Intoxicated

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.

“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.”, “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.”

Mel Y. Chen is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Chair in Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Studies and Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the author of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect and coeditor of Crip Genealogies, both also published by Duke University Press.