A Look Back at the Public Future

I write this letter as I step down as coeditor of Public Culture, and this issue is my last in that capacity.I was coeditor at the founding of the journal in 1988, and until the year 2000, the editor was the late Carol Breckenridge.It is also a good moment to recall Carol's inspiring leadership of the journal in its first twelve years, a period that consolidated its ethical and observational tone.Since 2019, I have enjoyed a second life as coeditor.I have the advantages of a long career, both inside and outside Public Culture.So, some reflection seems in order, both about the journal and about the world.Much could be said about the four decades since the journal was conceived.The journal has thrived, and it remains a field-defining venture that has inspired many imitators, competitors, and transitions since 1988.The world has done less well.One needs only to utter the words neoliberalism, illiberalism, global warming, and ethnocide to realize that we are both spectators and victims in a planetary crisis, which makes the ideas paired in the title of the journal, public and culture, now seem puny, minor, even marginal.First, as far as the term culture is concerned, it has suffered damage from a thousand cuts.In the discipline of anthropology, it has been overtaken by such terms as cosmology and ontology, perhaps efforts to escape the dark overtones of the idea of culture, as it has come to be used by right-wing populists, homeland fanatics, and semiliterate media commentators.For this last group, culture has become a xenophobic and exclusionary weapon against migrants, minorities, and outsiders of every type.In the incendiary world of social media, the culture concept has become largely an identity-loaded term, both for a variety of racial, sexual, and minoritized populations, and for those who would like to evacuate any semblance of the idea of diversity from policies that were meant to correct historical injustices.Donald Trump and his enforcers epitomize this hostility to all cultural claims to justice that seek to correct historical wrongs.When Public Culture was launched, the reference to culture in its title was intended to indicate that every sort of human community could nurture a worldview, a lens, a point of view, about the basic issues of life, justice, and social connectivity.This basic understanding, derived mostly from anthropology, had the historical disad-