...José Esteban Muñoz This piece reflects on two orders of the poetic event. On one hand, it describes Fred Moten’s reading of the poem “the gramsci monument” at the public art project of the same name. On the other, it meditates on the event that the poem registers, or the general antagonism...

... to make the events intelligible to themselves and debating the main issues that this rebellion raised: the absence of political claims and the production of violence against material symbols of the current regime of power. It is an attempt to make sense of the “events” while they were still resonant...

... Highway (2004), Luis Alberto Urrea’s documentary narrative account of a failed border-crossing expedition in 2001 that killed fourteen migrants. I read Urrea’s narrative reconstruction of this event, a case that remains the single worst migrant death-event in Arizona border history, as unconcealing...

... operate today. Arguing that the #BlackLivesMatter movement has created a persistent looking as a means of making such issues visible, Mirzoeff describes how the grand jury prosecutors turned the event into a high-definition visual space in which only physical evidence and police testimony could be trusted...

.... It is a mark of the power of the trans-Arab, middle-class ethos that it has penetrated into the farthest reaches of the Arab world, and in a turbulent landscape shattered by wars, displacement, and dispossession. I argue that the coalescence of the momentous political events at the local level (the Oslo...

...Ellen Moodie This essay develops the concept of biospectacle, in which the politics of managing populations becomes sensational visual display. It does so as it explores a series of events in 1999 surrounding the arrest and trial of “El Directo,” a gang member in El Salvador who, at age seventeen...

...David Suisman This article reframes the history of recorded sound to take phonographs and player-pianos into account on more or less equal terms. It argues that the two technologies developed in complementary, dialectical relation to each other: one analog, storing and conveying an acoustic event...

... in fact examples of an early, nonmusical genre in commercial phonography known as the “descriptive specialty,” which often involved studio reenactments of current events. Like other descriptive specialties, these recordings were meant to exhibit the phonographic medium to capture audience attention. Using...

... of the pivotal events of the Pan-African movement, bringing together artists and intellectuals from around the African diaspora, including Alioune Diop, Jacques Rabemananjara, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, George Lamming, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Jean Price-Mars. Césaire's reflections...

... reflect on how to “contain” them. Viral epidemics constitute not only vital events but also scalar narratives—they articulate transformations at the levels of molecules, cells, organisms, individuals, populations, species, ecosystems, technological infrastructures, political economies, and networks...

... and the human as a set of comparative and relational events in specific historical and geopolitical contexts by investigating Euro-American, Chinese, and transnational itineraries of the human. While it analyzes China's potential to undo the universalizing claims of Western idealized norms of the liberal human...

... and selfishness are counterposed as the defining qualities, respectively, of superior persons and their inferior counterparts. I then consider this dyad as an argumentative device at work in actual and textual acts of dissent in post-Maoist China, focusing on an event that occurred during the student protest...

... at the village of Deir Yassin and how the event impacts upon the artist’s work. Finding evidence of postmemory in many works from across Hatoum’s career, this article argues that postmemory underpins Hatoum’s emphasis on the broader issues of trauma, gender, orality, and corporeality. © 2014 Duke University...

... that is unthinkable and incommunicable. The essay theorizes the transplant as an event that reveals the conjunctive relationship between life and death, fostering a practice of sharing out that allows for the appearance of community as such. Tracing the forms of queer community and kinship that appear in the work...

...Stephanie C. Kane; Eden Medina; Daniel M. Michler Retrospective narrations by maritime authorities trace decision making in the compressed time frame between earthquake and tsunami, when geological events literally rupture the skein of communication devices and flows that animate social life...

... events and beings in time. Geologic realism is argued as an analytic to understand the entwinement and emergence of (a) normative modes of approaching matter forged through the histories and temporalities of colonial power in material and metaphysical orders; (b) the realism of quotidian experience...

...J. Kameron Carter Against the backdrop of the summer 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, this article thinks about that event as indexing a crisis of US political theology, indeed, as a volatile flashpoint wherein the sacred comes into view otherwise. Here the sacred figures...

...Hamzah Baig Contemporary political events in Palestine and the United States have drawn renewed interest in the long history of militant Black-Palestinian solidarity. Although many historical accounts typically begin in the post-1967 Arab-Israeli War moment with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating...

...Jayna Brown; Neferti X. M. Tadiar Abstract This essay introduces Social Text 's collaborative issue on the events of 2020. 2020. The year 2020 lunged ahead, each day revealing more and more drastic and catastrophic events. These were not new catastrophes; in fact they were all too familiar...

... an important role in reinvigorating the sense of community, by legitimizing ownership claims that the community has made over the area, and by serving as a mitigation strategy in a context of increasing climatic-extreme events. In 2019 a team of researchers started an oral history project to document...