Through his work as a scholar, as a critic, and as a political commentator, Edward Said asked insistently: Who speaks? For what and whom? How does an intellectual articulate his or her place in the West? Or in the developing world? What is the specific contribution and intervention to be made by the intellectual? This Social Text special issue in memory of Said examines how he challenged established authority and identity with these questions and shaped a culture of criticism.

This special issue of Social Text examines the self-perpetuating nature of postmodern war and war culture. It looks at the instrumental nature of war discourse as a political force and challenges its vision of endless warfare as the means to control both domestic and foreign populations in an era of globalization. Essays analyze the historical and material interests that war serves and challenge the seductive mythology of high-tech precision warfare, which allows the traumatic effects of war to be considered at a great distance. The issue also argues that the increasing tendency to discuss war metaphorically—as in the phrases “War on Drugs” and “War on Terror”—blurs the boundaries between civilian and soldier and between combatant and noncombatant and defers the human cost of permanent warfare.

The contributors to this special issue—drawing on cultural studies, anthropology, economics, psychoanalysis, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and war literature—target the blind spots in current debates about war. One essay examines the financing of war, challenging the myth that our military-industrial complex generates economic bounty. Another contributor addresses strategies of high-tech urban warfare now being developed by the U.S. military and warns of the historical limits of colonial policing techniques that build on practices of surveillance. Other essays discuss the eroticization of “consent” embodied in the practice of torture at Abu Ghraib; the paradoxes of paramilitary policing and popular resistance along the militarized Mexico-U.S. border; and the continuities between the permanent war economy that emerged in the United States during World War II and the current disastrous confluence of militarism, global outsourcing, and economic depletion.

Contributors. Ashley Dawson, Patrick Deer, Jonathan Michael Feldman, Kennan Ferguson, Jean Franco, Randy Martin, Leerom Medovoi, Rosalind C. Morris, Gilberto Rosas

This issue follows the punk movement’s lingering aftereffects, investigating its unruly profligacy of meanings within music and popular culture and outside and beyond genre. The contributors track punk’s affect and aesthetics across media and geography from the 1970s to the present, seeking to disrupt conventional linear narratives of punk’s development. This collection participates in a growing body of literature focusing on the stories and creative articulations of punk by women, people of color, and queer individuals. The contributors reconsider the presence of masculinity in emo; posit a queer minstrelsy underlying the homophobia in 1980s hardcore punk; analyze the “shadow feminism” within the screams of Rhoda Dakar, Yoko Ono, Grace Jones, and Janelle Monáe; and confront the relationship of faith, feminism, and aesthetics in Pussy Riot’s work. Other essays offer a realignment of punk’s Los Angeles–New York–London axis by investigating South Tejas punk bands and disentangling punk’s thorny connections to ska, dub, dubstep, and pop.

Jayna Brown is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Patrick Deer is Associate Professor of English at New York University. Tavia Nyong’o is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.