Editor’s Letter

It is with a combination of sadness and relief that I write my final editorial letter for Public Culture. Serving as editor the last four years has been an honor. The generous support of Eric Klinenberg and the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University allowed me to focus on the core task of reading articles and reviews. Knowing the extent of what other editors do, I realize what a privilege this was. And the truly phenomenal management and editorial work of Stephen Twilley made the task far easier than it could have been. The assistance of Sam Kellogg, supported by the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, has been essential to Stephen’s and my stewardship of the journal. The other editors of the journal have been quick to aid in a moment of need and steady in their advice. For all of this I am grateful.Editing the journal has not been without its challenges. Our review times have been longer than I had hoped in no small part because most people we ask say no. My ambition is always grander than my capacity. I set out to accomplish five things: (1) to bring more underrepresented scholars into the journal; (2) to publish more on Palestine; (3) to publish more on religion and on sport; (4) to insist on writing that was accessible to a broad audience; and (5) to make race a more central part of the conversation. In my own assessment, I largely failed on the third aim; I feel I delivered to a greater or lesser degree on the other four. In the end, I hope that in these four years we brought new conversations to our community and published work that inspired scholars to think with, argue about, and learn from.This issue opens with a haunting and beautiful Forum essay by Kathryn A. Mariner. Building off Pauline Boss’s notion of “ambiguous loss,” Mariner provides an elegy for Devonte Hart, the young Black boy who was “famously photographed at the age of twelve, tearfully hugging a white police officer at a Ferguson rally in Portland, Oregon.” Devonte was likely in a car with the rest of his family when his adoptive mother intentionally drove the family off a cliff. Mariner shares her haunting, of our living “in a white nation built on Black disposability.” Devonte is gone—disappeared—yet Mariner returns the memory of his life to us. The effect is one in which we are “haunted, at once adrift and sinking.”Gabriel Gatti opens the issue’s first set of research essays with a genealogy of disappearance. This exercise reveals the concept of the “social disappeared”—which Gatti uses to think through the current politics and experiences of Mexico as well as of the southern border regions of Europe. Gatti’s account draws on fieldwork, but primarily functions at a conceptual level. Jesse Ribot, Papa Faye, and Matthew D. Turner move us closer to the experience of some of those men who disappear (and some who do not) in the process of migrating from the Sahara to Europe. They argue that we cannot understand these men as “climate refugees.” While the climate may be intertwined with colonial and postcolonial policies and experiences, these men understand their migration as not relative to climate but to abusive policies, market failures, debt servitude, and a broader set of failures of their homes to provide the capacity for human dignity and survival.Lisa Richaud and Ash Amin moderate some of the brutal despondency we see in the experiences of Ribot, Faye, and Turner’s subjects. Richaud and Amin ask how the precarious endure, exploring the experiences of migrants to Chinese cities. Their portrait is far from romantic, but it helps us see how “stress is negotiated through practices of inhabitation.” In the final essay of the first section, Jenn M. Jackson builds on this theme of resistance within conditions of oppression. Jackson reads the autobiographic accounts of feminist, queer, and critical race writers, moving us through and beyond slavery, to see the process of “self-making” among Black women—that is, their taking ownership over labor, sexuality, and reproduction. Jackson suggests that such self-making has rarely been autonomous, and thereby is often stitched with the threads of imperialism.In our second set of research essays, D. Asher Ghertner returns us to the theme of the environment. Ghertner uses the case of pollution in Delhi—the experience of “shared air”—to open up ideas of citizenship and its transformations. Kristen Drybread pivots the conversation to gender and justice. Drawing on years of fieldwork in Brazilian courtrooms and prisons, Drybread examines the ways in which inmates brutalize—and often rape—peers who have been revealed as perpetrators of sexual assault, and how prison officials conceal these acts, facilitating extrajudicial punishment.Maayan Amir looks not at state concealment but instead at state-incriminating coproduced archives: those instances in which states help produce information that can, to a degree, undermine their interests. Amir takes the reader through four cases that, different as they are, share patterns of image and archive making wherein states construct documentation of their own wrongdoing. Fernando Domínguez Rubio and Glenn Wharton close our issue, reflecting on how the most important information of our era—personal and institutional memory, scientific knowledge, government and corporate data, and cultural artifacts—is being produced and stored on digital media that is enormously fragile and potentially short-lived. They show, powerfully, how the fragility of the digital is reconfiguring our cultural logics and institutional structures.Finally, I wish to welcome Erica Robles-Anderson and Arjun Appadurai as the next editors of Public Culture. There is something almost romantic about Arjun coming back to the journal, after having founded it with Carol Breckenridge more than thirty years ago. I’m excited to see what this return, combined with the fresh vision that Erica provides, will bring

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