Reading, Repair, Reconciliation

Public Culture's vision comes together across genres and cultural geographies, disciplines and professions.It depends on the untraceable impulses of individual authors who sense an affinity with our vision and are prepared to work through the contingent assemblages of author, reader, anonymous reviewer, and editors that yield a published piece.These webs of collaboration encounter other such webs to give an issue its special texture.Occasionally the dialogue has been extended through time with articles that echo and comment on previously published essays.Since its inception in 1988, Public Culture has also had a particular focus on visuality, aligned with yet different from disciplinary art history.We open this issue with a Forum essay by Fawzia Afzal-Khan, a scholar of literature and the performing arts, focusing on the work of the diasporic artist Shahzia Sikander and its reception in US public culture.Sikander's work has graced the covers of Public Culture twice, twenty-five years apart -on the first occasion, in 1999, an image of her painting Fleshy Weapons was on the front cover of the journal.On the second occasion twenty-five years later, the front and back cover images of her paired sculptures Witness and Now (placed atop the courthouse across the street from Madison Park in New York City) were accompanied inside the issue by a conversation between Sikander and the historian Faisal Devji.The sculpture Witness -celebrating women and justice -which was placed in Madison Park in spring 2023 was subsequently reinstalled on the grounds of the University of Houston in 2024.A few months after our conversation with Sikander and the images of Witness and Now were published in the journal, the female form was beheaded in Houston in a brutal and audacious act of vandalism on July 8, 2024, as a hurricane was passing through the city, signaling the literal censorship of an artist's ideas around femininity and justice.When we put Sikander's sculpture on the cover of our issue, we were aware of its potential for inciting debate, as the best of public artwork does, but little did we know that it would become a literal meeting point for the real and the virtual, forcefully gesturing toward new ways in which various strands of mediated public culture are becoming enfolded contingently into contemporary collective life.Such enfoldings are particularly prominent in this issue in which three themes