Our current issue brings together a set of independently submitted essays. The essays by Paul Frosh and by Asef Bayat are arguments about the tension between consumerism and the solemn single-mindedness that is routinely invoked by nationalist and religious zealots. Frosh discusses the tension between consumerism as a form of adhesion to national interest and as a rupture in the very framing of the common good in the face of a chronic state of war. This tension is poignant not only in (Frosh’s) Israel, but also in the United States, where September 11 was met simultaneously with a call to war and a call to shop. And yet no matter how allegedly patriotic, shopping is hard to construe as a sacrifice, and citizens luxuriating in it are racked by the nagging guilt of the asymmetric distribution of the weight of the war.

Asef Bayat’s discussion of Islamism and the politics of fun provides a provocative supplement to this argument. Religious abhorrence of “fun” — a concept that includes forms of hedonism that indulge in fashion, youth subculture, and attention to consumer products — has reached an oppressive pitch among fundamentalists who seek to frame, represent, and direct national interest. Stern admonitions against what Bayat calls “fun” expose a contradiction between the religious community as a hegemonic space and the general economy. These two essays on the politics of consumption are enriched by Tod Hartman’s contribution to our “Arts in Circulation” section, which is a playful exploration of Ikea, mass design, and self-fashioning in France. Here the global production of modular design is seen as shaping a particular modality of class subjectivity — bourgeois-bohemian — a figure that is at once ascetic and tasteful, and in some ways well suited to the kind of consumer-oriented collective mindedness that is at the heart of the contradiction explored by Paul Frosh.

Vyjayanthi Rao’s two pieces on Bombay explore the urban economy of construction and destruction and probe the ways in which terrorist serial bombings reveal the sites at which contemporary terror is forged. Like the great earthquakes and natural disasters of modern history — San Francisco 1906, the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, Managua 1972, or Mexico City 1985 — the serial bombings of Bombay’s Black Friday exposed the hidden circuitry of the city. The Black Friday bombings, however, were themselves in some way a part and an effect of that circuitry. Rao’s essay and accompanying visual materials are thus an exploration of the social life of public works in contemporary history.

Finally, the essays by Didier Fassin and by Hugh Raffles offer deeply disruptive reflections on humanism, the politics of science, and the state. Their interventions — on humanitarian intervention of Doctors without Borders and on the unstable politics of resistance and collaboration in the face of race science and of extermination under National Socialism — complicate criticism of political action; they explore the dialectic between resistance and collaboration and reveal that the purity of humanistic intervention is part of an impure amalgam that is in some way implicated in the state and in the conceits and privileges of scientific authority.

This substantial collection of essays is introduced by two reflective and timely “Doxa” pieces by Brian Edwards and Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo.