Pub Date : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/08992363-8917220
Éléonore Rimbault
Before the 1990s, there were many child performers in India's circus companies. They joined the circus as trainees and received a salary for their performance. After their activity was problematized as child labor and made illegal, they progressively disappeared from circus companies. Drawing from ethnographic materials, this article reflects on the memories of former circus children who have now become adults. The author argues that taking the interlocutors’ memories as a point of departure for the study of childhood helps circumvent some moral and methodological issues with this category. Childhood memories illuminate an individual's assessment of their own experience, regardless of whether it conforms to widespread normative expectations about childhood; it can also suggest biographical periodizations that are more relevant to a person's life than prevalent age categories. The essay ends with a caveat about the need for a reflexive approach to the context in which childhood memories are shared.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/08992363-8917178
Mingwei Huang
This article tells a story about the unfolding “Chinese Century” in South Africa centered on China Malls, wholesale shopping centers for Chinese goods that have cropped up along Johannesburg's old mining belt since the early 2000s. Based in ethnographic and historical analysis, the essay takes a palimpsestic approach to imagine how Chinese capital enters into a terrain profoundly shaped by race, labor, and migration and is entangled with the afterlives of gold. Chinese migrant traders in South Africa draw on legacies of migrant mine labor and refashion processes that devalue Black labor. Whereas these histories are lost upon Chinese newcomers, African workers experience working for “the Chinese” through the memory of the mines. With the aim of theorizing emergent formations of race and capital in the Chinese Century, the essay threads this new epoch through the history of colonial and racial capitalism of the City of Gold.
{"title":"The Chinese Century and the City of Gold: Rethinking Race and Capitalism","authors":"Mingwei Huang","doi":"10.1215/08992363-8917178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8917178","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article tells a story about the unfolding “Chinese Century” in South Africa centered on China Malls, wholesale shopping centers for Chinese goods that have cropped up along Johannesburg's old mining belt since the early 2000s. Based in ethnographic and historical analysis, the essay takes a palimpsestic approach to imagine how Chinese capital enters into a terrain profoundly shaped by race, labor, and migration and is entangled with the afterlives of gold. Chinese migrant traders in South Africa draw on legacies of migrant mine labor and refashion processes that devalue Black labor. Whereas these histories are lost upon Chinese newcomers, African workers experience working for “the Chinese” through the memory of the mines. With the aim of theorizing emergent formations of race and capital in the Chinese Century, the essay threads this new epoch through the history of colonial and racial capitalism of the City of Gold.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48662086","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 : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1215/08992363-8742208
E. Apter
This article summarizes a broader project on “just translation” that attempts to rethink translation in the framework of Western philosophies of right, Sittlichkeit (ethical norms, customs, practices), and theories of justice (Plato, Hegel, Rawls), as well as of recent work on “postcolonial justice” that negotiates the collision between the drive toward universality and the normative, on the one hand, and the drive toward difference, on the other. Devising a critical approach that “does justice” to the nuances of words associated with adjudication in all the world's languages is the larger aspiration. But given practical limitations, this means scaling down to select terms and cases that signal translational injustice under conditions of violence and legal disputation. These conditions include gender violence and sexual safety across languages, the untranslatability of terms like refugee and migrant, the fraught vocabulary of settlement and unsettlement (involving the translation of terms like indigeneity, occupation, detention zone, and camp), shibboleth tests and the foreclosure of the right to residency (which amounts to the passporting of speech), and the multilingual scripts of biopolitical surveillance and patrol relied on in forcible-entry raids, stop and frisk, and executions of orders to “report and deport.”
{"title":"What Is Just Translation?","authors":"E. Apter","doi":"10.1215/08992363-8742208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8742208","url":null,"abstract":"This article summarizes a broader project on “just translation” that attempts to rethink translation in the framework of Western philosophies of right, Sittlichkeit (ethical norms, customs, practices), and theories of justice (Plato, Hegel, Rawls), as well as of recent work on “postcolonial justice” that negotiates the collision between the drive toward universality and the normative, on the one hand, and the drive toward difference, on the other. Devising a critical approach that “does justice” to the nuances of words associated with adjudication in all the world's languages is the larger aspiration. But given practical limitations, this means scaling down to select terms and cases that signal translational injustice under conditions of violence and legal disputation. These conditions include gender violence and sexual safety across languages, the untranslatability of terms like refugee and migrant, the fraught vocabulary of settlement and unsettlement (involving the translation of terms like indigeneity, occupation, detention zone, and camp), shibboleth tests and the foreclosure of the right to residency (which amounts to the passporting of speech), and the multilingual scripts of biopolitical surveillance and patrol relied on in forcible-entry raids, stop and frisk, and executions of orders to “report and deport.”","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":"33 1","pages":"89-111"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65961344","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 : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1215/08992363-8742160
T. B. Hansen
Theories of sovereignty in the twentieth century are generally based on a teleological “out-of-Europe” narrative where the modern, centralized nation-state form gradually spread across the world to be the foundation of the international order. In this article, the author reflects on how the conceptualization of sovereignty may change if one begins a global account of modern sovereignty not from the heart of Western Europe but from the complex arrangements of “distributed sovereignty” that emerged in the Indian Ocean and other colonized territories from the eighteenth century onward. These arrangements were organized as multiple layers of dependency and provisional domination, captured well by Eric Beverley's term minor sovereignty. Thinking through sovereignty in a minor key allows us to see sovereignty less as a foundation of states and societies and more as a performative category, emerging in a dialectic between promises of order, prosperity, and law, and the realities of violent domination and occupation.
{"title":"Sovereignty in a Minor Key","authors":"T. B. Hansen","doi":"10.1215/08992363-8742160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8742160","url":null,"abstract":"Theories of sovereignty in the twentieth century are generally based on a teleological “out-of-Europe” narrative where the modern, centralized nation-state form gradually spread across the world to be the foundation of the international order. In this article, the author reflects on how the conceptualization of sovereignty may change if one begins a global account of modern sovereignty not from the heart of Western Europe but from the complex arrangements of “distributed sovereignty” that emerged in the Indian Ocean and other colonized territories from the eighteenth century onward. These arrangements were organized as multiple layers of dependency and provisional domination, captured well by Eric Beverley's term minor sovereignty. Thinking through sovereignty in a minor key allows us to see sovereignty less as a foundation of states and societies and more as a performative category, emerging in a dialectic between promises of order, prosperity, and law, and the realities of violent domination and occupation.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":"33 1","pages":"41-61"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65961254","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 : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1215/08992363-8742136
Achille Mbembe
As the new century unfolds, humans are increasingly surrounded by multiple and expanding wave fronts of calculation. What remains of the human subject in an age when instrumental reason is carried out by and through information machines and technologies of calculation? Who will set the boundary that distinguishes between the calculable and the incalculable? In the double-edged conditions of our times, what will it take to turn instruments of calculation into instruments of liberation?
{"title":"Futures of Life and Futures of Reason","authors":"Achille Mbembe","doi":"10.1215/08992363-8742136","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8742136","url":null,"abstract":"As the new century unfolds, humans are increasingly surrounded by multiple and expanding wave fronts of calculation. What remains of the human subject in an age when instrumental reason is carried out by and through information machines and technologies of calculation? Who will set the boundary that distinguishes between the calculable and the incalculable? In the double-edged conditions of our times, what will it take to turn instruments of calculation into instruments of liberation?","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":"33 1","pages":"11-33"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65961213","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 : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1215/08992363-8742148
Erica Robles-Anderson
This article is a response to Achille Mbembe's “Futures of Life and Futures of Reason,” which is featured in the same issue of Public Culture. The article builds on Mbembe's concept of “wave fronts of calculation” as a means of amplifying a language for political possibilities in a moment when calculability and incalculability determine the boundaries between the biological, social, and technical.
{"title":"“Wave Fronts of Calculation”","authors":"Erica Robles-Anderson","doi":"10.1215/08992363-8742148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8742148","url":null,"abstract":"This article is a response to Achille Mbembe's “Futures of Life and Futures of Reason,” which is featured in the same issue of Public Culture. The article builds on Mbembe's concept of “wave fronts of calculation” as a means of amplifying a language for political possibilities in a moment when calculability and incalculability determine the boundaries between the biological, social, and technical.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":"33 1","pages":"35-40"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65961239","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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