Social TextPub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10174968
R. Carroll
{"title":"Remains to Be Seen","authors":"R. Carroll","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10174968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10174968","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article unspools the history of nylon as a commodity between two Black feminist cultural expressions, Senga Nengudi's R.S.V.P. series and Audre Lorde's Zami. The first popular petroleum-derived synthetic fiber, nylon was a crucial material in building what Dwight D. Eisenhower was to dub the “military-industrial complex.” Through readings of R.S.V.P. and Zami, the article traces the racial and gendered history of nylon as both a fashion commodity and a military resource. These readings demonstrate Black feminism's central relevance to US military imperialism, particularly in Asia and the Pacific, as well as imperialism's impacts on Black femininity during the Cold War. This article argues that Black feminist aesthetics, such as those Nengudi and Lorde employ, restores the context of commodities like nylons, revealing the centrality of Black women's productive and reproductive labor to US empire. Most important, as R.S.V.P. and Zami restore context, they also generate a system of value in opposition to racial capitalism that does not depend on violence against Black women.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47883019","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 : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10013332
Juan Llamas-Rodriguez
{"title":"Ruinous Speculation, Tunnel Environments, and the Sustainable Infrastructures of the Border","authors":"Juan Llamas-Rodriguez","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10013332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10013332","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The US-Mexico borderlands used to host a wide range of natural and social environments, many of which have become irreversibly altered by the structures built to reinforce geopolitical boundaries. To rethink the form and purpose of these borderlands is a political objective of utmost importance, yet most future thinking about the border has remained restricted to imagining new versions of border walls euphemistically rebranded as “sustainable” alternatives. This essay analyzes the limitations of popular design projects that effectively greenwash the securitization imperative of the nation-state. It then turns to a lesser-known speculative project that reimagines the borderlands from the perspective of underground tunnels through a multimedia model. The essay draws on the insights of critical environmental media studies to illustrate the affordances of specific media forms for articulating future worlds with a greater focus on care. This analysis proposes ruinous speculation as an affirmative form of future thinking that orients toward infrastructures that enable human and nonhuman worlds to thrive and away from infrastructures that reinforce the violent hierarchies of the geopolitical divide.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49424602","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 : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10013290
Anna More
{"title":"The Early Portuguese Slave Ship and the Infrastructure of Racial Capitalism","authors":"Anna More","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10013290","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10013290","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article argues that an infrastructural analysis of the early Portuguese slave trade permits a detailed account of the emergence of what Cedric Robinson called “racial capitalism.” The early Portuguese slave ship is one of the clearest examples of how an infrastructure of accumulation accelerated the racialization of capitalism. As denounced by the 1684 Portuguese Law on Tonnage, the holds of the early slave ships created spatial regimes that regularly killed captives through asphyxiation, a unique form of death resulting from the reduction of human life to capital. If enslavement was defined by this spatial regime of suffocation, the early slave trade extended the grounds for racialization through extensive networks of credit and debt. This financial system established the parameters of enslavement and freedom, bridging shipboard and terrestrial social relations. Early slave ships included Black sailors, known as grumetes. A term that became adopted throughout the first region of the Portuguese slave trade in Africa, grumete referred to African wage laborers who worked with Luso-African traders. As wages were likely paid in credit that could only be cashed out by participating in the sale of humans, the freedom of the grumetes was constrained by the system of credit that financed the early trade. The infrastructure of the early slave trade was thus the nexus and conduit between interconnected financial modes, commodified life and debt, that together account for the racialization of the early Atlantic world.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45646490","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 : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10013346
S. Gerson
{"title":"Siphoning and Sabotage","authors":"S. Gerson","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10013346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10013346","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In a moment of electrified literary worldmaking, the unnamed protagonist of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man steals electricity to power the 1,369 lightbulbs and radio phonography in his subterranean refuge. Narratively and materially, electricity theft diagnoses the uneven access to and impacts of electrification, while also (temporarily) creating alternative infrastructural relationships that refuse exclusion. Centered on Ellison's Invisible Man and its representation of electricity theft, this essay analyzes a constellation of US electrifictions focused on the relationship between Blackness and electricity. Going beyond a traditional literary close reading, this essay triangulates a reading of Invisible Man with a history of General Electric's “electric Slave” advertisements from the interwar period and concludes with an analysis of a 2010 WXYZ-TV Detroit news segment focused on electricity theft. GE's advertisements necessitate a reexamination of US cultural constructions of electrification as inherently progressive and instead highlight the ideologies of unfreedom and exploitation that undergird electrified modernity. While the 2010 news segment may seem of a different place and time than Ellison's novel, both are focused on moments where racialized individuals come into contact with the large-scale system of the electricity grid and the structures of power the grid both metaphorizes and materializes. Like in Invisible Man, the electricity thieves in the news segment do more than diagnose the racist impacts and exclusions of electrified modernity, they also, through their illicit acts of siphoning that redistribute electric current, materially intervene in and reimagine the larger infrastructural system.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66117266","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 : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10013318
G. Flaherty
{"title":"“Anxious Desires”","authors":"G. Flaherty","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10013318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10013318","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In 1961, the Mexican government launched the Programa Nacional Fronterizo (Pronaf) in partnership with the country's economic elites, a precursor to the state's more widely known border industrialization project. Pronaf was ostensibly an urban beautification program targeting nine cities at the Mexico-US border, led by former Ciudad Juárez mayor Antonio Bermúdez and with architecture supervised by Mexico City–based modernist Mario Pani. However, as this article argues, Pronaf sought to better integrate the borderlands to the national market and political structure at a moment of crisis. The state's capitalist modernization plan of import substitution industrialization, which produced the so-called Mexican Miracle in the 1940s, was showing signs of strain. Greater consumption of products made in Mexico, based on a more patriotic identification by citizens at the border, would buttress the “Miracle,” which had initially ignored these very citizens based on metropolitan perceptions of their lack of allegiance to Mexico and affinity for the US. Understanding spectacular architecture to have not only a didactic but an affective function, Pronaf deployed a network of soaring, Jet Age–inspired built environments. These parabolic hyperboloid environments, accompanied by a hyperbolic rhetoric from Bermúdez, sought to convince border residents of the “beauty” and “desirability” of national culture and the fluidity of the national market just as their socioeconomic mobility came under greater government scrutiny. Pronaf piloted an affective infrastructure that desired to channel border residents’ citizenship and consumption toward the reproduction of the political and economic status quo, eventually setting the stage for neoliberal transition.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49359823","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 : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10013304
S. Zieger
{"title":"Back on the Chain Gang","authors":"S. Zieger","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10013304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10013304","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay explores the road and the chain as material and ideological forms of logistical and infrastructural power. Focusing on threechain gang narratives, John L. Spivak's Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang (1932), Elliot Burns's I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain (1932), and its film adaptation, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang! (1932), the essay shows how these white-authored stories imagine the extraction of Black male labor in the construction of road infrastructure in the early twentieth-century southern United States. The essay demonstrates how logistics—the art and science of moving goods, people, and information efficiently to maximize profit—inheres in the infrastructures it calls into being. It traces the history of the chain gang through the shackles used to immobilize enslaved people on the ship, in the coffle, and on plantations, contending that such iron implements are infrastructure that helped build the nation. Chain gangs similarly relied on the forced labor of Black men who were routinely rounded up, incarcerated, and set to work on roads that tantalized them with the freedom of mobility while punishing them with backbreaking labor and physical torture. Chain gangs were a logistical phenomenon, the supply of labor at the right time and right place to maximize profit for private capital, which obtained this free labor through its collusion with the state. In this case study, the logistical aspect of infrastructure articulates it not as a promise of the common good, but as a threat against the disenfranchised whose freedom was abridged to make it.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41370409","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 : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-10013360
J. Wenzel
{"title":"Forms of Life","authors":"J. Wenzel","doi":"10.1215/01642472-10013360","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10013360","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay discusses “Forms of Life” in two senses: first, infrastructure as a social process that fosters particular forms of collective life and second, the agency/vitality imputed to infrastructure. The essay considers an unremarked ambivalence in energy humanities about infrastructure: the extant infrastructure of fossil fuels poses an obstacle to energy transition, while the act of making infrastructure visible and “following the pipeline” is regarded by incisive petrocritics as necessary but insufficient. What do cooling towers, electric pylons, or railways make happen (or keep from happening), socially and narratively, when they “work” or when they're hacked? In other words, is there a narrative grammar of infrastructure? How much has to happen for nothing to happen? And how do cultural texts differ from built environments in thinking infrastructure as a form of life? China Miéville's story “Covehithe” mobilizes the literary imagination to depict sunken oil platforms as revenant and reproductive organisms that pose new questions about relationships among humans, nature, and technology, and about the care, responsibility, and politics such forms of life demand. This weird tale doubles as documentation of dead infrastructure: its platform characters are actual rigs that litter sea beds around the world. What imaginative or conceptual forms, then, can help us grasp infrastructure's forms of life? This question is particularly urgent with regard to fossil infrastructure, which here names not only infrastructure that processes, circulates, or depends on fossil fuels but also infrastructure that is archaic, obsolete, and otherwise tethered to the past, standing as an obstacle to transition.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41684638","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 : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9771049
S. Al‐Bulushi
{"title":"From the Sky to the Streets, and Back","authors":"S. Al‐Bulushi","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9771049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9771049","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Against the Eurocentric, heteronormative paradigms that continue to structure analysis of post-9/11 global warfare, this article asks what it means to decenter the view from the imperial war room, illustrated most poignantly in the 2016 thriller Eye in the Sky. Highlighting the role played by the Kenyan state in the ongoing war against the Somali militant group al-Shabaab, it takes seriously the African subjects who co-constitute geographies of war making in East Africa today, from the political and business elite who normalize militarized masculinities and femininities, to the African troops whose affective and violent labor sustains war making in Somalia. Far from a celebration of subaltern agency, the article engages the notion of a “subaltern geopolitics” that is mindful of asymmetries of power and that foregrounds ambiguous positions of marginality that are neither dominant nor resistant. Attention to entanglement disrupts binary analytical paradigms of global/local and masculine/feminine, and calls for a deeper consideration of collaboration and complicity.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47011215","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 : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/book.3341
Sahana Ghosh
{"title":"Domestic Affairs","authors":"Sahana Ghosh","doi":"10.1353/book.3341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/book.3341","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 How do protests and security regimes engage each other on the question of difference? This question frames this essay's ethnographic portrayal of the expression of dissent and political claims in a borderland site of national security and the Indian security state's management of such dissent to reinforce its legitimacy as a liberal democracy. Border residents in eastern India, predominantly Muslim or depressed caste, are minority citizens. By closely reading the terms through which they articulate their claims and humiliations and how they are rendered suspect, subordinated, and othered from fulsome democratic rights and citizenship, this essay offers a portrait of the slow violence of affective rule in a place of “no conflict.” Turning away from spectacular instances of militarism and state violence, this essay illuminates the affective force of militarization whose goal is to disable critique and segment minority citizens into subordinated inclusion. It asks how collective political action might be heard and endure in such constrained conditions. This specific locus is instructive for the logic of contradistinction as a mode of security rule more widely. It demonstrates that the intersection of gender and religious identity is not a “dimension” of contemporary national security regimes but must be seen as foundational to their constitution and legitimacy.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46788388","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 : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9771021
S. Al‐Bulushi, Sahana Ghosh, Inderpal Grewal
{"title":"Security from the South","authors":"S. Al‐Bulushi, Sahana Ghosh, Inderpal Grewal","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9771021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9771021","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This introduction offers “security from the South” as a method and an analytic to trace the colonial continuities, the imperial geographies, and the forms of difference through which people become subjects of, resist, and shore up security regimes across the world. Rather than one overarching set of politics, practices, and ideas that constitute “security,” the essay insists on a pluriversal lens onto a world in which security regimes appear beguilingly universal. Using a transnational feminist approach, we contest the boundedness of the category of the “Global South,” instead emphasizing the fluidity between supposedly separate scales (e.g., North/South, intimate/global, etc.). Thinking across time and space allows for consideration of the ways in which the US empire has shaped practices elsewhere, but not in isolation, not without tension, and not without links to other empires. Security from the South thus encompasses imperial “war on terror” projects, but has a before and after to such projects, as security regimes across the Global South are enmeshed in longer histories of colonialism and racisms, religion, and gender/sexuality.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43977547","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}
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