In Refiguring Race and Risk, Roberta Wolfson turns to novels, memoirs, and other cultural works to debunk the false sense of national security rooted in positioning people of color as embodiments of risk. Considering output by Miné Okubo, Sanyika Shakur, Abraham Verghese, Khaled Hosseini, Helena María Viramontes, and others, Wolfson demonstrates how these authors disrupt racist security regimes and model alternative strategies for managing risk by crafting stories of collective care and community building. Chapters discuss, among other examples, how gang members defy the mass incarceration of Black and Latinx Americans by committing to self-education and self-advocacy; how an Asian immigrant doctor offers a corrective to the pandemic-era trend of allowing xenophobia to inform public health decisions by providing human-centered medical services to HIV-positive patients; and how Latinx migrant farmworkers battle ongoing precarity amid the increasing militarization of the US-Mexico border by bartering life-sustaining resources. In revealing how these works cultivate love as a mode of political resistance, Wolfson relabels people of color not as a source of risk but as critical actors in the push to improve national security.

Roberta Wolfson is Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. Her articles have appeared in College Literature, American Literature, and MELUS.

Introduction

Chapter 1        Gangsters at Risk: Refiguring the Threat of Urban Violence in Contemporary Gang Memoirs

Chapter 2        Community in Contagion: Modeling Holistic Care in the AIDS Medical Memoir

Chapter 3        Militarized Borders, Toxic Fields: Affirming the Value of Migrant Lives in Latinx Environmental Justice Literature

Chapter 4        Feeling One’s Way out of Terror: Affective Guidance in Post-9/11 Muslim Cultural Production

Conclusion      Speculative Visions of Race and Risk: Imagining the Future of National Security