Public CulturePub Date : 2022-04-06DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9584778
Christo Sims
{"title":"Green Magic: On Technologies of Enchantment at Apple's Corporate Headquarters","authors":"Christo Sims","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9584778","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9584778","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Apple's corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley has become an object of public fascination for its technical marvels and green magnificence. However, architectural critics and urbanists have widely critiqued the campus for being socially retrograde and ecologically injurious. This essay queries this divergence in public responses to Apple's headquarters by examining how the campus has been designed to counter a growing disenchantment with neoliberalism, its technologies, and its environmental defilements. In doing so, the essay argues for the analytical potential of adapting anthropological theories of enchantment and magic to the study of contemporary uses of the built environment for branding and public relations purposes.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49352694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-04-06DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9584722
Mihir Pandya
{"title":"Disclosure by Design: What Leaks Produce","authors":"Mihir Pandya","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9584722","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9584722","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay revisits the saga of Cold War era stealth development programs—classified but curiously public efforts to build airplanes that eluded radar detection—to explore how leaks work and the work leaks do when designing complex technical systems. Stealth programs are aging examples of an increasingly visible phenomenon: disclosures about large, closely guarded design, manufacturing, and administrative efforts before their official unveiling. Rather than simply policing the boundary between the secret and the public, in “big” design, in collective efforts to produce knowledge and things at scale, the article argues that leaks have a more subtle purpose: they help govern the uncertain terrain between knowing and knowing enough.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43387392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-04-06DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9584680
L. Chumley
{"title":"Currency under Value, Currency in Debt: A Conversation with Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Sarah Muir","authors":"L. Chumley","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9584680","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9584680","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45745394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-04-06DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9584750
Fazil Moradi
{"title":"Catastrophic Art","authors":"Fazil Moradi","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9584750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9584750","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article is a transdisciplinary inquiry into catastrophic art—artworks whose worlds the empires destroyed and brutally deported to the imperial metropoles. At issue is the impossibility of seeing and speaking of catastrophic art, without at the same time speaking of both systems of knowledge and life forms and of the colonial inheritance and epistemicide. The article follows various historical events, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor's encounter with African art in Paris after World War I and the British colonial destruction of the Kingdom of Benin in 1897; turns to a conference held at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin in 2018; and disturbs Emmanuel Macron's 2017 speech at the University of Ouagadougou and the 2018 French presidential report on restitution. It shows how provenance exhibits epistemicide as it restitutes “looted” art to colonial beneficiaries, and how the incalculability of catastrophic art is to be found in hospitality.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45251629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-04-06DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9584694
Darren Byler
{"title":"The Social Life of Terror Capitalism Technologies in Northwest China","authors":"Darren Byler","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9584694","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9584694","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the digital enclosure of Muslim minority data and labor through a techno-political “reeducation” system in Northwest China to make a broader argument about the way surveillance capitalism can be linked to ethnoracialization. Specifically, it considers how Chinese state capital investment incentivizes technology companies to engage in the dataveillance of ethno-racialized populations to generate what the article names terror capitalism. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research, interviews with former detainees, and analysis of internal police reports, and written in conversation with feminist anthropological scholarship on capitalism and social reproduction, it argues that these systems have created a matrix of conversion devices that produce Muslim social life under the sign of terrorism while expropriating it as data and labor. At the same time these systems, ultimately, are vulnerable to outside interception—opening them to a partial reversal of the surveillant gaze.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42690178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-04-06DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9584708
T. Alexander
{"title":"Black Mass; or, a Billion Plagues and More","authors":"T. Alexander","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9584708","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9584708","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay asks how we are to think the ethics of Black Lives Matter protest amid conditions of contagion in the summer of 2020. It argues that the multitude instantiated in these events didn't simply tolerate the biomedical damage that could result from such proximity, but that it stakes a claim for the ethical virtue of exposure and vulnerability. That these viral commonwealths apprehend not exactly Covid itself, but the risk of infection, as a figure for the historicity of Blackness under the necropolitics of medical apartheid and social death. In order to stage this counterintuitive valorization of risk, the essay examines the barebacking and bug chasing subcultures that emerged during the late 1990s. These communities, too, sourced means of filiation, intimacy, and minoritized historicity from their identification with—and desire for—HIV. Thinking these movements together also allows an overdue retelling of AIDS activism through the intersectional lens of a contemporary queer diaspora.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49538490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-03-18DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9435384
Erica Robles-Anderson, A. Appadurai
{"title":"Democracy without Freedom","authors":"Erica Robles-Anderson, A. Appadurai","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9435384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9435384","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44891525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-03-18DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9435442
Eric Vázquez
{"title":"“ Your Life Is One-Hundred-Percent at Risk”: The Caravan of the Mutilated and the Internationalism of the Vulnerable","authors":"Eric Vázquez","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9435442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9435442","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay examines the cultural politics of migrant caravans through video testimonies produced by Honduras’s Association of Returned Migrants with Disabilities (AMIREDIS). While the stated aim of the 2015 association-sponsored Caravan of the Mutilated involved raising transnational public awareness of the plight of Central American migrants, this essay argues that AMIREDIS’s testimonies and embodiments conjoin the savage risk confronting migrants with histories of imperialist expropriation and transnational financial processes in which migrants find themselves increasingly incorporated. In effect, their testimonies and embodiments invert the reparative logic of worker remittances—cash transfers often thought to be the objective of migration. Against the cruel economies of risk that decapacitated AMIREDIS members as laborers, their testimonies offer an internationalism of the vulnerable. This ethic of mutual vulnerability works against financial markets’ “pooled risks” and capitalism’s predilections to explain away its crippling eventualities with terms like “negative externalities” or “spillover effects.”","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41759345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}