Social Text recent issues

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.

Editorial Note

Edwards, B. H., McCarthy, A. — 2008-03-28

On (Our) American Ground: Caribbean-Latino-Diasporic Cultural Production and the Postnational "Guantanamera"

Ortiz, R. L. — 2008-03-28

"On (Our) American Ground" traces the relevant genealogies, and itineraries, of a song and a site whose various symbolic and practical constructions have helped to determine what a transnational American historical past can allow us to imagine of a postnational American future. The song "Guantanamera" is a quasi-officially Cuban cultural and national artifact, though in fact its history of composition, performance, and recording reveals it to be a remarkably unstable and fluid text. The site, the U.S. naval base on Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, continues into 2007 to challenge political and legal theorists to worry the limits of what is politically thinkable and doable. Together, these two decidedly "local" institutions have historically drawn into themselves an impressive procession of political and cultural figures (from José Martí to Celia Cruz to Wyclef Jean), a procession that has collectively embodied, and performed, the complex careers of the nation, the transnation, and the postnation through their engagements of the matter of Guantánamo/"Guantanamera." The piece then implicates in that procession populations that bear no simple relationship with any of the more available categories (national, racial, cultural) according to whose terms we conventionally organize ourselves and others. The piece concludes by suggesting what new forms of knowledge can come out of a critically engaged, "postnational" American studies, and in turn out of a "postnational" Latino studies, a still-emerging disciplinary field that understands its own organizing category as strategically historical, contextual, and critical.

When Home Is a Camp: Global Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and Internally Displaced Persons

Seshadri, K. R. — 2008-03-28

Analyses of globalization usually ignore the category of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) to focus instead on transnational migrants. This essay argues that a close look at the humanitarian conceptualization of IDPs provides an understanding of the operations of global sovereignty. Global sovereignty is here taken as the enmeshing of three forces: the neoliberal state and its abdication of fundamental responsibilities to citizens, the hand of the global economy in civil war, and the role of international law. The author suggests that contemporary global sovereignty is fundamentally bio-political insofar as it engenders the conditions of possibility for displacement through the transformations it effects on the traditional nation state, and then offers a salve for displacement through the empty form of humanitarian law. Between the abdication of national responsibility and the emptiness of humanitarian law, the displaced person, who is a complex political actor, is entirely depoliticized and rendered unintelligible. The largely ignored program of ethnic cleansing in Gujarat, India, in 2000 provides an example of this now routine process of sovereignty.

Tonal Disturbances: Works on Paper by Jenny Perlin and Visible Collective

Min, S. — 2008-03-28

This selection of recent artwork explores the disquieting and overwhelming silence regarding those who have disappeared and been detained since 9/11. Through music and drawing, low-tech art and text, artists Jenny Perlin and Visible Collective/Naeem Mohaiemen and Aimara Lin question in multifarious ways the war on terror and its effects.

Neoliberalism, Activism, and HIV/AIDS in Postapartheid South Africa

Mindry, D. — 2008-03-28

The transition to democracy in South Africa promised a new equitable social order that would be responsive to the needs of "the people." These hopes were very quickly eclipsed by a transition to neoliberalism and by the HIV/AIDS crisis. An examination of the HIV crisis provides insights into how responses to the disease are situated within the landscape of neoliberal discourses and policies, revealing the fissures and inconsistencies of neoliberalism. As communities mobilize varied local, national, and international networks of support to reshape the fields of power, they draw on old and new modes of organizing. These struggles have yet to result in widespread transformations of structures of governance, but they reveal the ways people work within and against them. We can begin to map and link the diverse local practices and transnational solidarities that are deployed to contest and disrupt neoliberal and other forms of governmentality, in order to assert individual and communal rights. Activists and academics seeking to shift policy and public health practice, in particular, would do well to examine more closely the ways in which HIV/AIDS discourse and activism in South Africa challenges the neoliberal biomedical framing of the disease and offers alternate approaches.

Immune Communities, Common Immunities

Cohen, E. — 2008-03-28

This essay focuses on the controversy incited by Thabo Mbeki's comments at the Thirteenth International AIDS Conference, held in Durban in 2000, which unleashed a deluge of opprobrium that has inundated the South African president since then. By analyzing the ensuing discursive conflict, it makes visible and intelligible some unarticulated and unarticulable assumptions about bioscience as a natural and exclusive framework for comprehending and addressing HIV/AIDS. In particular, it suggests that the bioscientific paradigm "immunity," which lies at the very center of HIV/AIDS, might not transparently reveal the material processes of the living organism as it coexists with other living beings in shared environments. Instead, "immunity," which existed as a powerful juridical and political concept for almost two thousand years before it was applied to vital contexts, construes the individual as a "natural unit" and thereby renders the social and political milieu within which this individual necessarily lives extrinsic or epiphenomenal with respect to life itself. To the extent that the bioscientific imagination of HIV/AIDS enfolds this individualizing and self-isolating framework as an essential truth, that is, as a "natural fact," it necessarily represents the phenomena it describes as an inevitable consequence of the political and legal assumptions that it unreflectively incorporates.

By considering the controversies about HIV/AIDS in South Africa as conflicts of values, we might illuminate how the "concerns" of health care get construed in bioscientific accounts of HIV/AIDS and reconsider what the salient biopolitical dimensions of health and life actually are.

The Daughter's Exchange in Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood

Min, E. K. — 2008-03-28

The two most dominant twentieth-century theorizations about the exchange of daughters are Freudian psychoanalysis, which theorizes the psychic, libidinal exchange performed by the daughter of the mother for the father, and Lévi-Straussian anthropology, which theorizes the exchange of the daughter by her brothers and fathers through marriage. In both theories, the daughter's exchange is a founding moment in the institution of culture. In this essay, I interrogate the relevance of these paradigms of daughter-exchange to the phenomenon of transnational adoption, where the daughter loses her mother even before she can exchange her mother for her father, and where the daughter is exchanged precisely not to extend kinship ties between the biological and adoptive families. Through a reading of Jane Jeong Trenka's 2003 The Language of Blood, a memoir of growing up as a Korean adoptee in Minnesota, I explore the meaning of the failure of these kinship paradigms in transnational adoption and propose that the psychic and political economies of kinship need to be examined together in light of the growing global diaspora of transnational adoptees.

British Troops Conduct Counter Taliban Operations

Di Lauro, M. — 2008-03-28

Free Time: Overwork as an Ontological Condition

Stephens, P., Weston, R. H. — 2008-03-28

Free Time is a collection of collaboratively written experimental prose fragments on topics primarily involving labor and leisure. The form of the project (Denkbilder) is taken from Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Included in this selection is a theorization of the form ("Denkbild Denkbild"). A Denkbild can range from an aphoristic fragment to a mini-essay. Although these Denkbilder experiment with critical form and challenge conventional modes of academic writing, they continue to follow conventional scholarly citation procedures. The neologism chronotistics is meant to describe practices and ideologies of time management and expenditure. Topics discussed in the cycle range from the vocabularies of temporality ("Time Consuming" and "Killing Time") to discussions of gender and labor ("Mars and Venus in the Workplace") to time spent viewing Internet pornography ("Polymorphous Pornygamy"). Inspired by the Frankfurt school and by the late work of Michel Foucault, these Denkbilder attempt to update and expand an interdisciplinary approach to questions of ideology critique and practices of the self.

Contributors

2007-12-26

In the Afterlife of the Duke Case

Wiegman, R., Lubiano, W., Hardt, M. — 2007-12-26

Reality Television: a Neoliberal Theater of Suffering

McCarthy, A. — 2007-12-26

Biocommunicability: THE NEOLIBERAL SUBJECT AND ITS CONTRADICTIONS IN NEWS COVERAGE OF HEALTH ISSUES

Briggs, C. L., Hallin, D. C. — 2007-12-26

Writing into a Void: REPRESENTING SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN THE NARRATIVE OF COLONIAL SPANISH AMERICA

Bennett, H. L. — 2007-12-26

Urban Transculturations

Archibald, P. — 2007-12-26

Freedom from Transculturation: A RESPONSE TO PRISCILLA ARCHIBALD

Moreiras, A. — 2007-12-26

A Response to Alberto Moreiras

Archibald, P. — 2007-12-26

Contributors

2007-10-22

Introduction: THE TRAFFIC IN HISTORY

Kazanjian, D., Saldana-Portillo, M. J. — 2007-10-22

The Tepoztlan Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas

Voekel, P., Young, E. — 2007-10-22

From the Rivers of Guinea to the Valleys of Peru: BECOMING A BRAN DIASPORA WITHIN SPANISH SLAVERY

O'Toole, R. S. — 2007-10-22

Sexuality and Gender in Transnational Spaces: REALIGNMENTS IN RURAL VERACRUZ FAMILIES DUE TO INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION

Plaza, R. C. — 2007-10-22

In Search of Lourdes Casal's "Ana Veldford"

Negron-Muntaner, F., Miguel, Y. M.-S. — 2007-10-22

Hysteria and History: A MEDITATION ON MEXICO

Gorbach, F. — 2007-10-22

The Soul of Neoliberalism

Moreton, B. E. — 2007-10-22

Representing Global Labor

Denning, M. — 2007-10-22