Showing papers in "Public Culture in 2004"

People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg

Abstract: The inner city of Johannesburg is about as far away as one can get from the popular image of the African village. Though one of Africa’s most urbanized settings, it is also seen as a place of ruins—of ruined urbanization, the ruining of Africa by urbanization. But in these ruins, something else besides decay might be happening. This essay explores the possibility that these ruins not only mask but also constitute a highly urbanized social infrastructure. This infrastructure is capable of facilitating the intersection of socialities so that expanded spaces of economic and cultural operation become available to residents of limited means. This essay is framed around the notion of people as infrastructure, which emphasizes economic collaboration among residents seemingly marginalized from and immiserated by urban life. Infrastructure is commonly understood in physical terms, as reticulated systems of highways, pipes, wires, or cables. These modes of provisioning and articulation are viewed as making the city productive, reproducing it, and positioning its residents, territories, and resources in specific ensembles where the energies of individuals can be most efficiently deployed and accounted for.

The Corporeal Politics of Quality ( Suzhi )

Abstract: The phantom-like nature of value—what could be a more compelling topic in the wake of the bursting of the 1990s economic bubble, when the value of the new economy seemed suddenly to dissipate overnight? Where did value go? And how can it be that, in the midst of a global restructuring of capitalism, certain things that formerly seemed to have so much value are now deemed to be what society (or something called that) can no longer afford? The topic of value is particularly compelling in light of the momentous social transformations taking place in China during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In the movement from a planned to a market economy, the representation of value has undergone a reorganization in the realm of the biopolitical in which human life becomes a new frontier for capital accumulation. This changing rela-

Aesthetics of Superfluity

Abstract: If there is ever an African form of metropolitan modernity, then Johannesburg will have been its classical location. The idea of the metropolis in European thought has always been linked to that of “civilization” (a form of existence as well as a structure of time) and capitalist rationalization. Indeed, the Western imagination defines the metropolis as the general form assumed by the rationalization of relations of production (the increasing prevalence of the commodity system) and the rationalization of the social sphere (human relations) that follows it. A defining moment of metropolitan modernity is realized when the two spheres rely upon purely functional relations among people and things and subjectivity takes the form of calculation and abstraction. One such moment is epitomized by the instrumentality that labor acquires in

Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy

Abstract: In Kano, the economic center of northern Nigeria, media piracy is part of the “organizational architecture” of globalization (Sassen 2002), providing the infrastructure that allows media goods to circulate. Infrastructures organize the construction of buildings, the training of personnel, the building of railway lines, and the elaboration of juridicolegal frameworks without which the movement of goods and people cannot occur. But once in place, infrastructures generate possibilities for their own corruption and parasitism. Media piracy is one

From Englishization to Imposed Multilingualism: Globalization, the Internet, and the Political Economy of the Linguistic Code

Abstract: C urrent debates on the possible linguistic consequences of the process of globalization concentrate on the complementary issues of Englishization and language loss. Most writers view today’s linguistic world as a site of contestation between the global and the local: the spread of English as the lingua franca of the information age is viewed as the linguistic counterpart to the process of economic globalization; the causal factors working against the process of Englishization are thought of as locally bound and are equated with patterns of local resistance to economic (and cultural) globalization. This conception also determines the structure of the discourse on linguistic human rights: the need for negotiated multilingualism and the rights of speakers to resist global pressures and to use, maintain, and develop their local languages. In this essay, I suggest that this conceptual framework misses out on a critical aspect of the linguistic dynamics of our time. The process of globalization undoubtedly has far-reaching linguistic consequences, but these, I claim, have less to do with the spread of

Trust and Gender in a Transnational Market: The Public Culture of Laleli, Istanbul

Abstract: The operation of market exchange usually relies on a combination of written rules and regulations and some unwritten but shared cultural codes. Yet in an age when the mobility of people, goods, and money is rapid and far-reaching, many markets might lack either one or both of those bases of operation. This essay discusses the organization of such a marketplace, one formed at the nexus of cross-border movements of goods and people. In the Laleli district of Istanbul, entrepreneurs from different countries and of both genders mobilize eclectic idioms of trust and sex in order to carry out economic exchange in a weakly regulated economic environment. In the process, they form gendered social relationships ranging from friendship to sexual intimacy. Over the last fifteen years, a transnational trade network has emerged that is centered in the former Soviet Union (FSU) and spans the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and South and Southeast Asia. The agents of the chelnochny biznes (shuttle trade), as unregistered and unregulated cross-border trade is called

The Suffering Body of the City

Abstract: S ince 1990, parallel to the period of transition to a democratic society, the AIDS epidemic in South Africa has increased dramatically. The level of HIV infection in the adult population (ages 15–49) rose from 1 percent in 1990 to more than 20 percent in 2000. However, this figure conceals a disparity in the distribution of the disease. The townships are affected far more than the largely white suburbs, while in the townships themselves the highest levels are found in the so-called squatter camps (Shisana and Simbayi 2002).1 The combination of pandemic and democracy has wrought changes specific to sufferers living on the periphery of Johannesburg. People obtained their freedom and fell sick at the same time. The newly acquired sovereignty has enabled individuals to explore previously unavailable urban spaces, to develop innovative forms of political mobilization, and to access, in new ways, health services that had once

Dismembering and Expelling: Semantics of Political Terror in Colombia

Abstract: In a series of very suggestive essays, Daniel Pecaut considers how representations of Colombian society as fragmented, heterogeneous, and precarious go hand in hand with the anguish produced by irruptions of an object that hinders socialization.1 This external something is violence, which Pecaut understands as a circumstantial default or excess of the social that deprives the latter of any type of internal unity. Colombia, a semiperipheral and violent country with one of the most durable democracies in Latin America, has tragically fulfilled Homi Bhabha’s definition of the nation: an idea whose potential resides precisely in its impossible unity as a symbolic force.2 Some of the most remarkable features of the Colombian case are the paradoxes and dilemmas that in its recent history accompany the relationships between war, nation, democracy, and the peaceful

Goddess across the Taiwan Strait: Matrifocal Ritual Space, Nation-State, and Satellite Television Footprints

Abstract: Author(s): Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui | Abstract: This essay examines complex interactions among the nation-state, popular religion, media capitalism, and gendered territorialization as these are inflected across the Taiwan Strait. Relations across the strait have been fraught with political tension and military preparations over the question of whether taiwan is part of China or an independent state. Since the 1999 presidential elections in Taiwan, the new government there has been more vociferous about Taiwan independence, and mainland China's Communist Party has responded with more vigorous claims on Taiwan, including the launching of a warning missile over the island. Under these conditions, it is all the more remarkable that in recent years there has been an increasing number of religious pilgrimages and exchanges across the strait, and that, in 2000, one such pilgrimage by Taiwanese worshippers of the maritime goddess Mazu to her natal home in Fujian Province was broadcast live from China back to Taiwan via satellite television.

From the Ruins: The Constitution Hill Project

Abstract: Between the University of the Witwatersrand and the inner-city neighborhood of Hillbrow (the densest square kilometer of urban space in Africa) is a giant building that emerges from rubble and ruins. To watch it rise is to see a city and a democracy heaving itself from the debris, carrying with it the physical markers and the tangible echoes of an iniquitous political system but also of a history stretching back long before apartheid. The building is the new Constitutional Court, and it is being erected on the site of the Old Fort, Johannesburg’s notorious prison complex. On this 95,000-square-meter site, the municipal and provincial governments are developing a major urban regeneration project and mixed-use heritage precinct: Constitution Hill. Constitution Hill will house the new court, symbol and guardian of the South African Constitution, one of the most democratic public declarations in the world; it is also being developed as a “campus for human rights” that will house many statutory bodies and nongovernmental organizations whose job it is to protect and interpret the Constitution. Constitution Hill will bear the mantle of this new order—understood, always, within the context of the past. Prominent in the precinct are the three derelict prisons, left mostly to rot since 1983 when they were closed down and the prison was moved to Soweto. Each prison has its own legacies and ghostly presences; each will fulfill separate roles in the new public space being wrought from the heart of the city. As the court rises, its every shape is etched against the high-rise apartment blocks of Hillbrow, a neighborhood of one hundred thousand people, most of whom are immigrants from other parts of Africa. From the ramparts of the Old

Copyrighting Che: Art and Authorship under Cuban Late Socialism

Abstract: Visitors to Havana are dwarfed by Ernesto Che Guevara’s monumental face presiding over Revolution Square. A principal icon of the Cuban revolution and anticolonial movements worldwide, Che Guevara has been the object of state worship since his death in 1967. So when Tomás Esson, a young graduate of Havana’s prestigious Art Institute, scandalized the public in 1988 with an exhibit featuring an image of Che associated with sexual and scatological imagery, the Ministry of Culture quickly closed down the show.1 In the words of one onlooker, the offending artwork depicted Che looking at “figures doing ‘things’! Fornicating! People with horns! And one was sticking his horn up someone else’s ass! And in the middle of that there were little Cuban flags! And pioneros climbing a cannon that was in fact a phallus!” (Garcia 1999).2 Visitors were puzzled to see at a state gallery what appeared to be blasphemy. And to no one’s surprise, the exhibit lasted only one day. Allegedly, it was the minister of culture himself, Armando Hart, who asked the artist to close it down. This incident marked the boundaries of Cuba’s version of perestroika, a period of ideological opening and generational renewal in the Communist Party that brought about a thriving youth culture and unprecedented political humor. Barely two years later, perestroika,

Mango Mao: Infections of the Sacred

Abstract: On 15 March 1666, Louis XIV conducted his first military review. Several years later, a medal was struck depicting the scene (Foucault 1979a: 188). In the spatial layout of this medallion, which showed lines of disciplined soldiers sharing equal space with their sovereign (see fig. 1, above), Michel Foucault would find the first and quite tentative sign of a subtle but utterly crucial shift in the way power was depicted and deployed. The arrangement of the troops; their placement in relation to their king; their movement and how it was ordered, planned, and disciplined by a series of intersecting lines at their feet—all these small, almost indiscernible signs were to cast a shadow over what appears to be a straightforward, ostentatious display of Louis XIV’s famous motto, l’etat c’est moi.1

Reframing Township Space: The Kliptown Project

Abstract: n 1955, the African National Congress (ANC) held its historic Congress of the People to ratify its liberation manifesto, the Freedom Charter. This event took place in Kliptown, on the outskirts of Soweto (fig. 1, above), at a site that came to be called Freedom Square in honor of the occasion. Today Freedom Square is an open, windswept tract of land, lying between a shack settlement, a railway line, and a taxi rank and bounded by the back facades of warehouses and wholesale stores. The trees that once lined its edges, providing shade for local traders and commuters, have mostly died, and the farm that once cultivated the land around it has long been abandoned. Remarkable today only for the tapestry of footpaths marking its surface, tracing the movement of people who traverse it in the course of their daily lives, Freedom Square has an auspicious history. This site in Kliptown was chosen for a meeting of what became known as the

Nationalism As Such: Violence during South Africa's Political Transition

Abstract: The study of Africa has been prejudiced by omissions. Most glaring is the failure to treat the question of nationalism. The African state or the state in Africa (to allude to Jean-François Bayart’s great ambivalence)1 is so often treated in relation to the colonial state; ethnicity; underdevelopment and imperialism; modernity; capitalism; bureaucratization; and traditional authority, ritualism, or power. It is rarely treated in relation to nationalism or the nation-state.2 This is surprising given that various struggles against British, French, Portuguese, and Belgian colonialism were often conducted under the auspices of African nationalism and in pursuit of independent African nation-states. This does not mean that nationalist movements have not been studied; it does mean that they are often treated as agents of many things other than nationalism: ethnicity, modernity, elite politics, bourgeois class politics, and so on. What is absent are studies of national movements that are vectors of, precisely, nations. What is an African nation? What is entailed in African nation building? It is precisely the failure to pose these questions that contributes to the apparent inscrutability of the African scene. I will suggest here, for example, that what has often been discussed in eth-

Compulsive Gambling, Diagrammatic Reasoning, and Spacing Out

Abstract: ��� he past two decades have seen an extraordinary growth in regulated casino gambling and state-run lotteries in the United States. This expansion was spurred by the 1988 passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which mandated state governments to enter into good-faith negotiations with Indian tribes seeking to operate casinos and high-stakes bingo games. Concurrently, a series of decisions by various state governments (worried about tax revenue), municipalities (worried about jobs), and gaming corporations (worried about profits) has led to the development of Nevada-style casinos in non-Indian jurisdictions as diverse as Gary, Indiana, and Biloxi, Mississippi. Finally, during the 1990s, state lotteries began pooling monies into so-called interstate games (like Powerball), which are able to award jackpots of up to hundreds of millions of dollars and have substan

The Genuflected Body of the Masochist in Richard Wright

Abstract: In the spirit of E. P. Thompson’s celebrated essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967), we will isolate three moments in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, and Richard Wright’s Black Boy that convey a historical movement, a movement that we will then articulate in more detail.1 In the second chapter of his Narrative, after describing the sleeping conditions of the slaves, Douglass tells us that “they sleep till they are summoned to the field by the driver’s horn.” He points out that “Mr. Severe, the overseer, used to stand by the door of the quarter armed with a large hickory stick and heavy cowskin, ready to whip anyone” who does not respond promptly to the “sound of the horn” (Douglass 1977: 31–35). In Up from Slavery, Washington (1986: 286) has high praise for the English, who impress him because “the home life of the English seems to me to be about as perfect as anything can be. Everything moves like clockwork.” In the second part of Wright’s Black Boy, the narrator works for a while at a medical research institute at a hospital in Chicago. Wright (1993b: 361–62) presents an apparently minor incident that takes place at his job. Some excerpts from the episode follow:

The Price of Honor: The Press versus Congress in the Rhetoric of Brazilian Politics

Abstract: Rarely has honor been studied in the context of modern political relationships. From Marcel Mauss’s pioneering study The Gift (1924) until John Peristiany and Julian Pitt-Rivers’s landmark 1992 volume Honor and Grace in Anthropology, little has been done to consider this topic as an important object of political analysis (notwithstanding the fact that Mediterranean studies during the 1960s fostered a field later called the “anthropology of honor”). My purpose in this essay is to call attention to honor as a major aspect of contemporary political life, by focusing on the relationship between the press and the Brazilian legislature. I begin by briefly considering the relationship between honor and politics; I then examine legislative debates over the new press bill, and I finish with an analysis of a critical event involving journalists and members of Congress that exemplifies the tensions between the media and politics in contemporary Brazil.

Calling up Annie Moore

Abstract: We see a woman clothed in a late-nineteenth-century dress coat and a wide-brimmed hat. She sits on a black swivel chair with wheels. On the floor next to her are a small bag and an electric candle that shines when the surrounding environment is dark and fades out when the room gets brighter. She faces the wall onto which she projects slides. The images are mostly of her own bronze portrait sculpture.