Spring 2010 Newsletter
Dear Friends,
We’re writing to remind you of an exciting summer workshop in post–World Cup Johannesburg, pitch a plan to publicize your events, and present volume 22’s first issue, which we’re hoping to celebrate in a particularly engaging fashion. At publicculture.org you can preview all the content from the latest issue and access full-text versions of both the expansive Editor’s Letter and a striking photo-essay by the New York–based artist collective, JC². Subscribers can of course immediately access complete versions of all articles by following the links to the Duke University Press Journals Web site.
Inaugural Meeting of the Public Culture Reading Group Kicks Off at Columbia in May!
The journal’s Editorial Board and Staff are now firming up plans to launch a Public Culture Reading Group on the campus of Columbia University, with a first meeting focused on the articles in issue 22.1. We’re looking forward to lively discussion among students, editors, and contributors over refreshments, and would like to invite all those in the area to attend, especially past and present contributors to the journal. Our plan going forward would be to meet shortly after the publication of each new issue, in spring, fall, and winter. Ultimately, we envision creating reading groups attached to different universities and institutions around the globe, coordinated via a dedicated page on the journal’s Web site. If you would like to receive updates about plans for the group, or to offer any questions, comments, or suggestions you may have, please contact us at info@publicculture.org.
Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, July 18–28, 2010
The theme of the 2010 workshop is Techniques of Capital: Property, Self-Creation and Politics in Precarious Times. The program will span ten intensive days of lectures, seminars, public events, exhibitions, and performances, and will also include explorations of Afropolitan Johannesburg. Public Culture contributors scheduled to attend include Ato Quayson, AbdouMaliq Simone, Sarah Nuttall, John L. Comaroff, Thomas Blom Hansen, Achille Mbembe, Jean Comaroff, and Arjun Appadurai. For more information visit the JWTC Web site or contact Leigh-Ann Naidoo, JWTC Administrator, at info@jwtc.org.za.
Public Culture Editors & Authors: Let Us Publicize Your Events!
If you’re a past or present contributor to Public Culture, or a current member of the Editorial Collective, and are aware of, hosting, or participating in an event anywhere in the world that may be of interest to our readers, let us know and we’ll be happy to consider including it on the News & Events section of our Web site, publicculture.org.
Release of Winter 2010 Issue
The contributions collected in issue 22.1 lead us to reconsider the role of violence in the twentieth century, especially as represented in literary and artistic contexts. Nouri Gana’s essay movingly engages with the complexity of writing poetry during wartime; a polemical piece by S. Lochlann Jain sheds light on the unvoiced violence of cancer treatment; Ashis Nandy mines interviews with a Gandhi-assassination conspirator to craft a partly speculative psychological profile of a citizen-killer; and much more.
Table of Contents
- Editor’s Letter: Amid Violence
- Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar
DOXA AT LARGE
- Acid Violence against Women in Bangladesh
- Pallavi Govindnathan
- Reconstructing Corrosion: A Conversation with Pallavi Govindnathan
- Poornima Paidipaty
- Iran, in Search of a Nonsecular and Nontheocratic Politics
- Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
ENGAGING VIOLENCE: POETRY, HOPE, AND SELF-ESTEEM
- War, Poetry, Mourning: Darwish, Adonis, Iraq
- Nouri Gana
- The Reckless Will: Prison Chaplaincy and the Problem of Mara Salvatrucha
- Kevin Lewis O’Neill
- The Mortality Effect: Counting the Dead in the Cancer Trial
- S. Lochlann Jain
PHOTO-ESSAY
GANDHI AND THE ENEMIES WITHIN
- Coming Home: Religion, Mass Violence, and the Exiled and Secret Selves of a Citizen-Killer
- Ashis Nandy
- Country First? Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966) and the Writing of Essentials of Hindutva
- Janaki Bakhle
PHOTO-ESSAY
- This Is Not a Pipe: The Treacheries of Indigenous Housing
- Tess Lea and Paul Pholeros
Subscribe to Public Culture
To subscribe call 1-888-387-5765 or 1-919-687-3620 (toll-free in the U.S. and Canada), e-mail subscriptions@dukeupress.edu, or visit the Duke University Press Web site.
All the very best from everyone at Public Culture!