...José Esteban Muñoz This essay considers the history of “a queer text” in the journal Social Text . It posits that the journal, through individual essays and pivotal special issues, has made significant contributions to the development of a queer social theory. The essay suggests that queer theory...

... Three founding editors, John Brenkman, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric Jameson, discuss the origins of the title Social Text . Aronowitz argues that it comes from Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life , while Jameson claims he did not know Lefebvre at the time and the phrase social text just...

...Brent Hayes Edwards; Alondra Nelson; Tavia Nyong'o Despite the divergence between the accounts given by Stanley Aronowitz and Fredric Jameson of the origins of the name Social Text, it is worth exploring the use of the phrase in the work of Henri Lefebvre. Even if it is ultimately a false cognate...

... Collected here are the names of all members of the Social Text collective, from the founding of the journal until today. The masthead of Social Text 1 is reproduced, to honor the founding editors and collective. People who joined the collective subsequently are listed in three groups, by each...

...Brent Hayes Edwards; Randy Martin Duke University Press 2002 Editorial RALLYING SOCIAL TEXT This issue of Social Text marks a turn in the journal’s...

...After Globalism Writing Group This text chronicles the book sprint process through which we wrote “ Here and Now ”: the events and conversations that prompted it, the contours of our five days of collaborative writing, and the challenges of finishing something we made together after we had gone...

... FUTURE TEXTS We will make our own future Text. Alondra Nelson —Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo and on to post now post new —Amiri Baraka, “Time Factor a Perfect Non-Gap” In popular mythology, the early years of the late-1990s digital boom were...

...Dohra Ahmad Following a brief discussion of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart , this essay examines the newly burgeoning genre of “oppressed Muslim women” narratives. For each of the texts under consideration—Jean Sasson's Princess , Latifa and Shékéba Hachemi's My Forbidden Face , Azar Nafisi's...

...Brent Hayes Edwards; Anna McCarthy The essay provides a short introduction to the special anniversary issue of Social Text , explaining the protocol for the “keyword” essays that make up the majority of the issue: each contribution takes up particular points (single essays) or threads (themes...

...Ana María Dopico As Social Text published its first essays on Latin America, the Americas were living the disastrous consequences of a hemispheric cold war in the forms of dictatorships, military rule, and brutal state violence; confronting popular and institutionalized revolutions; and suffering...

...Ashley Dawson Social Text contributors have approached the environmental crises of the last several decades by exploring the constitution of a second nature. If, that is, the environment furnishes particular societies with a specific set of obstacles and possibilities, this original natural realm...

...María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo; David Sartorius This essay reflects on the Social Text articles on revolution. Many first-world contributors to Social Text , on the one hand, reassessed Marxist theories of political consciousness and political economy in light of the praxis of third-world...

...Ann Pellegrini; Jasbir Puar This essay traces Fredric Jameson's important early analyses of the waning of affect and disappearance of the depth psychological subject under conditions of postmodernism, arguments he developed over the course of several essays in Social Text —beginning, in fact...

...Micki McGee An analysis of media coverage concerning the physiques of three iconic African American figures—Oprah Winfrey and Barack and Michelle Obama—is taken as a point of departure for revisiting Sohnya Sayre's 1987 Social Text article “Glory Mongering: Food and the Agon of Excess...

...Patrick Deer Modern cultural criticism, like the younger discipline of cultural studies, has long struggled to reconcile the antagonistic logic at the heart of the idea of culture. Social Text 's project as a journal has been energized throughout by the contradictory genealogy of the term itself...

...Shireen R. K. Patell Social Text as both a collective and a publication has always troubled disciplinarity, with its commitment to various praxes and theories of the multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary. This essay looks at the complex, if not ambivalent, place of literature in the multi-, inter...

...Livia Tenzer This essay surveys the feminist work published in Social Text over its thirty-year history, while noting an initial lack of interest in feminism among the journal's founders. It shows that early feminist work in the journal focused on cultural analysis, while later work engaged...

...Anna McCarthy Social Text 's engagement with mass culture, and particularly film, began as a way of rethinking the binaries structuring Marxist cultural criticism. The terms shifted over the years, partly in response to political developments such as the culture wars of the 1990s and partly...