Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire (ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise) - Hardcover

Chen, Mel Y.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1478020563 ISBN 13: 9781478020561

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2023

Synopsis

In Intoxicated Mel Y. Chen explores the ongoing imperial relationship between race, sexuality, and disability. They focus on nineteenth-century biopolitical archives in England and Australia to show how mutual entanglements of race and disability take form through toxicity. Examining English scientist John Langdon Down’s characterization of white intellectual disability as Asian interiority and Queensland’s racialization and targeting of Aboriginal peoples through its ostensible concern with black opium, Chen explores how the colonial administration of race and disability gives rise to “intoxicated” subjects often shadowed by slowness. Chen charts the ongoing reverberations of these chemical entanglements in art and contemporary moments of political and economic conflict or agitation. Although intoxicated subjects may be affected by ongoing pollution or discredited as agents of failure, Chen affirmatively identifies queer/crip forms of unlearning and worldmaking under imperialism. Exemplifying an undisciplined thinking that resists linear or accretive methods of inquiry, Chen unsettles conventional understandings of slowness and agitation, intellectual method, and the toxic ordinary.

About this title

About the Author

Mel Y. Chen is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. They are author of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect and coeditor of Crip Genealogies, both also published by Duke University Press.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478020563
• ISBN 13: 9781478020561
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208