Editor’s Letter

Our issue opens with a concern that will run through my editorship of Public Culture: violence. (We will devote a special issue to the topic in 2017.) Madiha Tahir brings us to Barmal, a district in Afghanistan’s Paktika Province bordering Pakistan’s Tribal Areas. While American journalists often write about such places from “green zones,” hundreds of miles away, or more likely from different countries and even different continents altogether, Tahir takes us up close to where bodies, earth, and communities are torn apart by American violence. How do we know such places? How are we to make sense of the wounds we inflict? This beautifully rendered essay is nearly impossible to read and as such represents the best of what Public Culture can do: make that which we thought we knew more unknown, yet better understood.Josef Sorett joins Tahir in our Forum section, reflecting on literature, politics, and the afterlives of Afro-Protestantism. He explores the “new black literary movement” under way, one that affirms black lives by exploring how violence has made them not matter. Sorett shows how the “Black Arts” have relentlessly tried to “lift the veil on the violently real constraints imposed by the fictions of race.” Yet while black Christian churches were once imagined as central to this conversation, today writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates express little connection to this institution. Sorett offers another reading, suggesting how #BlackLivesMatter and current literary and artistic black movements are part of “an effort to reclaim, reconstitute, and reimagine a radical religious tradition associated with (but never to be conflated with) a black church that was birthed in the midst of the struggle for freedom.”Tahir’s themes of space, place, and knowledge are taken up in our first three research essays. A consequence of state violence is often displacement. Rogier van Reekum and Willem Schinkel reveal the often hidden visual infrastructure through which border lines and movement lines are drawn and mobilized, to work upon and understand the migrant. Visualizing migrants through medical or statistical modes of knowledge both sanitizes and dehumanizes the experiences of and forces behind forced human mobility.Jess Bier’s essay on Palestinian state maps provides a nice counterpoint to Reekum and Schinkel’s; whereas the latter authors are concerned with human movement, Bier is interested in what she calls “stasis,” or the ability to stay in place. Some people respond to violence by leaving, yet Bier explores how the Palestinian Authority uses digital maps to specify borders, roads, and urban areas; this mapping becomes integral to maintaining homes and preserving space. Mapping becomes a deeply political project — where producing knowledge and representations of a place helps transform it from a blank area that can be seized because it is “blank” into a place that can stay in place.From a story about the Palestinian Authority’s construction of maps, we move to Jo Guldi’s history of the participatory map, a representation that seeks to “incorporate the perspectives of populations traditionally excluded from governance.” Guldi’s historical perspective offers a sobering lesson, reminding us that to imagine new technologies like Google Maps Mashups or crowdsourced maps as advancing our democracy or communities is more often than not a fantasy propelled by our ignorance of how power intervenes in knowledge production.Our interview presents the ideas of the artist Carlos Motta, accompanied by several images of his work. Heather Love talks with Motta about the themes of archives; queer politics; colonial violence; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community; and constructing alternate histories and imagery through art. Featuring an interview with an artist is a shift for our journal, yet Motta’s deep engagement with concerns at the heart of Public Culture—uncovering the particular experiences of marginalization among a range of world communities — captures a new perspective on classic themes.Our final set of essays builds off our interview with Motta, with a further reflection on the idea of the image. Daniel A. Barber uses the case of midcentury climatic diagrams to better understand how image making articulates the range of ways humans perceive their relationship to the climate system. Barber’s account of the visual rhetoric employed to convey climate and environmental change moves us to reflect on our overreliance on “data” as the knowledge-producing device for the “architectural-climatic diagram.”The essay by Kenny Cupers continues the issue’s focus on architecture, asking that we consider its relationship to the social sciences. Through this focus, Cupers extends the conversation beyond the shift from “public” to “private” housing, exploring a deeper epistemological transformation from thinking of “habitat” to thinking of “human territoriality.”We conclude with Irus Braverman, whose essay interweaves many of the issue’s themes. Writing on Gaza demands attention to space and territory. It also necessitates a discussion of violence, borders, and captivity. Braverman provides an account of Israel’s 2014 summer incursion, with an eye to both the animalization of humans and the humanization of animals. Braverman offers a biopolitical idea, “zoometrics,” that allows us to chart the process of determining worth along the animal-human divide. As bookends, Tahir and Braverman do not provide us with a celebratory vision of our public cultures, but they do, poetically, provide a necessary one

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