This introduction to the special thematic cluster on burnout describes how the notion has informed cultures of contemporary work during the pandemic and the ways in which the concept of burnout reproduces the intertwined interests of labor and self-management under conditions of neoliberalism. The essay sketches a brief genealogy of the term, starting with the formulation of neurasthenia that preceded it and proceeding to its first citation within medical literature by Herbert J. Freudenberger and then to its philosophical uptake in the writing of Byung-Chul Han. In addressing burnout's relationship to recent art, criticism, and histories of media, the introduction stresses its unequal impacts across disparate populations relative to class, race, and gender.

This open letter responds to the murders of six women of Asian descent on March 16, 2021, all workers in Atlanta-area massage parlors. It describes both the contemporary climate and the historical foundations for anti-Asian/AAPI racism in the country, and it reflects on both the promise and the violence that inheres in acts of naming and nomination for Asian women. In its address to “Asian sisters,” the letter challenges the terms of Asian American representation and considers larger discussions among BIPOC scholars about whether to refuse institutional recognition by the state.

The term decolonize has gained a new life in recent art activism, as a radical challenge to the Eurocentrism of museums (in light of Native, Indigenous, and other epistemological perspectives) as well as in the museum's structural relation to violence (either in its ties to oligarchic trustees or to corporations engaged in the business of war or environmental depredation). In calling forth the mid-twentieth-century period of decolonization as its historical point of reference, the word's emphatic return is rhetorically powerful, and it corresponds to a parallel interest among scholars in a plural field of postcolonial or global modernisms. The exhortation to decolonize, however, is not uncontroversial-some believe it still carries a Eurocentric bias. Indeed, it has been proposed that, for the West, de-imperialization is perhaps even more urgent than decolonization. What does the term decolonize mean to you in your work in activism, criticism, art, and/or scholarship? Why has it come to play such an urgent role in the neoliberal West? How can we link it historically with the political history of decolonization, and how does it work to translate postcolonial theory into a critique of the neocolonial contemporary art world? Respondents include Nana Adusei-Poku, Brook Andrew, Sampada Aranke, Ian Bethell-Bennett, Kader Attia, Andrea Carlson, Elise Y. Chagas, ISUMA, Iftikhar Dadi, Janet Dees, Nitasha Dhillon, Hannah Feldman, Josh T. Franco, David Garneau, Renee Green, Iman Issa, Arnold J. Kemp, Thomas Lax, Nancy Luxon, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Saloni Mathur, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Alan Michelson, Partha Mitter, Isabela Muci Barradas, Steven Nelson, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Alessandro Petti, Paulina Pineda, Christopher Pinney, Elizabeth Povinelli, Ryan Rice, Andrew Ross, Paul Chaat Smith, Nancy Spector, Francoise Verges, Rocio Zambrana, and Joseph R. Zordan.

This article considers the prospects of “facial politics” in the wake of CoVID-19. Recounted through the author's positionality as an Asian American feminist academic, the article describes her encounters in the university and the street, in the United States and China. Addressing gestures of face touching and the trope of the mask relative to its wearer, the essay draws on the work of Mel Y. Chen on the viral conjunction of race, animality, illness, and gender as inflected further by both historical and contemporary treatments of “Chineseness” and visibility. In so doing, the article reframes concepts of perfomativity and the face that are associated with Judith Butler, with the face becoming “the fallen site of discourse” under the conditions of a pandemic.

A brief remembrance of Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019), “the most influential curator of the past quarter-century.”

Let the hand be numb, but let the eye be agile, perspicacious, cunning. —Félix Fénéon, as paraphrased by Bridget Riley