Editor's Note

Long before 11 September 2001 a cluster of essays on violence, culture, and communication began trickling into the offices of Public Culture. These essays grappled with the forms and conditions of ethnic, class, and religious discomforts, distresses, and aspirations that seemed to touch on fundamental questions about the relationship between culture, communication, and violence. Some essays reanimated persistent questions about the mutual dependencies of certain modes of violence and certain orientations of desire. Authors struggled to analyze and figure the strains on the social, personal, and environmental body as persons are caught up in building new social orders or maintaining older ones. Where is the critical leverage when the conditions for individual and collective dreams are also the grounds for social and personal suffering? How does one approach the hatred that turns the dreams of a good life into the ruins of Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Chechnya, New York City, and Afghanistan?

Li Zhang, Pun Ngai, and Mathieu Borysevicz and Mindy Gross present, in the different genres of scholarly essay, testimonial, and visual essay, new forms of social agony accompanying the economic transitions of the Chinese state and subsequent redefinitions of citizenship and the good life. The dramatic transformations of the Chinese economic system is complemented and troubled by the often invisible quotidian nature of poverty in advanced capitalist nation-states like the United States. How does one make these forms of grinding physical violence and cultural innovation legible, and to what end? Anya E. Liftig's visual essay on a rural community in the southern Appalachians and Kathleen Stewart's accompanying commentary try to provide some critical leverage on "the vitalities and exhaustions captured in a bodily gesture" by diversifying the languages and genres by which we communicate them. Other essays confront more directly regional and international forms of social violence. Brian Keith Axel examines the image of the tortured Sikh and the production of a diasporic Sikh nationalism. Sheila Miyoshi Jager looks at how a war memorial in South Korea is used to perpetuate a masculine image of history, the military, and its own legitimacy vis-à-vis North Korea.

Although the authors in this issue clearly share an interest in social violence, the cultures of communication, and their institutional mediation, Public Culture noticed a diversification of academic voice. The polemic—in the sense of the polemique (the controversial) and the polemikos (the warlike)—seems to have made a comeback. Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen's visual essay looks at forms of violence all too common in New York City long before 11 September. John Borneman slices into the question of ethnic hatred in Europe, controversially links it to discourses of reproduction, and proposes a communicative solution. Joseph Massad interrogates what he calls the Gay International for creating the conditions for, and factuality of, homophobia in the Arab world by assuming the global transparency of sexuality and sexual identity. These essays can be read as, and I think are meant to be, provocative.

Public Culture is not the only journal taking up the themes of violence, terror, and culture. On the horizon of publishing houses throughout the world are a host of collected volumes directly addressing violence and terrorism in late liberal times. Public Culture would like to announce a special issue entitled Fallout that will grapple with recent and long-term global-cultural and -political alliances and realignments arising from the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001. In the wake of U.S.-Russian antiterrorist talks, the U.S. secretary of state, Colin Powell, announced that not only is the Cold War over, but the post-Cold War era is now a historic memory. How do such declarations of a new hothouse of international political relations help constitute new geopolitical imaginaries? What forms of violence and warfare are just or unjust within these new rememberings, realignments, and rededications? What are the global cultural implications, when Salman Rushdie calls for a cultural fatwa against those opposed to secular notions of free speech and expression? When Samuel Huntington's essay "Clash of...