The book opens with a discussion of a case from Delaware challenging a long-standing requirement for partisan balance on state courts in the Delaware state constitution. The chapter goes on to note that substantively Marbury v. Madison (1803) was a case about the judicial appointment process. After a brief discussion of recent litigation over the appointment of federal administrative law judges, the chapter notes that litigation over judicial selection is consistent with Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that “scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved sooner or later into a judicial question.” The chapter identifies several expectations, describes the data collection process, and briefly outlines the chapters that follow.

The eponymous protagonist of Gwendolyn Brooks’s under-examined 1953 novel Maud Martha becomes acutely attuned to the multisensory dimensions of quotidian experience. As she navigates the intersecting forces of race, gender, class, and color in the public sphere, she begins to conceive of herself as a perceiving subject rather than solely as a perceived object in the private sphere. Drawing on Black feminist scholarship, I theorize synesthetic stillness as an aesthetic strategy that reveals aspects of Black interiority through its exploration of overlapping and intermingling perceptual faculties. In deploying synesthetic stillness, Brooks not only counters dehumanizing sensory stereotypes, but traces a mode of Black resistance that privileges internal sensation rather than external expression.

This chapter explores a line of influence in the architecture of American intentional communities from the Associationist movement of the nineteenth century down to the hippy communes that emerged in 1965, built, after Drop City, around the shape of the geodesic dome. This hippy modernism borrowed freely from the ideas of Charles Fourier and Buckminster Fuller and fostered a community that included Stewart Brand, who went on to think about the shape of space colonies and early models of the Internet.

The first part of Chapter 6 focuses on cases about the nomination process. A large percentage of these cases come from New York where party conventions are the primary method for nominating candidates. The chapter divides nomination cases into those concerning the initiation of candidacy (e.g., nominating petitions) and those concerning choosing nominees. Of more consequence are the cases concerning candidate speech and campaign finance, both of which led to major SCOTUS decisions. The speech cases focused heavily on codes placing limits on what candidates in judicial elections could say. In addition to speech code limitations, there were speech-related cases concerning defamation, misrepresentation, false statements or claims, impugning opponents, and improper promises or statements. In addition to speech issues, the chapter discussed other forms of improper candidate behavior (e.g., improper use of work resources by incumbents running for reelection). Campaign finance issues included those related to fundraising (e.g., solicitation by candidates, reporting requirements, requests for recusal due to parties or lawyers being involved in fundraising for the judge/s campaign), loans, expenditures, and public funding.

Set in the midst of the quotidian anti-Black terrorism that circumscribed Black life in Jim Crow America, the HBO series Lovecraft Country seamlessly combines Black history and graphic horror to tell a story through a distinctly Black creative and reflective lens. A reading of the journey of Hippolyta Freeman in episode 7, “I Am,” reveals how the means of embodiment, speculative fiction, and elements of Black feminist Afrofuturism are used as a fulcrum to shift the critical weight away from the grim reality of oppression and towards the possibility of escape and liberation. The episode offers a revolutionary representation of the Black body as a conduit for self-discovery, a tool for circumventing anti-Blackness, and ultimately a vehicle for affirming a broader spectrum of Black aliveness that reverberates far beyond the realm of speculative fiction.

In contraposition to notions such as “transgression” or “marginality”, the idea of “dissidence” points towards the dismantling of binary figures and concepts that shape canonical readings of Argentinean literature. Literary writings on gender and sexual dissidence—especially after the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of 21st century—not only decenter heteronormative models  (masculine/feminine; hetero/homosexual; transgender/cisgender) but also drag with them a number of constitutive configurations of Argentinean cultural imagination, such as nationalism/cosmopolitanism, Peronism/antiperonism, lettered/non—lettered, etc. This essay analyzes a series of literary texts (from Manuel Puig´s El beso de la mujer araña to Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Las aventuras de la China Iron) in which sexual and gender opacity interrupts and displaces normative binarisms—at the same time bodily and cultural—showing the way in which the languages of dissidence set the ground for other cultural, as well as political, imaginaries.

The Argentine crisis of 2001 saw economic collapse, social unrest, and police repression. But if it caused a political and economic fracture with apocalyptic overtones, in literature – and in prose fiction, specifically – it did not mean a complete break with the past nor an eruption of the new, but instead the return or reformulation of the old. Despite everything, the 2000s was a period of productivity and global acclaim for Argentina’s writers. Certain activist uses of literature and its insertion in other areas of social praxis coexisted with a search for a personal voice, namely autofictions, writings of the self, and stories of everyday life. This chapter structures a reading of the literature of the 2000s around three key topics that emerge from this conjuncture: an aesthetic of recycling; an aesthetic of haunting; and the presence of a reinvigorated feminist gaze. After a period of scepticism about the role of literature in social change, these trends sparked a renewal of interest in the activist uses of fiction. At the same time, other writers made abject characters the protagonists of their stories and agitated for a literature that strives to be both autonomous and political at the same time.

Scholars have long understood Manuel Puig’s work as embedded in media history, as he reinvented the novel by adapting techniques from film, radio-novelas, and soap operas. Critics like Alan Pauls linked gossip to the media circuitry of Puig’s first novel, while Josefina Ludmer wrote of how radio-novelas pertain to the “justice of the kitchen knife” in Boquitas Pintadas, and Francine Masiello discussed the relationship between invertido and inversión that Puig plots in entangling sexuality, media, and neoliberal capital. This chapter deepens Puig’s media history with special attention to sound across Puig’s novels, but with a particular focus on El beso de la mujer araña (1976). That novel has been hailed for its cinematic flair, but critics have tended to ignore the importance of listening in the book: from Puig’s own tape-recorded interviews in preparing the manuscript to Molina’s listening as an agent of the state to the shared listening that brings the characters together. Drawing from work on “aurality” by Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Jonathan Sterne, and others, this chapter explains and analyzes how listening became Puig’s queer response to authoritarian power and the media technologies of his day.

Chapter 4 discusses the types of cases that are the most consequential: those challenging the existing system of judicial selection and those concerning proposed or enacted changes to the system. The majority of challenges to systems were brought under the Voting Rights Act, which the US Supreme Court found to cover judicial elections, at least in certain ways. Efforts to challenge judicial elections under the one person, one vote doctrine were not successful because that doctrine applied only to “representatives,” a category not including judges. There were unsuccessful challenges brought on other grounds as well. The cases involving proposed and enacted changes covered a wide range of such changes.

This is a chapter about the desire to escape, to flee, to desert the Argentineity of Argentine literature; about a force bent on undermining or abandoning Spanish, on imagining literary projects placed beyond, underneath, or against the institutionalized understanding of a national tradition based on long-held beliefs in sovereign forms of language, territoriality, and identity. It focuses on a discursive force lurking behind a list of proper names – J.Rodolfo Wilcock, Copi, Sylvia Molloy, Edgardo Cozarinsky, María Negroni – rendered visible by a shared will to displace the boundaries of the Argentine tradition as a cultural site that lends itself to processes of subjectivation and misidentification. The textual moments and stances analyzed inscribe displaced writerly practices (always marked by ambivalences and unresolved tensions) in a designated, reimagined foreign space, at once strange and familiar – be that a specific cultural and linguistic location in the Global North (Rome, Paris, New York) or an indeterminate site marked by indexical signs of elsewhereness.