Best of 2011 by Mimi Nguyen

A lot of my bests from this year are about remembering how I totally had a productive and fulfilling creative and intellectual life before I started my tenure-track assistant professor position at a large, but isolated research university, surrounded by Midwestern GM corn- and soybean fields."

MISC BEST OF 2011, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

-- Seeing Grass Widow and the Raincoats at the Double Door (Chicago)

-- Seeing Janelle Monae at Foelinger at the University of Illinois

-- Participating on the panel at MEET ME AT THE RACE RIOT: People of Color in Zines from 1990 to Today (co-organized by POC Zine Project, Barnard Zine Library, and For the Birds Collective) at Barnard (watch the whole event here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqoW-uhC7W8)

-- Crazy Band, FUCK YOU LP

--Shotgun Seamstress 6, and eager anticipation of the collected zines from M’Lady Records

-- Relatedly, finally meeting Osa Atoe and Mariam Bastani (at MEET ME AT THE RACE RIOT), and otherwise connecting (and re-connecting) with smartass punks in still-crucial conversations about punk histories, punk archives, and punk theories

-- Finishing my freaking manuscript almost sixteen years after I first thought to write about the “gift of freedom” and liberal empire in a graduate seminar (out in 2012, with awesome cover art by the inimitable illustrator Hellen Jo: http://helllllen.org/)

-- Putting the Race Riot compilation zines back into circulation (POC Zine Project, For the Birds Collective, Stranger Danger Distro)

-- Seeing Wild Flag at the Highdive (Champaign, IL)

--The spread of global revolts beginning in Tunsinia at the start of 2011 and ending in Russia at the end, and all those in between that identified transnational capital, authoritarian regimes, and the liberal empires that support both, as radically unfree forms of social organization

-- The Shoppers, Silver Year LP

-- Household, Items (household.bandcamp.com)

-- Finally, all the amazing scholarly books that were published this year, including Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law; Jodi Byrd, Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism; Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, eds., Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death; Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick Ferguson, eds., Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization; Helen Jun, Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America; Nhi Lieu, The American Dream in Vietnamese; Ruby Tapia, American Pietas: Visions of Race, Death, and the Maternal; Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State; Lamia Karim, Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh; and lots more I can’t remember!