... and the public activism of many whose forms of political communication are usually ignored, or even denounced as passive. But a more generous definition of the political, one that does not presume liberal democracy as its natural setting or emancipation as its aim, can show how even compliance and personal...

... of inequality (e.g., segregation and the division of labor) are sidelined by explicit adoption of egalitarian principles, the essay shows that, even when democratic civility prevails, background inequalities on the basis of race, gender, social class, and immigration status are often reproduced in mundane...

... agential ambivalence, where feelings of control apply to tactics for managing surveillance and to reckless risk-taking are key. Agential ambivalence is required to “stay alive” in Cairo. The activists the author knows still take extreme risks and sometimes even make seemingly careless decisions...

... screening policy arenas, we illustrate affective economies as a powerful catalyst for forms of political action that may inadvertently sustain public health inequities even as they seek to redress them. 2014 In the fall of 2002, just hours after the birth of their daughter Lucia, Elaine and Nathan...

...Kevin Lewis O’Neill; Jatin Dua Despite the number of people held at this very moment inside prisons, detention centers, black sites, reformatories, stockades, refugee camps, and even the hulls of ships, there has been surprisingly little self-consciousness about the analytical power of captivity...

... suggests that this structure of sovereignty, premised on the adjudication of minority demands (for equality, for recognition), might also be the condition of possibility for its disruption, and even for new political arrangements to emerge. Indeed, a number of Muslim French now reject the paradigm...

... shares with the war on terror is the idea that we ought to organize our political life around the quest for security and that we can even recover a sense of moral purpose through the response to (environmental) emergencies. Here too the aim seems to be to scare us into submission, rather than open up new...

... or dueling national claims to Israel/Palestine, exerts enormous existential pressure. This essay draws on an eclectic but substantial number of poems composed by canonical contemporary figures such as Nizār Qabbānī, Adonis, and Mahmoud Darwish to demonstrate how Arab poets strategically (even routinely...

...S. Lochlann Jain This essay analyzes the subject positioning demanded by randomized control trials (RCT). Taking seriously the fact that people in late-stage cancer treatments will die, even if one arm of the study receives a “successful” treatment, Jain argues that the RCT framework carries...

...-social formations of bottom billion capitalism. It argues that the work of converting poverty into capital is arduous and fragile and requires technologies of gender. While the analysis of neoliberal penality emphasizes the quarantine, and even banishment, of “at risk” subjects, this essay draws...

...Peter Redfield Expectations that people should live—even under extreme conditions of crisis, neglect, and poverty—now combine with doubts about the capacity of states to provide for their populations. One result has been a set of technologies built around minimalist forms of care. Created...

...Mireille Abelin This essay explores the public drama that ensues after a husband and wife lock themselves in their BMW to protest the Buenos Aires provincial tax authority’s attempt to sequester their vehicle. When the conflict airs in real time on the evening news, class tensions erupt outside...

... the Devil: The Life, Legacy, and Love of My Son Michael Brown not only as performances of grief and of the birth of political subjectivity—even as they emphatically stage how respectable black maternal political subjectivity is born through loss. These black maternal memoirs also offer what we call strange...

... of Toussaint Louverture and Victor Schoelcher and the legacies of the 1790s revolution in Saint-Domingue and the 1848 abolition of slavery. At these crucial turning points, imperial conditions had created the possibility of nonnational colonial emancipation even as certain kinds of instituted liberty...

... be defended in the most murderous of ways. It was only by disregarding and even throwing life away, Gandhi maintained, that it might be protected. The love of death, in other words, might guarantee life far more effectively, if only as an indirect and unintended consequence, than making an absolute value...

...Ritu Birla Gandhi's thematics of addiction mark him as acutely present in his time, even as they launch his temporal performativity. Publicized via transnational debates on the legality of opium and anxieties about the market as casino, the problem of addiction reflected the circulation of law...