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How and why have freedom and social hierarchies and exclusions become fused in Trump's America? What causative factors can explain the emergence within twenty-first century US political culture of a movement notorious for its attacks on basic norms of tolerance, civility, and human decency? In their efforts to respond to such questions, prominent historians, political commentators, and theorists have correlated Trump's rise to political power in terms of his transmogrification of a large segment of the American populace into US liberal democracy's fascist totalitarian Other. While Trump's illiberal pronouncements and actions do indeed bear a resemblance to the political behavior of European fascists, the Americanness of Trump's conquest disposition might be better understood as his resurrection of an archaic variant of liberalism practiced by American settler colonists throughout the expansionist era of US history. How did President Trump persuade or provoke a broad swath of US citizens, who were for the most part accustomed to consider the principles and institutions of liberal democracy essential components of American democracy, to regard his settler conquest disposition as representatively American? What enabled Trump to advocate with preemptive impunity the demolition of liberal institutions and principles? How could he serve simultaneously as the president of the world's most powerful liberal democracy and leader of an insurrectionary movement of latter-day settler colonists? In an effort to address these questions, this essay engages Trump's March 23, 2011, endorsement of Birtherism; Trump's unauthorized transfer of power at the January 20, 2017, inauguration; Trump's August 12–15, 2017, statements about the Charlottesville protest; and Trump's role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection as distinct but interrelated moments in Trump's production of this settler-colonist conquest disposition.

Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel Home is concerned primarily with the efforts undertaken by its protagonist, the black Korean War veteran Frank Money, to accommodate himself to civilian life. However, Home differs from other Korean War novels in that after Frank returns to the United States, he neither aligns his wartime experiences with the superpower rivalry nor conducts a critical meta-engagement with Cold War ideology. When Frank comes back to the United States in 1955 from a tour of duty as a combat infantryman in Chosin, Korea, he instead undergoes the unheimlich experience of becoming a fugitive within a carceral state. Morrison confronts readers with a comparably uncanny experience when she deletes from the narrative any trace of the Cold War ideology whose structures of feeling, epistemologies, and military architecture the Korean War was putatively fought to establish and that the so-called war on terror had eerily revived. When she disallowed Cold War ideology control over representations of Home’s characters, actions, and events, Morrison recast the Korean War as the Cold War’s uncanny Other that exposed readers to an ongoing settler-colonial war being waged within 1950s US domestic society.

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Restoring Tennessee Williams’s Production of the 1950s Primal Scene” explores the productive exchanges between the domains of drama and psychoanalysis by removing the “primal scene” from its embeddedness within psychoanalytic theory and resituating it within a contemporary drama, Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which the playwright put the primal scene to the work of countering the dramaturgy of the Cold War state. Pease specifically resituates Freud’s theorization of the primal scene in the Wolf Man case within the dramatic context of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to restore what Pease calls the primal scene of 1950s masculinity constructions.

This article discusses the importance of Auseinandersetzung to William Spanos’s untimely exile legacies.

Obama constructs links among signs of history to produce what I would call a punctual presidency, a presidency that is punctual in two senses: Obama works at the level of historical puncta, and he’s just in time. He is a figure who knows how to work with an evental logic of history, and how to transpose the evental logics of history into a means whereby change within the territory of the United States can be linked with transnational democratic possibilities. By impersonating a transnational institution that does not exist anywhere else on this planet, Obama has as one of his aspirations the desire to become the institution of transnational democracy that otherwise has not materialized.

“The Crisis of Critique in Postcolonial Modernity” situates Michel Foucault's method of genealogical analysis within the history of critique, examines the usage to which David Scott has put Foucault to reconfigure the problem-space of postcolonial studies, and explains how Scott's usage of genealogical critique functions as a form of governmentality.

The U.S. political landscape underwent a sea change when Barack Obama, a former community organizer who seemingly came from nowhere, ran a presidential campaign that resembled a populist grassroots movement. Obama’s campaign cohered around two aims: to bring an end to President George W. Bush’s unconstitutional state policies—abridgment of civil rights, preemptive strikes, renditions, internment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay—and to oppose the war in Iraq. Drawing together disparate constituencies that traversed traditional party lines, Obama’s “movement” successfully realized what had previously seemed an endlessly deferrable American Dream. In an essay that he published the week after Obama’s election entitled “Use Your Illusions!” Slavoj Žižek criticized the cynics who ignored what Žižek described as Obama’s manipulation of the “power of illusions.” Comparing his election to other world historical events, like the French Revolution, the successful slave revolt in Haiti, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, that defied historical explanation, Žižek concluded that Obama’s victory was a “sign of history” because, like these other world historical events

Jack London concludes his quasi-autobiographical novel, Martin Eden, with the narrator's eerily detailed recounting of the aesthetic aspects of Martin Eden's suicide by drowning. What Eden communicates as aesthetic in the drowning refers to the disinterested, seemingly extrinsic viewpoint from which he observes his reactions to the episode and to the radical division structuring this disinterestedness. The agent who undergoes the drowning is twofold and oscillates between a terrified "interior" subject, who experiences the drowning involuntarily, and a reflective consciousness, who records its effects as aesthetic.

The body of literary knowledge that has taken as its object of investigation narratives of the previously unrepresentable realm between the death of the symbolic order (in which the narratives take place) and the social death of its representative agents -neoslavery narratives, holocaust testimony, witness literature-has isolated negative interpellation as one of the invariant features of this emergent literary practice. The "subject" in/of each of these narratives has been voided of any "imaginary" relation to the "real" state violence to which the "subject" has been interpellated. What is negative in the interpellation then refers at once to the status of the "subject" before she/he was taken up by the interpellative address ("Hey, you there!") as well as to the sociosymbolic order that had come disjoined from that addressee.

Oe: Rob Wilson, you're an inveterate Japan and Korea watcher teaching English literature at the University of Hawaii. Your book, American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre, was published fairly recently by the University of Wisconsin Press. A couple of years ago, during a talk you gave at a conference at the University of California, Irvine, I heard you read passages from your book while it was still in manuscript. I was quite impressed by your notion of the nuclear sublime, so when I returned to Japan, I introduced it here, especially what you had to say about Hiroshima. You know, of course, that I've also written on Hiroshima. By chance, a Japanese translation of Harold Bloom's Ruin the Sacred Truths had just appeared, so I wrote a review essay of that and some other books, and in that essay, I discussed your work. I wrote that I thought the Japanese might have trouble under