Editors’ Note

In our last issue we explored questions of licit and illicit economies of production alongside fractured geopolitical borderlands with a focus on questions of formal and informal practices of surveillance. This issue continues to explore the intersections between states and borderlands as well as to consider the interrelationship between subjects of and concepts in history.

The section titled “Concept Histories of the Urban” is organized around concepts that function as entry points for a consideration of the poetics and politics of urban transformation in the global South. Our contributors are concerned with how global urbanism reflects economic processes, e.g., those that go under the name of neoliberalism, which are shaped by convergent processes (real estate speculation, land grab, financialization of financial risk, deskilling, and deindustrialization) but take distinct spatial form and respond to local histories. These challenge anticipations of urban democracy and social mobility shaped by an earlier understanding of how cities organize and operate. As accelerated urbanization and “slumification” become dominant forms of life for populations experiencing rural distress and precarity, Asian and African cities have increasingly taken on distinct forms of enclaving and social differentiation. Built form and infrastructure (e.g., the refugee camp, shantytowns, ghettos) can be used to segregate vulnerable populations in the interest of governance and control. Forms of enclaving also stigmatize such spaces, leaving them open to association with economies of precarity and disposability such as homelessness, street hawking, domestic labor, contract work, and illicit trade. The contributors to this section thus work with such keywords as ephemerality, exception, and accumulation, all of which have gained pertinence in the context of longer-term histories of urbanization and colonial racialization. They also function as condensed points of entry for understanding how spatial histories are being transformed by climate crisis, emergent links between the rural and the urban, and the rise of various forms of urban violation as practices of social distinction.

Zeina Maasri’s essay, in the section “Design and Canon,” looks at literature and art together to analyze the “visual economy” of “precious books” in modern Beirut. Maasri places the production of visual artifacts and the economy of print culture within a shared historical analysis to examine how the rise of transnational publishing in the mid-twentieth century impacted the commodification of precious books.

The five essays in the section titled “Loyalty and Critique: Gender, Morality, Militancy” contend with competing forms of loyalty, acts of betrayal, and charges of treason that have accompanied struggles for alternative sovereignty and self-determination in the borderlands of Kurdistan, Kashmir, and the western Sahara. The essays explore the relationship between militancy and its dependence on gendered constructs of commitment and fidelity in the context of state occupation and popular revolt. In so doing, they reflect on the anxieties surrounding the management of moral conduct and political selfhood in situations of uprising, insurrection, and everyday resistance. By considering the emotional work required for maintaining ideological commitment, the essays take up questions of the intimate and affective lifeworlds of political opposition and militancy as states impose increasingly violent, authoritarian measures to police their borders and boundaries, as well as surveil their internal enemies.

Finally, our book forum, Kitabkhana, considers the late Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, bringing together seven scholars of diverse backgrounds to meditate on the interrelationship between religion, politics, and power. Responding to Ahmed’s call to answer “What is Islam?” against essentializing definitions of the Muslim practices, beliefs, and identities, they highlight how history can both illuminate and at times obscure our understanding of both the question and the attempt to answer it.