Vice Patrol analyzes how reconfigurations in postwar gay public life, psychiatric research, and policing surveillance technologies recast Americans’ chimerical commitments to purging sexual vice. Before a more radical, visible queer liberation movement emerged after 1969, vice enforcement was not a monolithic project but rather a conglomeration of newly empowered post-Prohibition liquor agents, policing units, and judicial institutions. Enforcement practices and institutional priorities generated inconsistencies over policing sexual difference, creating conflicts that became embedded in judicial processes, themselves fraught with institutional pressures and contradictions. These legal and administrative configurations did more than enforce existing law regulating sexual deviance; they actively produced identifiable targeted groups believed to be predisposed to sexual criminality. Vice Patrol’s insights are urgent; they reveal and explain the historical, institutional, and political processes of negotiating human expression into criminal acts requiring state policing intervention. The intrusive tactics that Lvovsky chronicles did not disappear; they were redirected, which is best articulated in the liberal disillusionment with “urban renewal” and with the Nixon administration's “War on Crime” that targeted “high crime” areas in urban communities of color, propelling forward racialized mass incarceration.

This article is an attempt to make sense of the paradox structuring the narrative of extinction in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), which juxtaposes a romanticized image of survival and rebirth and the ugliness of senseless death. Departing from a biopolitical framework, the article argues that Cuarón’s story represents extinction as beyond redemption yet as subject to regulation. Given the fact that the narrative is structured around the citizen/refugee nexus, I read the film as a story about the eschatological value of refugees to both cultural conceptualizations of human extinction and a reproduction of statist political identities. The film is thus not only about unequal access to death but also about how the difference between the citizen and the refugee can still be maintained in the face of climatic extinction when the regulation of life is no longer sufficient.

This article interrogates the South-South internationalism of two renowned US Latinx poets: Miguel Algarín’s abjection in Morocco in his poem “Tangiers” and Sandra María Esteves’s anti-apartheid poetry for the French Art contre/against apartheid project, which included the controversial participation of Jacques Derrida. Although these poems focus on different contexts of African liberation, both react to French coloniality. For Algarín, his Orientalist evocations of underage child prostitution operate under a French hegemony, coming into crisis when a third world alliance fails. In Esteves’s work, her poetic solidarity draws on Frantz Fanon’s experience of French colonization in Algeria but also comes into crisis when Derrida’s foreword for Art contre/against apartheid is challenged as Eurocentric. Although both engagements with African self-determination exhibit residues of a French hegemony undergirding and undercutting what I term is a poetic Latin-African solidarity, their South-South approach enriches postcolonial studies, in which Latin American, and by extension, Latinx identities have been sidelined.

Just a stone's throw from the campus of the university in Kingston, Ontario, where I teach, is a small park. Hugging a rocky stretch of Lake Ontario shoreline, Macdonald Park, named after Canada's first prime minister, is better known by locals as “Pervert Park.” Since at least World War II, Pervert Park has been the primary cruising ground in Kingston for men searching for sex with other men, a meeting place for a mix of mostly working-class men, men stationed at the nearby military base, and the occasional intrepid university student. For women, the park's name references a different kind of pervert and signals the potential danger of walking alone in the park at night. Two of the park's main features are the Newlands Pavilion, a bandstand built in 1896, and the Richardson bathhouse, which is really a public washroom and changing facility, and which, when it first opened in 1919, boasted lockers, hot-water showers, and a list of “rules that would be enforced to maintain decorum in the bathing house.” A paved path, punctuated by park benches, connects the pavilion and bathhouse, which, after dark, conveniently becomes an oval track for men cruising around and sometimes having sex behind the pavilion and bathhouse.

Breastfeeding, both in its literal consequences on a woman’s body and its symbolic associations with attachment, highlights the simultaneously powerful yet servile position of the maternal figure. I trace this ambivalence in Mahasweta Devi’s story “Breast-Giver,” exploring women’s literal and metaphorical hungers, as well as the hunger their children experience, arguing that breastfeeding often serves as a means of showcasing a woman’s physical limitation based on her familial status as “feeder.” However, I also argue for a profoundly embodied version of the breastfeeding trope, one that negates prior conceptions of breastfeeding as a “taking” and establishes it as a “giving” that not only nourishes one’s family, but also one’s self, as mothers circumvent hierarchical systems of cooking and food preparation. Ultimately, I both lay bare the interconnection between a woman’s body and food-based labor systems and reveal literary methods for their extrication, through narrative instances of breastfeeding.

This article contributes to the study of the globalization of science through an analysis of Ahmed Cevdet's nineteenth-century translation of the sixth chapter of Ibn Khaldun's (d. 1406) Muqaddimah, which deals with the nature and history of science. Cevdet's translation and Ottomanization of that text demonstrate that science did not simply originate in Europe to be subsequently distributed to the rest of the world. Instead, knowledge transmitted from Europe was actively engaged with and appropriated by scholars, who sought to put that material within their own cultural context in a manner that could serve their own intellectual and practical needs. Cevdet's case is particularly interesting because it demonstrates that (1) Islamic conceptions of human nature, the soul and the nature of knowledge provided particularly fertile soil in which empiricist and positivist traditions could take root, and (2) aspects of modern science – specifically its ostensive separation from metaphysical debates – made it more attractive to Islamic theologians than was, for example, the work of Aristotelian philosophers. Through an exploration of Cevdet's career and a close analysis of his historiographical treatment of Ibn Khaldun's account of sciences, this article foregrounds the agency of non-Europeans in the late nineteenth-century circulation of scientific knowledge.

During the 1830s, the Bushranging Act and the Vagrancy Act were crafted to prevent crime, revolt and insurrection in the colony of New South Wales. These statutes contained exceptional methods to police and control colonial populations and suspended legal safeguards designed to protect the population from abuses of power. Supporters of the laws argued that extreme measures were necessary due to the emergency of the occasion. Understanding the Bushranging Act and the Vagrancy Act’s enactment and operation, as well as the purposes they were designed to serve and the liberties they infringed to achieve these ends requires attention to local circumstance. A fine-grained analysis, rooted in the peculiarities of life in colonial New South Wales and anchored by the law’s operation on the ground is needed to understand the malleability of British law at this place and at this time. In this article, I argue that rather than a select criminal contingent, the New South Wales’ authorities increasingly feared that the composition of the colony threatened their colonial enterprise. The Bushranging Act of 1830 and the Vagrancy Act of 1835 contained wide coercive and discretionary powers to mitigate the extent of this threat.