Editor's Note

The essays for this issue were supposed to emerge from a symposium on Paranoid Politics co-hosted by the Society for Critical Exchange and Frida Beckman and the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University in June of 2021. That the hidden powers that really rule the world found it necessary to invent a virus—or at least the myth of one—to prevent this symposium is obviously a sign of its enormous significance. But these powers have proven ineffective in stifling the voices of the wonderful ensemble of scholars from around the world who were poised to convene in Stockholm. Frida and I are most appreciative for the generous spirit with which they adapted to the changing situation of the symposium and agreed to utilize this format to carry on with the project. We are pleased with the result as represented in this collection of essays on paranoid politics—and invite you to read our introduction to the issue and to enjoy the ensemble of takes on this timely topic.

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Looking forward, we have two issues under preparation. The first, entitled Theorizing Asia (Vol. 30, Nos. 1-2 [2022]), which will be edited by Alex Taek-Gwang Lee. Asia is not self-evident. The region called Asia was culturally defined after the Russia-Japan War and geopolitically designed after the Second World War. Modern Asia was the historical byproduct of colonialism and its effects; the rise of nationalism in Asia was collective resistance to colonial modernization. Modernity in Asia has been the consequence of the dialectical process between modernization and counter-modernization. Its complicated historical background registers the strong demand of "Asian theory" for analyzing the structure of Asian modernity. Recently, as participating in the global distribution of labor, contemporary Asia has attracted many scholars to not only its rapid economic development, but also its cultural products. This issue aims to bring together various theoretical interventions into Asian literature, contemporary art and culture as well as inquiry into the intellectual history of critical theory in Asia. Focus will be placed on the dynamic relation between Western theory and Asian intellectual history. Deadline: closed.

Also, we are preparing an issue entitled Infrastructuralism (Vol. 31, Nos. 1-2 [2023]), which will be edited by Christopher Breu and myself. Over the past forty years or so, the humanities have largely been concerned with issues of representation. Such a focus is not surprising, given that the textual, broadly conceived, sits at the center of humanistic endeavor. Much contemporary online discourse has a similar focus. As our lives become more virtually mediated, questions of representation appear to become ever more central. Yet what is obscured by our investments in the computer screen and avatar culture? The singular focus on representation has worked to mystify the systems, structures, and forms of labor that enable representation to take place and life and ecosystems to flourish. In an era defined by climate emergency, pandemics, and massive inequality, the issue of infrastructure becomes ever more pressing. This issue will be dedicated to thinking about the centrality of infrastructure to the humanities and to the most pressing political questions of our moment. We define infrastructure broadly to include economic structures and systems, ecosystems, material state formations, institutions, computational and web-based materialities (including servers, fiber-optic cables and code), various forms of labor, forms of textuality that exceed representation, as well as all that more regularly goes under the name of infrastructure. As people working in the humanities, we are interested in how cultural objects and forms of theory engage with the question of infrastructure. How does representation engage with that which exceeds and enables it? Deadline: 31 December 2022.

I would like to thank the contributors to this issue for sharing their reflections on paranoid politics with us. Special thanks also to Frida Beckman, who co-edited this focus with me, which is an extension of her exceptional organizational efforts regarding our planned twelfth annual Theory Institute at Stockholm University; to Daniel T. O'Hara for his work on our amazing Reformations feature on Paul Bové's Love's Shadow; to Jeffrey J. Williams for...