Public Culture current issue

Call for Contributions

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:27 PDT

Editor's Letter

Lomnitz, C. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:27 PDT

Remembering Benjamin from South of the Pyrenees: The Two-Gauge Problem

Valverde, M. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:27 PDT

This essay is a personal reflection on the absence of the Spanish civil war refugees from the cultured public's collective memory of the place where Walter Benjamin died.

Phantom of the Forever War: Fazul Abdullah Muhammad and the Terrorist Imaginary

Prestholdt, J. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:27 PDT

This essay addresses myths about al Qaeda operative Fazul Abdullah Muhammad and their implications for American foreign policy. The essay demonstrates how Fazul's legend mirrors broader genealogies of information that shape contemporary perceptions of terrorism. Fazul orchestrated two major al Qaeda attacks in Kenya, including the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy, but he has also become the object of fantastic speculation—the product of a psychology of fear combined with a popular imagination saturated with the layered syntax of the entertainment industry's imagery. Fazul's myth reveals how, in declaring war on terrorism, we have likewise waged a shadow war against the projections of collective paranoia.

"We're Mexican Too": Publicity and Status at the International Line

Yeh, R. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

A series of ethnographic examples, all related to a demonstration at the International Port of Entry connecting Tijuana, Mexico, to San Diego, California, show the importance for Tijuana's public sphere of the distinction between documented and undocumented status vis-à-vis the United States. They also show how Tijuana's documented public reproduces itself across a range of communicative genres and sites, from a newspaper poll, to face-to-face dialogue, to the local baseball stadium, to the port of entry itself.

Complexio Oppositorum: Notes on the Left in Neoliberal Italy

Muehlebach, A. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

The contemporary situation is seldom best characterized as a battlefield with clearly drawn political dividing lines. In fact, neoliberalism is often better understood as a form to contain the oppositional—old leftist solidarity and new rightist utopias—and fold them into a single moral order: a complexio oppositorum, in Carl Schmitt's words.

Secular Populism and the Semiotics of the Crowd in Turkey

Tambar, K. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

In much of the Muslim world, secularization has proceeded through the modernizing mechanisms of the region's various states. By contrast, social movements committed to the (re)introduction of religion into public and political life have frequently functioned through appeals to the popular will. Recent political events in Turkey present a dramatic contrast to this historically established antagonism between secularization and populist politics. In the spring of 2007 a series of mass demonstrations, rallied in the name of secularism and against the elected Islamist regime, were conducted in several of Turkey's major urban centers. The figure of the secularist crowd provides an image of secularism grounded not in the coercive apparatuses of the military and the modernizing bureaucracy but in an assertion of populism. This article explores the tentative formation of a secular populism. I argue that this particular conjuncture not only displays the persistent contradictions that subtend the relationship between secularism and populist politics but also reveals the tensions that sustain the field of democratic politics in Turkey.

Virtual Museums of Forbidden Memories: Hu Jie's Documentary Films on the Cultural Revolution

Li, J. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

This essay explores the politics of remembering the Chinese Cultural Revolution through a study of two banned documentaries by Hu Jie that have circulated widely in cyberspace: Though I Am Gone (2006) and In Search of Lin Zhao's Soul (2004). Contextualizing them in discourses on the (still unrealized) Cultural Revolution Museum, I argue that these films manifest an intriguing tension between the traumatic past and the oblivious present, between the intimate confidentiality of interviews and their address of a larger public sphere, and between the courtroom-like "objectivity" of their photographic evidence and the passionate "subjectivity" of testimony.

The Park Pass: Peopling and Civilizing a New Old Beijing

Farquhar, J. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

Many mundane practices of city life in public in Beijing converge on public parks. Focusing on the uses, significance, and powers of the annual park pass, an inexpensive identity card that gives residents free access to the city's well-known and historic parks, I demonstrate some ways in which the "routines and rituals" of state articulate in practice with both a spatial and a nationalist politics of the people. This is not a politics of rebellion or resistance; rather, it advances a compliant civilizational nationalism with deep roots in China's revolutionary twentieth century. It displays a particular sensitivity to the history of spaces in the city and to the forms of ownership and control to which such spaces can be subjected. To understand the daily enjoyments of ordinary city residents as a continuation of China's revolutionary century is to acknowledge the voices and the public activism of many whose forms of political communication are usually ignored, or even denounced as passive. But a more generous definition of the political, one that does not presume liberal democracy as its natural setting or emancipation as its aim, can show how even compliance and personal pleasures work on the dispositions of power in public.

From Consumer to Prosumer to Produser: Who Keeps Shifting My Paradigm? (We Do!)

Grinnell, C. K. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

Less than ten years after going mainstream, the Web returns to its roots as a read/write tool while entering a new, more social and participatory phase (Web 2.0) where the consumer's role morphs into that of "produser."

On Target: Aura, Affect, and the Rhetoric of "Design Democracy"

Harold, C. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

This article analyzes the Target Corporation as an example of the foregrounding of design in contemporary consumer culture. To understand the destiny of the manufactured object in an age of aesthetic capitalism, this article argues that the previous relationships among use value, exchange value, and sign value need to be reconfigured. A new dimension of the object is emerging, one that is best understood as combining aura and affect.

Books Received

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

Contributors

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT