Editors' Note

In our previous issue, we asked how to think about the archive under conditions of ongoing occupation and systematic efforts at erasing memory in its many material manifestations. The essays in that special section, "Palestine: Doing Things with Archives," thus took up the problem of the Palestinian archive as a site for problematizing insurgent knowledge. Another set of essays addressed the politics of publicity in Turkey, from modes of self-fashioning to emergent forms of state surveillance.

This issue begins with a broadly conceived special section, "Trans-African Slaveries," that promises to be a major intervention in the existing historiography of slavery. The section organizer, Mahmood Mamdani, argues that the range of histories constituting trans-African slavery cannot be categorized under the rubric of "Islamic slavery," or as so many variants of a universal model of freedom/unfreedom whose genealogy remains wedded to the understanding of plantation slavery in the Atlantic World and the economic logics and practices of corporeal violence that are associated with it.

A second section, "Art and Culture in the Modern Middle East," addresses the relationship between art and politics, political art, and the key role of artists and cultural producers in imagining new political formations against the backdrop of anticolonialism and decolonization in the region. The essay by Nadia von Maltzahn addresses the centrality of the state and its presence in supporting cultural production in Lebanon. Meanwhile, Rounwah Adly Riyadh Bseiso draws on oral histories and interviews with artists and other cultural producers in Cairo to emphasize their focus on making revolutionary art to challenge the commodification of the artwork. Finally, Dina Matar brings art into the streets, highlighting the importance of mass mediated aesthetic forms and practices for political struggle. She situates her argument in the context of the Palestine Liberation Organization's revolutionary period, which spanned the years 1968–82. Together, our authors consider the relationship between art and everyday life in the region.

A third special section, "Southern Futures," addresses the political imaginary of neoliberalism. The section opens with conversation among Ravinder Kaur, Keith Hart, and John Comaroff on the topic, and it echoes previous conversations in this journal (e.g., the interview with Kalyan Sanyal) on what it means to think and write about political economy outside the North Atlantic. Ravinder Kaur's essay addresses the ongoing reinscription of the third world as an emerging market, with postcolonial nation-states now viewed as so many territories for the work of commodity exchange and branding. A photo essay by Juan Orrantia and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan offers a meditative glance at the economies of extraction, decay, and indifference. Vinita Damodaran and Felix Padel show how predatory practices of mineral extraction and human displacement by private capital both resemble and fall on a continuum with earlier projects of postcolonial "development."

As this goes to press, we are deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Saba Mahmood on March 10, 2018. Saba was a close friend and beloved colleague to many of us at CSSAAME. Saba's was a distinctive voice in the anthropology of secularism, and her work was among the most powerful examples of thinking the relationship between area and theory in the production of rigorous concepts and new questions that transform accepted protocols of knowledge. Her powerful commitment to thinking the politics of theory, and the relevance of theory to political engagement and activism, is more necessary now than ever. Her luminous and powerful presence will be missed.

We are especially honored, therefore, to close this issue with a Kitabkhana on Saba Mahmood's Religious Difference in a Secular Age, with an introduction by SherAli Tareen. Arvind-Pal S. Mandair argues that "non-Western" sources and experience could provide new ways for negotiating human difference that challenge secular intolerance to alterity. Nermeen Mouftah addresses the unfortunate (and unexpected) exacerbation of majoritarianism and interreligious conflict as the consequence of state secularism. Finally, John Modern addresses the capacity of the secular state to sustain itself independent of individual action, and its role as a discursive formation enables individuals to become "meaningful to themselves."