Elsewhere in America

David Trend is Chair of the Department of Art at the University of California, Irvine. He holds a PhD in Curriculum Theory and an MFA in Visual Studies. His books include Worlding: Identity, Media, and Imagination in a Digital Age (2013), The End of Reading (2010), A Culture Divided (2009), Everyday Culture (2008),  and The Myth of Media Violence (2007), among others. Honored as a Getty Scholar, Trend is the author of over 200 essays and a former editor of the journals  Afterimage and Socialist Review. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

• Belonging Where? Introduction Part I: Belonging There: People Like Us Makers and Takers: When More is Not Enough The Wealth of NationsOther People’s Money The Virtues of SelfishnessCultures of Unreason2. True Believers: Spiritual Life in a Secular Age Surprised by SinTrue Believers?Selective MemoriesA History of Religious Outsiders3. Ordinary People: The Normal and the Pathological Inventing NormalLaws of AveragesStandard DeviationsCommon Denominators4. Homeland Insecurities: Expecting the Worst A Dangerous World? Barbarians at the GatePrivacy Rights and WrongsSomething to HideOrganized Hate Part II: Belonging Somewhere: Blurred Boundaries 5. Reality is Broken: Neoliberalism and the Virtual Economy Neoliberalism RevisitedCitizenship, Inc.The Politics of CultureAesthetic ContradictionsVirtual Rebels6. Mistaken Identities: From Color Blindness to Gender Bending Welcome to "Post-Identity" AmericaThe Race for RacePictures at an ExhibitionBending Sex and GenderVarieties of Gazing7. No Body is Perfect: Disability in a Posthuman Age No Body is PerfectConstructions of AbleismThe Dismodern ConditionThe Posthuman Body8. On the Spectrum: America’s Mental Health Disorder Stigma and DiscriminationOn Invisibility and PassingThe Shame GameThe Affective TurnPolitical FeelingsPart III: Belonging Elsewhere: The Subject of Utopia 9. Gaming the System: Competition and its Discontents No ContestDoing God’s BusinessCapitalism and SchizophreniaThe Power of GivingGame Over10. To Affinity and Beyond: The Cyborg and the CosmopolitanA Cyborg ManifestoThird Person PluralQueering HeterosexualityCrip AnalogiesRealms of Mattering11. Medicating the Problem: The New American PharmakonThe Narcotic Tower of BabelModels of AddictionWriting on DrugsRecoveryBig Pharma12. The One and the Many: The Ethics of Uncertainty Be Here NowPossession and DispossessionThe One and the Many

"This is a terrific book--smart, provocative, engaging, and clearly written. It offers a memorable set of readings for students and scholars alike. Each chapter is a gem of organization, integration, and argument. Trend’s essays lead the reader through a maze of countervailing theories and positions leaving them with a much stronger sense of the complexity of our present time. Trend’s book is less about critique (though the critique is powerful) and more about a kind of hope that is restrained yet feasible." Richard A. Quantz, Professor, Miami University"Trend is a lucid writer able to unmask the internal contractions of the neoliberal order with theoretical and conceptual clarity, as he writes with urgency to make sense of a fractured America in a changing world economy."Rodolfo D. Torres, Professor, University of California, Irvine, and former Adam Smith Fellow, University of Glasgow "Elsewhere in America offers a prescient, non-dialectical approach to alterity, deftly revealing the hidden paradoxes inherent to so-called positions of "center" and "margin" within current media-driven polemics. Skirting binary logic, Trend offers a series of daring new formulations for hybrid positionalities – neither utopian nor dystopian – that afford theory to be transposed effectively into practice. Elsewhere in America will sit on my bookshelf along side Chantal Mouffe and Henry A. Giroux as an invaluable go-to source for artists and writers rethinking democracy in this age of political extremism."Juli Carson, Professor, Univesity of California, Irvine