THE WHEEL TURNS AGAIN At CSSH, the Chief Editor position does not rotate often. As Thomas Trautmann wrote in his parting editorial foreword of 2006, “CSSH changes editors once in a blue moon, if then….” A decade later, his successor, Andrew Shryock, parted with an explanation: “Once you settle into it, and it settles into you, ordinary time/space blurs into the editorial longue durée.” This has certainly been true for us as well. In its sixty-five-year history, CSSH has been guided by only six editors: Sylvia Thrupp (the journal’s founder), Eric Wolf, Raymond Grew, Thomas Trautmann, Andrew Shryock, and now us, the bicephalous Geneviève Zubrzycki and Paul Christopher Johnson. In stepping down, we feel honored to join this hardy tree of editorial ancestors.
This, our swan song, is our thirty-third editorial foreword. With a tenure lasting “only” eight years and a bit, ours has been the shortest of the six editorial charges in the journal’s history. It has also been an extraordinarily eventful time, and it is possible, perhaps even likely, that these variables are not unrelated. While CSSH continues to cling tenaciously to the masthead of outstanding, original, and above all empirically “thick” scholarship, and an old-school house style of editorial exchange with authors, the business of editing scholarly journals has changed a lot since we took the helm. For one, journals are now, by necessity, multimedia platforms. Thus, some seven years ago witnessed the launch of a new, more sophisticated CSSH website (https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/cssh/) brilliantly designed and curated by our stellar Digital Content Editor Leigh Stuckey, featuring interviews and fascinating exchanges between authors as guided by Leigh, and our former Chief Editor, and now President of the journal’s Executive Board and Website Contributing Editor, Andrew Shryock.
Then, five years ago, the journal launched the Jack Goody Prize, awarded each year to the article that best represents the goals of the journal, as judged by an annually rotating, external, interdisciplinary jury. Perhaps most dramatically, two years ago the last paper edition of the journal was sent out; like most journals, we are now fully digital. While we, like many of you, feel an acute loss at no longer seeing the friendly brilliant green cover hailing us four times a year from our mailboxes, going digital has afforded exciting new possibilities. Most issues now contain nine articles instead of the original seven, then eight, of the past. We print many more photographs and other kinds of images now, and articles are made available much sooner than before, on the “FirstView” pages of the Cambridge University Press website, which dramatically increases their exposure and number of readers.
Our incoming Chief Editor is Jatin Dua, and we are thrilled to have him take over. While our time at the helm brought increased attention to Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe, and in terms of disciplines, to Sociology and History, Jatin brings a deep knowledge of the Indian Ocean region and all things related to the sea, piracy, and maritime jurisdictions, and in terms of discipline, to Anthropology. Despite his relative youth (at least compared to us!), Jatin has published many groundbreaking articles, not least being his magnificent, Goody Prize-winning CSSH essay, “Hijacked: Piracy and Economies of Protection in the Western India Ocean.”Footnote 1 Jatin’s celebrated first monograph, Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean (University of California Press, 2019), is a multi-sited ethnographic and archival engagement with maritime piracy and contestations over legitimate and illegitimate commerce in coastal East Africa. And he has two more books well underway. Jatin is ideally equipped to maintain the journal’s traditional strengths while also leading it in new directions. We cannot wait to see where he steers us next. Welcome aboard, Jatin!
On our way out the door—and we will try to avoid letting it hit us on the backside as we leave—we want to extend our deepest thanks to David Akin, Managing Editor extraordinaire, who kept CSSH running smoothly during the last eight years. CSSH essays have a distinct style, and this is largely because David has worked so closely and carefully with our authors for the past nearly quarter of a century. We cannot tell you how many times authors have recounted to us that working with CSSH was the best publishing experience they have ever had. While our journal is not immune to the ever-encroaching automation afflicting all academic publishing today, we have to a remarkable degree maintained a deeply personal and hands-on approach to the editorial process, which is very much to the good. That is due to David Akin. Take a bow, sir.
We also want to thank Ben Hollenbach, our indefatigable Submissions Manager, who kept the review process running from week to week and kept us on task with endless nudges and reminders. Thank you, Ben. Special thanks, also, to Andrew Shryock for good advice whenever we needed it and for his continuing aforementioned work for the journal. To Mark Zadrozny, our longtime liaison at Cambridge University Press, thank you for treating CSSH well.
But enough of this ancestor-worship, these Maussian (if all too textual) gifts, and these nostalgic kudos and gratuitous self-commendations. There is work to be done! In this, our final round, we offer you yet another rich, intellectually nourishing buffet of nine incredible essays.
HOLY DECAY The papers joined here together compare the temporalities and aesthetics of decay. J. Barton Scott’s study, “Heterodoxies of the Body: Death, Secularism, and the Corpse of Raja Rammohun Roy,” considers a famous corpse in nineteenth-century India as “ritually indeterminate flesh.” Marisa Karyl Franz’s essay, “The Decay-Life of Things,” interprets the varying temporalities of material things left for the dead at a cemetery in Brooklyn during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Holy Infrastructures: Catholicism, Detroit Borderlands, and the Elements,” by Stephen Berquist, Valentina Napolitano, and Elizabeth Rigotti, examines how urban infrastructures in all their fragile brokenness channel human contact with the basic elements of soil, water, and air. These elemental infrastructures work together, in turn, to parse, partition, and modulate affective flows and intensities of communal religious life.
RUMOR, SECRECY, AND STYLE Carla Jones’ “Style on Trial: The Gendered Aesthetics of Appearance, Corruption, and Piety in Indonesia,” reveals surprising semiotic interactions between the gendered forms of religious style called “modest fashion,” on one hand, and legal corruption and theft trials, on the other. Jones shows how female defendants use modest fashion strategically to signal humility and virtue in court, especially by covering the face and, even further, how the hermeneutic project of revealing secrets yokes post-authoritarian projects of exposing political corruption to style, visibility, and the problem of discerning the “real” face of the accused.
In “Return to Orléans: Racism, Rumor, and Social Scientists in 1960s France,” Arthur Asseraf explores how a 1969 case of antisemitic racism generated new social scientific hypotheses (most famously by the sociologist Edgar Morin) on how concepts of rumor, ambiguity, and media networks help to produce “racism without racists.” Revisiting the famous case of la rumeur d’Orléans, Asseraf shows how new social scientific concepts emerge out of complex interactions on the ground, but then often take on lives of their own.
AGENCY BEYOND RESISTANCE In “Slavery, Mobility, and Identity on the Western Coast of India, Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries,” Ananya Chakravarti demonstrates how central slavery was to the early modern Portuguese colonies of India. Importantly, Chakravarti also shows how indigenous society negotiated Portuguese categories of race, caste, and blackness, and transformed and indigenized labor systems that relied on enslaved labor.
Łukasz Stanek’s contribution, “Hegemony by Adaptation: Decolonizing Ghana’s Construction Industry,” shows how, after independence from Britain, Ghanaians drew strategically from both British and Soviet models of economic development to adapt construction projects to local conditions. Indeed, Stanek shows, “adaptation” became a keyword for Ghanaian architects and administrators in the postcolonial moment.
In their essay entitled “The Paradox of Black Incomes in Puerto Rico in the Early Decades of U.S. Colonialism,” César J. Ayala and Joel S. Herrera investigate a surprising anomaly, namely that Black men in Puerto Rico enjoyed an economic advantage during the 1910s in comparison with men classified as “Whites” and “Mulattos.” Ayala and Herrera attribute this to the ongoing existence of skilled Black workers in rural zones, a paradoxical legacy of slavery and other systems of coerced labor. Formerly enslaved or indentured skilled laborers thrived in the early twentieth-century sugar economy in ways working class White and Mulatto men could not, either in Puerto Rico or in comparable post-slavery economies like Louisiana.
Finally, John Edward Higginson’s essay, “‘If your ox does not pull, what are you going to do?’: Persistent Violence in South Africa’s Deep-Level Gold Mines and Its Contribution to the 1922 Rand Rebellion,” presents an example of agency beyond resistance in a less sanguine or emancipatory vein. In this case, Higginson examines how twenty thousand striking white mine workers of South Africa transformed their movement from a general strike into a violent racial pogrom, an attempt to link their labor movement to a racial ideal of white supremacy and a political vision of a “White South Africa.”
It has been a great pleasure presenting these remarkable articles to you for the last eight plus years, dear readers. The shining green cover of CSSH glows brighter than ever, and continues to invite you to read, think, and learn.
