This article traces a speculative and critical engagement with histories of health care disparity and medical exploitation shared across fictions by Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, and the artwork of Ellen Gallagher. It argues that insistent returns to racialized experimentation and scientific modes of looking form a significant interrogation of a wider set of US promises and attritions. Specifically, it asks how postwar African American culture takes up scopic questions to address dominant accounts of progress and the modern, both via reference to visual orders and technologies, and via formal choices regarding iteration, perspective and scale.

From the early 1960s to the early 1990s, a range of concerns about “brainwashing” in youth reeducation programs obfuscated professional and political discourse, influencing key outcomes that shaped the development of the troubled-teen industry in the United States. The most significant historical developments related to this controversy involved three different youth programs. In response to accusations of “brainwashing,” program executives created elaborate counterarguments and public-relations campaigns. Instead of working to address inherent risks associated with therapeutic reeducation, the brainwashing label obscured the potential for harm and enabled an unethical teen program industry.

This paper analyzes the 2003 Iraq War's origins through the lens of orientalism and within the history of liberal empire. It argues that Edward Said correctly contended that an orientalist emphasis on essential difference helped justify the war. However, Said overlooked how liberal assertions of universal values also served as a basis for empire in this case and how many opponents of the war also drew on orientalist ideas. Simultaneously, opponents of the Iraq War often used orientalist binaries and stereotypes in their arguments for restraint. It concludes that in using cultural lenses in policy analysis, scholars should pay close attention to shifting contexts and appreciate the multidirectional potentialities of cultural factors for policy.

Within southern US newspapers, the Indian Uprising of 1857 was reported and read across a global colour line, which posited the superiority of whiteness against the “darker races,” thereby developing a framework through which white Southerners could amplify their own internal fears about the possibility of slave rebellion. News printed in southern newspapers about the events in India can be seen through a lens of the South's racial hierarchy and can also be analysed as part of a wider global system of nineteenth-century white supremacy. Despite Anglophobia and fear of abolitionists, southern enslavers could also find it within themselves to support the British when it came to the maintenance of a global hierarchy of whiteness. The news from India could be read as a form of contextual substitution, in which southern slaveholders could see perceived racial parallels between themselves and the British in India, and between the “darker races” of the world, whether that was the enslaved African American or the Indian Sepoy.