Intoxicated
Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy Across Empire
Published on 8. December 2023
Book
Hardback
208 pages
978-1-4780-2056-1 (ISBN)
Description
In Intoxicated Mel Y. Chen explores the ongoing imperial relationship between race, sexuality, and disability. They focus on nineteenth-century biopolitical archives in England and Australia to show how mutual entanglements of race and disability take form through toxicity. Examining English scientist John Langdon Down's characterization of white intellectual disability as Asian interiority and Queensland's racialization and targeting of Aboriginal peoples through its ostensible concern with black opium, Chen explores how the colonial administration of race and disability gives rise to "intoxicated" subjects often shadowed by slowness. Chen charts the ongoing reverberations of these chemical entanglements in art and contemporary moments of political and economic conflict or agitation. Although intoxicated subjects may be affected by ongoing pollution or discredited as agents of failure, Chen affirmatively identifies queer/crip forms of unlearning and worldmaking under imperialism. Exemplifying an undisciplined thinking that resists linear or accretive methods of inquiry, Chen unsettles conventional understandings of slowness and agitation, intellectual method, and the toxic ordinary.
Reviews / Votes
"Intoxicated thinks about and through molecular intimacies. We are all chemically restrained, either structurally or voluntarily, some more the former than the latter. We are all too slow (or intoxicated), too fast (or agitated), and never quite right. 'Take my hand,' Mel Y. Chen invites the reader, 'and slump, stumble, shake, and tumble with me.' These alternate forms of cognition and movement promise new ways of knowing in the academy and beyond." - Cynthia Wu, Professor of Gender Studies and Asian American Studies, Indiana University "In the interlaced archives of toxicity, disability, and race, Mel Y. Chen brilliantly agitates the past and helps us unlearn and redistribute these key terms. The book gifts us with profoundly reorienting paths that undo, rather than reify, toxicity, pointing readers toward an alterwise of vibrating noninnocent transecologies of intoxicated intimacy." - M. Murphy, author of (The Economization of Life) "Taking an impressively expansive, interdisciplinary approach, Chen situates the book within critical ethnic and race studies, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory, but the work also has clear historical, historiographical, and autobiographical impulses. ... [A] strange, but eminently brilliant and enjoyable, book."- Andrew Bellamy (H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews)
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
North Carolina
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
15 illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
572 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4780-2056-1 (9781478020561)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Mel Y. Chen is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. They are author of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect and coeditor of Crip Genealogies, both also published by Duke University Press.
Content
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Intoxications, Intimacies, and Interformations 1
1. Slow Constitution: Down Syndrome and the Logic of Development 18
2. Agitation as a Chemical Way of Being 62
3. Unlearning: Intoxicated Method 100
Afterwards: Telling the End Not to Wait 142
Notes 165
Bibliography 177
Index
Introduction. Intoxications, Intimacies, and Interformations 1
1. Slow Constitution: Down Syndrome and the Logic of Development 18
2. Agitation as a Chemical Way of Being 62
3. Unlearning: Intoxicated Method 100
Afterwards: Telling the End Not to Wait 142
Notes 165
Bibliography 177
Index