Osman Khan’s performative sculpture Come Hell or High Water both evokes and disrupts images of Detroit’s crumbling residential infrastructure. In so doing, the piece focuses attention on the home as a site of Fordist desire for a secure middle-class life, and the Fordist bargain itself as an object of attachment.

Contemporary Navajo artworks bind together communicative competence, history, and affect within the commodity situation. Exploring the dynamic character of the object and its social trajectories, the author demonstrates how Navajo art objects are not static entities, but invested and infused with infinite performative powers. The object “speaks”; it animates relations of exchange even as it is, itself, animated.

In the aftermath of the genocide wrought in the 1970s by the Khmer Rouge, some Cambodians told themselves that dance was the reason for their survival. Hamera investigates the fraught relations between history, trauma, and truth. At stake is the survival of a family—and of a culture.