Hand-wringing conversations about queer theory, its continued viability, its expiration date, and its applicability to a range of subjects and objects have been at the heart of the field since its inception in the early 1990s. This essay argues that, fundamentally, queer (as we continue to discuss the term) is an institutional formation, which occasionally and hubristically imagines its reach in other areas, both touching and being touched by “the real.” Thinking with and through the work of José Esteban Muñoz, whose loss has created a rupture in our utopian impulses, this essay also reimagines some of the disciplinary desires—the fundamentals—as well as the reparative relations his being in the world forged.

Drawing on the mentoring genealogy José Esteban Muñoz emerges from, Vazquez points to how his pedagogical style and ways are accumulative of his own extension from Paul de Man to Eve Sedgwick. This extension is also a mode of giving away, a sharing of vulnerability and excess that is resoundingly Cuban, brown, and queer.

This coauthored introduction reflects on some of the impacts of José Esteban Muñoz’s life and work—from his scholarship through his friendship and mentoring to his collaborations in intellectual and social life. The coauthors emphasize Muñoz’s commitment to both the production of minoritarian knowledge and the thought of plural singularity, or what this issue as a whole indexes with the name “Being With.”

In May 2011, the Anthropology Department and the Department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico offered a class entitled “Technologies of Settler-Colonialism in Israel-Palestine.” This field school was designed as a decolonizing project for American students (an extremely diverse group representative of New Mexico’s particular diverse population that included Hispanic, Native American, Arab and Muslim-American, Jewish-American, and others) that operated at several levels: through close collaboration with local scholars and experts; through experiential ways of knowing and understanding practices of ethnic cleansing and apartheid; and by being present for and with Palestinian testimony in places Americans seldom go and in this way intimately witnessing quotidian parameters of life under occupation. This article elaborates the historical, theoretical, and ethnographic components of the field school’s activities through the student’s daily activities.

In considering the music of two dub-influenced artists based in the United Kingdom, Tricky (Adrian Thaws) and the Bug (Kevin Martin), I explore the ways dub and punk share historical space and affective territory, and particularly the ways a punk ethos has continued to be imbricated into dub and its descendants. I argue that their shared territory is heavily masculinized, and I am interested in the uses of violence in the artists' works, as a mediating force in the case of the Bug, and as an ambivalent site for Tricky. I focus on Tricky's posture of abjection, as he uses his concept of "brownpunk" to evoke alternative punk sensibilities, to refer to forms of degradation and social rejection that range from the petty criminal to the sexual nonconformist. Abjection comes through the Bug's music as the alienated subjects that can survive apocalypse. These evocations open up "punk" as a concept defined by, and useful to, those excluded by more proscriptive uses of the term.

This essay explores the ethicopolitical context in which black art, black performance, black social movements, and black popular culture find expression. I configure the critical study of hip hop within an accounting of the materiality of antiblack sexual violence in which the modern world is grounded, especially as hip hop emerges through the transmutation of the state’s terroristic repression of black revolution in the 1960s and 1970s into the sexualized violence of the present prison industrial complex. Using a reading of Lil’ Wayne and his song “Mrs. Officer,” I argue that the relationship between erotic practices of state violence and hip hop’s renditions of sex and gender politics is an intimate one that reveals continuities with the originary violence of slavery. I consider Lil’ Wayne in this light: How can we read the present context of increasing black dispossession and criminalization and the historical context of black struggles for self-determination and representation within contemporary cultural production? How is a popular hip hop song that explicitly recalls an infamous police beating, and implicitly brackets the ensuing historic urban uprising, connected to a sonic and visual landscape that consolidates black suffering and its invisibility today, that further eclipses the historical context of (ongoing) black struggles for self-determination, and that endeavors to marshal all manner of black expression into the new discourse of containment, “postracialism”?

Television melodramas around the world provide extended stories in which characters publicly draw out their inner emotional selves for all to experience in lurid, detailed portrayals of desire and struggle; characters’ moral choices show—and in the process produce—the landscape of their interior emotional worlds. In contrast, Ghanaian television melodrama is parody that shows how to act in public in order to elude moral revelations and judgment. Instead of revealing interiority, Ghanaian melodramas parody the notion of personal moral revelation, in the process masking a subject’s inner desires from public inquiry. I examine the making of an episode of the television show Cantata, a popular musical-comedy soap opera, showing how its narratives provoke audience excitement by focusing on exaggerated and inverted moral tales. I show how the use of white actors in one episode that explores infidelity and rumormongering elucidates local representations of race and gender. In a broader sense, this soap opera shows how moral inversion and poetic indirection are at the center of Ghanaian theatrical performance and interpretation, giving insight into how Ghanaian performers and audiences imagine their participation in national public life.

The embrace of the city in ruins was a familiar rallying cry of punk music. From Public Image Limited’s evocation of an urban subject murdered in the countryside while “the cassette played poptones,” to the Clash’s raucous calls for “a riot of our own,” to dub-influenced declarations of provincial alienation, to anthemic satires of Cold War apocalypse, to voyeuristic detachment in the face of urban decay, to critiques of inner-city racism, the punks’ city was both a scene of violence and of potential safety. During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the anarchic growl of punk music confronted sectarian violence, unemployment, and a militarized state of emergency. Punk bands like the Undertones, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Gang of Four, Public Image Limited, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and the Fall pitched punk negation and artlessness against the sounds of urban conflict with unpredictable results. This essay argues that pop evanescence emerged as often as punk dissonance. The bands also intervened and vamped it up in the performance spaces of the music industry, including the television shows Top of the Pops and American Bandstand, playing off the alienating restrictions of lip-synching, miming, and media censorship, to full effect. Was this selling out to pop? Or, as this essay argues, did punk bands learn from pop even as pop sought to plunder and profit from punk, playing out, in the process, the internal contradictions of a punk culture confronting the struggles of urban life?

This paper examines a series of visual representations of illegalized migration in order to consider how they respond to the presence of labor within global systems of economic exchange. Through an examination of the aesthetic qualities of these images it suggests that the worker’s body is repeatedly represented as a kind of specter or ghost. The paper considers how far this depiction is a product of the technical limitations on imaging migrants as they covertly pass across national borders and also how far it is a result of the bureaucratic restriction upon the attempts to record such images. It concludes that while these images partly demonstrate the forms of power that are exercised in policing the border they also question some of the key assumptions that sit at the heart of neoliberal trading regimes. In particular, the paper indicates how the separation of labor and freight, which command quite different treatment in narratives of market freedom, is undermined by the visual blending of the workers body with cargo. In reading these images through the figure of the ghost, the paper argues that the commoditization of labor power is made explicit by the reappearance of embodied labor in the spaces for traded goods. In such a way, these images implicitly re-articulate the Marxist critique of the commodity’s fetish-like character by highlighting the invisibilities that this involves.

This paper argues that the failure of MySpace and the rise of Facebook in the social networking site market is due in part to the degrees in which either site associates users, technology, and marketers into a successful “real software abstraction.” Real software abstraction is a synthesis of the software engineering concept of abstraction and the Marxian concept of the real abstraction. This concept is used to examine MySpace and Facebook at the levels of aesthetics, code, culture, and appeal to marketers. I argue that instead of creating an architecture of abstraction in which users’ affect and content were easily reduced to marketer-friendly data sets, MySpace allowed users to create a cacophony of “pimped” profiles that undermined efforts to monetize user-generated content. In contrast, Facebook has proven to be extremely efficient at reducing users to commodifiable data sets within a muted, bland interface that does not detract from marketing efforts.