Editors’ Note

In the previous two issues, we announced the changed concerns of the journal and welcomed responses from a range of interlocutors. This issue reflects on some of those concerns and continues the dialogue by taking up the questions of how to think about the relationship between area and theory and what that would involve both conceptually and in practice. These questions are approached from a variety of theoretical perspectives, different geographical locales, and divergent disciplinary spaces.

We began this engagement in volume 33, number 3, in two ways: by forefronting the question of Eastern Marxism through an extended history of the Meerut Conspiracy Case, and by posing questions about the embodiment and phenomenology of caste and the experience of untouchability raised by Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai’s excellent text The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory (2012). The special section in this issue, “Insurgent Thought,” further explores the genealogies of thought and concept formation in non-Western locales.

We are also pleased to carry a special section in remembrance of Donald Quataert (1941–2011), the well-known scholar of Ottoman labor and social history, whose work brought into view the history of the working class in the late Ottoman Empire and the history of colonial infrastructure as a site of political self-making. The pieces presented in this issue by his students and interlocutors reflect and continue to build on the intellectual concerns he developed in his scholarly work.