Intoxicated
Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Duke University Press
Published:8th Dec '23
£21.99
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This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£90.00(9781478020561)
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.
“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 *ISBN: 9781478025320
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 295g
208 pages