Social Text recent issues

Contributors

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Introduction

Edwards, B. H., McCarthy, A. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

The essay provides a short introduction to the special anniversary issue of Social Text, explaining the protocol for the "keyword" essays that make up the majority of the issue: each contribution takes up particular points (single essays) or threads (themes in a number of essays over the years) in the publication history of the journal as starting point for a consideration of broader issues of knowledge production, critique, or methodology. The introduction begins with a discussion of the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of Social Text, and recounts the origins and history of the journal in some detail. The piece describes the ways the editorial collective has functioned since 1979, both in the production of the journal itself and in a variety of other activities (including meetings, soirées, and conference panels). The introduction also discusses some of the major shifts in the organization of Social Text, including its affiliations since the mid-1980s with the CUNY Graduate Center, Rutgers University, and Columbia University (which have provided in-kind support and funded the managing editorial position) and with the University of Minnesota Press and Duke University Press (which have published the journal's book series and the journal itself).

The Collective as a Political Model

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Fredric Jameson, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, John Brenkman, Sohnya Sayres, Andrew Ross, and Randy Martin discuss the role of the collective in the journal's political-intellectual work. They reflect on the alleged founding principle of Social Text: the idea that politics was not organized around parties but journals. The collective offered a way to learn theory and practice as political issues: it came up with political interventions that were urgent, of the moment, and had a theoretical cast.

Aesthetics

Min, S. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

The essay focuses on Social Text's lack of engagement with aesthetics as a point of departure to think about art and politics in the wake of the culture wars, the intensification of globalization, and the aftermath of 9/11. The essay concludes with a forceful argument for a (re)turn to the aesthetic both within the journal and in cultural discourse in general.

Affect

Pellegrini, A., Puar, J. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

This essay traces Fredric Jameson's important early analyses of the waning of affect and disappearance of the depth psychological subject under conditions of postmodernism, arguments he developed over the course of several essays in Social Text—beginning, in fact, in the journal's very first issue. This brief survey of Jameson's argument launches a sketch of the multiple genealogies and political uptakes of the term affect in more recent scholarly work, some of it also in the pages of Social Text.

AIDS

Cohen, E., Livingston, J. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

This essay considers key themes in the history of HIV/AIDS, including biopolitics, affective communities, epidemics, and the meanings of immunity. It traces a set of intellectual, existential, and material connections between bioscientific inquiry, human existence, care, and community. The authors emphasize the ways that human vulnerability bespeaks social life.

(Theorizing the) Americas

Dopico, A. M. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

As Social Text published its first essays on Latin America, the Americas were living the disastrous consequences of a hemispheric cold war in the forms of dictatorships, military rule, and brutal state violence; confronting popular and institutionalized revolutions; and suffering U.S. interventions in open or secret civil wars that would kill millions and devastate civil society through the end of the century.

The engagements of the essays in Social Text's first hundred issues offer an instructive map of engagements with Latin America and a history of critical movements in the U.S. academic Left across the last thirty years.

Social Text's attention to the long cold wars in the Americas shifted in the late eighties as writers traced new ideological positions and discourses, struggling over the meaning of the Americas amid the culture wars of the Reagan-Bush years, engaging the politics of multiculturalism, border studies, and Latino cultures in the United States. Contributors read the queer voices and homophobic paranoia of patriotic discourse—founding new disciplines that deconstructed the gendered authority of the state and established a new archive of queer poetics across the Americas. Across the nineties and into the new century, writers turned to the new subjects of globalization, questioning the logic and markets of development, and the new discourses of neoliberalism in the hemisphere. In more recent years, contributors explored the cultural archives of diaspora, the local lifeworld and geopolitical consequences of slum cities and unplanned urbanization, and the contentious afterlives of the foundational ideas of Latin American modernity.

Art

Nyong'o, T. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Was the photograph Shepard Fairey used as a basis for his "Hope" image of Barack Obama a social text? The Associated Press thought not when it threatened to sue Fairey for using a photograph it owned as the basis for his poster. What issues of aesthetics and appropriation are raised when remixers claim, in the name of an electronic commons, access to the anonymously produced creativity of the Internet?

Body

McGee, M. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

An analysis of media coverage concerning the physiques of three iconic African American figures—Oprah Winfrey and Barack and Michelle Obama—is taken as a point of departure for revisiting Sohnya Sayre's 1987 Social Text article "Glory Mongering: Food and the Agon of Excess" and reflecting on the role of Social Text in offering critiques of everyday life.

China

Eng, D. L., Ruskola, T. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

How should we go about interpreting, reading, and understanding "China" as a social text, in the face of persistent Orientalism and self-Orientalism, in an age when the ghosts of socialism are still all around us? Given its semicolonial history and its passage through communist and capitalist visions of modernity, China cannot be studied in isolation, as a preexisting thing in itself. Instead of reducing it to a preconstituted object of knowledge, we must ask how China, and the objects in relation to which it exists, have come into being, and how they become stabilized discursively.

Cold War

Singh, N. P. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

This essay explores the imperial and colonial genealogies of the Nazi Holocaust as a form of industrialized killing. It argues that cold-war discourse, and particularly the theory of totalitarianism, enacts a displacement of these outside the ambit of Western history and theory. The continuity and disavowal of colonial violence, in this sense, frames the era of decolonization, which is told as a story of cold-war rivalry and anticommunist vigilance.

The Social Life of the Collective

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Andrew Ross, Sohnya Sayres, Bruce Robbins, Randy Martin, John Brenkman, and Anders Stephanson discuss the venues where the collective met face-to-face: conversations and debates at manuscript reviews and formal meetings, but also the role of reading groups, conferences, and the soirees held at the collective members' lofts.

Collective

Edwards, B. H., McCarthy, A., Martin, R. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

The story of the Social Text collective begins with the desire to establish a counterpoint to possessive individualism, creating a means for valuing collaborative engagement against the singular authorship of genius; later it would come to stand against the deadening metric of disciplinary accountability as well. The editorial collective foments a deliberative process that aims to set its own context and hence to make something generative of its internal disciplinary difference.

Commodity

Ralph, M. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

If commodification is endemic to the logic of capitalism, it is perhaps because the space of the sacred—that which cannot have a market value affixed to it—has apparently receded. Still the idea that commodities are born from secular revelations suggests that there is plenty more to be said about the "metaphysical subtleties" and "theological niceties" that occasion their arrival.

Culture

Deer, P. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Modern cultural criticism, like the younger discipline of cultural studies, has long struggled to reconcile the antagonistic logic at the heart of the idea of culture. Social Text's project as a journal has been energized throughout by the contradictory genealogy of the term itself, of the inner dynamism and instability generated by the pull between culture defined, in Arnoldian terms, as the highest, disinterested "cultural" achievements of a civilization's elites, and its contrary anthropological definition as a "whole way of life." This ethnographic expansion of the range of culture, generated in part by the colonial encounter and in part by the collision with working-class subcultures, allowed it to include the whole way of life of other populations: now culture could include the popular and demotic, the marginalized and oppressed subjects of modernity. This contradictory inheritance from the nineteenth century was complicated and enriched by the emergence in the twentieth century of successive instantiations of culture within mass communications, signifying systems, and subaltern cultural productions generated out of decolonization and further class struggle. The picture is complicated by culture's intimate ties to the state: administration, governmentality, and war. These days, the culture concept's combination of expansionist energies and inner antagonisms makes it a slippery and untrustworthy idea: it offers, at once, too much and too little. Social Text's long romance with culture offers some invaluable lessons about the culture concept's continuing viability, or what it means, as editors Brent Edwards and Randy Martin asked in 2002, to pursue "the question of cultural politics after cultural studies."

Departures

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Stanley Aronowitz, Toby Miller, John Brenkman, Randy Martin, and Bruce Robbins discuss the cycling of leadership and their own responses to leaving the journal or changing their role in the collective.

Diaspora

Ralph, M. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

How does using the French term for jet lag, décalage, to theorize the gap in time and space that structures diasporic articulation encourage us to think of the period between the dawn of formal decolonization and the present as not merely a structure but an atmosphere of disenchantment: a reminder that diasporic bodies inhabit tactile economies, data streams, born of emotional and financial trajectories that make it impossible to anticipate the ingenious forms of belonging—and exquisite strategies of exclusion—they will ultimately help to erect, however unwittingly?

Interdisciplinarity

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Stanley Aronowitz, Randy Martin, John Brenkman, and Toby Miller examine the journal's aim at understanding culture and politics without excluding certain topics or certain kinds of work. The journal offered a space for negotiating between different disciplines and their view of politics and what counted as writing. The journal wanted to introduce new ideas and to break down the divide between political economy and cultural and social theory.

Disciplinarity

Patell, S. R. K. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Social Text as both a collective and a publication has always troubled disciplinarity, with its commitment to various praxes and theories of the multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary. This essay looks at the complex, if not ambivalent, place of literature in the multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary space of Social Text. Literature, understood as a multiplicity of practices, theories, and critical methods, is a complex site for negotiating the tension of the universal and particular, a tension that governs, among others areas, the relation of theory and praxis and that of Marxist critique and empiricism. Pressuring the very success of the admonition to "always historicize," renewed attention to the literary specificity of rhetoric as trope indicates new ways of understanding the relationship between the universal and the particular, by recognizing the political and ethical force of the emergent universality of singularity, literary and lived.

Empire

Tadiar, N. X. M. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Edward Said's 1979 essay in the inaugural issue of Social Text, "Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims," places before us the problem of the present moment of global power—the problem called "empire"—in terms of the specific intellectual/political task Said set for himself with respect to Zionism; that is, to bring out its concealed history as it was exacted, from somewhere and some people. We are urged to ask: How do we critically understand the idea of empire and the reality it is a part of? What does it mean to examine empire from the standpoint of its victims? This essay takes up the differences between an older imperialism and present-day empire, in order to envision what yet remains for us to consider in opposing its contemporary global rule.

Environment

Dawson, A. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Social Text contributors have approached the environmental crises of the last several decades by exploring the constitution of a second nature. If, that is, the environment furnishes particular societies with a specific set of obstacles and possibilities, this original natural realm is reshaped and transformed through human agency. A hallmark of Social Text's theorization of the environment could be said to be critical inquiry into the modes through which biopower has shaped both society and the natural environment over the last several decades. Social Text contributors, for example, anatomized the impact of hegemonic projects of environmental transformation such as the Green Revolution. In addition, they reminded us that the polarized debates about climate change that unfolded during the 1990s were but the latest installment in the agonistic social construction of the climate in the modern world.

Feminism

Tenzer, L. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

This essay surveys the feminist work published in Social Text over its thirty-year history, while noting an initial lack of interest in feminism among the journal's founders. It shows that early feminist work in the journal focused on cultural analysis, while later work engaged directly with the politics of the feminist movement, and credits Ellen Willis and Alice Echols, especially, with establishing in the 1980s a Social Text brand of feminism based on constructionism and materialism. The essay traces the engagement of feminist theory with postmodernism in the journal's pages and finally points to feminist questions that must be considered by the journal today in the context of broader social analysis to understand how rapidly changing economic realities intersect with gender.

Film and Mass Culture

McCarthy, A. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Social Text's engagement with mass culture, and particularly film, began as a way of rethinking the binaries structuring Marxist cultural criticism. The terms shifted over the years, partly in response to political developments such as the culture wars of the 1990s and partly in response to changing editorial commitments, which included a turn toward understanding culture as a domain of labor. The launch of the Social Text Web site represents another stage in the journal's ongoing interest in media as a site of leftist critique.

The Future of Journals

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

John Brenkman, Anders Stephanson, Sohnya Sayres, and Bruce Robbins discuss the changing role of journals. In light of the Internet, changing reading practices, and financing, doing a journal is an uphill struggle. However, magazines do sustain a kind of culture and chains of connection.

Governmentality

Jazeel, T. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

This article uses David Scott's notion of "colonial governmentality" (from Social Text 43) to make a broader postcolonial intervention into the power structures that shape the theoretical rubrics of contemporary critical intellectual work. Advancing an argument about the governmentality of leftist academic knowledge production, it suggests that Euro-American journals like Social Text be attentive to their ongoing role in the production and effects of tensions between general theoretical ambition and the particularities of politics located in place.

Hip-Hop

Ralph, M. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

The tendency for hip-hop enthusiasts to measure the genre against an imaginary golden age evidences a curious brand of nostalgia: a mixture of homesickness, loss, and longing that coheres in the angst of a generation. Meanwhile rappers and politicians blame each other for the demise of disadvantaged communities, as they overlook how each discourse harkens back to a time of prosperity that never existed.

Ideology

Harney, S. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Michael Brown's article "Ideology and the Metaphysics of Content" (ST 8, 1983) reminds us of what was at stake in the transition from ideology critique to cultural studies. Through an ethnomethodological close reading of the opening part of Marx's Capital, Brown teaches us that this text is educative before it is didactic and that its meaning is historical and available only in the encounter with the reader, an encounter that produces both reader and text. There is no room here for a correct content independent of reading in history. Brown's example is used to stage an encounter in teaching, in a British business school, between undergraduate students and reports of the current financial crisis, approaching the crisis phenomenologically. The article concludes with a discussion of mutual promises and possession in the world of finance.

Independent Publishing

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

John Brenkman, Stanley Aronowitz, Fredric Jameson, Andrew Ross, and Sohnya Sayres discuss the self-reliance and independence of the journal in the early days and the eventual move to the university press. Being tied to a university press offered editorial support, finances, and regular help, but also meant a rigid production schedule and fewer chances to gather in new material and thoroughly think through new avenues.

Labor and Class

Maxwell, R. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

This essay concerns three decades of engagement with themes of labor and class in the pages of Social Text. It identifies common threads and describes dozens of variations that contributors made on these themes. The continuities include: social and cultural reproduction of class; race and class; gender and class; the state of the Left and the labor movement; working-class depictions in popular culture as well as in institutional discourses of business and government; commodification and class consciousness. Works also focused on new social movements, post-Fordist or postindustrial characteristics of the new international division of labor, deunionization, decline of the welfare state, industrial relocation, and working conditions in the global South. More recently, the journal made room for work on the impoverishment of the American middle class, on the worsening conditions of academic labor, and on theorizing "nonindustrial" informational work of symbol makers and symbol users (a.k.a. "immaterial labor," "no-collar workers," "knowledge workers," "creative labor," or "mental labor").

Marxism

Kazanjian, D. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

This essay reflects on the import of Marxism for the history of Social Text. It argues that Marxism can be understood as a mode of challenging frameworks for thought rather than as a framework in and of itself.

National Allegory

Larkin, B. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

This paper examines the debate between Fredric Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad in articles that appeared in Social Text 15 (1986) and Social Text 17 (1987) over the status of national allegory in third-world literature. It argues that national allegory can be produced not from authorial intention but from the dynamic of circulation across cultural difference.

Peer Review

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Stanley Aronowitz, Randy Martin, Sohnya Sayres, and Toby Miller discuss the reasons why Social Text is not a peer-reviewed journal and shed light on the nature of collective meetings. The conversation around the submissions and commissions at the meetings was ephemeral but also constituted a moment of evaluation and responsibility.

Performance

Nyong'o, T. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Can "performance" ever be exactly defined? Or is the constitutive tension between what performances are and what performatives do simply part of what makes the field of performance studies politically pertinent?

Literature

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Reflecting on the role of literature in Social Text, John Brenkman, Stanley Aronowitz, Sohnya Sayres, and Andrew Ross discuss the vision of the journal as a hybrid between a political review and a literary magazine. They touch on literature as a form of social knowledge, the relationship between creative writing and theory, and the question of how to evaluate creative submissions.

Poetry

Edwards, B. H. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Literature has been part of the purview of Social Text since the journal's inception, although the literary has never been presumed to be its paradigmatic or primary object of study. Moreover, from issue 4 (1981) through issue 39 (1994), the journal not only published scholarship on literature, but also sporadically published poetry and fiction. There are intriguing parallels between the experimentalism of the essays in the journal, especially in the rubric of short, theoretical pieces called "Unequal Developments" featured in early issues, and the experimentalism of the poetry and fiction.

Policy and Planning

Moten, F., Harney, S. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Policy is the imposition of insecurity, the oppressive regulation of the plans and operations by which the objects of policy anticipate and object to policy. These are notes toward an understanding of policy that also take up the question of whether it is inevitable that hope, and being wary of false hope, turn to policy. We suggest that ongoing operations and plans must be seen in fugitive opposition to the widespread attempts to formulate and participate in something called policy.

Postcolonialism

Miguel, Y. M.-S. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

This essay proposes a brief reflection on the meanings and relevancy of postcolonialism as a keyword in contemporary cultural studies. Taking as a point of departure the well-known etymological crisis through which many scholars feel compelled to explain how postcolonial theory is still a productive approach, this entry questions the applicability of the postcolonial paradigm to study sixteenth-century Latin America, nineteenth-century Africa, or the twentieth-century Caribbean. The Caribbean and Latin America are used as a disciplinary counterpoint, to trace the advantages and disadvantages of the universalization of the postcolonial paradigm. This essay also reviews some of the key contributions to this topic by articles published in Social Text, as a way to celebrate this journal's publication of one hundred issues.

The Means of Production

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Anders Stephanson, Bruce Robbins, Andrew Ross, Randy Martin, and Sohnya Sayres reflect on the physical labor and the cumbersome procedures of getting the journal published in the early days.

Production

Ross, A. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

In this essay Andrew Ross reminisces about the methods and politics of collective production at Social Text in the 1980s and 1990s, recalling the hands-on participation of members of the Social Text collective in tasks like mailing out issues and the weekly meetings at which members reviewed submissions to the journal and debated questions of current interest. Ross also traces changes in the journal that reflected differences in the publishing climate and "information landscape."

The First Issue

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

Discussing the inaugural issue of Social Text, John Brenkman, Stanley Aronowitz, and Anders Stephanson emphasize the quality of the articles in terms of theoretical sophistication and the versatility of genres and questions tackled. The first issue aimed at making a political intervention and, through the selection of essays, put forward the idea that for a socially critical mode of theory and thinking, reflection on mass culture was as important as reflection on literature and art.

Prospectus

Brenkman, J. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

This essay revisits the "Prospectus" written by the author, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric Jameson for Social Text's first issue and evaluates it with thirty years' hindsight. It focuses on the journal's position regarding Marxism and the then Soviet Union, and its—for the author—problematic veering away from liberalism. It praises the plurality of thinkers and theories that the journal engaged with.

Queer and Disorderly

Stadler, G. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:42 PDT

This essay examines contemporary lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) activism in the light of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's important Social Text piece from 1991, "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay." It revisits the restrictive views of gender that she discovered in the psychotherapeutic professions via current (2008–2009) controversies over the authors chosen to write the entry "Gender Identity Disorder" in the forthcoming edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). It argues that the priorities of current LGBT activism, centered largely on same-sex marriage, indicate a shift away from the deeply antinormative strain of queer politics, a move that threatens to isolate lesbian and gay activists from transgender activists.

The Queer Social Text

Munoz, J. E. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:43 PDT

This essay considers the history of "a queer text" in the journal Social Text. It posits that the journal, through individual essays and pivotal special issues, has made significant contributions to the development of a queer social theory. The essay suggests that queer theory needs to conceptualize itself in relation to a larger tradition of Left critical thought.

Racial Politics (in the United States)

Mukherjee, R. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:43 PDT

This piece briefly revisits Social Text's promise and vantage as a forum for emergent critical scholarship on the challenges of repoliticizing post–civil rights political subjectivities and the relevance of public intellectuals within the promise of black politics in the wake of Barack Obama's historic ascension to the presidency of the United States. Parsing cultural strains of racial triumph and vexation, of political elation as well as mourning, that mark the Obama phenomenon, the piece underscores the urgency of critically interrogating the post in "postracial."

Revolution

Saldana-Portillo, M. J., Sartorius, D. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:43 PDT

This essay reflects on the Social Text articles on revolution. Many first-world contributors to Social Text, on the one hand, reassessed Marxist theories of political consciousness and political economy in light of the praxis of third-world revolutionary experiences, especially those in Latin America. The reality of these processess permanently debunked the developmentalism of Euro-American Marxist theory that privileged a model of revolutionary agency stubbornly identified with urban, industrial labor. The cultural and sexual policies of revolutionary governments, on the other hand, were also often the subject of criticism for contributors. This essay argues that such criticism is often ahistorical in its focus on Cuban politics in the seventies. Rather than prognosticate the death of revolution and the triumph of liberal democracy, as Social Text contributors tended to do after 1989, the authors reflect upon the dynamic and historically contingent nature of revolutionary consciousness, change, and culture that is ongoing.

"Social Text"

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:43 PDT

Three founding editors, John Brenkman, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric Jameson, discuss the origins of the title Social Text. Aronowitz argues that it comes from Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life, while Jameson claims he did not know Lefebvre at the time and the phrase social text just occurred to him as an effective way to gesture toward the journal's sociological and cultural interests and its commitment to grounding itself in the textual.

Social Text

Edwards, B. H., Nelson, A., Nyong'o, T. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:43 PDT

Despite the divergence between the accounts given by Stanley Aronowitz and Fredric Jameson of the origins of the name Social Text, it is worth exploring the use of the phrase in the work of Henri Lefebvre. Even if it is ultimately a false cognate, the chapter titled "The Social Text" in the second volume of his Critique of Everyday Life (1961) is an intriguing intertext for the journal, especially given the importance of the category of the "everyday" in its early issues. The occasional invocation of the title phrase in Social Text articles over the years might be described as heuristic rather than categorical: an ongoing, dialogic effort to limn an arena of investigation, rather than the attempt to define once and for all an aspect of a broader social field.

Alondra Nelson revisits "The New Right and Media," an article from Social Text's inaugural issue that explored how "media politics" and forms of mediated, networked communication were used by conservative countermovements to advance their ideological agendas. The idea of "social textronics" is taken up from this article, revised and expanded in order to suggest how new technologies and mediated communication are—borrowing from Fredric Jameson—"a symbolic vehicle" for, and an object of, progressive critique.

Tavia Nyong'o considers how the image of the Internet as a creative commons is belied by Marx's insight into the dominating logic of machinic over human intelligence. Fortunately, technology also gives rise to a social brain, whose virtuosity both Marx and Paolo Virno see as crucial to the emancipation of species-being.

State

Gautney, H. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:43 PDT

This essay discusses the evolution of state theory from G. W. F. Hegel to Gilles Deleuze, with a focus on the ways in which the state has been theorized as a mechanism of egalitarian social change. Following Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's empire thesis, it raises the question of whether institutional mediations, like states and trade unions, have exhausted their potential to serve as agents of social change. In answering this question, the essay points to contemporary movement activity and recent developments in Latin American politics in which states have played a major role in enacting change.

Theory

Harper, P. B. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:43 PDT

Considering the intersections of theory, culture, and ideology in Social Text, this essay suggests that for all its interest in theory, the journal has never had a theory of theory, except for the proposition that insofar as theory explains practice it must derive from the latter. However, this proposition has never been definitively realized because at no point has everyone involved been able to agree on what constitutes practice: as the means of articulation are always contested and contingent, the production of theory itself is an unending and necessary project.

University

Martin, R., Lim, E.-B. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:43 PDT

As a critical nomenclature in Social Text, university points to a constellation of trends that coalesces around the corporate ethos of higher education: professionalization, academic capitalism, industry standardization, anti-intellectualism, managerialist protocols, adjunctifying professoriate, casualized instruction, knowledge factory, and the global university. As an interventionist journal of tendency, work published over the past thirty years has considered responses along intersecting organizational registers of the professional association, industrial union and party. These areas of inquiry are now embroiled in the phenomenon of the global university, or the proliferation of U.S and European academic outposts in the rest of the world. This complex terrain of global corporatization, neocolonial educative empires, and cross-cultural exchange calls for a renewed critical vigilance, particularly around the implications of university transnationalism for minor epistemologies in the arts and humanities.

War

Feldman, A. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:43 PDT

As viewed through the lens of work published in Social Text on the governmentality of terror] this essay proposes that the trope of the terrorist signals the departure of a reliable and calculable enemy and the "unleashing of the incommensurable— that we now know as asymmetric war, as the unending war of and against terror, and other emblematica of the immeasurable such as shock and awe. However, this is also a war of political effects and consequences deemed not worthy of measurement, such as collateral damage, the discounted Iraqi dead, and the unlimited detention of perpetual "terrorists" at various hidden black sites.

The Social Text Collective: 1979 to 2009

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:46:43 PDT

Collected here are the names of all members of the Social Text collective, from the founding of the journal until today. The masthead of Social Text 1 is reproduced, to honor the founding editors and collective. People who joined the collective subsequently are listed in three groups, by each decade of the journal's thirty-year history.

Contributors

Mon, 18 May 2009 12:47:56 PDT

Neocitizenship and Critique

Cherniavsky, E. — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:47:56 PDT

This essay asks how the political identity and the domain of civic participation we reference with the term citizenship has been transformed in the contexts of neoliberalism. Michel Foucault famously argues that the subject of a market-centered, neoliberal governance structure is best understood as an entrepreneur of him- or herself. Recent influential scholarship in the (interdisciplinary) humanities and social sciences builds on Foucault's model of an entrepreneurial self-manager in order to posit a new mode of "self-enterprising citizen-subject," not defined by her claims on the state. This essay considers how, to what degree and in what spheres of public life, the neoliberal self-manger exercises the political capacities of a citizen. The analysis dwells particularly on what many have observed is a contemporary dissolution of the modern nation-state synthesis, predicated on the exercise of popular sovereignty, but also, in complementary fashion, on the creation of civic pedagogies: on educational institutions that set specific norms of social and political identity, and thereby transform the "mob" into a national "people." I argue that these kinds of normative (or disciplinary) pedagogies no longer seem functional to the aims of neoliberal governance and speculate on the parameters of an emerging "neocitizenship," in which citizens and noncitizens alike appear primarily as the targets of knowledge and control, rather than of social discipline.

TV Urgente: Urban Exclusion, Civil Society, and the Politics of Television in Venezuela

Leary, J. P. — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:47:56 PDT

This essay explores the politics of representation in contemporary Venezuelan television, which in its mainstream forms has produced an urban imaginary that models national citizenship on the geographic, class, and racial divisions of the Venezuelan metropolis. The nation's airwaves have been a crucial theater of partisan class conflict in Venezuelan society since the election of President Hugo Chávez, a radical social democrat who has counted on the residents of the nation's huge urban slums, or barrios, as a major constituency. This study concentrates on the two major antagonists in this televisual battle by exploring their visual content and production methods in the context of the history of Caracas's barrios and the nation's television industry. On one side, Globovisión, a private cable news channel, commands the loyalty of the nation's middle-class anti-Chávez opposition; on the other, Catia TVe, a nonprofessional UHF station based in west Caracas's barrios, mobilizes its urban constituency with some state financing. The essay examines the different forms of political citizenship that these stations offer and explores how they complicate popular liberal notions of "civil society." It also reconsiders questions about the political role of mass media—to what extent are citizens manipulated as objects of the television media, and can they become subject-participants in their own representation? Finally, this study provides a critical examination of the formally innovative model of "alternative" media production that Catia TVe offers.

The Labor Factor in the Creative Economy: A Marxist Reading

Pang, L. — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:47:56 PDT

This paper offers a Marxist analysis of the creative agency conceptualized by the new creative economy. Analyzing the differences and continuities between the creative economy and the traditional industrial economy, I explore how creative labor is selectively invested with the logics of both artistic production and industrial production, so that the creative economy, like and unlike the traditional industrial economy, could operate and proliferate amid the tensions between scarcity and abundance. Labor does not evaporate in the creative economy, but it is only more intricately shaped to accommodate to and justify a condensed and twisted late-capitalist economic logic.

Seventeen Years, Seventeen Murders: Biospectacularity and the Production of Post-Cold War Knowledge in El Salvador

Moodie, E. — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:47:56 PDT

This essay develops the concept of biospectacle, in which the politics of managing populations becomes sensational visual display. It does so as it explores a series of events in 1999 surrounding the arrest and trial of "El Directo," a gang member in El Salvador who, at age seventeen, was accused of seventeen murders. The episode occurred at a key political conjuncture, at the end of a brutal decade in which staggering crime rates belied the Central American country's claim to an internationally lauded "peace." The El Directo biospectacle emerged from the convergence of a widely shared sense of out-of-control postwar criminality with the potent memory of past "terrorist subversion" of the war era and before. It was orchestrated by media moguls, powerful politicians, and law-enforcement leaders who opposed legal limits on sentences for juveniles imposed by United Nations conventions. They also hoped to reassert the mano dura (or iron-fist style) penal order that had been loosened after the war. But as a symbolically dense figure, crystallizing the contradictions of the moment, El Directo's meaning would be reconfigured on multiple planes. The biospectacle represented both anxiety and affinity, meeting a desire in the larger population to grasp palpable insecurity, to understand what was happening in a future once imagined as "peace."

Not Yet Beyond the Veil: Muslim Women in American Popular Literature

Ahmad, D. — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:47:56 PDT

Following a brief discussion of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, this essay examines the newly burgeoning genre of "oppressed Muslim women" narratives. For each of the texts under consideration—Jean Sasson's Princess, Latifa and Shékéba Hachemi's My Forbidden Face, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, and Suzanne Fisher Staples's Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind—Ahmad examines its claims toward authenticity and also notes the places in which those claims are undermined. Ahmad focuses on how the texts at once generate and challenge essentialized misreadings, misreadings that then proliferate within a prevailing interpretive field that posits feminism and multiculturalism as irreconcilable goals. The emphasis in the essay is on reader reception as well as content: whereas some of the texts responsibly recognize and depict local specificities, that nuance often disappears as readers situate texts within a "clash of civilizations" discourse. Ahmad considers as well the effect of publishing apparatuses like covers, appendices, and reviews, which can encourage a reductive and simplistic reception. The essay concludes with an emphasis on interpretive and pedagogical practices that discourage reductive ethnographic readings.

Rose the Hippopotamus, Central Park Zoo

Adorno, T. W. — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:47:56 PDT

Editorial Note

Edwards, B. H. — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:47:56 PDT

A Short Introduction to Adorno's Mediation between Kultur and Culture

Kalbus, M. — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:47:56 PDT

This introduction to the translation of Theodor W. Adorno's "Kultur and Culture," originally a lecture not intended for transcription and publication, situates the talk amongst Adorno's analyses of U.S. society and traces his distinctions between European and American understandings of culture. The talk is a rare example where Adorno discusses culture per se, as opposed to his work on "culture industry" and "cultural criticism." The object of the critical and dialectical critique—a prime example of "immanent critique" as understood by the Frankfurt school—is the Enlightenment, both as a historical epoch and as human beings' increasing technical mastery over nature. In its historical sense, the Enlightenment has been victorious in the United States, where free and equal citizens engage in market exchanges as free agents, without feudal and precapitalist residues. Examining the concept of culture in American and European context suggests that in the United States, culture is seen as an exertion of control over human nature and one's natural surroundings. On the other hand, the Old World is "cultured" because it preserved, cared for nature: the Enlightenment as humans' increasing technical mastery over nature has not been completely victorious. In its critique of the Enlightenment both in the historical and philosophical sense, "Kultur and Culture" seeks to transcend the dichotomy of uncritically identifying oneself with or hypercritically isolating oneself from the United States. It rejects the opposition between the allegedly profound German Kultur and the "mere civilization" of the United States. The introduction concludes by highlighting the main challenges of translating "Kultur and Culture": the author's complex sentences and the characteristics of a spontaneous, freely held speech, which are mirrored in the syntax of the translation.

Kultur and Culture

Adorno, T. W. — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:47:56 PDT

This lecture examines American and European understandings of the concept of culture and highlights the need for developing critical thought instead of yielding to the strength of the status quo in either setting. At the heart of the contrast between American and German culture lie two approaches toward the word culture: (1) gaining mastery over one's natural surroundings and human nature; and (2) caring for and preserving nature that the human power simultaneously destroys. These approaches are not without negative aspects: American culture, based on the idea of taming nature, does not go beyond shaping the external world and relationships between people. In Germany, grounding the concept of culture in the idea of conserving nature for its own sake has led to spiritualization, to Geisteskultur but has made people forget the idea of culture as a conscious confrontation of external and internal nature that shapes political reality. On the basis of these two approaches to culture, Americans tend to regard European culture as limited to aesthetics, and Germans see Americans as "uncultured." Opposing this anti-American stance, the lecture points out that in American society of pure exchange, democracy is more substantial than in Germany: the universality of the exchange principle leads to a greater freedom from authority, does not allow one to isolate oneself in one's own individual interests, and brings benevolence to human interactions. However, the exchange society generates the pressure of conformity, particularly dangerous for emigrant intellectuals. The talk thus seeks to overcome the dichotomy of uncritically identifying oneself with, or hypercritically isolating oneself from, the United States. Adorno proposes that it is not enough simply to understand one another or realize that everything has positive and negative sides: in both the United States and Europe it is crucial not to let go of critical thought and surrender to the status quo.

Questions on Intellectual Emigration

Adorno, T. W. — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:47:56 PDT

This article explores the notion of contribution and the role of emigrant intellectuals in relation to their new cultural context. Using the example of German exiles in the United States, Adorno suggests that if emigrants find the demands for intellectual independence in discord with the dominant habits of American intellectual life, they should not conform to the American Geist. In academic fields, the notion of contribution is visible in the positive sciences but becomes more problematic in the humanities, where contribution appears not as a palpable result but as a reflection about the results and the nature of the contribution itself. The idea of contribution presupposes the merit of the order to which the contribution is being made: it is precisely this merit of the order that needs to be scrutinized. Emigrant intellectuals—by making contributions without critically reflecting upon them—and the organization of American intellectual life itself—by insisting that the intellectual either integrate him- or herself or remain an outsider—are to blame for furthering standardized contribution. The emigrant intellectual should not accept the idea of "this is the way it is done here" but needs to develop critical thought in relation to the new context. The article proposes four demands to intellectual emigration: (1) one should not cancel out previous life experience and consider emigration as beginning life anew; (2) one must resist the pressure of the industrial apparatus; (3) one must express one's thoughts without regards for ends and the sake of communication; and (4) one must not curtail insight, imagination, and speculation. The article thus propounds the idea that we can only contribute to the building of a better society by not "blindly devot[ing] ourselves to the existing" one.

"States."

McCarthy, A. — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:47:56 PDT

Depression Today, or New Maladies of the Economy

Andrews, J. — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:47:56 PDT

Drawing on recent theories of affect and affectivity, this essay argues that depression is an "affect" that connects the individual and the social. In particular, depression serves as both a response to, and a cause of, economic fears and uncertainties—a "quasi-cause" that opens up negative feelings into political potentials. In examination of two New York Times feature articles from the mid-1970s, the essay suggests that depression and economic crisis have been ineluctably linked in the recent period of neoliberalism.

Contributors

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 10:58:43 PST

Introduction: Diaspora and the Localities of Race

Makalani, M. — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 10:58:43 PST

This introduction explores the major themes addressed in this special issue, particularly how racial difference both structures the African diaspora and informs how scholars exploring this social formation engage with modes of knowledge production that reshape diaspora. In this way, the introduction considers how the local, the nation, remains an important site for the construction of African diasporic identity and outlines how such nations at times facilitate diasporic imaginaries.

The Racial State of the Everyday and the Making of Ethnic Statistics in Britain

Brown, J. N. — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 10:58:43 PST

This article critically examines a common premise of racial discourse in contemporary multiracial societies: that ethnic data collection, in the form of population statistics, is necessary for the apprehension and eradication of discrimination. Drawing on ethnographic data from the conduct of the 1991 National Census of the United Kingdom—the first ever to include a direct question on ethnicity—I analyze the myriad dimensions of racialized power and subjectivity at work in demographic knowledge production. In the process, I suggest that the 1991 census reveals less about people's racial or ethnic identity, per se, than it does about the contradictory racial identities of the British state itself. These become visible both in terms of state practices with regard to race and in terms of the myriad ways that black people represent the state, appeal to it, resist it, or embody it.

Left Out: Afro-Latinos, Black Baseball, and the Revision of Baseball's Racial History

Burgos, A. — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 10:58:43 PST

The project of recovering the history of the Negro Leagues, and in so doing establishing a more complete account of U.S. professional baseball's segregated past, is fertile ground for interrogating the possibilities and limitations of diasporic frameworks. This article examines the problem of the color line in baseball and interrogates how the writing of black baseball history—itself a revision of the traditional narrative of U.S. professional baseball—has often obfuscated the place of Afro-Latinos. Rather than examining the history of African Americans and Latinos in baseball as two distinct strands, my approach endeavors to complicate our understanding of racialization, transnational history, and diaspora by focusing on their participation in this circuit where their professional aspirations overlapped and intersected. Specifically, as a means to discuss the place of Afro-Latinos within baseball history then and now, this article revisits the public outrage at the "snubbing" of Buck O'Neil along with the more muted reaction to Afro-Latino Orestes "Minnie" Miñoso not being elected in a special Hall of Fame election in 2006. The varied reactions provide an opportunity to engage popular narratives about black baseball history, the place of Afro-Latinos within baseball history, and the study of the African diaspora within the Americas. The focus on the treatment of Afro-Latinos within these narratives, I argue, illuminates a selective revision of baseball's racial history, one that minimizes the impact on and contributions of Afro-Latinos and also diminishes the international and transnational dimensions to the struggle to overturn racial segregation in U.S. professional baseball.

Beyond Heritage Tourism: Race and the Politics of African-Diasporic Interactions

Pierre, J. — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 10:58:43 PST

This article engages the scholarly discussion of the booming heritage tourism industry in Ghana to explore the dynamics and politics of historical and contemporary African-diasporic interactions and provoke a critical revision of diaspora theory. I argue that Ghanaian-diaspora interactions in Ghana occur within a broader sociopolitical and cultural terrain that is not limited to heritage tourism. This terrain is configured through Ghana's own historical trajectory and narratives around slavery and race which, in turn, are informed and renegotiated by the country's relationship with diaspora history and community over time. Black diaspora and other African visitors, expatriates, and professionals converge in Ghana's cosmopolitan centers and confront a local landscape that is at once familiar and jarring because it has distinct and similar articulations of race and Blackness. My argument forces an explicit recognition of local processes of racialization in Ghana and calls for an approach to Ghanaian-diasporic interactions that juxtaposes Ghanaian racial subjectivity to that of diaspora bBlacks. By framing the heritage tourism discussion in this way, I hope to demonstrate that, contrary to conventional treatment of Africa within diaspora theory, transnational interactions between Africa and its diaspora are both historical and contemporary and, more importantly, are marked by the integument of race.

Family Matters: Diaspora, Difference, and the Visual Archive

Campt, T. M. — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 10:58:44 PST

When and where do we "see" the emergence of a black German subject? Where do we encounter a visual instantiation of a black subject who is internal to German society and partakes of a relationship to this society that is neither transplanted, transitional, nor transitory, but instead firmly grounded within it? In early-twentieth-century Germany, one important site where this subject emerges is through the medium of photography—specifically, black German family photography. Often considered one of the most mundane forms of photographic imaging, family photos function as a complex site of black European diasporic formation. This essay analyzes a series of images that register blacks as Europeans, yet framed through the lens of national and familial idioms that presents them as undeniable members of German society. In so doing, the article highlights both the tensions of diasporic formation, as well as the coconstitution of racial and gendered subjects therein.

Feeling Diaspora in Harlem and Havana

Guridy, F. — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 10:58:44 PST

This essay examines how diasporic commonalities are experienced in the midst of cultural and linguistic difference by highlighting the making of Afro-diasporic linkages by participants in the Harlem Renaissance and the Afro-Cubanism (afrocubanismo) movement. The essay interprets the traffic between the cultural movements in Harlem and Havana as evidence of diasporization, rather than as mere background information for two distinct national movements. In the 1920s and 1930s, the boundary-crossing activity of African American and Afro-Cuban writers and musicians, such as Langston Hughes and Mario Bauzá, and the reception by their audiences produced new hierarchal and relational understandings of Afro-diasporic cultures in both countries. Cubans celebrated Hughes as a representative of the most advanced sector of the global "colored race." At the same time, Hughes played a decisive role in the construction of Afro-Cuban culture as more authentically "African." Although these views were suffused with projections, they illustrate some of the ways African-descended writers, musicians, and their audiences in Cuba and the United States articulated a shared diasporic imagination. Moreover, the essay highlights audience reaction to the music and literature produced by the movements and argues that expressions of affect or feelings were powerful ways that Afro-diasporic linkages were established across cultural difference.

Contributors

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:54:12 PST

Killing Time

Ralph, M. — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:54:12 PST

This article explores a key trope of economic stagnation and chronic joblessness in postcolonial Senegal: the image of "lazy" young men in the public sphere. This civic and moral discourse is critical of young men who allegedly drink tea "all day." But this attitude elides the long history of youth protest against injustice, and excuses a state that has displaced the most strident critics of Senegalese neoliberalism by bribing them with overseas scholarships and government positions. This suggests that what some see as political and economic inactivity is manufactured through state-sponsored encadrement: techniques of trapping, quartering, and containing youth.

Light Reading: Public Utility, Urban Fiction, and Human Rights

Rubenstein, M. D. — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:54:12 PST

This essay argues that the public utility, particularly electricity supply, signifies powerfully as a form of social recognition, a basic human right, and a model of civic inclusion and citizenship in the modern and postcolonial Bildungsroman. James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and centrally, Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco all connect with one another through a preoccupation with electricity as an akasic medium for the creation of urban imagined communities. The essay further deals with public utilities as a terrain of political struggle from the megacities of the global south (what Mike Davis calls the "planet of slums") to the banlieues of Paris. That struggle is embodied in the emergent practice of parkour, whose expressions this essay analyzes via their popular dissemination in films such as Distrcit B13 and Casino Royale.

Strange Bedfellows: Black Feminism and Antipornography Feminism

Nash, J. C. — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:54:12 PST

Saartjie Baartman's story has become central to black feminist theory and politics, serving as the primary analytic vehicle for explaining the violence that the dominant visual field inflicts on black female bodies. The re-telling of Baartman's story has also provided black feminists with tools for grappling with racialized pornography, which is thought to re-enact Baartman's violent exhibition by rendering black women objects for white male spectators' consumption. This article argues that the constant invocation of Baartman's story has allowed an anti-pornography formation to flourish within black feminism, masked as racial progressivism. Ultimately, this strain of anti-pornography politics has promoted a black feminist sexual conservatism which systematically ignores questions of black women's pleasure, sexual agency, and desires, and has generated a normative – rather than analytical – engagement with racialized-sexualized imagery. In place of normative readings of racialized pornography, this paper offers a new reading practice – racial iconography – which examines the ways that pornography mobilizes race in particular social moments, under particular technological conditions, to produce a historically contingent set of racialized meanings, pleasures, and profits.

"Word?"

Peskine, A. — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:54:12 PST

Activisms and Epistemologies: Problems for Transnationalisms

Briggs, L. — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:54:12 PST

This article argues for a different academic practice in relation to social movements, asking scholars to be more deliberate about acknowledging the specifically intellectual contributions of activisms. It notes that much of the new theoretical work in the United States on neoliberalism neglects the strong critiques of neoliberalism emerging out of the Central American left in the late eighties and early nineties, as well as the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico beginning in 1994.

"What Do Children Learn at School?": Necropedagogy and the Future of the Dead Child

Pellegrini, A. — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:54:12 PST

This essay moves to investigate the co-constitution of "the child" and "the secular." Twins of modernity, "the child" and "the secular" underwrite moral claims about progress, the universal human, and the ordering of time itself. These moral claims are carried forward by dominant narratives of secularism and European Enlightenment.

This dominant story aligns secularism with universalism, reason, progress, freedom, and peace "versus" an irrational and atavistic religion. Though narrated as a universal project, secularism, in its dominant form, remains tied to a particular religion, Christianity, and a particular history of origins in Enlightenment Europe. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini have termed this dominant formation "Christian secularism." How does "the child" come to function in the gap between "the religious" and "the secular"?

This essay pursues these connections via a close analysis of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's February 2008 proposed educational initiative to teach the meaning of the Holocaust to every French fifth grader. Sarkozy calls upon the specter of dead Jewish child-victims in order to produce a supposedly universal social body in the present and for the future. This unexpected lamination of pedagogy and necrophilia reveals that the survival of the body politic happens not by keeping death at bay but by soliciting it. As site of this solicitation, the Christian secular child uneasily straddles past and future, death and life. Lee Edelman may be right that "the child" summons the fantasy of a future. Nevertheless, we must critically supplement his analysis by asking, which child, whose fantasized future?