Public Culture is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies, published three times a year—in January, May, and September. It is sponsored by the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU.    A four-time CELJ award winner, Public Culture has been publishing field-defining ethnographies and analyses of the cultural politics of globalization for over thirty years. The journal provides a forum for the discussion of the places and occasions where cultural, social, and political differences emerge as public phenomena, manifested in everything from highly particular and localized events in popular or folk culture to global advertising, consumption, and information networks.    Artists, activists, and scholars, both well-established and younger, from across the humanities and social sciences and around the world, present some of their most innovative and exciting work in the pages of Public Culture.

Public Culture is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies, published three times a year—in January, May, and September. It is sponsored by the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. A four-time CELJ award winner, Public Culture has been publishing field-defining ethnographies and analyses of the cultural politics of globalization for over thirty years. The journal provides a forum for discussing the places and occasions where cultural, social, and political differences emerge as public phenomena, manifested in everything from highly specific and localized events in popular or folk culture to global advertising, consumption, and information networks. Artists, activists, and scholars, both well-established and emerging, from across the humanities and social sciences and around the world, present some of their most innovative and exciting work in the pages of Public Culture.

《Public Culture》是一本经过同行评审的跨学科文化研究期刊，每年出版三期——分别在一月、五月和九月。该期刊由纽约大学媒体、文化与传播系主办。作为四次CELJ奖的获奖者，《Public Culture》在过去三十多年中一直致力于发布具有领域定义性的民族志研究和全球化文化政治分析。期刊为讨论文化、社会和政治差异作为公共现象出现的场所和时机提供了一个论坛，这些现象体现在从特定的地方性事件到全球广告、消费和信息网络等各个方面。来自人文学科和社会科学领域的艺术家、活动家和学者，无论是知名的还是年轻的，均在《Public Culture》的页面上展示他们一些最具创新性和激动人心的作品。

Public Culture

Abstract This article tracks the ways citizens in the People's Republic of China have come to manage the banality of state violence and impunity by turning common political failures into a distinctive politics of fiasco. As a mode of civilian engagement with officialdom in contemporary China, this kind of politics is a departure from the usual straightforward forms of popular resistance, as typified by the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest. Fiasco is not just any kind of failure. It is a kind of flop with performative flair, where repeated malfunctions and blunders escalate in often ludicrous and humiliating fashion to turn once earnest and serious projects in feel-bad dramas of inescapable failure. As such, this form of politics casts a renewed light on the aesthetic and affective dimensions of citizen–state struggles, especially among those that persist in confronting failures of justice under authoritarian conditions of political non-crisis.

Julie Y. Chu

Schlock Value and the Politics of Fiasco

烂片价值与失败的政治

The front and back cover images of this issue are inspired by Fishing, a graphic book written by Michael Ralph and illustrated by Nia Palmer and Laura Molnar (forthcoming). Fishing is a term people who are incarcerated sometimes use to describe the practice of improvising strings (from bed sheets, clothing, dental floss, and other fabrics) they can tie to objects to share with each other. Fishing is a dynamic network of attachment and attentiveness. Fishing proves that ingenuity cannot be incarcerated. Many states allow children of any age to be tried as adults for certain crimes. Fishing is a reminder of the harsh reality that many people come of age in prisons.Fishing does not have any words; instead, Michael's art direction treats fishing as an imaginative form of choreography, born from a desire to connect and share resources. In this spirit, fishing is about how we share resources to build networks that endure no matter where we find ourselves.

Michael Ralph

Nia Palmer

Laura Molnar

Artist Statement

艺术家声明

Abstract This article argues that the global emergence of children at the forefront of causes from climate change to education reveals a contradiction at the heart of politics. If politics is defined by the making of a future, the children who are meant to be its heirs are crucial to it. Yet they represent the last category of persons formally to be disallowed political agency, suggesting it is their very unfreedom that allows children to exercise power. Does their mobilization in contemporary politics signal the limits of its realm?

Faisal Devji

The Childhood of Politics

政治的童年

Abstract This article tells a story about the unfolding “Chinese Century” in South Africa centered on China Malls, wholesale shopping centers for Chinese goods that have cropped up along Johannesburg's old mining belt since the early 2000s. Based in ethnographic and historical analysis, the essay takes a palimpsestic approach to imagine how Chinese capital enters into a terrain profoundly shaped by race, labor, and migration and is entangled with the afterlives of gold. Chinese migrant traders in South Africa draw on legacies of migrant mine labor and refashion processes that devalue Black labor. Whereas these histories are lost upon Chinese newcomers, African workers experience working for “the Chinese” through the memory of the mines. With the aim of theorizing emergent formations of race and capital in the Chinese Century, the essay threads this new epoch through the history of colonial and racial capitalism of the City of Gold.

Mingwei Huang

The Chinese Century and the City of Gold: Rethinking Race and Capitalism

中国世纪与黄金之城：重新思考种族与资本主义

The preceding issue (January 2021) was completed in the spring of 2020 as a pandemic was disrupting every arena of social life. Even then, we aimed to see “the virus in the context of the planet” and not to succumb to “the temptation to see the planet solely through the lens of the virus.” (3) We've taken those words to heart. The present issue offers a somewhat dispersed set of articles about apps and air filters, shopping malls and circuses, urban majorities and children. Yet in the light of the current conditions, these topics reveal a set of conjunctural surprises. The essays in this issue remind us that the coronavirus spreads through particular contexts and that we should poise ourselves to observe and to notice what comes next.This issue opens with two essays about tracking majorities. In “Not Tracking: The Antipolitics of Contact-Tracing Applications,” Paula Kift analyzes efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic via contact-tracing apps. These apps promise to interrupt transmission by alerting users if they have been in proximity to someone with a confirmed case of COVID-19. Putting aside the question of technical feasibility, the very idea of contact tracing depends on creating a new fiction of community of those who might have had contact with sources of infection. However, those with greatest exposure to the virus are less likely to have smartphones, access to medical care, or the capacity to shelter in place. Attempting to manage an epidemiological crisis via consumer electronic devices creates a new category of social exclusion: those who are not counted, traced, or tracked. Apps that facilitate fast counting produce afflicted majorities who do not count but are nevertheless accountable as targets of blame. This new form of viral sociality leaves the weaker majority out of account.In “Counting the Uncountable” AbdouMaliq Simone and Vyjayanthi Rao turn our attention toward “urban majorities.” Like Kift, Simone and Rao are less concerned with counting as an enumerative device than with how technologies fail to take contexts into account. Urbanism coheres in the dense fluidity of relations that proximity and conjuncture afford. Spaces for work and for living, sites of production and consumption, and forms of movement and inhabitation blend, making social distancing nearly impossible and individuals’ distinct and separate trajectories hard to trace. There is a liquid sociality of dynamic relations among those who slip through the cracks of what the state can provide in terms of employment, security, and health. Urban majorities may be difficult to count but their presence and resilience are also difficult to ignore. Some of the most densely populated places in the world have more successfully controlled the spread of COVID-19 than have affluent zones in the global North. It is exactly those who are not counted and do not count who operate in the contingent, precarious, recombinant, and improvisational socialities of the new urban majorities.The second conjuncture occurs in two essays that offer rich portraits of Chinese capitalism at home and overseas. In “Filtered Life: Air Purification, Gender, and Cigarettes in the People's Republic of China,” Matthew Kohrman traces filtration discourse through a gendered set of expectations about tolerance for bodily risk. As air quality worsens, women wear masks in public, but “real men” don't fear air. The state has made efforts to intervene in this literally toxic masculinity by promoting filter-tipped cigarettes as signs of leisure and power.Air purifiers are supposed to mitigate the effects of pollution, but these consumer devices make more work for mother as the expectations that someone will protect the environment come home. At the end of the day, the purification of domestic air has revitalized the masculine practice of smoking at home. Kohrman's informants express frustrations that would be familiar to people enduring polluted environments, wildfires, a global pandemic, or even the conjuncture of all three. The filters and masks that keep us safe are constant reminders that there will be no adequate state response: “They just make me feel like a caged bird now. Am I to just stay home all the time? What solution is that? It just makes me so mad” (184).In Johannesburg, as described by Mingwei Huang in “The Chinese Century and the City of Gold: Rethinking Race and Capitalism,” Chinese shopkeepers, store guards, and workers extend and reconfigure old traditions of racialized capitalism that are rooted in the history of gold mining in the region. In Huang's sharply observed essay we see the conjuncture of two circuits of migration: entrepreneurs from Fujian and Guangdong, and undocumented workers from Malawi and Zimbabwe. The malls are typified commercial environments that bind these populations together in unequal interdependency. In the terrain of consumer capitalism, the interracial flow of ethnic stereotypes, hidden angers, and radical economic disparities are minimized and banalized. In this light, Huang argues, “The humble mall is a harbinger of the novel transformations, and dogged retrenchments, of capital, labor, and race that the ‘Chinese Century’ brings, while questioning what is even ‘new’ about this moment after all” (213). Together, Kohrman and Huang's articles help us think about circulations and body politics in the era of state-sponsored merchandising ventures.The third conjuncture occurs around the politics of children. Michael Ralph joins us as guest editor. We developed this theme well before the spread of COVID-19, but the pandemic has only confirmed the importance of the topic. What is it like to grow up when crises—economic, political, epidemiological, ecological—constitute the ground conditions of the global present?There are those who question the ethics of bringing children into a dying world. There are those who would reorient reproduction toward “making kin, not babies” (Haraway 2016: 102). Yet never have there been more children. Children are at once priceless and endlessly subject to political calculations. They are sites of immeasurable investment. Yet there are also record numbers detained in camps, orphaned by conflicts, and displaced as refugees. These vulnerable beings must be protected from radicalization, exploitation, and abuse. Yet there are several places in the world where there are not enough adults to do the protecting, where more than half the population is under eighteen. When children are soldiers, activists, caregivers, and organizers at the forefront of social movements, the politics of possibility are perhaps most evident through the terms of those who come of age through transformations in social order.Can a phrase like “we the children” make sense, and if so, how? Are children the last hope for imagining community? In placing our hopes for the future in the hands of our children, do we abdicate our responsibilities and make children our laborers (once more)? Or might they be better able than we are to imagine a world in which equity, connection, and well-being can be thought of in a ludic, loving, and even fabulous manner? If politics is downstream of culture, there is perhaps no better place to attend to than the imaginations of those navigating childhood in the conditions of crisis and catastrophe. What comes after, if anything, will be lived out by those who are still young.In “The Childhood of Politics,” Faisal Devji centers the child as key to thinking about the limits of citizenship. Children, he observes, are simultaneously emblematic of the future and constitute the single category of person who “cannot consent to making the very future they are meant to represent.” Children are, categorically, prepolitical beings.When children such as Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai are moved to speak, or rather when their speech is heard, it is a sign that something is awry. The order of things has been upset when we find ourselves wondering, “Who is the adult in the room?” Children's political speech is exceptional. Unlike subjects who seek voice rights and independence, children speak up in order to preserve their protections from having to speak at all. Children's categorical exemption from politics means they cannot trade the present for some imagined future. Devji calls us to consider whether childhood could provide the basis for establishing a politics that prizes “virtuous means over desired ends.” This alternative political imagination may be essential to the very prospect of a future in which we and they can live.Chika Watanabe picks up the thread of children as guarantors that we can go on living. In “Playing through the Apocalypse: Preparing Children for Mass Disasters in Japan and Chile,” Watanabe analyzes neighborhood disaster-preparedness events where kids play games that teach them evacuation procedures and survival skills. This ludic arrangement is a tacit acknowledgment that disasters are in the future and the government will fail to adequately respond. Young people must be prepared to navigate the world, come what may. Children are playing at taking on the burden of being with disaster. They imagine possible futures by engaging in “as if” games. They explore terrifying possibilities through the ambiguity of serious play. We could not help but see a resonance with Kohrman's essay here, in that again the burden of mitigating the harms from environmental disasters are folded into the kinship relations that sustain heteronormative homes.Finally, Eléonore Rimbault takes us to the circus. In “Childhood Memories of Circus Children” Rimbault explores the lives of the “company girls” who lived and worked in Indian circuses before labor laws prohibited the employment of children. By eliciting childhood memories from group interviews with the women who once were company girls, Rimbault moves around the prohibitions that prevent studying children directly. The women's memories are filled with impressions and details from that time as well as evident omissions and oversights. Their recollections are generative acts in that they bring childhood experiences into the present such that memory plays a role in shaping the future self. Rimbault urges us to take seriously children's subjective assessment of the categories used to contain their discourses and to assess their capacities. Her informants are aware that life in the circus did not meet the ideal conditions of childhood. Yet they also recall how performing a contortion act was among the happiest moments in their lives.Paying attention to children's experiences during this pandemic is essential. These are world historical conditions in the formation of childhood and they will leave lasting and still unknown effects on social orders and political imaginations around the globe. In 2020 schools and daycares all over the world closed. Most children were at home. Stranger still, children escaped the worst effects of COVID-19. Their capacity to resist the virus is still a mystery.Children may be immune from the worst effects of this illness but they are not immune from the experience of life at home with anxious, overworked, scared, and confused adults. Given that the ordinary forms of growing up can already feel like a crisis, which features of this time will stand out? From a series of interviews conducted in the spring by Gillian Frank, we hear directly from a child about the first days of shut-down in the United States: GF: What do you wish the grown-ups in your life understood about what coronavirus is like for kids and what living through this is like for kids?Carter (age 6): I wish that they understanded that kids are not having any fun. . . . It's like my mom is being crazy now; she is making us do things crazy. When we get right in the door she's making us take off our clothes, put it on the ground, and run upstairs and take a bath. Even if it's three in the morning and you go to work, you have to come back and take off your clothes and put them on the ground and go upstairs and take a bath. Why are we putting our clothes where we are walking outside? We're putting all our shoe dirt on our clothes, making no sense. (Frank 2020; our transcription)There is little trace of children's voices in the records of academic journals. The citizens who will forge the public culture and the political futures of life in constant crisis are currently less than ten years old. Suffice it to say that the emergent politics of childhood and children turns out to have much to do with who counts, who speaks, and what we rely on our children to filter out and sometimes to mask.Public Culture welcomes a new editorial assistant, Anna Stielau.

Arjun Appadurai

Vyjayanthi Rao

Erica Robles-Anderson

Conjunctures: Who Counts, What Circulates, and the Politics of Children

情境：谁被计算在内，什么在流通，以及儿童的政治

Vyjayanthi V. Rao

Repetition, Prediction, Comportment

重复、预测、行为

Abstract Chess engines are suites of algorithms that evaluate game positions through prediction—they calculate billions of possible moves, dozens of steps into the future state of play. And over the past two decades, these algorithms have usurped humans as the principal arbiters of chess knowledge. Openings, tactics, and strategies are now all authenticated, and often dictated, by engine analysis, leading to new styles of play. This article uses the example of predictive chess engines to conceptualize an emergent temporal interplay between the future and the present. Drawing inspiration from historical metaphors of geology, this article proposes a topographical approach to temporal becoming. In this approach, engine predictions facilitate not preparations for some forecasted future state, but future-reliant calibrations of present activity, where second-by-second algorithmic futures are used to make second-by-second decisions.

John Cheney-Lippold

Engines of the Future

未来的引擎

Abstract Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with international war reporters, this article interrogates dominant meanings for warfare and for the civilian death that results. It takes as a case study the 2016 to 2017 battle for Mosul, Iraq. Lauded reportage from Mosul revealed official underestimates of US-caused civilian harm in anti-Islamic State operations, exemplifying journalism's ability to “speak truth to power.” Yet in questioning official death tallies, journalists failed to challenge the rationale offered for this death: an accidental exception or necessary excess to justified violence. The article demonstrates how a humanitarian turn in war reportage transforms war from the effects of policy on populations to the effects of violence on the innocent. Emphasizing the morality of militarism while mystifying its political logic, news coverage of civilian death, widely presumed to function as a critique of mass violence, serves to sanction official rationales for global war.

Isaac Blacksin

Extermination as Protection

灭绝作为保护

Abstract The medical term apparently drowned emerged in the mid-eighteenth century to describe a kaleidoscopic gap between potential life and potential death. The “seemingly,” or “so far as one can judge” dead, unbreathing body embodied a moment of possibility if only one knew how to actively extract it. As drowning became a focus of social attention, interest gathered around developing resuscitation methods and materials. The article tracks the contiguity of the apparently drowned body with other partially animated proxies: diagrams, drawings, paintings, casts, corpses, masks, dolls, and models—all of which became foils by which to practice affective responses to particular human bodies in particular sorts of trouble and nodes through which community could be practiced and interpellated through ideologies of rescue and feelings of responsibility.

短名	Public Cult.
Journal Impact	1.16
国际分区	CULTURAL STUDIES(Q2)
期刊索引	SCI Q2中科院 2 区

ISSN	0899-2363, 1527-8018
h-index	86
国内分区	社会学(2区)社会学文化研究(2区)社会学人类学(3区)

涉及主题	政治学社会学历史法学哲学经济地理政治艺术计算机科学
出版信息	出版商: Duke University Press，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal，开源期刊: 否
基本数据	创刊年份: 1996，原创研究文献占比: 100.00%，自引率:9.10%， Gold OA占比: 0.00%

Public Culture

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Schlock Value and the Politics of Fiasco

Artist Statement

The Childhood of Politics

The Chinese Century and the City of Gold: Rethinking Race and Capitalism

Conjunctures: Who Counts, What Circulates, and the Politics of Children

Repetition, Prediction, Comportment

Engines of the Future

Schlock Value and the Politics of Fiasco

Extermination as Protection

Be a Doll, Blow a Hero