Americans not just as hard-working, but hard-playing, high-risk-taking gamblers who reinforce the American Dream through their serious play.

What were other surprising things you found in your research?

I’ve been struck by the role that Asia, and specifically the assumption of an absolute difference between East and West (“and never the twain shall meet,” as Kipling put it), played in the intellectual foundations of the field of game studies – but to an extent which is still hardly discussed. As Chapter 4 shows, game studies traces its history, and owes much intellectual debt, to the work of western and northern European scholars like Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois, whose very definitions of why people play games in the first place were based in their presuppositions of fundamental differences between the games of different “civilizations” – particularly “Oriental” versus “Anglo-Saxon” – and their professional training and research interests as Orientalists.

If there is one thing you hope people learn from your book, what is it?

That games are always political: not by chance, not only sometimes, but always – and that in part their power derives from the illusion that they are “magic circles,” somehow free from the social divisions and hierarchies that exist in “the real world.” My hope is that when people play or use the language of games they come to recognize the way that games are used to justify the unjust as instead equitable, rational, and inevitable.

For those teaching game studies or Asian American history, how best could they use your book and the research it provides?

The book provides students with the basic cornerstones of Asian American history from early waves of immigration through the Japanese American internment to the present, along with an updated way of thinking about the model minority in the digital, globalized age, particularly the age of East Asian economic and political power, and the resultant shift in U.S.-Asian diplomatic relations. For example, the ludo-Orientalist dynamic has become especially visible in the current moment of the Hong Kong protests, where U.S. game giants like Blizzard (creator of World of Warcraft and many others) faced domestic backlash after their decision to ban one of their professional esports players, “Blitzchung,” for publicly supporting the movement.

Understanding the Orientalist origins of game studies provides the necessary background to truly appreciate the central role Asia continues to play in contemporary gaming – not only as game players and spectators, but as exporters, manufacturers, and producers. It also helps students recognize how the power of games is itself indebted to the way that power relations tend to be drawn along lines of race, class, and nationality, alongside those of gender and sexuality more commonly critiqued in game studies.

How does the research you did for The Race Card lend itself to your next project if at all?

My next project is expanding on my interests in Asian American literature and culture to explore the publishing history and context of Aiiieeeee!, a seminal Asian American literary anthology. I’ve recently inherited the archive surrounding this anthology from one of the editors, Shawn Wong, and am in the process of developing a monograph and digital archive around it. You can learn more at Aiiieeeee.org.

Tara Fickle is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon and an affiliated faculty in Ethnic Studies, the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, and the New Media & Culture certificate. She is the author of The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities, now available from NYU Press. Find more ways to teach the book, and access copies of some of the primary materials and images examined, at tarafickle.com.

What was Negro Fort?

During the War of 1812, British military forces established a large defensive fortification on the eastern shore of the Apalachicola River in Spanish Florida. From here they recruited thousands of Native Americans and African Americans to join in the fight against the United States. Following the war’s conclusion, the British abandoned the fort and left it in the possession of several hundred fugitive slaves. For more than a year, this free black community, with the help of its Seminole, Creek, and Choctaw allies, survived independently under the leadership of black veterans of Britain’s Corps of Colonial Marines.

What was the impact of the battle that took place there?

The battle closed an escape valve that fugitive slaves across the United States’ southern frontier had utilized for generations. It also opened the door to the American republic’s conquest of Spanish Florida and its large indigenous population. The battle demonstrated in no uncertain terms the United States’ strong commitment to the expansion of slavery.

What inspired you to study this piece of history?

I am utterly fascinated by extraordinary examples of slave resistance that have for whatever reason failed to capture the public’s imagination. Though historians have long been familiar with Negro Fort’s history, the general public has not. I hope The Battle of Negro Fort will begin to change that.

What was the most surprising thing you found in your research?

Two things really stand out. First was the extent to which the reports from the frontier that Negro Fort posed a grave threat to the lives of frontier settlers were greatly exaggerated and in many cases completely fabricated. Negro Fort became a bugbear that American citizens, soldiers, and officials exploited to justify the United States’ expansion into Florida. Second was that prior to the Civil War Americans were quite familiar with the fort’s history. It was widely covered in popular books and pamphlets. Abolitionists especially kept its memory alive. I was not surprised to discover that John Brown studied Negro Fort and thought its short-lived success portended well for his plan to initiate a southern slave insurrection.

Why do you think this story has been mostly overlooked until now?

Spanish Florida’s history has always been overlooked because it falls outside the traditional narrative of United States history, and dramatic accounts of enslaved people resisting their American oppressors have also been ignored because they challenge the idea of American Exceptionalism. But today I imagine it has more to do with a growing disconnect between historians and the public. Professional historians too often produce scholarship that is inaccessible to students, teachers, and ordinary readers. Indeed, the argument could be made that in some circles the mark of sound scholarship is its inability to be understood by the general public. The point is that there are truly incredible stories of American history that readers would be taken with if only they were presented the information in interesting and informative ways.

Are there any traces left of the fort or its community?

There are. Though none of the wooden structures remain above ground, the massive moat that surrounded the entire fort complex is still plainly visible. Also visible are ground depressions that are believed to be where hundreds of the casualties of the Battle of Negro Fort were buried following the battle. Though closed temporarily due to damage caused by Hurricane Michael, the sight of the former fort is a National Historic Landmark known as Prospect Bluff Historic Sites. It is located in an incredibly beautiful and still isolated section of northwest Florida.

If there is one thing you hope people learn from your book, what is it?

Unquestionably, it is the indomitable spirit of enslaved people. Even when an entire nation conspired against them, they continued to fight for freedom. That they benefitted from the assistance of British soldiers, Native Americans, and even American citizens, is also important to remember.

For those interested in teaching about early American history or African American history, how best could they use your book and the research it provides?

The possibilities are endless. Almost everything they need to know and teach about Negro Fort is hiding in plain sight. While a good amount of the primary research for The Battle of Negro Fort derives from hard-to-find sources in archives across the United States and the United Kingdom, much of it is readily available in published accounts, such as The Papers of Andrew Jackson. Moreover, many of the first-person accounts of Negro Fort are also available online in popular early nineteenth century newspapers and periodicals like Niles’ Weekly Register. I know from firsthand experience that students are excited to learn about Negro Fort and the lessons it teaches us about racism, slavery, and slave resistance.

How does the research you did for The Battle of Negro Fort lend itself to your next project?

When faced with a lifetime of servitude, many of Negro Fort’s residents chose “liberty or death.” It was a decision that many enslaved people made throughout the history of the early America. They took Patrick Henry’s words literally. Not surprisingly, then, the next project I am working on explores the ways in which the revolutionary rhetoric of the founding fathers both encouraged and justified slave resistance.

Matthew J. Clavin, Professor of History at the University of Houston, is the author of Aiming for Pensacola and Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War. His latest book The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise And Fall Of A Fugitive Slave Community is now available from NYU Press.

Feature image from Wikimedia Commons