This book was born in hard times. This also goes for its publishing climate. It has been more than four years since the Queer Necropolitics panel at the American Anthropological Association in 2009 where our collective first began taking shape. We wouldn’t want to miss these four years and the sustained cross-Atlantic conversations on queer necropolitics that happened in them. Yet we also feel the need to honour the attrition and exhaustion we’ve often experienced, after writing countless emails and book proposals, knocking on and waiting in front of many doors, which is a place we share with other non-Ivy League intellectuals with unintelligible positionalities, excessive critiques, and not enough mentorship. When we started out, we were three British-based academics with little pedigree and sticky, hard-to-pronounce, harder-to-publish names. Our topic long seemed unpublishable – however trendy it has become since.
But we did it! And we have learned things on the way: that gates may open and then slam shut again. That in these times of preemptive censorship, the task at hand is often not to live up to the false promises of meritocracy and academic freedom, but to cushion the blow, to not leave anyone behind, and to build as much community on the way as we can decently manage.
Other forms of publishing are clearly needed.
We thank our contributors – Aren Z. Aizura, Che Gossett, Dean Spade, Elijah Adiv Edelman, Jason Ritchie, Michelle R. Martin-Baron, Morgan Bassichis, S. Lamble and Sima Shakhsari – for believing in us, and for sticking with us, through the longest ever production process, and through many rounds of, at times painful, editing. We have learned much from your generosity and graciousness towards us as editors. We also thank Darcel Bullen, Onyinyechukwu Udegbe and Eric A. Stanley for joining us parts of the way and for continuing to inspire us. Others have given us imagined community through related projects, especially Anna Agathangelou, Sokari Ekine, Umut Erel, Andil Gosine, Suhraiya Jivraj, Jennifer Petzen, Johanna Rothe, Humaira Saeed and Tamsila Tauqir. We could not have done it without you.
But most of all, we could not have done it without each other. During the four years each of us has gone through personal and professional turbulences – of job hunting and family crises, of cross-continent migration and sleep-deprived parenting, of writing deadlines, ill health and chronic pain, exhaustion and toxic everyday racism. And every time one of us would feel like falling down or simply needing to take a step back to catch a breath, the other two would join shoulders and take over. We are thankful for the creative co-authorship and the intellectual friendship we have built and sustained, and are immensely grateful to each other for the level-headedness, practical solidarity and loyalty to everyone involved, which has become a model for how each of us wants to work in the future.
Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, Silvia Posocco
Toronto, Manchester, London
June 2013