Editor's Note

Editor's Note Mari Yoshihara, Editor We go into the production of this issue in the fall of 2023 when, in an act of collective punishment for Hamas's terrorist attack on October 7, Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people who have been under an illegal occupation for decades, with the full support of the US government. Meanwhile, in the US, threats to free speech and academic freedom that had already been underway are now intensified in the censoring of any criticism of Israel. As we mourn the loss of human and nonhuman lives and join the global call for immediate ceasefire, release of prisoners and hostages, humanitarian aid and relief to reach all areas across Gaza, and a comprehensive military embargo on Israel, we renew our commitment to rigorous research, debates, and education about settler colonialism, war and militarism, racial capitalism, and the carceral state throughout the world. While the five essays in this issue are not directly about Israel-Palestine, many of them address issues that resonate with the structures undergirding the situation in the Middle East and the United States' role in it. The first two essays examine race, labor, and incarceration in different contexts. Caleb Smith's essay reconstructs the life of Jacob Hodges, a Black man who was arrested for the murder of a white man in 1819 and sent to New York's Auburn State Prison, where he experienced a life-altering Christian conversion. Through abolitionist reading of literature about Hodges, Smith points to evangelical Protestantism, racial assimilation, and industrial market capitalism that shaped Hodges's life and the ideology of the modern prison system. Karen Miller examines a conjugal migration program at the Iwahig Penal Colony in the early twentieth-century Philippines, where American colonizers used incarcerated Filipino labor to confiscate Indigenous land they labeled as underutilized and integrated it into the colonial political economy. She thus analyzes the ideologies of gender, sexuality, and family as well as race and Indigeneity that undergirded both the expansion of US prison infrastructure and the colonial regime in the Philippines. The next two essays deal with the Japanese and American empires on the Korean peninsula, the biopolitics of the Korean War, and the authoritarian developmentalism in South Korea as they manifest in diasporic cultural representations. In "Reclaiming the Korean War Minor: Beyond a Politics of Childhood Innocence," Sharon Tran elucidates the production of juvenile Asian-raced and gendered bodies in US military archives. Attending to the limits of a politics of childhood innocence, Tran aims to reclaim the figure of End Page v the Korean War minor through an analysis of Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl. In "Minor Settler Grief: Korean Diaspora, Settler Colonialism, and the Pastoral Fantasy in Minari (2021)," Jeong Eun Annabel We examines Lee Isaac Chung's critically acclaimed film. Analyzing the Korean nativist aesthetics of earth in the intersecting histories of settler colonialism, authoritarian developmentalism, and anticolonial imaginations, We critiques expressions of grief that enable settler colonial recognition as well as forgetting. In "See Detroit Like We Do: White Savior Capitalism and the Myth of Black Obsolescence," Christine Hwang and David Helps investigate the phenomenon of wealthy white men's mobilization of financial power to "revive" Detroit after a perceived "death." The authors trace what they call white savior capitalism in the Black-majority city on stolen Native land to the eighteenth-century conquest by French settlers, the exclusionary redevelopment policies of Mayor Coleman Young, the city's use of federal antipoverty funds and eminent domain to establish a General Motors plant, and the ongoing "rediscovery" of the city by its businesspeople. In the Book Review, Timothy Marr discusses five books that examine the transformation of the border by evolving technologies of surveillance developed out of military and corporate innovation. In the Event Review, Kunio Hara and I contextualize Boston Lyric Opera's 2023 production of Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly, which boldly reimagines the Orientalist classic by centering the Japanese American subject and setting the narrative in World War II San Francisco and the Japanese incarceration camp in Poston, Arizona. End Page vi Copyright © 2024 The American Studies Association