Contemporary public culture is run through with new technologies and a new politics of visibility. This issue brings together a set of independently submitted essays that interrogate and explore this broad theme. Following our editorial section—with commentaries by Rajeev Bhargava and by Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor—we have chosen to open and to close our issue with visual essays that offer converging viewpoints on this family of phenomena.

João Biehl and Torben Eskerod introduce one dimension of the contemporary politics of visibility in their stunning essay on “zones of abandonmentâ€? and the will to live in contemporary Brazil. These spaces of collective shame, holding pens for people who are not or cannot be cared for—by their families, by their friends, or by the state—are also quietly unobtrusive, practically to the point of invisibility. Biehl and Eskerod’s essay presents photographic portraits of poor AIDS patients, accompanied by brief biographical vignettes. Through this portraiture, and in a set of impressions culled from ongoing conversations between the anthropologist, the photographer, and the ill, Biehl and Eskerod reveal creation and desire in the midst of distress and of social abandonment.

“Will to Live� is followed by a section on media and visibility, with essays by William Mazzarella and Haiyan Lee. Mazzarella offers a conceptually robust ethnographic account of the ways in which politics is visualized and mediated. His essay turns on a paradox: some of the most gripping media events of the day are visual and aural exhibitions of what everyone already knows to be the case. Specifically, the politics of corruption that has emerged worldwide as a core issue of contemporary democratic debate turns on the ways in which corruption is made visible. Mazzarella explores and explodes the question of transparency in politics, an urge and a social demand that has found its utopian horizon in the Internet and in the possibilities of wide and transparent access that it appears to offer. It is certainly not fortuitous that the Tehelka.com scandal in India, explored in this essay, has a powerful counterpoint in news events that have been pivotal in places as far-flung as Peru, South Africa, Mexico, Albania, and Russia, to name a few cases.

The second piece in this section, by Haiyan Lee, is a remarkable discussion of the media solutions that are currently being invented to produce inhabitable narratives for the Chinese. The challenge is by no means trivial: China, with its phenomenal rate of growth, its massive internal migration, and its fraught relationship to capitalism and to foreign capital in particular, is producing new teleologies for its citizens. Lee’s humorous—though in some ways depressing—discussion of “neoliberal Cinderellasâ€? shows how a tongue-in-cheek drama of gendered connections between Chinese and foreigners, and between China’s emerging social classes, is being developed as a captivating way of figuring, of embodying, and of visualizing the historicity of the new China.

Our “Arts in Circulation� section complements the preceding essays’ focus on media with an extended piece on the Inuit film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Monika Siebert contributes to contemporary discussions of indigenous media production with a considered reflection on film technique and authenticity. The problem is certainly an old one. Indigeneity has long been a resource in the figuration and representation of the national soul, particularly in settler colonies like Canada. And concern with authenticity and with the shades of a time before colonial contact is a staple of indigenous video, film, and literature. At the same time, Atanarjuat stands out as one of only a few internationally successful indigenous films. Siebert studies the visibility of the Inuit in this context of transculturation.

Our exploration of the politics and technologies of visibility and invisibility concludes with a section on urban landscapes, reading, and legibility. Kate Eichhorn’s original essay on Xeroxing is a contribution to the history of reproduction and reading, and a reflection on the topography of knowledge production and circulation in contemporary Toronto. Eichhorn provocatively discusses the sites where photocopying takes place—on the margins of the university campus—and then frames her findings in a deeper history of copying that stretches back to the Middle Ages. Here, the mundane activity of copying is made invisible by dint of its everydayness, and yet, as Eichhorn shows, the sites of copying are key sites of traffic and circulation, sites that she identifies as “zones of abjection.â€? Closing the issue is “Moscow for Flaneurs,â€? a literary reading of the city of Moscow by Sabine Gölz. Gölz is interested in the dense interplay of allegory in Muscovite architecture and its development projects. She thereby offers a polyphonic vision of history as material life, a reading that usefully contrasts with approaches to visibility that work internally with a media product or event. By focusing on the city—on built environment and on human traffic—Gölz illuminates the anarchy in management and the ways in which it is sutured: always only partially, never successfully.

Through these rich ethnographic and critical engagements, the conceptual work that is yet to be done on visibility and invisibility in contemporary public culture is beginning to surface.