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  • Editors' Note
  • Marwa Elshakry and Anupama Rao

Our last issue focused on modern modalities of regulation, particularly regimes of law and bureaucracy, to examine how these structured selves and personhood, constructed peripheral urbanisms, and created modes of imagination through which spatial and conceptual constraints might be breached and redefined.

This issue continues this latter focus on the subversive role of political imagination to consider renegade forms of popular sovereignty in particular. It begins with a special section entitled "Political Society and Popular Politics in Africa," which explores both the analytic potential and the limits of notions of "political society" as a way to address specific histories of violence and governmentality in postcolonial African states. Anneeth Kaur Hundle surveys new practices of citizenship among South Asian communities in Uganda as they navigate between "nativist" Ugandan policies, on the one hand, and transnational forms of political organization on the other. Similarly, Ahmed Veriava discusses problems of postapartheid citizenship for the poor in South Africa via the homology between Thabo Mbeki's concept of "two economies" and purported division between a "civil" and "political society." Meanwhile, Sylvia Croese focuses on a social housing and resettlement project in Angola (Zango) to understand how spatial infrastructure in turn informs and structures popular politics in unexpected ways. Finally, Ruchi Chaturvedi's essay returns to the question of how violence relates to party politics and to state projects of minority protection by similarly considering new formations of popular sovereignty.

Next, we turn to the section titled "Multilingual Locals," where authors address shifting hierarchies between a formal "high" language and colloquial "low" language in precolonial settings. This also extends and elaborates the "Circulation and Language" section in our last issue, which discussed the Persian literary traditions across South Asia. Here, Francesca Orsini engages with multilingual texts and their reception through literary circles in a single setting to explore the complex social life of language and literature. Nathan Lee Marsh Tabor also extends this focus on questions of locality by analyzing Persian poetry gatherings at a Delhi shrine to show how literary, religious, and material practices combined to create a space of interaction between people across social strata. Similarly, Richard David Williams traces the numerous translations, transliterations, and transmissions of a single musical treatise to understand its multisensory experience and its many afterlives.

Another special section, titled "The Global Middle East in the Age of Speed," is inspired by the work of Palestinian artist Jumana Manna, and it considers the impact of automation technologies in the Middle East at the beginning of the twentieth century. Simon Jackson's introduction examines the transregional history of automobility across Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, and Syria to address the relationship between the ubiquity of car cultures and their attendant and powerful transformation of sense and sensibility. On Barak's piece focuses on the uncertain outcomes of Anwar Sadat's policy of Infitah (or Open Door) and its forceful promotion of an American-inspired car society. Barak tracks eight decades of automobility in the post-Nasser era to show how associations between gender, sexual harassment, and the culture of the car emerged and took precedence over such issues as energy efficiency, traffic accidents, and environmental pollution. Pascal Menoret traces the relationship between the Saudi desert and its [End Page 1] association with (masculine) cultures of the car, adventure, and control. Jakob Krais's piece analyzes the spectacle of motor sports and desert rallies and closed-circuit car races in interwar French Algeria and Italian Libya, which were typically staged to perform the supposed scientific advancement and technological superiority of colonial powers over native subjects. If Krais's article highlights how the automobile served as the main currency of colonial mastery, Mehdi Sakatni's argues that even as nomadic communities' camel-automobile entourages foretold the eventual obliteration of their pastoralist lifestyle, they nevertheless appropriated these technologies to creatively resuscitate their own economic and political interests.

Our final section, "The Past for Pakistan," addresses the complex forms of erasure, refusal, remembrance, and forgetting embedded in the idea of Pakistan, whose violent founding continues to structure the psychic life of the subcontinent. Chris Moffat addresses the material manifestations of the past through architectural public history, or...

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