The three types of issues discussed in Chapter 5 involve a combination of interesting and routine issues. Probably the most interesting are those related to eligibility that dealt with formal qualifications: legal training, law license, practice time, residence, age, and gender. Several challenges to licensing requirements arose because the requirement was stated as “learned in the law,” which in turn raised questions as to whether that meant holding a law degree. The more interesting issues concerned age, particularly after the passage of the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA); importantly, the ADEA cases arose in states that appointed rather than elected judges, and the issue was whether judicial positions fell under the “policy position” exclusion. Age-related cases were brought on other grounds (e.g., equal protection) as well, but those cases failed. Term length cases generally concerned how long a judge appointed to fill a vacancy was to serve. Vacancy cases concerned the existence of a vacancy and how vacancies were to be filled.

How does the contemporary novel imagine utopian possibility in the wake of the global dominance of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century?  This chapter suggests that we can discern two forms in which the novel responds to this perceived waning of American power. The first of these is an elegiac strand in the contemporary American novel, which mourns the failure of the American ideal and laments the exhaustion of its historical possibility. The second sees in the same failure of US hegemony not the winding down of a world view, but the emergence of new forms of cultural hybridity, new subject positions that come to thought only now, in the wake of the “American century.” This chapter suggests that, in order to understand the persistence of utopian thinking into the contemporary moment, one has to attend to both of these strands in the novel after American hegemony. The old word is dying, we might say, in an echo of Gramsci’s famous line, and the new cannot be born. It is in this interregnum that we find not only morbid symptoms, but the emergence of new forms of utopian possibility.

The primary focus in Chapter 7 is election administration, which includes ballot contents (e.g., what name a candidate could use on the ballot and additional information that should or could appear on the ballot such as incumbency status of a candidate), ballot form or format (retention or contested), scheduling issues, validity of the election, and a range of other issues. The chapter concludes with a relatively brief discussion of election contests, including type of election being contested (partisan or nonpartisan, primary or general), and the issue raised in the contest; two of the cases involved name issues raised after the election, one a name change and the other the use of the candidate’s birth name rather than her married name.

This chapter considers contemporary environmentalism through the lens of ecotopia, a modification of the utopian form that includes the ecological as a core consideration. The idea that the nonhuman world should have meaningful political status is a radical transformation of the usual terms of utopia, rendering certain utopian tropes (like the technology-fueled extinction of vermin or pests) impossible while activating other new possibilities both for the transformation of the social and for individual self-actualization. In particular, ecotopias are distinct from most utopias in their abiding suspicion of technology; in an era of escalating climate disaster, this suspicion of technology becomes increasingly urgent even as it becomes complicated by the perceived need for some miraculous techno-fix to ameliorate the worst impacts of climate change even in ecotopia. A short coda discusses real-world ecotopian projects, attempts to make such visions real as a model to others for what might yet be.

This chapter traces the waning of utopian literature in the 1970s following the end of Keynesianism and the rise of neoliberalism. It argues that the downturn in the rate of profit related to production, and the resulting turn to economic growth predicated on financial speculation, resulted in a crisis for the utopian imagination and its ability to conceive of utopian alternatives to the present. As a result, the critical utopianism of the long 1960s gave way to a new wave of dystopian writings. Although these dystopias echoed the turn to weak utopianism and cognitive mapping in critical theory by convincingly illustrating the negative effects of neoliberalism on economic growth, income inequality, and the social safety net, they often struggled to imagine anything outside of these worsening conditions. The chapter culminates in a consideration of new utopian writing following the 2008 financial crash that foregrounds the socialization of debt.

This chapter examines complex interplays of utopia/dystopia in the context of European colonization through two works: Alberto Yáñez’s postcolonial zombie narrative, “Burn the Ships,” and Yuri Herrera’s dystopian Signs Preceding the End of the World. These works grapple with biopolitical dialectics between utopia and dystopia, belonging and exclusion, and competing identities and epistemologies of mestizaje hybridity. Using as a starting point codices produced by mestiz@ scribes in the dystopian post-Conquest society of sixteenth-century New Spain, analysis draws from Damián Baca’s Mestiz@ rhetoric to demonstrate how these texts exemplify what he defines as a “powerful Mestiz@ rhetorical strategy” of nepantlism – “a strategy of thinking from a border space.” By self-reflexively engaging this Mestiz@ rhetoric through diegetic elements, these texts subvert hegemonic narratives of assimilation in the context of imperialism and the border.

This chapter offers a theoretical examination of the relationship between the Black body and religion in African American religious studies, paying particular attention to enslavement and the construction of the slave body and “the flesh” as a complex fulcrum for religious embodiment and self-fashioning in modernity and also for intracommunal bodily violation in Black religious contexts. This chapter wrestles with the philosophical inheritances that scholars in this field must navigate as both an intellectual exercise on the matter of Black existence, and as an ethical problem with regard to how to account for both the experience of domination and the manifold examples of Black religious innovation which sit at the crux of the study of Black religions. Thus, it effectively argues that scholars cannot sidestep attention to the Black body and its interdependence on the fraught category of religion.

This chapter conciliates two different demands. On the one hand, it presents Martín Fierro as the apex of the gauchesca genre, as an intervention in political and cultural conflicts regarding the consolidation of the nation-state, the conservative order, rural capitalism, and the relationship between urban elites and rural populations, taking into consideration the two very different contexts in which both parts of the poem were written and initially read. On the other, it presents what seems to be the most impactful and widespread legacy of the poem: how, through the trope of the gaucho outlaw, the poem establishes a mode of conceiving the relationship between lettered elite and subaltern bodies and voices, when articulated to diverse (even contrasting) cultural/political projects. This articulation entails a constant redefinition of what “subaltern” may mean but always seems to assume unique uses of gaucho bodies and voices. One example would be the notion of the gaucho sociolect as the true national language and not a frontier sociolect, something unique to Latin America. How this came to be, and why, and with what consequences, are guiding questions.

In what is now known as Argentina, the year 1837 marked the birth of a modern, historically grounded understanding of literature and culture. It also marked the emergence of a generation (later known as the Generation of 1837) with far-reaching influence on the life of the country – including its first constitution, the public education system, and the drive to write national literary histories. Since then the preoccupation with what makes Argentina and its literature unique, and its present unlike its past, has not ceased to be a central trait of national culture. This chapter argues for the relevance of interpreting 1837 writers – in particular, Esteban Echeverría, Domingo F. Sarmiento, and Juan B. Alberdi – as our contemporaries, in the sense that we are still enmeshed in the modern project that, we think, they inaugurated. This is the case despite, or precisely because of the fact that their Eurocentric and exclusionary views have been increasingly evident in the public sphere. Showing that they were the first Argentine intellectuals for whom texts were understood and mainly valorized because of their location, author, and moment of production, this chapter offers clues into their foundational status.

After the publication of Eduardo Gutiérrez’s Juan Moreira (1879), its successful theatricaladaptation, and the numerous narratives about rebellious gauchos that followed, the set ofpractices and discourses that create a sense of belonging around the figure of the gaucho hascome to be known under the umbrella term of criollismo. Although recent research has shownthat criollismo did not disappear in the early twentieth century but converted to other nonliterary media, no approach considers the relationship between criollismo and cinema in thelong term and on a global level. In doing just this, this chapter focuses on the crossingbetween criollismo and cinema by looking at the images of the nation that gaucho-themed filmsbring into play. It explores how a repertoire of themes, characters, arguments, and landscapesdisseminated by criollista literature was adapted to film, projected globally in Hollywood movies, and then reappropriated by the local culture. Finally, it argues that this feedbackbetween criollista literature and film was fruitful until the late 1970s, when – after reaching a high level of violence – the political uses of criollismo became less massive and more sporadic.

Chapter 8 covered cases specific to nonelective systems, including the Missouri Plan, other appointment (mostly gubernatorial) systems, and legislative elections. The Missouri Plan cases mostly concerned the membership and processes of nominating commissions. Appointment cases concern issues such as requirements for legislative (usually state senate) confirmation and recess appointments. The legislative election cases generally dealt with technical issues (e.g., whether the vote in the legislature could be a voice vote or required ballots).

This chapter looks at the ways sf visions of the future published in the decades following World War II both challenge the dominant ideology of American exceptionalism – the notion that the United States is a single homogenous nation uniquely exempt from history – and the Program Era division between literary and genre fiction. Both Program Era realism and sf develop representations of the present. However, sf’s mirror is a distorting anamorphic one, presenting imaginary futures that help its readers cognize the contradictions, conflicts, and struggles that are always at work in any historical situation, and which naturalizing formulations such as American exceptionalism occlude. The chapter traces shifting practices of representing the future, beginning with 1950s dystopias, postapocalypses, and alternate histories through the radical visions of the New Wave and the new practices of postmodern cyberpunk and critical dystopia up to the recent wave of literary sf and climate change fiction.

The chapter argues that, with the publication of Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen) in 1929, Roberto Arlt produced the first major Argentine novel whose ideological topics, ways of representation, systems of characters, and spatial inventions, far from finding their place among the national literary traditions, establish a dialogue with the great novels of metropolitan modernity of the time: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925), and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1928). The modern city, the cosmopolitan city of urban mixture and modernization, is the grand stage for the aesthetic, ideological, cultural, and social conflict in Arlt’s literature. In this sense, as a writer, journalist, and playwright, Arlt is the one who best expresses the disruption of an order and the instability implied by the impact of modernization on Argentine culture in the early twentieth century.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the term “literature” was used broadly to describe any printed text. By the turn of the century, its meaning had narrowed to refer specifically to aesthetic verbal objects with distinctive features of authorship and form. This change was brought on by rapid transformations in print culture. Literature created its readership mainly through periodicals: newspapers, leaflets, pamphlets, illustrated weeklies, magazines of mass and high culture. Periodicals were not only the medium for all literary genres but were also key in the professionalization of writers and the making of national literatures. They were a powerful tool to shape the literary imagination of a growing and increasingly more diversified reading public. Through the publication of serialized novels, essays, and reviews, periodicals such as La Nación, Sud-América, and Caras y Caretas were essential to the process of literary autonomy in Argentina. In this chapter the history of this process is outlined and those cases in which developments in print culture framed some of the most significant works of Argentine literature are discussed.

This chapter reorients readings of Harriet Jacobs’s and Harriet Wilson’s (semi)autobiographies as narratives of disability. I underscore the inextricable links between girlhood, labor, and disability began in their self-authored texts, alongside Jean Fagan Yellin’s publication of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers and other documents which detail the life of Harriet Wilson. I argue that these life writings demonstrate each woman’s post-captivity labors as a challenge to nineteenth-century extractive economies of bondage. Studying the (semi)autobiographies, public and private correspondence, journal entries, and newspaper advertisements related to Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson not only makes legible their disabled lives, but also provides a complex understanding of the interrelation between labor, disability, capacity, and resistance.

This chapter meditates on how Black erotic bodies manifest in a white supremacist world. It contends that said bodies congeal through an amalgamation of fungible gender and material/discursive dispossession. These inheritances afford Black people the opportunity to conjure fugitive freedom practices, such as multiplicity, which enable Black people to harness erotic power in the pursuit of self-determined notions of pleasure and intimacy with themselves and within Black communities. To buttress my argument, I draw on the work of Akwaeke Emezi – namely, their debut novel Freshwater and an essay about their gender transition surgeries – and Audre Lorde’s classic essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” to illustrate how multiplicity is a freedom practiced undergirded by erotic power such that practitioners need not minimize or eliminate contradictory or complex aspects of themselves in order to access pleasure and intimacy along personal and interpersonal registers.

This chapter focuses on the Black body in the narrative genre of passing literature, which combines issues of embodiment with those of visuality. It begins by arguing that, whereas recent literary culture habituates us to immediacy, access, and confession, the passing plot operates on different terms. At a moment when many artists and critics are arguing for the importance of opacity to relational frameworks, the passing plot comes into focus as a special testing ground for viewing racialized embodiment and ethical sociality in fresh ways. The chapter goes on to argue that just as the passing plot proves a rich container for considering the ethics of relation, dramatic literature offers a particularly productive platform for considering passing literature today. My case study for these claims is Branden Jacob-Jenkins’s play An Octoroon (2014). A metatheatrical riff on a prominent nineteenth-century melodrama called The Octoroon (1859), the play avoids conveying some intimate truth about racial embodiment – the secret ostensibly kept by the passing figure – in order to offer new opportunities for Jacobs-Jenkins’s audience to become aware of their embodied participation in acts of racialization.