Editor's Note
At the close of volume seventeen of Public Culture, I will step down from the editorship of the journal in order to take up a position at Columbia University, handing over my job to the capable hands of Claudio Lomnitz. When I agreed to assume the role of editor of Public Culture some four years ago, I faced the imposing legacy of the journal’s fi rst and founding editor, Carol Breckenridge, as well as my own ignorance of the daily rhythms of running a scholarly journal whose aspirations are to foster and be fostered by critical global publics. The forms of talk and topics of urgency and the everyday that compose these critical global publics can diverge dramatically, as suggested by the productive exchange in this issue between Michael Watts and Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe over the representations of life and death worlds in Johannesburg. Quite quickly the idea of mastering scholarly terrains such as this one gave way to a deep curiosity about the terrain itself: the international forces at play in the emergence of specifi c arguments in Public Culture essays, the local editorial tasks crucial to publishing these arguments, the global nature of interpersonal relations leading to or developing out of the publishing endeavor, and the complexly circulating social sensorium that provides the languages and trace memories out of which these scholarly conversations and their publishing trajectories arise.
This issue of Public Culture exemplifi es the long-standing goals of the journal to lend itself to essays focused on the contested intersection of critical publics and commodity dynamics. Kaylin Goldstein and David Bennett elaborate the delicate, dramatic, and sometimes hilarious means by which internationally circulating critical scholarly publics are transformed into sales receipts and admission tickets: the absorption of Edward Said’s Orientalism into the politics and economies of museum display and Freudian psychoanalysis into the selling of Barbie dolls. Neville Hoad and Charles Briggs critically engage the genealogies of healthy and pathogenic polities in the wake of cosmopolitan calamities: the racist eugenics of the early twentieth century and the contemporary HIV/AIDS pandemic. Edward LiPuma and Thomas Koelble, Danny Hoffman, and Simon Leung and Marita Sturken roam and remodel the landscapes left in the wake of these international imaginary, commodity, and cultural transfers.
None of the issues that have borne my name as editor would have been possible without the steady and stellar management of Kaylin Goldstein, who is leaving the journal to take up a postdoctoral position at the University of Miami. Her collaboration with me, the other members of the editorial committee, and authors stretched far beyond the already creative and cumbersome duties of an editorial manager.
—Elizabeth A. Povinelli San Francisco July 2004