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Almost Futures looks to the people who pay the heaviest price exacted by war and capitalist globalization—particularly Vietnamese citizens and refugees—for glimpses of ways to exist at the end of our future’s promise. In order to learn from the lives destroyed (and lived) amid our inheritance of modern humanism and its uses of time, Almost Futures asks us to recognize new spectrums of feeling: the poetic, in the grief of protesters dispossessed by land speculation; the allegorical, in assembly line workers’ laughter and sorrow; the iterant and intimate, in the visual witnessing of revolutionary and state killing; the haunting, in refugees’ writing on the death of their nation; and the irreconcilable, in refugees’ inhabitation of history. “Almost Futures is a tour de force. Within the immediate contexts of Vietnam studies and critical refugee studies, the book stands out as sui generis in its theoretical sophistication, interdisciplinary rigor, and beautiful prose. In a word, it is incomparably in a class by itself.” — JODI KIM, author of Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries “This is a truly singular study: it contends with the ghosts of Vietnam in material, conceptual, and aesthetic modes, and it is a book that belongs to the humanities in the broadest possible sense of the word, to include a resonant understanding of humanism and humanity.” — JOSEPHINE NOCK-HEE PARK, School of Arts and Sciences President’s Distinguished Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

Contemporary film and television production is extraordinarily mobile. Filming large-scale studio productions in Atlanta, Budapest, London, Prague, or Australia’s Gold Coast makes Hollywood jobs available to people and places far removed from Southern California—but it also requires individuals to uproot their lives as they travel around the world in pursuit of work. Drawing on interviews with a global contingent of film and television workers, Kevin Sanson weaves an analysis of the sheer scale and complexity of mobile production into a compelling account of the impact that mobility has had on job functions, working conditions, and personal lives. Mobile Hollywood captures how an expanded geography of production not only intensifies the often-invisible pressures that production workers now face but also stretches the parameters of screen-media labor far beyond craftwork and creativity. “Engagingly written and sharply observed, Kevin Sanson’s latest book—firmly grounded in the experiences of film workers themselves—is an invaluable contribution to the field.” — JADE L. MILLER, author of Nollywood Central: The Nigerian Videofilm Industry “Every course in global media, media industries, and production studies should adopt this book.” — TIMOTHY HAVENS, author of Black Television Travels: African American Media around the Globe “Persuasively encourages a major rethinking of how we understand the dynamics of transnational film and television production.” — PAUL MCDONALD, coeditor of Hollywood and the Law

Angloscene examines Afro-Chinese interactions within Beijing’s aspirationally cosmopolitan student class. Jay Ke-Schutte explores the ways in which many contemporary interactions between Chinese and African university students are mediated through complex intersectional relationships with whiteness, the English language, and cosmopolitan aspiration. At the heart of these tensions, a question persistently emerges: How does English become more than a language—and whiteness more than a race? Engaging in this inquiry, Ke-Schutte explores twenty-first century Afro-Chinese encounters as translational events that diagram the discursive contours of a changing transnational political order—one that will certainly be shaped by African and Chinese relations. A tremendously nuanced book that moves beyond the verities of postcolonial theory as much as liberal illusions of postracialism in the academy. The ethnographic richness of Angloscene in its expositions of tropes and situated encounters is remarkable and pointed—even poignant.” — DILIP M. MENON, editor of Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South “Reflecting a critical sensibility from the Global South, Jay Ke-Schutte’s book defies Euro-American-centric perspectives on language, race, and colonialism. The innovative concept of the Angloscene offers an imaginative way to unpack the transnational power matrix that conditions Afro-Chinese encounters.” — FAN YANG, author of Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization This book reveals the manner in which talk about signs of race and the racialization of those engaged in talk readily emerge hand in hand within social encounters, so that to isolate them from each other is to lose sight of the processes through which inequity persists in social life even when it is abjured.” — ASIF AGHA, Francis E. Johnston Term Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, and Editor-in-Chief, Signs and Society

Many Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Traveling enabled men to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage, while Syrian women’s roles in peddling led to more economic autonomy. In Possible Histories, Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores this peddling economy to reveal the sexual ideologies imbricated in Arab American racial histories. Possible Histories marshals a queer affective approach to community and family history to show how Syrian immigrant peddlers and their networks of labor and care appeared in interconnected discourses of modernity, sexuality, gender, class, and race. Karem Albrecht theorizes this profession, and its place in Arab American historiography, as a “queer ecology” of laboring practices, intimacies, and knowledge production. This book ultimately proposes a new understanding of the long arm of Arab American history that puts sexuality and gender at the heart of ways of navigating US racial systems. “Possible Histories brings an innovative queer analytic to Arab American history, inquiring into the intimate relationships among itinerant peddlers. Uncovering the role of sexuality in racializing Arab Americans, it challenges respectability politics and brilliantly upends reigning paradigms in Arab American history.” — EVELYN ALSULTANY, author of Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion “A deeply personal queer history that is brisk, unsettling, and brimming with insights. Puzzling through gossip, shame, and scandal, Charlotte Karem Albrecht offers an astounding kaleidoscope of Arab Americans in the twentieth century.” — NAYAN SHAH, author of Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes “Possible Histories is a rich contribution to queer theorizing on kinship, archives, and diaspora. In this moving tribute to the challenges and traps of recovery work, Karem Albrecht traverses the maze of memory and family with care and thoughtfulness.” — JASBIR PUAR, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers University

The digital PDF of the Introduction, Chapter 3, Chapter 8 and the Afterword of this title are available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. The word ‘precarity’ is widely used when discussing work and employment, social conditions and lived experiences, and social classes. There is not, however, a consensus on the precise meaning of the term or how it should best be used to explore social changes. Bringing together an international group of thinkers from a diverse range of fields, this book offers a distinctive and critical perspective approach to an important topic.