PUBLIC BOOKS | Go to April Issue

An interdisciplinary journal of transnational cultural studies

• Articles

  Featured from recent journal issues

  Theses on Urbanization

  In the early 1970s, a young Marxist sociologist named Manuel Castells, then living in exile in Paris, began his soon-to-be-classic intervention, The Urban Question, by declaring his “astonishment” that debates on “urban problems” were becoming “an essential element in the policies of governments, in the concerns of the mass media and, consequently, in the everyday life of a large section of the population.” Four decades after Castells’s intervention, it is easy to confront early twenty-first-century discourse on urban questions with a similar sense of astonishment—not because it masks the operations of capitalism but because it has become one of the dominant metanarratives through which our current planetary situation is interpreted, both in academic circles and in the public sphere.
  • by Neil Brenner
  • in Volume 25, Number 1

• The Precarious Truth of Asylum

  I would like to make the matter of a reflection on truth and asylum, not in the historical moment of the fabrication of the new international law but in the current state of the “refugee question.” This distinction between truth and true, veritas and verum, serves to address this question by distinguishing two interrogations: What is the truth of asylum? And how are the accounts of asylum seekers recognized to be true? The two raise significantly different issues. The first emphasizes the substance of asylum, the way it is permanently transformed through international debates and national jurisprudence and by the daily work of officers and magistrates confronted with concrete cases. The second focuses on the evidence of the asylum seekers, on the relations between what is told and what really occurred and between these alleged facts and the legal definition of the refugee.

  • by Didier Fassin
  • in Volume 25, Number 1

• Editor’s Letter

  This issue revisits core themes for Public Culture: time and space, cities and citizenship, truth and justice. The contributors—some familiar, some published here for the first time—argue that there’s an urgency to these issues today, an immediacy born of political action around economic restructuring, urban rescaling, and the unequal incorporation of people and nations in the emerging global order.

  • by Eric Klinenberg
  • in Volume 25, Number 1

• Images

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