Editor's Note

On the Transition

It has been twelve dizzying years.

With this special issue on Cosmopolitanism, I conclude my editorship of Public Culture.

This special issue gives me particular pleasure since in part it features essays by some of my colleagues from the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS) at the University of Chicago. I am grateful to COSAS for its support both for the May 1999 conference on Cosmopolitanism and for this special issue. Thus Public Culture comes full circle and returns to the geopolitical site of its founding. What inspired the founding of Public Culture? Liberalization in India is part of the history. The urge to deexceptionalize India (at least in the Western academy) and to deparochialize British cultural studies (then crossing the Atlantic as "transnational cultural studies") is another. The desire to conceptualize the contemporary (as Asian, African, and Latin as well as American and European) and to theorize the emergent (as complexly and unevenly global) were other interrelated dimensions. We were bold enough to think we could refuse disciplinary boundaries by blurring them. In l988, we understood that the nation-state no longer exclusively contained many of its traditional prerogatives in regard to finance, territories, borders, and citizenship. In this sense Public Culture was a naming as well as a mapping project--naming spaces, dimensions, and interrelations in order to give them critical publicity. We sought to understand other modernities by tracking the circulation of cosmopolitan cultural forms. We located its global problematic in the sphere of the public rather than that of the nation. This project of naming sought to put pressure on the assumptions that many held (and hold) about the nation as the primary and irreducible site of Politics with a capital P. It also sought to recognize the relocation of the nation in relation to changes in the circulation and form of global capital. Thus the history of Public Culture consists of these and other conjunctures and fragments. It is a nonlinear history that is part personal, part intellectual, and part political.

Public Culture required more stamina than I had originally imagined. But that has brought its own satisfactions. And I count myself privileged to have had the opportunity and the space in which to realize a vision.

In the initial instance, Public Culture was conceived as an intervention, which by definition meant that the journal would have a shelf life of perhaps ten years. Interventions (like the independence movements of "new" nations or the "new" social movements of the queer or disability nation) by definition need not continue into an openended future. Any such intervention seeks to change the landscape, to create new interrelated fields of knowledge or practice. If such change is accomplished the intervention (qua intervention) ought to become redundant. To continue, the intervention must be transformed into something else just as the independence movement at its moment of success must become a postcolonial governance project. Or the queer or disability nation, initially an ethical critique, must make a choice to either become communities that move from the edge to be "normalized" with a difference, or to continue to find ways to put pressure on the normal itself. Such repositionings transform at least the foundations of thought, if not the nature of structures and practices.

I have gradually come to see that interventions as knowledge-building projects require deepening. Transformative histories demand a basis in the work of intellectuals who provide the thought experiments that open the way for newness. That takes time as well as space. Thus on behalf of the Society for Transnational Cultural Studies, the sponsor of Public Culture, I am pleased to announce that Public Culture's new editor is Elizabeth A. Povinelli and its coeditor is Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. I am confident that together they will bring their own vital and energetic vision to bear on the journal. A time comes when a publication should benefit from a change in leadership. Under Beth and Dilip's leadership Public Culture will retain its commitment to shape an understanding of the world [End...