Elsewhere in America

Americans think of their country as a welcoming place where everyone has equal opportunity. Yet historical baggage and anxious times can restrain these possibilities. Newcomers often find that civic belonging comes with strings attached––riddled limitations or legally punitive rites of passage. For those already here, new challenges to civic belonging emerge on the basis of belief, behavior, or heritage. This book uses the term "elsewhere" in describing conditions that exile so many citizens to "some other place" through prejudice, competition, or discordant belief. Yet, "elsewhere" is discussed as a "not yet ripe" with potential. In the face of America’s daunting challenges, can "elsewhere" point to optimism, hope, and common purpose?

Through 12 detailed chapters, the book applies critical theory in the humanities and social sciences to examine recurring crises of social inclusion in the U.S. After two centuries of incremental "progress" in securing human dignity, today the U.S. finds itself torn by new conflicts over reproductive rights, immigration, health care, religious extremism, sexual orientation, mental illness, and fear of terrorists. Can we explain this recurring tendency of Americans to turn against each other?Elsewhere in America engages these questions, charting the ever-changing faces of difference (manifest in contested landscapes of sex and race to such areas as disability and mental health), their spectral and intersectional character (recent discourses on performativity, normativity, and queer theory), and the grounds on which categories are manifest in ideation and movement politics (metapolitics, cosmopolitanism, dismodernism).

David Trend is Chair of the Department of Art at the University of California, Irvine. He holds a PhD in Curriculum Theory and an MFA in Visual Studies. His books include Worlding: Identity, Media, and Imagination in a Digital Age (2013), The End of Reading (2010), A Culture Divided (2009), Everyday Culture (2008), and The Myth of Media Violence (2007), among others. Honored as a Getty Scholar, Trend is the author of over 200 essays and a former editor of the journals Afterimage and Socialist Review. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.