Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire

by Mel Y. Chen

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478027447
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	11/28/2023
Series:	ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

“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

"[Intoxicated] deserves to be read by historians of science, specifically those who write about medicine, disability and colonialism. It is an important addition to the growing literature combining critical race theory and queer, disability and animal studies and will surely challenge the ideas and enrich the vocabulary of historians of science for some years to come."
-- Thomas Parkinson British Journal for the History of Science

From the Publisher