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Sex, Time, and the Transcontinental Railroad: Abstract Labor and the Queer Temporalities of History

Through an analysis of two Asian North American pieces (text and video documentary) meditating on Chinese labor employed in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Iyko Day reflects on gendered and sexual temporalities of race, labor, and capitalism in the construction of the transcontinental railroads in Canada and the United States. Day pushes back on a temporal logic of equivalence imposed on alien labor put to work in an industrial, capitalist temporality.

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Iseeyou (above ground) in Johannesburg

Iseeyou (2013) is a short film essay by Simon Gush, depicting Johannesburg’s representations of mining. The film deftly questions what is at stake in the visibility and invisibility of labor.

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Distant Reading After Moretti
It is not a coincidence that distant reading does not deal well with gender, sexuality, or race. But if we re-commit ourselves to the project of exposing and interrogating power, we arrive potentially at a form of distant reading that is much more inclusive.
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On the spectrum, p.p.
How the autism spectrum in the popular imagination overlaps with and feeds a particular feature of European-American whiteness: the bias toward independence and self-sufficiency. 
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Race, Thick and Thin

There has been a noticeable doubling down on critique in African American literary studies. But postcritique is thriving in less-recognized work in the field: namely, scholarship that is oriented around empirical analysis of textual objects and that is animated by theoretical and practical reflection on archival research.