Social Text current issue

Contributors

2008-05-19

Introduction: Urban Margins

Ali, K. A., Rieker, M. — 2008-05-19

Drawing on the larger project of the Shehr Network on Comparative Urban Landscapes, the articles in this issue seek to revisit conceptually and theoretically the question of marginality in the production of contemporary urban cartographies in the Middle East and South Asia. In the last few years the heightened interest in urban studies has generally structured arguments around megacities. In contrast we argue that little attention has been given to other urban landscapes, small- and medium-sized towns that are situated on the margins of this discourse. Even less attention has been given to the different set of questions the study of such "marginal" cities—and marginal spaces at the edges of the megacities—may bring to our understanding of twenty-first-century urban landscapes. The essays in this collection variously gesture toward ways in which definitions of urbanity, and by implication rurality, have shifted within the context of these new urban cartographies.

Emergency Democracy and the "Governing Composite"

Simone, A. — 2008-05-19

Taking two neighborhoods in Dakar and Douala, the article investigates the processes through which these localities attempt to strike a balance between multiplying the conceivable relations among people, materials, and talk and forging a provisional framework to keep things from getting out of hand.

"City of Whores": Nationalism, Development, and Global Garment Workers in Sri Lanka

Hewamanne, S. — 2008-05-19

The rapid urbanization and industrialization of Katunayake resulting from transnational production at the Free Trade Zone (FTZ) and related globalized sociocultural flows affected the lived experiences of citizens in this new urban space in varied ways. The vast majority of FTZ workers are rural to urban migrant women. Consequently, neighbors reinvented themselves as moral guardians of these new arrivals while many agents and institutions, including the media and NGOs, got involved in spatial and conceptual production of the new city and its gendered citizen subjects. This essay explores the fragmented production of the gendered and classed subjects within this transnational space and how FTZ women workers responded to this by negotiating an identity that challenged the particular subjectivity that middle-class and capitalist narratives imposed on them. The essay focuses on how workers engaged in oppositional cultural practices and created and participated in gendered public spaces.

This article analyzes the new spaces and cultural practices to delineate the gender and class critique and asserts that the women's performances in public spaces conveyed a specific migrant FTZ garment workers identity that registered their differences from men, other women, and their counterparts in other working-class spheres. Although they participated in politics of citizenship by registering difference, their transgressive practices evidenced acquiescence to different hegemonic influences, especially capitalist hegemony. Ultimately, these women's experiences indicate how the transnational flows of ideas and resources shape responses to marginalization in ways that discourage transformational politics.

Urban Modernity on the Periphery: A New Middle Class Reinvents the Palestinian City

Taraki, L. — 2008-05-19

The Palestinian town of Ramallah, possibly on the lowest rung of urban hierarchies in the region, is a peripheral town trying to become a city on the fringes of the Arab world. Its nascent new middle class partakes enthusiastically in the trans-Arab, urban, middle-class ethos elaborated in the centers of Arab modernity, the metropolitan cities. This new imagination, a hybrid construct crafted by the new urban middle classes in the age of globalization and the demise of the postindependence nationalist project, encompasses a new consciousness of self, family life, and family futures.

It is a mark of the power of the trans-Arab, middle-class ethos that it has penetrated into the farthest reaches of the Arab world, and in a turbulent landscape shattered by wars, displacement, and dispossession. I argue that the coalescence of the momentous political events at the local level (the Oslo accords and the process of societal "normalization") with the general collapse of the nationalist project of the Arab nation-state and the relentless currents of globalization sweeping the Arab world constituted the fertile ground in which the emerging urban middle class began to incubate its new life agendas and the sensibilities and practices that give it expression. City life is becoming a possibility in Palestine, more than half a century after its urban modernity was aborted by war and occupation.

In the Ruins of Bahla: Reconstructed Forts and Crumbling Walls in an Omani Town

Limbert, M. E. — 2008-05-19

This article examines the ruins of the former structures of rule in a medium-sized town in the Sultanate of Oman. It explores how people in Bahla relate to and perceive the ruins of forts, walls, and neighborhoods that had helped maintain order in the previous era and that are being transformed in the new state. While the fort has changed from local and regional political-military center to national museum, helping shape more abstract and impersonal relationships to the past, the town's crumbling wall, whose origin myth and grandeur are no longer legitimized as an emblem of the town's identity, continues to evoke the sense of a protective boundary. And, the town's neighborhoods are succumbing to simultaneous centrifugal and centripetal pressures: state attempts at streamlining the administration of neighborhoods are emerging just as the control of the neighborhoods through locked doors ends, giving way to the disciplining of movement and the realignment of forms of belonging. Ruins of the former regime are selectively being legitimized, rebuilt, and incorporated into the new centralized and bureaucratic state, while memories of the past system of rule and governance, although shifting and certainly also selective, continue to mediate peoples' relationships to and senses of these sites. The shifts in perception and spatial experience that have accompanied the ruins of the old regime and that have emerged in the wake of the changing regime's management of order are also further reminders of the possibilities of Oman's future after the demise of the sultan and when oil reserves are depleted.

"Mardi Gras Geishas (Batters)," New Orleans

Sammond, N. — 2008-05-19

The Gnat and the Sovereign

Feldman, A. — 2008-05-19

This short essay interprets a narrative from the Talmud to explore Agamben's concept of bare life and Benjamin's concept of messianic violence.

With Ice in Their Ears

Feldman, A. — 2008-05-19

This short essay uses a Serbian war crime in Sarajevo to discuss the mediatization of war.

Witchcraft

Morris, R. — 2008-05-19

What explains the social power of music in the United States today? What allows Americans to invoke it as the cause of antisocial violence, as well as of personal expressivity? This essay contemplates the peculiar American invention of a musical culture defined by generation, which has political force without being properly political. It suggests that this music has come to play the part assigned to witchcraft in many other societies, bearing within itself the capacity to transform individualism into antisociality, alienation into destruction, desire into violence. It can do so because it opens anew the gap in language between meaning and force. Tracing the history of music in the aftermath of World War I, from the Beatles to Marilyn Manson, Frank Sinatra to santana, and following the popular cultural discourses that both invoked and strove to contain magic, the essay suggests that America remains possessed by the idea of witchcraft.