Editorial Statement

On the occasion of our transition to Duke University Press, we, the current Qui Parle Editorial Board, write this statement across the last days of 2016, a year concluding with looming political uncertainty and social fragility. Such a situating exercise—a mission statement, a manifesto, an apology—easily lends itself to the overestimation of any present moment and its particular gravity, effectively isolating it. Here, instead, we write this statement as if drawing a line in the sand—one for stepping over creatively, not for lingering before, as the movement of critique demonstrates: out of crisis, critique, back again, and so forth.

Making this move in the face of the current resurgence and consolidation of white heteropatriarchal nationalism calls us to reflect on the role of a journal such as Qui Parle amid antiracist, ecological, pro-LGBTQ+, feminist, and promigrant struggles. What can a journal of critical theory do in such times? Who speaks here? What change might this speech effect, especially in times of precarity and transition?

For more than thirty years some iteration of Qui Parle has existed as a space for critique to thrive in diverse forms. Founded as Ça Parle in 1985 at the University of California, Berkeley, Qui Parle began as a journal devoted to scholarship on literature, philosophy, critical theory, and visual studies and subsequently branched out into the social sciences to include work in political science, anthropology, and sociology. While our articles are identified within the parameters of these institutional frameworks, the profile of Qui Parle is most sharply defined by interventions that run across and against disciplinary boundaries.

As a journal run by graduate students, Qui Parle has an Editorial Board that changes every year. Many of the editors who voted on the transition will have moved on (taking exams, conducting fieldwork, writing) by the time this first issue with Duke is published. Consistency is maintained through weekly meetings in a liminal, windowless office space and a commitment to featuring authors who inspire and challenge the thinking and writing of the editors. At any one time, Qui Parle is a mosaic of our board members' interests and specialties. Given the diverse formations represented on the board, this makes for shifts and reorientations with every new issue and at times for unlikely constellations of divergent and complementary voices speaking across disciplinary lines and tongues. Our special issues, with titles such as "Toward Planetary Decolonial Feminisms," "At the Intersections of Ecocriticism,""Higher Education on Its Knees," "Affect Theory," and, most recently, "Ethics Outside the Human," condense ongoing investments in queer theory and gender studies, critical race theory, and ecological concerns that generations of editors have shared over the years.

The voices included in the current issue range widely in style and object of inquiry: juxtaposing critical biographical work with varied reflections on critique itself, pairing a reading of technics and the Anthropocene with a personal narrative relating animals and social stigmatization, examining artworks (from the fifteenth century through the present), and gathering photographs of black German identity during World War II. This range in genres marks a new kind of engagement for Qui Parle, producing novel modes of critique and reflection, speech and listening.

If the title of our journal comes in the form of a question, the answer to "who speaks" is never the same. What persists is the critical impetus embedded in the mode of questioning itself. While the voices in play are in constant flux, the commitment to solicit speech remains unwavering.

We thank Emily O'Rourke and Jordan Lev Greenwald, who undertook most of the labor of the transition process. We thank the University of Nebraska Press for housing us over the last years and Duke University Press for welcoming us and supporting us at every step of the transition. We thank all previous editors who worked to make this journal a constant reflection on the critical, social, and aesthetic concerns that occupy the graduate student...