Editor’s Letter
2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/08992363-7181802
ISSN1527-8018
Autores ResumoOur issue opens with a reflection on racist motifs at festivals and parades throughout Colombia. Melissa Valle ties the presence of characters that mirror “Mammy” and “Jezebel” archetypes and evoke the primitive African to the globally circulating racial imagination. As local narratives meet global representations, these subservient, sexualized, and animalistic representations make race legible. Resisting what many US scholars of Latin America are accused of — “mistranslating critique into travesty, difference into error, signifyin(g) into noise” (Chude-Sokei 2006: 90) — Valle is nonetheless unflinching in examining how processes of racialization and racial representation degrade, particularly in terms of the way the imagination of race reflects not just local histories but international representations and expectations of how race is done.Dave Tell continues on our theme of global transmission but shifts our attention to the 1940s, when the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, working under Pétain’s fascist regime, created The Modulor, a tape measure–like tool meant to help make sense of how objects were distributed throughout spaces. Tell traces the movement of this technology and way of knowing as it encounters different political circumstances. Eventually the Modulor “becomes liberal” when it is deployed in the construction of New York’s United Nations Headquarters. Tell is interested in the relationship between modernity and measurement, but his essay has much to tell us about how ideas and objects dialogue with different contexts to both extend their lives and fundamentally transform.Alana Lentin returns us to Valle’s major theme, interrogating Charlie Hebdo and the place of race in contemporary France. Working with the concept of “Black analytics,” Lentin places coloniality in France at the center of her analysis in order to renew a tradition of radical “political antiracism” and deny a strand of French exceptionalism wherein “white analytics” allows for a dangerous universalization of racism. Matthew Canfield extends our theme of exchange across contexts, exploring how transnational law is locally encountered. He follows struggles over the “Super Banana” — a crop funded by the Gates Foundation — ethnographically reflecting on how struggles between states, global corporations, institutions, and activists are translated “translocally.” Like Valle, Canfield is interested in interpretive authority, and he hopes to show how translocal translations can help transcend the hegemonic transnational translation of law.Our second set of essays picks up another theme of Valle’s: that of cultural representation. Maria Sonevytsky shows how Crimean Tatar radio penetrates the spaces of mass transit, helping us think more about the “aural sphere” — those symbolically resonant sounds within public spaces. In the case of Crimea this means the dissemination of “Eastern music” as a way to advance sovereignty in a context of political instability and Russian aggression. Isabel Huacuja Alonso’s focus is on All India Radio, the national radio network; whereas Sonevytsky shows a relatively successful project of constructing an aural sphere, Alonso’s case helps us understand some limits of these national projects and the role that international exchange can play. This essay explores the period shortly after Partition, when All India Radio used “classical music” to try to create a soundscape for Indian nationhood. The music was meant to help solidify a motley collection of people into an imagined community of “citizen-listeners.” Alonso notes that audiences spoke back, however, resisting such nationalist projects in part by embracing foreign radio that reflected their more varied tastes.Christian Sorace presents a more successful, often unexamined national-cultural process in China. Analyzing Cadre Confessions — a televised ritual that borders on a genre — Sorace shows the transformation of this form from one based on the possibility of redemption within the context of a utopian society (under Mao) to one of distinction, based on the separating out of corrupt individuals from the virtuous party. Finally, Karen Ann Faulk closes our issue with an analysis of the death of Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman just a day before he was meant to present his report on the 1994 car bombing of a Jewish Center in Buenos Aires that killed eighty-five people. As the report was heavily critical of then president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and foreign minister Héctor Timerman, Nisman’s death engulfed the nation in speculation about suicide or murder. Faulk uses this moment to think about what she calls the “moral economy of truth.” Returning to themes of Tell’s essay on the circulation of knowledge, and of Valle’s on how “truth” is produced and circulated, Faulk suggests we focus on law and media to understand not what truth is, but instead the technologies of its making.As an American I could not help but apply all of these themes — the technologies of truthmaking, the role of media, global and translocal circulations, and the resonance of race — to our current political context. While they brought little comfort, they richly demonstrate the best of what scholarship can give us: understanding.
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