Stanley Aronowitz, Toby Miller, John Brenkman, Randy Martin, and Bruce Robbins discuss the cycling of leadership and their own responses to leaving the journal or changing their role in the collective.
Issue: Issue 100 Collective History
Diaspora
Michael RalphHow does using the French term for jet lag, décalage, to theorize the gap in time and space that structures diasporic articulation encourage us to think of the period between the dawn of formal decolonization and the present as not … Continue reading “Diaspora”
Interdisciplinarity
stanley aronowitzStanley Aronowitz, Randy Martin, John Brenkman, and Toby Miller examine the journal’s aim at understanding culture and politics without excluding certain topics or certain kinds of work. The journal offered a space for negotiating between different disciplines and their view … Continue reading “Interdisciplinarity”
Disciplinarity
shireen r.k. patellSOCIAL TEXT as both a collective and a publication has always troubled disciplinarity, with its commitment to various praxes and theories of the multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary. This essay looks at the complex, if not ambivalent, place of literature in … Continue reading “Disciplinarity”
Empire
Neferti X. M. TadiarEdward Said’s 1979 essay in the inaugural issue of SOCIAL TEXT, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” places before us the problem of the present moment of global power–the problem called “empire”–in terms of the specific intellectual/political task Said … Continue reading “Empire”
Environment
Ashley DawsonSOCIAL TEXT contributors have approached the environmental crises of the last several decades by exploring the constitution of a second nature. If, that is, the environment furnishes particular societies with a specific set of obstacles and possibilities, this original natural … Continue reading “Environment”
Feminism
Livia TenzerThis essay surveys the feminist work published in SOCIAL TEXT over its thirty-year history, while noting an initial lack of interest in feminism among the journal’s founders. It shows that early feminist work in the journal focused on cultural analysis, … Continue reading “Feminism”
Film and Mass Culture
Anna McCarthySOCIAL TEXT’s engagement with mass culture, and particularly film, began as a way of rethinking the binaries structuring Marxist cultural criticism. The terms shifted over the years, partly in response to political developments such as the culture wars of the … Continue reading “Film and Mass Culture”
The Future of Journals
john brenkmanJohn Brenkman, Anders Stephanson, Sohnya Sayres, and Bruce Robbins discuss the changing role of journals. In light of the Internet, changing reading practices, and financing, doing a journal is an uphill struggle. However, magazines do sustain a kind of culture … Continue reading “The Future of Journals”
Governmentality
Tariq JazeelThis article uses David Scott’s notion of “colonial governmentality” (from SOCIAL TEXT 43) to make a broader postcolonial intervention into the power structures that shape the theoretical rubrics of contemporary critical intellectual work. Advancing an argument about the governmentality of … Continue reading “Governmentality”
Hip-Hop
Michael RalphThe tendency for hip-hop enthusiasts to measure the genre against an imaginary golden age evidences a curious brand of nostalgia: a mixture of homesickness, loss, and longing that coheres in the angst of a generation. Meanwhile rappers and politicians blame … Continue reading “Hip-Hop”
Ideology
stefano harneyMichael Brown’s article “Ideology and the Metaphysics of Content” (SOCIAL TEXT 8, 1983) reminds us of what was at stake in the transition from ideology critique to cultural studies. Through an ethnomethodological close reading of the opening part of Marx’s … Continue reading “Ideology”
Independent Publishing
john brenkmanJohn Brenkman, Stanley Aronowitz, Fredric Jameson, Andrew Ross, and Sohnya Sayres discuss the self-reliance and independence of the journal in the early days and the eventual move to the university press. Being tied to a university press offered editorial support, … Continue reading “Independent Publishing”
Labor and Class
rick maxwellThis essay concerns three decades of engagement with themes of labor and class in the pages of SOCIAL TEXT. It identifies common threads and describes dozens of variations that contributors made on these themes. The continuities include: social and cultural … Continue reading “Labor and Class”
Marxism
David KazanjianThis essay reflects on the import of Marxism for the history of SOCIAL TEXT. It argues that Marxism can be understood as a mode of challenging frameworks for thought rather than as a framework in and of itself.