Issue 97 tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2009-11-10:/journal/issue97/39 2010-01-04T17:25:22Z Winter 2008 Movable Type Pro 4.31-en Killing Time tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2009:/journal/issue97//39.473 2009-12-29T02:39:15Z 2010-01-04T17:25:22Z This article explores a key trope of economic stagnation and chronic joblessness in postcolonial Senegal: the image of "lazy" young men in the public sphere. This civic and moral discourse is critical of young men who allegedly drink tea "all day." But this attitude elides the long history of youth protest against injustice, and excuses a state that has displaced the most strident critics of Senegalese neoliberalism by bribing them with overseas scholarships and government positions. This suggests that what some see as political and economic inactivity is manufactured through state-sponsored encadrement: techniques of trapping, quartering, and containing youth. Michael Ralph http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=39&id=10 Unemployment? Oh. Like the young men who sit and drink tea all day? 

I was confused but dismissed my growing sense of discomfort, convinced this nagging feeling was an occupational hazard of the ethnographic enterprise. Whenever I mentioned my interest in studying the economic stagnation that had plagued Senegal for decades, someone mentioned unemployment (chômage, in French) and tea (in Wolof, attaya). Code switching, as we know, often involves miscommunication. To speak with friends and colleagues, I was obliged to maneuver between French, Wolof, English, and Fulani. Apparently not without some bizarre consequences.
 
]]> Light Reading: Public Utility, Urban Fiction, and Human Rights tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2009:/journal/issue97//39.472 2009-12-29T02:29:05Z 2009-12-29T02:38:32Z This essay argues that the public utility, particularly electricity supply, signifies powerfully as a form of social recognition, a basic human right, and a model of civic inclusion and citizenship in the modern and postcolonial Bildungsroman. James Joyce's A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, Henry Roth's CALL IT SLEEP, Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN, and centrally, Patrick Chamoiseau's TEXACO all connect with one another through a preoccupation with electricity as an akasic medium for the creation of urban imagined communities. The essay further deals with public utilities as a terrain of political struggle from the megacities of the global south (what Mike Davis calls the "planet of slums") to the banlieues of Paris. That struggle is embodied in the emergent practice of parkour, whose expressions this essay analyzes via their popular dissemination in films such as DISTRICT B13 and CASINO ROYALE. Michael D. Rubenstein http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=39&id=114
"The body, enlightened by electricity, was not docile, but ecstatic." 
 -- James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders 


In the 2005 French action film District B13, in which Luc Besson offers up a merely vehicular script through which to showcase the spectacular acrobatics of Paris's (more accurately, the banlieues [suburbs] of Paris's) newest offering to choreographed martial-artistry, parkour, a cop, Damien (Cyril Rafaelli), and a badass banlieusard called Leïto (David Belle) square off in an abandoned factory in a Paris ghetto. The cop shouts his abstract allegiance to the state: "Liberté, fraternité, égalité!" The ghetto youth responds with his material allegiance to the city's decaying slums: "Eau, gaz, électricité!" The battle begins, rages awesomely, and then ends in an alliance between the two characters when they realize, in the middle of the action, that they are on the same side after all, that the ideals of liberty, brotherhood, and freedom need to be unified with the material infrastructure of water, gas, and electricity for the ideals to have any real weight or meaning. The scene is a perfect reduction of the problem this 

essay addresses, the essential tension between democratization and modernization and, in particular, the status within global modernity of what I call, a little inexactly, public utilities: water, gas, and electricity. 

]]> Strange Bedfellows: Black Feminism and Antipornography Feminism tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2009:/journal/issue97//39.471 2009-12-29T02:23:30Z 2009-12-29T02:27:58Z Saartjie Baartman's story has become central to black feminist theory and politics, serving as the primary analytic vehicle for explaining the violence that the dominant visual field inflicts on black female bodies. The re-telling of Baartman's story has also provided black feminists with tools for grappling with racialized pornography, which is thought to re-enact Baartman's violent exhibition by rendering black women objects for white male spectators' consumption. This article argues that the constant invocation of Baartman's story has allowed an anti-pornography formation to flourish within black feminism, masked as racial progressivism. Ultimately, this strain of anti-pornography politics has promoted a black feminist sexual conservatism which systematically ignores questions of black women's pleasure, sexual agency, and desires, and has generated a normative - rather than analytical - engagement with racialized-sexualized imagery. In place of normative readings of racialized pornography, this paper offers a new reading practice - racial iconography - which examines the ways that pornography mobilizes race in particular social moments, under particular technological conditions, to produce a historically contingent set of racialized meanings, pleasures, and profits. Jennifer C. Nash http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=39&id=113 Saartjie Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, has emerged as one of the most significant figures in contemporary black feminist thought. The recent explosion of interest in Baartman can be traced, at least in part, to Sander Gilman's seminal article "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature." Gilman documents the nineteenth-century European fascination with Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who became an object of caged display at exhibitions in London and Paris. Baartman's 

body functioned as a "master text," allowing European audiences to cast their collective gaze on the racially and sexually marked Other in an era where locating the Other's imagined differences justified the project of exporting "civilization."

]]> Activisms and Epistemologies: Problems for Transnationalisms tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2009:/journal/issue97//39.470 2009-12-29T02:17:59Z 2009-12-29T02:23:03Z This article argues for a different academic practice in relation to social movements, asking scholars to be more deliberate about acknowledging the specifically intellectual contributions of activisms. It notes that much of the new theoretical work in the United States on neoliberalism neglects the strong critiques of neoliberalism emerging out of the Central American left in the late eighties and early nineties, as well as the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico beginning in 1994. Laura Briggs http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=39&id=111
Collective social movements are incubators of new knowledge. 
 -- Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination 


In the summer of 2006, the opening night of a conference, the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History, included one of the more memorable events of my life in academe: seventy-five scholars from the United States and Mexico, sitting at tables after dinner, singing "Solidarity Forever." Judging from the reactions around me, the event registered varying degrees of earnestness -- many of us have deep and substantive connections with labor movements, including, especially in the last decade, graduate teaching assistant organizing in U.S. universities -- and uneasiness -- from camp to irony to comments about the weirdness of well-off academics ventriloquizing themselves as workers. It was fun and funny, but also just awkward enough to be intriguing.

]]> "What Do Children Learn at School?": Necropedagogy and the Future of the Dead Child tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2009:/journal/issue97//39.469 2009-12-29T02:07:59Z 2009-12-29T02:16:41Z This essay moves to investigate the co-constitution of "the child" and "the secular." Twins of modernity, "the child" and "the secular" underwrite moral claims about progress, the universal human, and the ordering of time itself. These moral claims are carried forward by dominant narratives of secularism and European Enlightenment. This dominant story aligns secularism with universalism, reason, progress, freedom, and peace "versus" an irrational and atavistic religion. Though narrated as a universal project, secularism, in its dominant form, remains tied to a particular religion, Christianity, and a particular history of origins in Enlightenment Europe. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini have termed this dominant formation "Christian secularism." How does "the child" come to function in the gap between "the religious" and "the secular"? This essay pursues these connections via a close analysis of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's February 2008 proposed educational initiative to teach the meaning of the Holocaust to every French fifth grader. Sarkozy calls upon the specter of dead Jewish child-victims in order to produce a supposedly universal social body in the present and for the future. This unexpected lamination of pedagogy and necrophilia reveals that the survival of the body politic happens not by keeping death at bay but by soliciting it. As site of this solicitation, the Christian secular child uneasily straddles past and future, death and life. Lee Edelman may be right that "the child" summons the fantasy of a future. Nevertheless, we must critically supplement his analysis by asking, which child, whose fantasized future? Ann Pellegrini http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=39&id=65 Louis Althusser's now-classic analysis of "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" opens with a double act of ventriloquism. Casting his voice through Marx, he conjures the figure of the child: "As Marx said, every child knows that a social formation which did not reproduce the conditions of production at the same time as it produced would not last a year." What every child knows -- and how she comes to know it -- turns out to be far more complicated, of course, than this fairy tale invocation of the wise child suggests. Althusser's opening certitude quickly inverts into the form of a question: "What, then, is the reproduction of the conditions 

of production?" This question returns some twenty pages later in slightly different form: "I can now answer the central question which I have left in suspense for many long pages: how is the reproduction of the relations of production secured?" In between, though, another question takes central stage in Althusser's text: "What do children learn at school?" The short answer is: the "know-how" of the subject. The child-who-knows functions, within the terms of Althusser's argument, as the connecting point between the production of the concrete individual as a concrete subject (famously encapsulated in Althusser's conception of "interpellation") and 

the reproduction of dominative social relations. 

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