Editor’s Letter
This issue of Public Culture is richly varied in content, with editorial pieces on the Colombian truth and reconciliation process and on ethnonationalism in Kenya, a photo-documentary portfolio from Tibet, and essays on numerous topics that speak to one another in obliquely productive ways. I wish to highlight a few aspects of the collage before inviting the reader to engage with it.
The essay by Gary Wilder was submitted shortly before the death of Aimé Césaire. Public Culture joins Wilder in offering its publication as a tribute to him. Interestingly, Wilder’s discussion of the possibilities of liberation struggles that refuse to cast themselves in the mold of national liberation struggles offers a counterpoint to the politics of national humiliation, outlined by William A. Callahan, as a useful prelude to thought about civil strife in Lebanon.
This issue of Public Culture also offers a juxtaposition of works on image, nation, circulation, and narration. Beatriz Jaguaribe and Maurício Lissovsky’s study of photography and Brazilian social imaginaries can thus be read in relation to Callahan’s discussion of Chinese anxieties over territorial integrity and narratives of national humiliation. In both essays, the nation is figured as a future-oriented machine — a space of becoming — but it is mobilized in widely diverging vindications.
As editor, I am delighted to offer a group of essays that frames the present with such a variety of innovative strategies. Thus Michel Feher unveils the unsuspected political possibilities of human capital for an oppositional politics, while Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s examination of liberal sacrificial love brings the limits of contemporary historicities to the fore. Webb Keane’s close discussion of time, media, and circulation discovers structural fissures in the idea of an international public sphere, while Wilder points to the limits of the national frame. The contrasts and permutations between the essays lend the issue as a whole the dynamism of a sociological “book of mutations” that brings argument and phenomenological substance to the discussion of the future today.