Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9771077
Inderpal Grewal, Dipin Kaur, S. Sabherwal
This article examines the shifting nature of patriarchy and gender among Sikhs in Indian Punjab through the 1980s and into the 1990s in relation to the Indian state's counterinsurgent policies and practices. The authors’ research reveals that Sikh masculinities were altered during its separatist insurgency as the patriarchal state and communities both relied on violence for their own ends. Specifically, the article argues that the regimes of precolonial and colonial militarism, which constructed hegemonic notions of Sikh masculinity in service to the colonial and postcolonial state, were altered in this period, and that a dominant caste-based warrior masculinity came to be fractured to include a more securitized version. The authors see the targeting of Sikhs as part of a broader process of postcolonial nation making through militarism and security that alters the nature of its patriarchy. The article draws from interviews and fieldwork in Punjab, textual analysis of primary sources, human rights reports, and news articles to reveal the shifting nature of gender and patriarchy in the transnational security state.
{"title":"The Security State and Securitizing Patriarchies in Postcolonial India","authors":"Inderpal Grewal, Dipin Kaur, S. Sabherwal","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9771077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9771077","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the shifting nature of patriarchy and gender among Sikhs in Indian Punjab through the 1980s and into the 1990s in relation to the Indian state's counterinsurgent policies and practices. The authors’ research reveals that Sikh masculinities were altered during its separatist insurgency as the patriarchal state and communities both relied on violence for their own ends. Specifically, the article argues that the regimes of precolonial and colonial militarism, which constructed hegemonic notions of Sikh masculinity in service to the colonial and postcolonial state, were altered in this period, and that a dominant caste-based warrior masculinity came to be fractured to include a more securitized version. The authors see the targeting of Sikhs as part of a broader process of postcolonial nation making through militarism and security that alters the nature of its patriarchy. The article draws from interviews and fieldwork in Punjab, textual analysis of primary sources, human rights reports, and news articles to reveal the shifting nature of gender and patriarchy in the transnational security state.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42271268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9771091
Negar Razavi
In recent years, a growing number of experts claiming personal and familial ties to the Middle East have joined elite foreign policy think tanks in Washington, DC, in an effort to shape US policy debates on this complex region. Based on more than two years of ethnographic research within DC, this study contends that such diasporic experts have come to play a specialized role for US empire. Specifically, they serve as “multiplicitous diplomats” who use their connections to the region to navigate and translate the interests of competing political elites in Washington by strategically circulating ideas, people, and funding to and from the Middle East. Such observations reveal the extent to which the US empire functions in practice as a transnationally contested site of power. Furthermore, this study demonstrates how the “Middle East” operates within and enacts influence over the United States, as these diasporic experts bring the voices, anxieties, and power of entities in the region and its many diasporas into elite US policy debates.
{"title":"Navigating the “Middle East” in Washington","authors":"Negar Razavi","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9771091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9771091","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In recent years, a growing number of experts claiming personal and familial ties to the Middle East have joined elite foreign policy think tanks in Washington, DC, in an effort to shape US policy debates on this complex region. Based on more than two years of ethnographic research within DC, this study contends that such diasporic experts have come to play a specialized role for US empire. Specifically, they serve as “multiplicitous diplomats” who use their connections to the region to navigate and translate the interests of competing political elites in Washington by strategically circulating ideas, people, and funding to and from the Middle East. Such observations reveal the extent to which the US empire functions in practice as a transnationally contested site of power. Furthermore, this study demonstrates how the “Middle East” operates within and enacts influence over the United States, as these diasporic experts bring the voices, anxieties, and power of entities in the region and its many diasporas into elite US policy debates.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47346373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9771035
Deborah A. Thomas
This essay probes the project of security (defined as the protection of whiteness, class hierarchy, and heteropatriarchy) in relation to the desire for safety (glossed as “having somebody”). In probing this relation within a context in which police violence and extrajudicial killing are not typically seen as part of the global phenomenon of anti-Black racism, it seeks to contribute to a conversation in which raciality is not tethered to physicality, but instead is grounded in both historical-ideological and onto-epistemological phenomena that produce whiteness as the apex of humanity in the modern West. The essay explores the relation between security and safety through the rubric of diaspora in two senses—first as a phenomenon of Western modernity via plantation-based New World slavery, which catalyzed the development of enduring categories of (non)personhood and their elaboration into hierarchies of humanity; and second as a phenomenon of migration and the constitution of transnational sociocultural spheres. Diaspora, thus, generates forms of pan-Africanism and Black consciousness as much as it produces agendas related to transnational governance and global security infrastructures. The essay argues that to more complexly understand security from the South, these two notions of diaspora must be held in productive tension. In this way, security is revealed as a racializing project grounded in coloniality, even within majority Black spaces. The essay concludes by illuminating other terrains on which to build accountability and safety.
{"title":"Can Black Lives Matter in a Black Country?","authors":"Deborah A. Thomas","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9771035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9771035","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay probes the project of security (defined as the protection of whiteness, class hierarchy, and heteropatriarchy) in relation to the desire for safety (glossed as “having somebody”). In probing this relation within a context in which police violence and extrajudicial killing are not typically seen as part of the global phenomenon of anti-Black racism, it seeks to contribute to a conversation in which raciality is not tethered to physicality, but instead is grounded in both historical-ideological and onto-epistemological phenomena that produce whiteness as the apex of humanity in the modern West. The essay explores the relation between security and safety through the rubric of diaspora in two senses—first as a phenomenon of Western modernity via plantation-based New World slavery, which catalyzed the development of enduring categories of (non)personhood and their elaboration into hierarchies of humanity; and second as a phenomenon of migration and the constitution of transnational sociocultural spheres. Diaspora, thus, generates forms of pan-Africanism and Black consciousness as much as it produces agendas related to transnational governance and global security infrastructures. The essay argues that to more complexly understand security from the South, these two notions of diaspora must be held in productive tension. In this way, security is revealed as a racializing project grounded in coloniality, even within majority Black spaces. The essay concludes by illuminating other terrains on which to build accountability and safety.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44967911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9631117
Renyi Hong
This article examines the early telecommuting discourse of the 1980s and 1990s, understanding it as a pedagogical context for white plasticity, an ecological project in which racial privilege is protected through the transformation of homes and inhabitants. Rationalized initially as a crisis of adjustment, pedagogies of telecommuting were disseminated largely to upper-middle-class white professionals to build a “telecommuting personality,” a subjectivity that was also meant to buffer them from the growing precarious nature of jobs. Not content to focus simply on work, however, telecommuting gurus took occasion to urge the enhancement of relationships between partners, families, and communities. The home office was core to this imaginary. Convertible, modular, ergonomic home offices that can be changed to suit the needs of the home's many inhabitants were said to yield more integrated and rounded personalities that would radiate outward, creating emotionally mature children and stronger community bonds. Emerging at a moment when “telecommuting” condensed the political stakes of digital labor, this strand of discourse reveals how working from home was appropriated to ensure the protection of white plasticity—the racialized capability of adaptation that was to be passed as inheritance from parents to progeny.
{"title":"Telecommuting Pedagogies","authors":"Renyi Hong","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9631117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9631117","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the early telecommuting discourse of the 1980s and 1990s, understanding it as a pedagogical context for white plasticity, an ecological project in which racial privilege is protected through the transformation of homes and inhabitants. Rationalized initially as a crisis of adjustment, pedagogies of telecommuting were disseminated largely to upper-middle-class white professionals to build a “telecommuting personality,” a subjectivity that was also meant to buffer them from the growing precarious nature of jobs. Not content to focus simply on work, however, telecommuting gurus took occasion to urge the enhancement of relationships between partners, families, and communities. The home office was core to this imaginary. Convertible, modular, ergonomic home offices that can be changed to suit the needs of the home's many inhabitants were said to yield more integrated and rounded personalities that would radiate outward, creating emotionally mature children and stronger community bonds. Emerging at a moment when “telecommuting” condensed the political stakes of digital labor, this strand of discourse reveals how working from home was appropriated to ensure the protection of white plasticity—the racialized capability of adaptation that was to be passed as inheritance from parents to progeny.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41744195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9631145
J. Sánchez Cruz
This article proposes that the undocumented as a valence of difference expands on queer studies’ turn to a subjectless critique and how debility and negativity become part of the discussion of an objectless critique. In examining Alan Pelaez Lopez's “sick in ‘america,’” Julio Salgado's oeuvre, and Yosimar Reyes's #UndocuJoy, it is argued that undocumented queer subjects living under a landscape of debility and a climate of negative affect diagnose contemporary tactics of debility deployed as frames of illegality, securitization, and biopoliticization, and simultaneously reflect how the production of negative affect leads to feelings of nonbelonging, of being off. This article goes on to suggest that debility is conjoined to negative affect, arguing that in spite a continual state of debility and a dispersion of negativity, the undocumented thrive in the practices of the everyday, presented here as another lens of thinking mobility, a recalibrator to the debility/capacity/(dis)ability imaginary.
{"title":"Debility, Negative Affect, Mobility","authors":"J. Sánchez Cruz","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9631145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9631145","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article proposes that the undocumented as a valence of difference expands on queer studies’ turn to a subjectless critique and how debility and negativity become part of the discussion of an objectless critique. In examining Alan Pelaez Lopez's “sick in ‘america,’” Julio Salgado's oeuvre, and Yosimar Reyes's #UndocuJoy, it is argued that undocumented queer subjects living under a landscape of debility and a climate of negative affect diagnose contemporary tactics of debility deployed as frames of illegality, securitization, and biopoliticization, and simultaneously reflect how the production of negative affect leads to feelings of nonbelonging, of being off. This article goes on to suggest that debility is conjoined to negative affect, arguing that in spite a continual state of debility and a dispersion of negativity, the undocumented thrive in the practices of the everyday, presented here as another lens of thinking mobility, a recalibrator to the debility/capacity/(dis)ability imaginary.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46577189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9631103
J. Nash
This article develops the idea of slow loss as a relationship to time, space, and feeling that Black feminist theory has described in distinctive ways, helping readers to consider both Black female subjectivity and the stakes of Black feminist theory anew. This article travels with the central and undertheorized place of slow loss in the Black feminist theoretical archive at least in part because of a desire to emphasize Black feminist theory's long-standing investment in understanding and describing the subject position of Black woman.
{"title":"Slow Loss","authors":"J. Nash","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9631103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9631103","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article develops the idea of slow loss as a relationship to time, space, and feeling that Black feminist theory has described in distinctive ways, helping readers to consider both Black female subjectivity and the stakes of Black feminist theory anew. This article travels with the central and undertheorized place of slow loss in the Black feminist theoretical archive at least in part because of a desire to emphasize Black feminist theory's long-standing investment in understanding and describing the subject position of Black woman.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47273429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article deals with mostly negative ideological images of refugees, as they erupted in political graffiti and street art (stickers, stencils, various inscriptions) in Slovenia during the so-called refugee crisis from the fall of 2015 on. Its basic questions are three: How is the ideological process of othering the refugees constructed in political graffiti? How does this relate to dominant discourses and practices in Slovenian society (from official politics to mass media)? What were the reactions against such sprayed hate speech (so pro-refugee graffiti)? The process of othering progresses in two steps: refugees are first imagined as an unified mass that is radically different from imaginary notions of “Slovenianism” and “Europeanism,” which then serves as the basis for differentiation between more and less acceptable of them. On these grounds, four different ideological images are created: a refugee as a criminal, a refugee as an uninvited visitor, a refugee as a powerless victim, and a refugee as a global proletarian. About 150 original photos of anti- and pro-refugee graffiti, mostly from Slovenia (but for comparative reasons also from the whole region), are analyzed using the semiotic method as developed by its classics and finally interpreted with Theodor Adorno and Alexander Mitscherlich's concepts of “displacement of hatred” and Seymour Martin Lipset's concept of “extremism of the center.”
{"title":"“New Others”","authors":"M. Velikonja","doi":"10.2307/j.ctt1mtz7sv.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1mtz7sv.6","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article deals with mostly negative ideological images of refugees, as they erupted in political graffiti and street art (stickers, stencils, various inscriptions) in Slovenia during the so-called refugee crisis from the fall of 2015 on. Its basic questions are three: How is the ideological process of othering the refugees constructed in political graffiti? How does this relate to dominant discourses and practices in Slovenian society (from official politics to mass media)? What were the reactions against such sprayed hate speech (so pro-refugee graffiti)? The process of othering progresses in two steps: refugees are first imagined as an unified mass that is radically different from imaginary notions of “Slovenianism” and “Europeanism,” which then serves as the basis for differentiation between more and less acceptable of them. On these grounds, four different ideological images are created: a refugee as a criminal, a refugee as an uninvited visitor, a refugee as a powerless victim, and a refugee as a global proletarian. About 150 original photos of anti- and pro-refugee graffiti, mostly from Slovenia (but for comparative reasons also from the whole region), are analyzed using the semiotic method as developed by its classics and finally interpreted with Theodor Adorno and Alexander Mitscherlich's concepts of “displacement of hatred” and Seymour Martin Lipset's concept of “extremism of the center.”","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41569550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9495117
M. Armiero
It has often been said that the problem with climate change is its invisibility. People do not mobilize about climate change because they cannot see it; even less can they see CO2 emissions—that is, the most relevant material element causing climate alternations. Although I would argue that for some people climate change is more visible than for others, it remains a global environmental problem not easily felt on the ground. On the other hand, waste appears to be an incumbent presence, almost impossible to avoid; it also seems more localized than global climate change. People mobilize around waste because it stands in front of their eyes and noses. This is how the story has been told so many times. This article instead tells another story, one in which climate activism is rooted in struggles against waste contamination. In Naples, Italy, twenty years of mobilization against toxicity—which, by the way, is much less visible and much more harmful than the urban garbage in the streets—has generated an epistemic community trained to understand the invisible connections linking local problems, global issues, and socioenvironmental inequalities. Their original elaboration of biocide as the theoretical framework explaining the production of toxic communities provided them with an equally original framework to understand climate change and its unequal impacts on people and ecosystems. In moving between waste and climate, local and global, those epistemic communities have not only changed the ways in which climate activism has been conceived but have also changed themselves.
{"title":"From Waste to Climate","authors":"M. Armiero","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9495117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9495117","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 It has often been said that the problem with climate change is its invisibility. People do not mobilize about climate change because they cannot see it; even less can they see CO2 emissions—that is, the most relevant material element causing climate alternations. Although I would argue that for some people climate change is more visible than for others, it remains a global environmental problem not easily felt on the ground. On the other hand, waste appears to be an incumbent presence, almost impossible to avoid; it also seems more localized than global climate change. People mobilize around waste because it stands in front of their eyes and noses. This is how the story has been told so many times. This article instead tells another story, one in which climate activism is rooted in struggles against waste contamination. In Naples, Italy, twenty years of mobilization against toxicity—which, by the way, is much less visible and much more harmful than the urban garbage in the streets—has generated an epistemic community trained to understand the invisible connections linking local problems, global issues, and socioenvironmental inequalities. Their original elaboration of biocide as the theoretical framework explaining the production of toxic communities provided them with an equally original framework to understand climate change and its unequal impacts on people and ecosystems. In moving between waste and climate, local and global, those epistemic communities have not only changed the ways in which climate activism has been conceived but have also changed themselves.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47402908","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9495174
M. Armiero, Salvatore Paolo De Rosa
This interview focuses on a spectrum of urgent challenges facing marginalized human and other-than-human communities, including the intersecting crises of global anthropogenic climate disruption and state and institutional racist violence. We discuss and consider the opportunities, limits, and contradictions of pursuing transformative, intersectional political change and scholarship through efforts to bridge community activism and academic labor. We also critically engage questions concerning the role of the state in the context of racial capitalism and the production of environmental and climate injustice, and how grassroots movements have responded to these concerns. Specific movement formations included in this discussion include the Central Coast Climate Justice Network of California, the Movement for Black Lives/Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, and multispecies abolition democracy. The importance of radical, multi-issue politics and cross-movement solidarities is also given serious attention.
{"title":"Climate Insurgency between Academia and Activism","authors":"M. Armiero, Salvatore Paolo De Rosa","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9495174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9495174","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This interview focuses on a spectrum of urgent challenges facing marginalized human and other-than-human communities, including the intersecting crises of global anthropogenic climate disruption and state and institutional racist violence. We discuss and consider the opportunities, limits, and contradictions of pursuing transformative, intersectional political change and scholarship through efforts to bridge community activism and academic labor. We also critically engage questions concerning the role of the state in the context of racial capitalism and the production of environmental and climate injustice, and how grassroots movements have responded to these concerns. Specific movement formations included in this discussion include the Central Coast Climate Justice Network of California, the Movement for Black Lives/Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, and multispecies abolition democracy. The importance of radical, multi-issue politics and cross-movement solidarities is also given serious attention.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45975713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9495146
Sinan Erensü, Barış İne, Yaşar Adnan Adanalı
Ever since the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul in the summer 2013, defending and reclaiming the city parks, market gardens, public squares, and urban forests has become a mainstream act of defiance and a symbolic rejection of an intensifying authoritarianism, neoliberal urbanism, and exclusionary planning practices. Growing interest in the mobilizing capacity of the emerging urban-environmental imaginary, however, has not remained exclusive to the opposition. Rather than dismissing the critique entirely, the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) has most recently embraced the politics of urban greenery and strived to mold it in its own image. This article focuses on the contentious politics of urban greenery in Istanbul and examines how the city's green public spaces have come to proxy a larger struggle over the future of Turkey. By discussing the possibilities, challenges, and limits of the politics of urban greenery, this article examines how the government has attempted to absorb an emerging urban-environmental objection into its fold. To do so, the article traces the genealogy of Istanbul's park politics in the last decade and most specifically focuses on the latest iteration of the urban greenery frenzy: the Gardens of the Nation. By studying how this nationwide urban greenery drive has been designed, promoted, discussed, inaugurated, and used, this article provides an account for the critical role green aesthetics play in conjuring up alternative environmental imaginaries and communities against the backdrop of a populist authoritarian climate.
{"title":"From the Occupied Parks to the Gardens of the Nation","authors":"Sinan Erensü, Barış İne, Yaşar Adnan Adanalı","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9495146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9495146","url":null,"abstract":"Ever since the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul in the summer 2013, defending and reclaiming the city parks, market gardens, public squares, and urban forests has become a mainstream act of defiance and a symbolic rejection of an intensifying authoritarianism, neoliberal urbanism, and exclusionary planning practices. Growing interest in the mobilizing capacity of the emerging urban-environmental imaginary, however, has not remained exclusive to the opposition. Rather than dismissing the critique entirely, the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) has most recently embraced the politics of urban greenery and strived to mold it in its own image. This article focuses on the contentious politics of urban greenery in Istanbul and examines how the city's green public spaces have come to proxy a larger struggle over the future of Turkey. By discussing the possibilities, challenges, and limits of the politics of urban greenery, this article examines how the government has attempted to absorb an emerging urban-environmental objection into its fold. To do so, the article traces the genealogy of Istanbul's park politics in the last decade and most specifically focuses on the latest iteration of the urban greenery frenzy: the Gardens of the Nation. By studying how this nationwide urban greenery drive has been designed, promoted, discussed, inaugurated, and used, this article provides an account for the critical role green aesthetics play in conjuring up alternative environmental imaginaries and communities against the backdrop of a populist authoritarian climate.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49184543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：