Shifting the Gaze

This issue of Public Culture covers vastly different regional and historical geographies, from Tanzania to China and Iran, from India to the American South. From farmland to oil wells, cooperative farming and urban demolitions, beach communities and gendered urban protests, the essays in this issue tackle a range of themes and issues that demonstrate the possibilities for the idea of public culture to cut across the division of the world into regions and areas as objects of study. Media artifacts and archives of public record have proved invaluable in finding commonalities across these divisions, whose persistence attests to the continuing influence of the Area Studies approach and worldview, promoted by liberal institutions of higher education in the US and the global North.Going back to its origins, Public Culture was premised on the transnational movement of people and ideas that would become the norm in the twentieth century, marked by anticolonial movements and the birth of new nations. The acts of resistance and self-making that were expressed in public seemed to invariably exceed the concept of the public sphere as a space of open and rational debate. Instead, the idea of public culture embraced the seemingly contradictory points of view that could be expressed through media in its many forms. In an age of social media, selective silences, censorship and elective amnesia, public culture's potential to focus collective attention is perhaps endangered by the sheer speed and volume with which ideas, images, and speech circulate today. The slow rhythms of a print journal, then, provide a counterpoint of sorts, allowing us to revisit moments when the public record might point us to different historical conjunctures than the ones that dominate our discourse.With a nod to rhythm, this issue opens with Irmelin Joelsson's meditative essay, “Beneath the Bridge, The Beach: Gathering Tidal Stories,” which collects stories from the Minazini beach community in Dar-es-Salaam, marginalized by both the colonial and postcolonial history of Tanzania. This community is situated in the shadows of the recently constructed Nyerere Bridge, East Africa's largest cable-stayed bridge, which was inaugurated in 2016. Like many such ventures across the global South, this bridge is a mega-project, stitching together parts of the city that were hitherto separate to create contiguous urban terrains ready to be developed and harvested for their real estate values. Like other mega-projects, the bridge bypasses ecologically sensitive terrain already marginalized by the colonial development of the city. But the bridge also calls attention to this once undesirable place and an ecological buffer zone—a place of containment of undesirable things rendering it buildable and thus desirable.Starting with the beach as the volatile foundation for the city, Joelsson's essay suggests methods to note create a dichotomy between monumental and popular economies, represented by the bridge and the beach respectively. Instead, she taps into local forms of storytelling to provisionally capture the felt spatialities of the beach community. Throughout the city's history, this community's livelihood has been premised on tidal temporalities and the ebb-and-flow rhythm of gathering remnants brought to the shore by the tides. Joelsson argues that attention to these practices of gleaning could tell us about how life is lived in the meantime or the interlude between ruin and construction, between subjugation and refusal. The article is in part a response to the study of popular neighborhoods that are often analyzed through the lenses of resilience, infrastructuring, or inhabitation of informalities. In this crowded field, Joelsson points out that paying attention to the rhythms of the tide and the potentialities of its movement provide a way for us to structure the heterogenous crowd of unformed potential.In the Swahili languages of the coast, kuchuma, or the work of gathering and thus performing the economy points to other ways of understanding the value of work, not through the summation of activities into a formal structure but through continual attention to the ongoing rhythms of provisionally gathering what the tides bring. This work, kuchuma, is immanently part of the economy at every scale, including the bridge whose presence engulfs these activities into a monumental, visual economy.To visualize life on Minazini beach and the provisionality of its claims, Joelsson offers kupiga storytelling as a method. She writes: “Unlike the written novel, kupiga story does not necessarily follow a certain format but is more about the facilitation of a free conversation, and it is usually filled with proverbs, riddles, references to poems, verses from the Bible or the Quran, or popular stories and urban myths.” This method views the beach through the lens of tidelectics, a form of reading the world articulated by the Edward Kamau Brathwaite, the great Caribbean writer, that foregrounds a temporality of history understood as a process, an ongoing answer, much like the tide, with no clear beginning or end, only a repetition punctuated by ebb and flow.While Joelsson's essay observes contemporary urban development through the lens of provisional and open-ended storytelling, Tim Shao-Hung Teng's essay “Prospecting a Socialist Oil Field: Extraction as Geotechnical Mediation” opens with the propaganda film as the medium narrating the birth of socialist China. The film Chuangye (Start an Undertaking) made in 1974 dramatizes the building of Daqing, a legendary oil field. Teng writes “As the films opening scene makes clear, the Chinese Civil War as an ideological struggle between the Communists and Nationalists was also a battle over fossil fuel resources. A modern nation, the film suggests, cannot be birthed without first securing its means of energy production.”The film's critical readings emphasize the role Daqing played in transforming the image of the valorous oil field worker—and, by extension, all workers—into a socialist hero. The oil field's survival under the duress of nationalist attacks symbolizes the heroism of workers who protect the field with their own lives. For Teng, however, the film is a point of departure into a broader aesthetic exploration of energy production and the role that energy production plays in consolidating the socialist revolution. Images of the Daqing oil field provided a fertile base for stoking the imagination of citizens about the political future of the socialist revolution. Daqing's place in popular culture helped to consolidate the place of oil prospecting as an index of the future orientation of the socialist government, firmly establishing its role within the aesthetic-sensory realm of socialist China. Images of the forward- looking gaze of oil prospectors helped express the idea of the political sublime, bearing implications for the social production of Maoist subjects. Teng's focus specifically on prospecting, or kantan, as a practice connects to Joelsson's essay in that they both explore the realm of unwieldly materialities, and attempt to make sense of the role they play in representation.Oil prospecting spans a time frame that extends from initial land surveys to the drilling of boreholes and is, as such, a crucial stage in energy production. Teng proposes a mediational framework to read this practice and to situate what happens between the revolutionary past and the utopian future—or, in other words, as an in-between time and space. In so doing, Teng redirects our attention to the density and eventfulness of the present, which is often erased in most accounts that focus on the Daqing oil well. Carefully crafting an analogy between mediation and the contingencies that it both produces and attends to, Teng argues that the geohuman encounters that take place in the context of prospecting might represent the Maoist revolutionary spirit more effectively than a focus on ideology alone.Austin Ehrhardt's essay “‘Self-Help, Rochdale Style’: Land Politics, Cooperatives, and Survival in the Black Belt” introduces us to yet another in-between moment, a forgotten part of the historiographic record of the American South. Ehrhardt focuses on the situation of Black farmers in the South after the formal end of slavery, and specifically on the operation of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a short-lived government initiative during the New Deal era that created and administered cooperative farming settlements in Alabama, Georgia, and Virginia. Ehrhardt uses the records of the FSA to introduce the practice of cooperativism and its history over the long dure among rural Black communities. He then shows how such practices were already well known among Black farmers who endeavored tirelessly to the secure soil upon which to sow seeds and build their homes, and in the period between the end of the civil war and 1910, Black ownership of farmland peaked to millions of acres.Scholars, activists, and public intellectuals of the Black community such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as institutions such as Black-owned banks, agricultural colleges, and businesses were at the forefront of the Black land-ownership movement. Ehrhardt focuses specifically on Washington's and Du Bois's practical demonstrations and intellectual arguments for the value of cooperativism as an economic practice and political tool for emancipation, which in turn built on experiments in cooperativism that were already underway among Black farmers in the South. Enforced monocropping of cotton, the great Depression, the wartime collapse of international cotton markets, and other factors turned the tide for Black farmers in the 1920s and 1930s, with devastating consequences. New Deal programs in turn almost exclusively supported White landowners, offering subsidies for fallowing the land. Black sharecroppers, tenants, and landowners were all affected by the subsequent loss of livelihoods and the lack of industrial jobs to absorb these losses.Ehrhardt approaches the short-lived and limited experiment of the FSA in the 1930s not to measure its success or failure as an institutional experiment in cooperative farming and community development, but rather in terms of its elision of the long history of Black cooperative traditions. This gives us an opportunity to consider alternatives to American racial capitalism as well as to speculate about the future of the cooperative movement in the twenty-first century as one practice among a repertoire of decolonial strategies that draws on a long history of practices, not just institutional or official histories. The decommodification of land, which is at the heart of the cooperative movement, also impacts social relations, as Du Bois pointed out in his extensive oeuvre, allowing us to imagine alternative practices of liberation and emancipation.This intersection between politics and economics is picked up in different ways in the following essay, “Bulldozers in the City: Economies of Excess and Repair,” by Sushmita Pati. Pati's essay focuses on the singular figure of the bulldozer, or more accurately, the backhoe, and its looming presence in India's public culture over the past two years as a machine symbolizing the power of the state to enact extrajuridical violence on Muslim communities in urban India. Between 2022 and 2024, bulldozer justice had become a commonplace strategy for clearing highly valued properties of long-term settlers under various pretexts, ranging from labeling the occupants of these neighborhoods and their structures as menaces to citing the ecological sensitivity of the lands being cleared. Underlying these events, however, is the singular messaging of the government, unifying the neoliberal privatization of urban lands with the communalized political practices of the state, favoring Hindu majority communities over minorities. The bulldozer's presence and its deployment thus cuts across these fields, unifying them into a new urban political economy designed to capture land through violence.Historicizing the bulldozer's presence in urban India, Pati shows how recent events of bulldozer justice, which target minority neighborhoods as retaliation against their attempts to protest disenfranchisement and discrimination, go beyond older practices of urban slum clearance, which targeted unauthorized structures and the presence of urban poverty. The recent demolitions also strategically deploy the bulldozers in a range of media appearances, tapping into the broader attempts to use technology simultaneously as a tool of governance and as an opportunity for value creation. These media forms—from songs, to news videos, to advertisements— conjoin the longer global history of militarized urban planning in which the bulldozer appears prominent, to new, technologically mediated economic practices.Pati suggests that technology, embodied in singular objects such as bulldozers, as well as in more invisible networks of digital capture, should be understood neither in deterministic nor agentive terms but in terms of the ethical and political choices enabled by its presence and functioning. Alongside the violent symbolism of the bulldozer's brute power as it stands in for the state, its ubiquity has also opened new avenues of economic activity. The bulldozers used in demolition and construction eventually find their way into scrapyards and repair shops to be fixed and, as the author discovers, to be recirculated for rent. This vibrant repair economy serves the aspiring middle classes who can partake in these new economies of violence backed by sovereign state power. Here, the excesses of violence entwine wealth and power in a nexus of actions that lie beyond utility and productive expenditure. Perhaps economies of repair draw the object back into more mundane circuits of action and wealth creation beyond the elite. Yet these circuits cannot be understood within the functionalist logics of either political economy or technology studies alone. Such an understanding would miss the multiple ways in which these mediatized objects operate on and in the public realm as ominous signs of actions that exceed collective well-being through productive political and economic practices.In the concluding essay of this issue, “The Bewitched City: Psychopolitics in the Wake of the Social,” Milad Odabaei analyzes a phenomenon of mass illness that gripped and incapacitated schoolgirls across Iran in 2022 and 2023. With more than 7,000 cases recorded of young women who lost cognitive and motor functioning while at school, this phenomenon was widely debated across the country, as it occurred in the wake of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests that gripped Iran in the fall of 2022. Those involved in the protests as well as state officials had divergent interpretations of the causes of these cases of incapacitation, which took place in more than 230 schools in different parts of the country. The Iranian state attributed these incidents to mass poisonings of the girls by criminal agents. However, despite extensive forensic investigations, no criminals were identified or brought to justice, leading activists to raise doubts about the state's intentions, arguing that the so-called poisoning of the schoolgirls was part of the state's broader campaign of intimidation against those who protest the state's ideological foundations.Odabaei offers an alternative reading of these events as symptoms emerging from the long history of modernity in Iran, which gave birth to both the modern Islamic Republic of Iran as well the ideologies of the protesters against the republic. His analysis emphasizes the epistemological incapacities of the Islamic tradition in the modern situation as well as the circulation of language and ideologies that address unveiled women as a threat to tradition and the nation. He goes on to suggest that the malady of the schoolgirls constitutes an interruption of the gendered ideologies of Iranian modernity, specifically the ideology of a modern Islamic state. Contrary to dominant readings of the Iranian revolution, Odabaei argues that the modern Islamic state is founded on the loss of the authority of politico-theological traditions regulating collective remembrance and forgetting and enabling the sublimation of destructive drives and existential dangers. The contradiction at the heart of the modern Islamic state is indexed by the way women's self-assertion points simultaneously to religious and political reforms as well as to the infiltration of Islamic traditions by Western political cultures. The hijab, in this context, signifies an indigenous geopolitical and cultural barrier against the West. He writes, “Women's hijab is thought to be necessary because it signifies Iran's cultural and political identity and autonomy in relation to the West.” Hijab is what makes the republic Islamic.With such weight placed on the veil, Odabaei surmises that both the Islamic revolutionaries and liberal and secular advocates of women's rights take certain discursive paradigms, institutional arrangements, and social practices as given, and the terrain of the debates are therefore commensurate. Neither side acknowledges the discontinuity of Iranian cultural politics from the Christian genealogies of self and society as discursive figures informing the modern Islamic republic. 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