Pub Date : 2023-05-05DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10575845
Danny Hoffman
March 5, 2018, was the final rally day for the Sierra Leone People's Party prior to that country's national elections. The SLPP held its last day of public demonstrations in Bo, the country's second largest city and primary urban center in the Mende-dominant southeast. As was true of other political parties in other cities and other elections in Sierra Leone's turbulent past, violence played a key role in structuring rally day events and participants’ experiences of them. And yet this violence has not always been the same. In 2018 the beating of a young man by a rally crowd was in some ways unexceptional, both in Sierra Leonean politics and in the postcolonial response to urban crime. And yet it marked a subtle shift in both Sierra Leonean electoral politics and in the way such vigilante justice in African cities is interpreted. Contrasting the ethnographic elements of this single day with other representations of crowd violence in West Africa, the article explores an urban landscape that complicates the distinction between political and nonpolitical violence and between the presence and absence of the postcolonial state.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-05DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10575831
K. Easterling
In the wake of civil rights struggles, a rural area in Southwest Georgia became a global stage for rehearsing some of the world's most provocative experiments with community and land tenure. An interracial intentional community, a Nation of Islam farm, the first community land trust, and a wave of cooperative experiments moving through the South in the late 1960s and 1970s found fertile ground around Albany, Georgia. Reflecting solidarity between the civil rights, Pan-African, Nonaligned, and Tricontinental movements, associations with prominent international activists also linked this area in the US South to decolonizing efforts in the Global South just prior to a neoliberal turn. Within these networks, victims of white supremacy modeled approaches to survival that are now broadly relevant to today's social and climate justice work. The story offers spatial tools and surprising histories to ground and energize a fresh wave of activism that looks to collective forms of urban and rural landholding to address racism, whiteness, inequality, reparations, and climate change.
{"title":"Trust Land","authors":"K. Easterling","doi":"10.1215/08992363-10575831","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10575831","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In the wake of civil rights struggles, a rural area in Southwest Georgia became a global stage for rehearsing some of the world's most provocative experiments with community and land tenure. An interracial intentional community, a Nation of Islam farm, the first community land trust, and a wave of cooperative experiments moving through the South in the late 1960s and 1970s found fertile ground around Albany, Georgia. Reflecting solidarity between the civil rights, Pan-African, Nonaligned, and Tricontinental movements, associations with prominent international activists also linked this area in the US South to decolonizing efforts in the Global South just prior to a neoliberal turn. Within these networks, victims of white supremacy modeled approaches to survival that are now broadly relevant to today's social and climate justice work. The story offers spatial tools and surprising histories to ground and energize a fresh wave of activism that looks to collective forms of urban and rural landholding to address racism, whiteness, inequality, reparations, and climate change.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41831855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-29DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10202374
Suraj Yengde
This article theorizes the gravitas of historical archive through a budding Dalit-Black studies. It looks at intersections of race and caste projects within the African American public sphere through an anchoring lens of concern for Dalits in India. The Black universalist vision exercised through media encompassed Dalit ontology and body politic as queering. Through “sibling solidarity,” it expanded through the conceptual identification of similar conditions as opposed to an emphasis on sameness or likeliness to build solidarity. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, untouchability and colonialism were two prisms through which the Black public sphere reorganized its internationalism, often drawing on race-caste analogies to describe the complicated patterns of post-slavery society and to imaginatively formulate potential communities across diverse geographies. The foremost Dalit figure B. R. Ambedkar was an important reference point. His moves and strategies were reported in the African American press and intellectuals and leaders drew inspiration from his works. It is through Ambedkar that archives of Dalit-Black struggles were built, and in recent years Ambedkar has resurfaced as part of a growing interest in challenging dominant narratives of solidarity between the Black elite and Indian dominant castes. By informing contemporary discourses of race and caste with their more particular histories, we might build new social imaginaries founded not on an identification as sameness but rather through a feeling of relation/relatedness with another.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-29DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10202430
Munira Khayyat
In South Lebanon, like other places across the Global South, war is experienced as an enduring condition that makes worlds even as it destroys them—worlds that continue to be lively, if also deadly. What theory of war might be adequate to these worlds? This essay shifts the terrain and the terms in which war is grasped by sourcing a theory of war from a resistantly inhabited battlefield of the Global South. Placing war alongside other more normalized sites of modern violence this essay seeks to decolonize theories of war and to bring to light vitalizing ecologies of practice that underwrite resistant life in deadly quarters.
{"title":"War, from the South","authors":"Munira Khayyat","doi":"10.1215/08992363-10202430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10202430","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In South Lebanon, like other places across the Global South, war is experienced as an enduring condition that makes worlds even as it destroys them—worlds that continue to be lively, if also deadly. What theory of war might be adequate to these worlds? This essay shifts the terrain and the terms in which war is grasped by sourcing a theory of war from a resistantly inhabited battlefield of the Global South. Placing war alongside other more normalized sites of modern violence this essay seeks to decolonize theories of war and to bring to light vitalizing ecologies of practice that underwrite resistant life in deadly quarters.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41265593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-29DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10202402
M. Malmström
This article explores the ambiguity of familiar materialities and the relationships between material and affective experiences. Those flows and interactions are crucial sites for interrogating social meanings, valences, and effects of suspicion. It explores how politically active Cairenes navigate suspicious spaces, bodies, and nonliving things in the cityscape and how materiality shapes and is shaped by the emotional-aesthetic responses of individuals and groups to the stimuli it provides. In this specific context, the distinct form of what I call agential ambivalence, where feelings of control apply to tactics for managing surveillance and to reckless risk-taking are key. Agential ambivalence is required to “stay alive” in Cairo. The activists I know still take extreme risks and sometimes even make seemingly careless decisions. Ambivalence in face of suspicion is a given, but it takes specific shapes and dynamics.
{"title":"Navigating the Ocean of Suspicion","authors":"M. Malmström","doi":"10.1215/08992363-10202402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10202402","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explores the ambiguity of familiar materialities and the relationships between material and affective experiences. Those flows and interactions are crucial sites for interrogating social meanings, valences, and effects of suspicion. It explores how politically active Cairenes navigate suspicious spaces, bodies, and nonliving things in the cityscape and how materiality shapes and is shaped by the emotional-aesthetic responses of individuals and groups to the stimuli it provides. In this specific context, the distinct form of what I call agential ambivalence, where feelings of control apply to tactics for managing surveillance and to reckless risk-taking are key. Agential ambivalence is required to “stay alive” in Cairo. The activists I know still take extreme risks and sometimes even make seemingly careless decisions. Ambivalence in face of suspicion is a given, but it takes specific shapes and dynamics.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46583034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-29DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10202444
Lauren Berlant, Moishe Postone, and Michael Silverstein were colleagues at the University of Chicago for over thirty years. Postone was one of the leading Marxist thinkers in the world; Silverstein was the leading linguistic anthropologist of his generation; and Berlant was the most influential literary theorist of her generation. This article examines whether Marxism, semiotic linguistics, and literary studies are compatible. However, we will have to go back to the “linguistic turn” and revisit some older debates about the role of rhetoric. But a revitalized rhetoric of temporality will answer the questions that Benedict Anderson raised almost forty years ago: How do the temporalities of capital and narration interact to create new social affects and emotions? What would a Marxist approach to a semiotic linguistics of affect and subjectivity look like?
{"title":"Time and the Rhetoric of Capital","authors":"","doi":"10.1215/08992363-10202444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10202444","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Lauren Berlant, Moishe Postone, and Michael Silverstein were colleagues at the University of Chicago for over thirty years. Postone was one of the leading Marxist thinkers in the world; Silverstein was the leading linguistic anthropologist of his generation; and Berlant was the most influential literary theorist of her generation. This article examines whether Marxism, semiotic linguistics, and literary studies are compatible. However, we will have to go back to the “linguistic turn” and revisit some older debates about the role of rhetoric. But a revitalized rhetoric of temporality will answer the questions that Benedict Anderson raised almost forty years ago: How do the temporalities of capital and narration interact to create new social affects and emotions? What would a Marxist approach to a semiotic linguistics of affect and subjectivity look like?","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48272111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-29DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10202360
Guobin Yang, Adetobi Moses
From the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, ordinary people around the world have been documenting their experiences in diverse media forms, giving rise to a public culture of pandemic storytelling. This public culture, however, can be transitory. Personal stories may disappear for many reasons. We call for scholars to help build and sustain this public culture through the work of digital archiving and research, and we emphasize a descriptive imperative, as opposed to theorizing, as the more urgent course of action.
{"title":"Building a Public Culture of Pandemic Storytelling","authors":"Guobin Yang, Adetobi Moses","doi":"10.1215/08992363-10202360","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10202360","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 From the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, ordinary people around the world have been documenting their experiences in diverse media forms, giving rise to a public culture of pandemic storytelling. This public culture, however, can be transitory. Personal stories may disappear for many reasons. We call for scholars to help build and sustain this public culture through the work of digital archiving and research, and we emphasize a descriptive imperative, as opposed to theorizing, as the more urgent course of action.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43417709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-29DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10202416
Elliott Prasse-Freeman
Through digital ethnography of the mass uprising against Myanmar's early-2021 military coup, this article considers appeals to “the international community,” in which activists maneuver the simultaneous potential and peril of global entreaties, deploying a double-move of contradictory thrusts: to continue stoking the possibility of international intervention, activists reiterate demands while intensifying their affective content; conversely, they use anticipated failure of those appeals to “boomerang” them back to local publics—making the international a present-but-effaced addressee, they engage in the jouissance of abandonment, coordinate (potentially violent) tactics, shame their enemies, and engage in political debate on the objectives of their ongoing struggle. By retaining the key mediatory role vis-à-vis Myanmar publics, activists enact an alternative relationship with the international, one that invites intervention but is not dependent on it.
{"title":"Bullets and Boomerangs","authors":"Elliott Prasse-Freeman","doi":"10.1215/08992363-10202416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10202416","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Through digital ethnography of the mass uprising against Myanmar's early-2021 military coup, this article considers appeals to “the international community,” in which activists maneuver the simultaneous potential and peril of global entreaties, deploying a double-move of contradictory thrusts: to continue stoking the possibility of international intervention, activists reiterate demands while intensifying their affective content; conversely, they use anticipated failure of those appeals to “boomerang” them back to local publics—making the international a present-but-effaced addressee, they engage in the jouissance of abandonment, coordinate (potentially violent) tactics, shame their enemies, and engage in political debate on the objectives of their ongoing struggle. By retaining the key mediatory role vis-à-vis Myanmar publics, activists enact an alternative relationship with the international, one that invites intervention but is not dependent on it.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43920323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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