Movement is a defining feature of life, for humans, for other living beings, for the inanimate, and the Suez Canal is a place that resonates with a promise of mobilities. The discussions of this roundtable were inspired by conversations among participants at the 2021 MESA annual meeting around both the human and other-than-human that have channeled through the Suez Canal. For this roundtable, we combine the histories of fish, pathogens, prevailing winds, iron ore, sewage, and peoples—seemingly disparate and unconnected circulations and histories—all in motion through, above, under, and around the canal. Their afterlives highlight both the historical depth of the processes propelled by the canal and the unruliness of vibrant matter and living beings, each with their own life projects and interdependencies.1

Auritro Majumder is Associate Professor of English at University of Houston. He is the author of Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and currently chair of the South Asian and Diasporic Languages, Literatures and Cultures forum of the Modern Language Association.

This article reflects on some developments in women's history based on the 1992 ‘An agenda for women's history in Ireland, 1500–1900’, particularly responding to the section authored by Maria Luddy, incorporating work grounded in the nineteenth century up to the first half of the twentieth. Specifically, it considers developments in Irish women's social history over the past thirty years on the period from the 1850s to 1950s. The focus is on themes of poverty and migration, crime, and sexuality, which were touched on in the ‘Agenda’ and identified as areas for future research. Analysis on these subjects allows for an insight into lived realities for ‘ordinary’ women. These are areas which reveal the growth and development of historical research and its impact on public narratives and policy. Taking its cue from the ‘Agenda’, this article also identifies other fruitful research topics that could be further explored in future scholarship.

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.

Returning by ship from the hajj in 1902, Aida and Fatma landed at the quarantine station of El Tor, 120 miles south of the city of Suez in the Sinai Peninsula.1 The El Tor station had been set up in the Egyptian town following international sanitary conferences convened to promote international standards for sanitary protections to safeguard Europe from “Asiatic” diseases, most notably cholera. Endemic in India for centuries, cholera had spread out of the Ganges basin in the nineteenth century through globalizing networks of trade and steam transport. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, with its shortening of travel times and distances, increased the danger of epidemics turning into pandemics. Although pathways of the cholera pathogen included routes across the Eurasian steppe and Russia into Germany, European authorities focused on the hajj as the catalyst for diffusion of the disease—a super-spreader event. El Tor was meant to be the linchpin in the system of stopping disease from passing through the Suez Canal to Europe.2

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.