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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
Social TextPub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9771077
Inderpal Grewal, Dipin Kaur, S. Sabherwal
{"title":"The Security State and Securitizing Patriarchies in Postcolonial India","authors":"Inderpal Grewal, Dipin Kaur, S. Sabherwal","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9771077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9771077","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the shifting nature of patriarchy and gender among Sikhs in Indian Punjab through the 1980s and into the 1990s in relation to the Indian state's counterinsurgent policies and practices. The authors’ research reveals that Sikh masculinities were altered during its separatist insurgency as the patriarchal state and communities both relied on violence for their own ends. Specifically, the article argues that the regimes of precolonial and colonial militarism, which constructed hegemonic notions of Sikh masculinity in service to the colonial and postcolonial state, were altered in this period, and that a dominant caste-based warrior masculinity came to be fractured to include a more securitized version. The authors see the targeting of Sikhs as part of a broader process of postcolonial nation making through militarism and security that alters the nature of its patriarchy. The article draws from interviews and fieldwork in Punjab, textual analysis of primary sources, human rights reports, and news articles to reveal the shifting nature of gender and patriarchy in the transnational security state.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42271268","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: 10.1215/01642472-9771091
Negar Razavi
{"title":"Navigating the “Middle East” in Washington","authors":"Negar Razavi","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9771091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9771091","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In recent years, a growing number of experts claiming personal and familial ties to the Middle East have joined elite foreign policy think tanks in Washington, DC, in an effort to shape US policy debates on this complex region. Based on more than two years of ethnographic research within DC, this study contends that such diasporic experts have come to play a specialized role for US empire. Specifically, they serve as “multiplicitous diplomats” who use their connections to the region to navigate and translate the interests of competing political elites in Washington by strategically circulating ideas, people, and funding to and from the Middle East. Such observations reveal the extent to which the US empire functions in practice as a transnationally contested site of power. Furthermore, this study demonstrates how the “Middle East” operates within and enacts influence over the United States, as these diasporic experts bring the voices, anxieties, and power of entities in the region and its many diasporas into elite US policy debates.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47346373","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: 10.1215/01642472-9771035
Deborah A. Thomas
{"title":"Can Black Lives Matter in a Black Country?","authors":"Deborah A. Thomas","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9771035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9771035","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay probes the project of security (defined as the protection of whiteness, class hierarchy, and heteropatriarchy) in relation to the desire for safety (glossed as “having somebody”). In probing this relation within a context in which police violence and extrajudicial killing are not typically seen as part of the global phenomenon of anti-Black racism, it seeks to contribute to a conversation in which raciality is not tethered to physicality, but instead is grounded in both historical-ideological and onto-epistemological phenomena that produce whiteness as the apex of humanity in the modern West. The essay explores the relation between security and safety through the rubric of diaspora in two senses—first as a phenomenon of Western modernity via plantation-based New World slavery, which catalyzed the development of enduring categories of (non)personhood and their elaboration into hierarchies of humanity; and second as a phenomenon of migration and the constitution of transnational sociocultural spheres. Diaspora, thus, generates forms of pan-Africanism and Black consciousness as much as it produces agendas related to transnational governance and global security infrastructures. The essay argues that to more complexly understand security from the South, these two notions of diaspora must be held in productive tension. In this way, security is revealed as a racializing project grounded in coloniality, even within majority Black spaces. The essay concludes by illuminating other terrains on which to build accountability and safety.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44967911","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 : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9631117
Renyi Hong
{"title":"Telecommuting Pedagogies","authors":"Renyi Hong","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9631117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9631117","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the early telecommuting discourse of the 1980s and 1990s, understanding it as a pedagogical context for white plasticity, an ecological project in which racial privilege is protected through the transformation of homes and inhabitants. Rationalized initially as a crisis of adjustment, pedagogies of telecommuting were disseminated largely to upper-middle-class white professionals to build a “telecommuting personality,” a subjectivity that was also meant to buffer them from the growing precarious nature of jobs. Not content to focus simply on work, however, telecommuting gurus took occasion to urge the enhancement of relationships between partners, families, and communities. The home office was core to this imaginary. Convertible, modular, ergonomic home offices that can be changed to suit the needs of the home's many inhabitants were said to yield more integrated and rounded personalities that would radiate outward, creating emotionally mature children and stronger community bonds. Emerging at a moment when “telecommuting” condensed the political stakes of digital labor, this strand of discourse reveals how working from home was appropriated to ensure the protection of white plasticity—the racialized capability of adaptation that was to be passed as inheritance from parents to progeny.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41744195","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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