Social TextPub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10959663
Penny Harvey Newell
{"title":"Clay","authors":"Penny Harvey Newell","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10959663","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10959663","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 What is the ontologizing effect of a care framework? And how can clay cease to insist on itself as an abstracted medium of self-making? The artists Jade Montserrat, Chinasa Vivian Ezugha, and Cassils each work clay as a material in their performance. Their toil of working with this organic material signals to the work of self-care as maintenance and ecological maintenance, a sign of the forces of reproduction that may befall marginalized people and communities within the collective care of the earth. Drawing up an analysis of the maintenance work of these three clay performances, this article builds toward an ecocritical framework that takes account of the literal dimensions of what might otherwise fall into the trappings of an abstract, conceptual affinity. That is, existing as conceptually closer to nonhuman nature carries duties and responsibilities, labor and toil, burdens of care, self-care, maintenance, and the sweaty, untidy, unraveling, by nature always unfinished work of recovery. The article explores a notion of transactional care, asking after the distributed ontologizing effect, the widened field of enclosure, and the matrices of legibility that earth-care paradigms might afford.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140407178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10959689
Gary Wilder
{"title":"Cover of Concrete Utopianism: The Politics of Temporality and Solidarity, with art by Dan Perjovschi","authors":"Gary Wilder","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10959689","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10959689","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140408189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10959676
Carla Lever
{"title":"(In)Security Theater","authors":"Carla Lever","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10959676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10959676","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Spectacle is central to protest efficacy, yet the term performance has a history of being used pejoratively to discredit both protestors and their causes. This deflects analysis from the ubiquitous tactical performances enacted by institutional representatives themselves. Following Cape Town mayor Dan Plato's 2020 dismissal of an eviction resistance on the grounds that it was a “staged act,” this article identifies various repertoires of performative intimidation enacted by local authorities against South African land occupiers during 2019–22. These staged acts were strategically performed with a dual audience in mind: one direct and the other, necessarily, oblique. In recasting such repertoires as rational actions in response to radical acts, municipal officials control the means of identifying and critiquing cynical public performance.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140405096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10959650
Tyson E. Lewis
{"title":"Fascism's Spatial Imaginary at the Threshold","authors":"Tyson E. Lewis","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10959650","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10959650","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article returns to the work of Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman to theorize the spatial imaginary of fascism, a dimension missing from existing analyses of the social psychology of the authoritarian personality. The fascist spatial imaginary can be defined in terms of a Manichean sense of world space, a dominance of spatial binaries such as inside versus outside, mythic/romantic spatial imagery, a paranoid mood, and finally, spatial projection in which internal contradictions are externalized. As a historical case study, the article charts the rise and fall of the American fascist compound and its replacement by more flexible and mobile terrorist cells, connecting this change in fascist spatial formations to underlying shifts in the composition of capitalism. In conclusion, the article turns to Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben to argue that, in the last instance, the fascist spatial imaginary cannot conceptualize thresholds, states of indistinction where the inside-outside binary blurs, and that dwelling within the threshold (rather than closing it) might be a tactic to disrupt the power of fascist spatial logics.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140401264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10959637
Debarati Biswas, Kirin Wachter-Grene
{"title":"Rituals of Survival in Single-Room Occupancy Hotels","authors":"Debarati Biswas, Kirin Wachter-Grene","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10959637","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10959637","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article works with a definition of care that encompasses expansive models of kinship and collective and communal life. Specifically, it explores representations of such interdependencies in the liminal space of the single-room occupancy hotel (SRO) through the literary and artistic creations of two understudied African American artists. Fiction writer Robert Dean Pharr and visual artist Frederick Weston created their work in SROs in New York City beginning in the 1960s, during a time of massive transformation of the city's built environment in the name of urban renewal. Their novels and artwork, respectively, provide some of the only uncovered (to date) literary and cultural representations of New York City's SROs. Pharr's and Weston's works memorialize rituals of survival that center care and interdependencies over and against competitive individualism and a climate of uncare. Further, both explicitly articulate this vision by working with conceptual and material waste. Trash is their literal and metaphoric medium. These artists relied upon what is seen as surplus value by the city. But as Pharr and Weston use it, trash offers a critique of negative assumptions about the lives of SRO residents. The pandemic has shocked us into awareness of our inescapable interdependencies. Therefore, it behooves us to revisit these understudied, early proponents of care—an ethics that today's mutual aid and other liberation movements often center. Pharr's and Weston's documentation and interpretation of care offer us ways to survive within our current environments in crisis without repeating the death-making logic and history of urban renewal.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140403896","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10959702
Salma Shamel, Gary Wilder
{"title":"From Image to Flesh in a World Seen from the South","authors":"Salma Shamel, Gary Wilder","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10959702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10959702","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This interview with the intellectual historian Gary Wilder explores the philosophical and methodological theses in his overall work, particularly focusing on his 2022 book Concrete Utopianism. The conversation explores such themes as relationships among solidarity, filiality, and freedom; the forces and fears of normative claims; the definition of an image; and the place of the flesh in a critical Marxism, among others. This is the second conversation in a series initiated by Salma Shamel (PhD candidate at New York University) with anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and media theorists whose work is located at the intersection of intellectual history, critical theory, and historical change.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140403329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10613773
Nicholas Mirzoeff
{"title":"To See in the Dark","authors":"Nicholas Mirzoeff","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10613773","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10613773","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Seeing with Palestine was a constitutive possibility in the anticolonial way of seeing from the moment of the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948. This article traces this way of seeing in the genealogy of visual culture that emerged in Britain in dialogue with Black British cultural studies and art practice, based on the practices of Stuart Hall, George Lamming, John Berger, and Jean Mohr. It then discusses Palestinian artist Randa Maddah, whose work Berger described as “landswept.” The conclusion speculates on how to “see in the dark” via the Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou Rahme.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135891230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10613787
Elyx Desloover, Marquis Bey
{"title":"Playing and Hiding Joyfully in the Rubble","authors":"Elyx Desloover, Marquis Bey","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10613787","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10613787","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Marquis Bey's Black Trans Feminism (2022) puts forth radical gender abolition as the necessary actualization of blackness and transness toward hopeful world de/construction. An intentional, ongoing work of stepping aside from expected regimes replaces material identitary stances and aims to embrace possibility rather than hold us down. The present conversational piece, fostering critical reflection in/on kinship and interested in evading disciplinary pledges, explores underlying themes of Bey's fugitive theorization, such as undefining, opacity, queer excess, playful performativity, and the destabilization of “solid” ground. Desloover and Bey discuss the avoidance of ontological gendering violence in practice and the necessary forgoing of identities held near and dear. They touch on xenogender proliferation, which could lead not only to fracturing the oppressive binary but also to obliterating gender as colonial cis-heteropatriarchy knows it — to release the need for “making sense” and let it remake itself over and again. Bey describes the stifling experience of (en)forced embodiment of attributed/assumed privilege, claiming nonbinariness on/as the way to wider spaces that skirt required legibility. How can we run (off) from socially imposed and oppressive terrain that forecloses possible unruly existences? Yearnings for the vastness of the “not quite” that-which-is-given ripple beneath the surface of the nameable and speak ofthe elsewhere Bey desires without tying it too tightly to defining words. Playful joy from and for radically healing openness is shared and upheld here to elude the paralyzing exhaustion caused by a “cistem” that cannot possibly hold us.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134995488","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10613639
Martina Tazzioli, Nicholas De Genova
{"title":"Border Abolitionism","authors":"Martina Tazzioli, Nicholas De Genova","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10613639","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10613639","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article proposes border abolitionism as both a political and an analytical framework for deepening critiques of border, migration, and asylum regimes worldwide. Abolitionist perspectives have been associated primarily with questions of criminalization and mass incarceration and thus articulated as a project of prison abolitionism. Importantly, migrant detention and deportation comprise another major pillar of the entrenchment of the carceral state. While critical migration scholarship and No Borders activism have been confronted with the increasing criminalization of immigration and a more general punitive turn in immigration enforcement, engagements with carceral abolitionist perspectives have largely been quite recent. Seemingly disparate struggles increasingly bring into sharper focus a multifaceted critique of what we call the confinement continuum. Not reducible to detention in migrant jails, the confinement continuum is the nexus of heterogeneous modes of confinement that migrants experience, from the fundamental condition of being stuck or trapped in a border zone to the consequent forms of border violence, as well as other forms of coercion that characterize the more general racialized sociopolitical condition of migrant subordination far beyond any physical border site and encompassing the full spectrum of migrant everyday life. Thus, migrants’ and refugees’ struggles and demands exceed a narrow focus on borders alone and frequently enact an incipient politics of abolitionism: migrants and refugees challenge the interlocking bordering mechanisms affecting them while always also repudiating and resisting the biopolitical constrictions that confine them to degraded conditions of life and articulating broader claims for social justice and visions of new and better ways of life.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134994456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10613653
James E. Dobson
{"title":"Objective Vision","authors":"James E. Dobson","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10613653","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10613653","url":null,"abstract":"Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a key technology powering the automated technologies of seeing known as computer vision. CNNs have been especially successful in systems that perform object recognition from visual data. This article examines the persistence of a mid-twentieth-century ontology of the digital image in these contemporary technologies. While CNNs are multidimensional, their ontology flattens distinctions between background and foreground, between subjects and objects, and even the relations established among the categories of information used to organize and train these models. This ontology enables the introduction and amplification of bias and troubling correlations and the transfer or slippage of learned associations between humans and objects found in the training image archives. Inspecting and interpreting what CNNs learn and index through their complex architectures can be difficult if not impossible because of how they encode and obfuscate quite human ways of seeing the world and the image repertoires used to train these algorithms that are rife with residues of prior representations.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134994463","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}