Frontiers Augmented highlights selected authors from our issues to create a means for deeper engagement with the content published in the Frontiers Journal. For our recent double special issue on Asian American Abolition Feminisms (44.3 & 45.1), we highlight the two guest editors who conceived of and created these issues: Dr. Diane Wong, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, Newark, and Dr. Rachel Kuo, Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
So much has changed, yet so much has stayed the same since the publication of our double special issue on Asian American Abolition Feminisms. The spaces that we are part of continue to open and begin with loss and remembering the dead. When we created the call for our special issue in 2022, we saw our collaborative work as a rupture from contemporary responses to anti-Asian violence that have expanded the carceral system through hate crimes legislation and reliance on law enforcement. We sought theoretical frameworks, pedagogies, and practices at the intersection of abolition feminisms and Asian Americanist critique that drew from a longer history of anti-war and anti-imperial struggles seeking to disrupt U.S. empire and liberal regimes of violence.
Since then, we have witnessed ongoing horrific violence in Palestine, enabled by U.S. military funding. The death toll keeps rising. And, at the same time, this violence continues to be normalized by media industries, technology platforms, academic institutions, and nonprofits who silence and suppress calls for solidarity with Palestinian liberation. All of this reveals the immense hypocrisy of the “hate frame”, which perpetuates carceral violence both “at home” and abroad under the guise of liberal progressive values. We have observed the brutal disciplining and punishment of students, friends, and colleagues protesting on our college campuses, as well as ongoing insidious collaborations. In tending to this collective grief, we see these special issues as an experimentation in mourning, as a way to reflect on our pasts and our futures, and as an invitation to dream otherwise.
The persistent work of abolition feminisms continues to be necessary. Our two interconnected issues offer different perspectives and analyses of state violence and empire as they intersect with racial, gender, and economic violence lived in the context of people’s daily lives. The first issue is inspired by the creative process and work of collective theorizing towards “living an abolitionist life” that comes from sustained dialogue and shared knowledge production. As Priya Kandaswamy, Margo Okazawa-Rey, and Setsu Shigematsu provoke in their conversation: “Given the incalculable ways the logics of carcerality and punishment have shaped us, who must we become to create, sustain, and further grow new worlds?” Looking to examples such as Hmong feminist responses to sexual violence; poetic speculations of collective safety and liberation; and reflections on healing from intergenerational trauma and conflict, this first volume reminds us that a critical feminist anti-violence perspective must be one that takes up the transnational struggles of anti-colonial and anti-war resistance. “From Turtle Island to Palestine to Cuba to Somalia to Iraq to the Philippines to Puerto Rico to Afghanistan to Guåhan, the struggles against U.S. empire persist,” write A. Ikaika Gleisberg and Nishant Upadhyay in their essay on coalitional queer and trans organizing for demilitarized futures
The second issue includes the voices of activists, organizers, artists, and movement-based scholars who share lessons learned from abolitionist organizing in recent moments. Together, these essays call for a “promiscuous” politics of relationality rooted in “care and curiosity to generate radical prospects” (Holton, 66) as well as enable us to “reimagine our relationship to institutions of higher education” (Bui, 92) as abolitionist and anti-militarist scholars and practitioners. We learn directly from Red Canary Song, 18 Million Rising, Asian Prisoners Support Committee, Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM NYC), Khmer Girls in Action, Believers Bail Out, Asian American Feminist Collective, Sick of It! and more. Our collaboration with one another has been defined by both political and intellectual stakes and shaped by a dialectical method of building and experimenting with abolitionist practice alongside and within our various communities. With Palestine in our minds and hearts, we invite readers to practice alongside us until all of us are closer to liberation.
Diane Wong is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, Newark. Her research and teaching interests include U.S. politics, race and ethnicity, critical urban studies, racial capitalism, abolition feminisms, and community rooted research. Diane is a socially engaged artist and her latest exhibits include “Degentrification Archives” at Pace University Art Galleries and “Archive as Memorial” at Storefront for Ideas in New York City. Rachel Kuo writes, teaches, and researches race, social movements, and digital technology. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a founding member and current affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies, a co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective, and served as a guest editor for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.