Winter 2008 Newsletter
Dear Friends,
We trust that year’s end finds you well engaged in what you do best. The journal’s editors have also been busy and would like to update you on the most interesting developments.
All Public Culture Back Issues now Available!
Ever needed to take another look at Michael Warner on “Publics and Counterpublics,” Charles Taylor on “Modern Social Imaginaries,” or Nilüfer Göle on “Islam in Public,” but couldn’t get your hands on a copy of issue 14.1? Thought it was time to revisit, while many miles from a good library, Craig Calhoun’s reflections on “Tiananmen, Television, and the Public Sphere” in 2.1? Or simply wanted to return to the inaugural issue for its Introductory Essay by Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, without leaving home? You can, in a matter of clicks, because every issue of the journal is now archived on publicculture.org and ready for viewing or PDF download. If you are an individual subscriber to Public Culture, or if your Internet connection is provided by an institution with an electronic subscription, you have direct access; if your institution has a subscription but you are not using their Internet connection, you will need to click through the institutional library site. Happy reading!
New Public Culture Web Genres to Make their Debut
While, due to technological obstacles appearing just beyond the journal’s purview, the unveiling of our completely rebuilt and redesigned Web site will have to wait until Spring, another way to take advantage of the newly available journal archive arrives in the form of two stimulating new features to be added to the existing site:
Best Books
Public Culture authors revisit their previously published essays in the light of recent scholarship, responding to challenges to their original arguments and offering an annotated selection of the most important recent contributions on the topic. If you have previously published in the journal and are interested in contributing to this genre you can make your proposals here.
Collections
Recent events provide the impetus for this regularly updated series of curated collections of Public Culture essays, starting with tools to understand the current financial crisis and analyses of the origins of “New China.”
“The Public Life of History” Submitted for CELJ Best Special Issue Award
The journal has once again been been nominated for recognition by The Council of Editors of Learned Journals, this time with an entry in the Best Special Issue category. The fate of issue 20.1, guest-edited by Bain Attwood, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Claudio Lomnitz, will be announced during the Modern Language Association convention in San Francisco, December 27–30.
Public Culture Editorial Collective Now on Wikipedia
Love it or lament it, the first place many readers turn when encountering a new name is the free online encyclopedia anyone can edit. And now those turning to the site will find there a brief article on each and every editor on the Public Culture masthead, from Lomnitz to Vogler and Abbas to Wedeen. We encourage the journal’s knowledgeable readers to take a look at these articles and contribute to their improvement.
Call for Pieces on Israel, Pakistan, and Iran
The editors of Public Culture continue to solicit submissions relating specifically to Israel, Pakistan, and Iran, to be published in a series of special issues.
See our general submissions guidelines. For more information please send us an e-mail.
Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, A Public Culture Book, Out Now
Originally appearing in a slimmer version in issue 16.3 of the journal, Johannesburg expands on a groundbreaking exercise in writing the worldliness of a contemporary African city. Edited by Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe and including an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge , the volume’s essays complicate and contest characterizations of South Africa’s premier metropolis as an emblem of irresolvable crisis, the spatial embodiment of unequal economic relations and segregationist policies, a city that responds to but does not contribute to modernity on the global scale. Contributors reassess classic theories of metropolitan modernity as they explore the experience of “city-ness” and urban life in post-apartheid South Africa, portraying Johannesburg as a polycentric and international city with a hybrid history that continually permeates the present. Journalists, artists, architects, writers, and scholars bring contemporary Johannesburg to life in ten short pieces, including Mbembe’s study on superfluity, Nutall’s on self-making and the literary city, Abdoumaliq Simone’s on the infrastructure of improvisation, Frédéric Le Marcis’s on the suffering body, and a section of nuanced and suggestive readings entitled “voice lines.”
New Public Culture Submissions Guidelines and Online Upload
In addition to clarifying, synthesizing, and otherwise revising the guidelines for submissions to the journal, we have added an online submissions form, allowing authors to directly upload their contributions, including images, to our Web site’s Submissions page.
Release of Fall 2008 Issue
Out last month, issue 20.3 dedicates special attention to current polemics, with an exchange between Stathis Gourgouris and Saba Mahmood debating secularism and critique, and a guest-edited dossier on Afflicted Powers, a manifesto and extended argument published by the RETORT collective. Shannon Mattern and Nancy Florida engage questions of spectacle and images in two essays on historicity in national self-fashioning, and Roland Marchal examines the war and crisis in Chad and Darfur. We are also proud to present the first circulation in English of an important text by Georges Canguilhem.
Until next time, a pleasant and productive winter from everyone at Public Culture!