Leland Tabares

Leland Tabares is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His work is published in ProfessionJournal of Asian American Studies, and Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association.

Gish Jen’s Resistant Possibilities: On Black Fugitivity, Coalitional Care and Baseball

A Review of The Resisters

Published this past February, Gish Jen’s novel The Resisters stands uniquely on the threshold of our world and the world we once knew. Jen’s futuristic dystopia questions the efficacy of activism; the possibility of coalition building during a global crisis; the intrusion of market capitalism and data surveillance on the human body and the role of sports in advancing social justice issues. But dystopias are never really about the future. They are critical interrogations of the present.