Editor's Introduction

Anxiety attaches to intellectuals engaged in social movement work because who they are and what they do set off alarms. Yet the scholarly critiques of neoliberal dogma and the injunctions to reconsider cultural strategies, which Jamie Morgan, Nam-hee Lee, and Andrea Louie raised in positions 11:3, force the question of who, supposedly, is to do these tasks and how they ought to do them. How do activist intellectuals work? Are academic researchers responsible for hands-on political work? Does the internationalist work of an engaged intellectual address our immediate crisis? What relationship is there between preemptive war and struggles to build alternative social institutions under conditions of market-inspired poverty? What is the timetable? Why struggle for democratic popular counterinstitutions even as the Bush administration's illegal war against Iraq rages on?

Wang Hui's lavish critique of the 1989 social movement's origins, strategies, and blind spots carries over into this issue our prior focus on retrospective political criticism. But they add a second string of questions: What relations obtain between unsentimental historical writing that evaluates immediate events and the work of those intellectually engaged in politics here and now? What happens when we step away from the safety of retrospection and toward the source of the anxiety—the internationalist intellectual in contemporary justice movements? The individuals interviewed here are in most respects like the readers reading the interviews. How should we interpret the interviewees' openly critical, undefensive self-reflection on their perceived gains and losses? Do their reflexive experiences of negotiating with the poor register as knowledge? What do their ambivalence and realism say about political claims made in the name of a scholarship perhaps necessarily removed from field experience?

The figure of the politically engaged intellectual in international justice movements is vital since it highlights the fragility or contingency of intellectual work. Several key points arise in the generous retrospections that make up the bulk of this issue. One is that "movement" does not (perhaps never did) characterize the social activity in question. What may have once been coherently oppositional, as in Beijing in 1989 or Chicago and Paris in 1968, or is now a predictably reformist, neoliberal, nongovernmental organization (NGO), is neither coherent nor particularly effective. Whatever it is that we are doing, Shigeki Takeo, Kin Chi Lau, and Gayatri Spivak repeat, it is chaotic. Sometimes it feels futile, given the magnitude of the crisis. Also, in Shigeki Takeo's words, "It takes a lot of time." The time it takes and the willingness to spend a lifetime reinventing a politically engaged social science, as Chayan Vaddhanaphuti is doing, gives Takeo's point a certain resigned realism. A second point at which the internationalist intellectuals highlighted here seem to concur is at the moment when the question "What is the relation of intellectuals and social movements?" turns into, as Kin Chi Lau bluntly puts it, "What kind of knowledge do we need?"

In "The Year 1989 and the Historical Roots of Neoliberalism in China," Wang Hui reinterprets Primo Levi's question: Since the political strategies of yesterday no longer work (if they ever did), how do we put a lien on the past, grasp its processes anew, and reuse it? Of course, Wang makes the thoroughly necessary move of seizing the past from the neoliberal opposition and revising its historical narrative. He reasserts the social origins and forces that infused the popular oppositional justice movement of Beijing in 1989 and he resituates political need in the ambiguous new context. Wang's willingness to risk writing provisional history in the moment addresses Kin Chi Lau's demand for writing about how we came to this point. Indeed, Lau's requirement that engaged intellectuals must grasp the determinations that structure this present is clearly voiced in all the interviews, from Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, Vandana Shiva, and Gayatri Spivak, to Mark Selden and Shigeki Takeo. The overriding point is that the past must be made comprehensible to the current conjuncture.

Celia Lowe's interview with...