Editors’ Note

In our last issue, we focused on how the reckoning of potential futures can impact and reorganize social life. We explored the ways in which powerful futures can be projected out of fractured and contested pasts—by considering the imagined futures for feminist politics in the Middle East and South Asia, addressing the anticipatory frames of speculation and calculation in India, and by turning our attention to the interplay between Islamic modernism and classical miniature painting in the work of Pakistani artist Shahzia Sikander.

In our current issue, the section “The Anxieties of Desire” picks up on the previous issue’s concerns with the role of gender and sex in shaping political practice and social violence. Steven Pierce argues that recent episodes of homophobia in Nigeria cannot simply be explained as the result of foreign influences like evangelical Christianity, reformist Islam, or the spread of Western homosexual identities. Rather, subterranean cultures of same-sex practice and the role of sex and sexuality in structuring local politics are key to understanding this phenomenon. While Pierce focuses on the anxieties of sexual regulation, Preetha Mani shows how two women writers of the 1950s and 1960s, who wrote in Hindi and Tamil, challenged the cultural limitations of Indian feminism by casting female desire in universalist terms.

In a special section on Indian constitutionalism, authors address the relationship between law and politics and the new foundations of political society that were established in the wake of postcolonial constitution making. Like other constitutions of the time, the Indian constitution sought to balance popular aspirations and revolutionary enthusiasm against bureaucracy and governance. It was an effort to think about new political forms that were adequate for addressing deep social divisions, conflict, and inequality, albeit through existing institutions and categories. The authors in this themed section explore the divide between the popular and the political, and the political and the social, as these offered novel spaces for experiment.

A section on waste and value showcases the theoretical potential of revisiting the Marxian concept of primary or primitive accumulation through an engagement with the work of the economist Kalyan Sanyal. Partha Chatterjee’s translation of his extended interview with the late Sanyal offers a window onto ongoing Bengali debates and discussions that have defined the collective effort to rethink the political economy of the post-Nehruvian state in India. Vinay Gidwani and Anant Maringanti’s essay addresses the relevance of the concept of primitive accumulation for describing South Asian realities of economic expulsion, and does so by engaging the genealogies of waste and value as supplemental concepts in the history of European political philosophy. Roanne Kantor’s essay, which explores literary representations of filth as these impact ideas of caste and sociality, adds yet another dimension to our focus on the conceptual significance of detritus, waste, and the remainder in social theory.

Fadi A. Bardawil’s interview with anthropologist Talal Asad sheds new light on Asad’s long career. Bardawil returns to some of Asad’s early work, including his Essays in Sudan Ethnography, to encourage Asad to reflect on his intellectual trajectory and elaborate on the relationship between life and scholarship. Bardawil presses Asad to think about the implications of his transformative work in the anthropology of religion for contemporary activism and political practice. He is interested in the tension in Asad’s work between the impulse to question moral and ethical positions, particularly those that appear self-evident, and their ability to structure the desire to act “politically” and the attendant constraints.

The issue closes with a Kitabkhana marking the tenth anniversary of the publication of Siba Grovogui’s Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Order and Institutions. Contributors respond to Grovogui’s provocation regarding the emergence and continuing power of the discipline of international relations. Made possible by empire, modern governmentality, and warfare, the discipline has demonstrated a marked Eurocentrism that has caused it to overlook and silence some of the most critical and innovative moral and political thinking of the anticolonial world. Addressing Grovogui’s argument regarding the peculiar imperviousness of international relations to forms of postcolonial critique, contributors explore figures from the...