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Silvia Schultermandl, Gulsin Ciftci, Jennifer Reimer

American Studies as Vulnerability Studies: Introduction

This special issue explores the ambivalent nature of vulnerability as a "politically produced" condition of suffering which contains the potential for resistance and consequential social change for minoritized individuals and communities. Judith Butler's now-classic rendering of vulnerability as "unequally distributed through and by a differential operation of power" helps us better grasp interrelated forms of oppression, yet we argue that narratives of vulnerability also foreground the relational and interconnected conditions of vulnerable lives, while at the same time engendering worldmaking projects centered around agency and resistance.

Kosal Khiev, Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt, Martina Pfeiler

Performing Vulnerability and Resistance in Spoken Word Poetry

This article explores the duality of Kosal Khiev's poetry performances as performing vulnerability and resistance within global cultural contexts. While his live performances vocalize several forms of systemic racism that he experienced as a refugee, in the US foster care system and with the US prison-industrial complex, his live-streamed performances reach beyond national borders that have jeopardized his very existence. Over the past few years, his livestreams and social media posts have most succinctly served as creative channels through which Kosal Khiev addresses his vulnerability. His poetry included in this article not only acknowledges and comments on his vulnerability as interconnected with US politics but also writes himself back into the national discourse from the perspective of an exiled poet.

Nathalie Aghoro

Voice, Silence, and Quiet Resistance in Percival Everett's Glyph

This article investigates how the refusal to speak becomes a resonant expression of protest in Percival Everett's novel Glyph (1999). It offers a reading of Everett's experimental work as generating a literary soundscape of the quiet voice to reflect on the functions of sonic absence in the politics and aesthetics of resistance. With Kevin Quashie's work The Sovereignty of Quiet (2012) and Fred Moten's writings on the significance of sound in black radical aesthetics as conceptual bridges, it seeks to establish that Glyph explores the boundaries and possibilities of black self-determination in the American socio-political context as it pitches the acoustics of silence and voice against the mute textuality of the book. Along these lines, the explicit refusal of a voice to speak in Glyph simultaneously reveals and complicates the dynamics of racialization in literary imaginations and reading practices.

Nassim Balestrini

Aesthetic Innovation and Activist Impetus in Climate Change Theater: Beyond a New Formalist Reading of Chantal Bilodeau's One-Actor Play No More Harveys (2022)

Canadian-American playwright and activist Chantal Bilodeau finds that we need innovative plays that meld climate change into the aesthetics, arguments, and social fabrics of drama and performance. Testing Bilodeau's suggestion, this essay focuses on the poetics of her newest full-length play, No More Harveys (2022). This reading of climate change theater and in particular of Bilodeau's one-actor play applies Caroline Levine's New Formalist method, which strives to read aesthetic and social forms simultaneously and non-hierarchically, and which raises pertinent questions as to how activist theater manages to balance aesthetics and (political and/or scientific) argumentation. While Levine's New Formalism offers a productive analytical angle on small- and large-scale forms, it cannot cover all literary and social phenomena single-handedly. The analysis offered here proposes to demonstrate the usefulness of complementary readings that take into account (a) decolonial and ecocritical concepts of planetarity, (b) a historically informed understanding of monodramatic and of autobiographical generic practices, and (c) the affordances of climate change theater at the present moment. As this contribution argues, Bilodeau employs and modifies elements of form and genre in a manner that allows multiple narratives of social injustice, violence, and detrimental hierarchies across large swaths of time and place to bleed into each other.