ISLAM AND MASCULINITY Looking beyond hegemonic versions of Islamic masculinity performed in the Middle East, and too often caricatured in the West, Michael G. Peletz brings needed subtlety and care to the comparative issue of masculinities. In “Hegemonic Muslim Masculinities and Their Others: Perspectives from South and Southeast Asia,” Peletz surveys a range of ethnographic, comparative, and theoretical perspectives on Muslim men in South and Southeast Asia, giving focused attention to Pakistan and Malaysia. He expands the view of gender and sexuality among Muslims, revealing the diversity of Muslim gender-making and ways they are and were historically informed by colonialism, postcolonial nation-building, neoliberal capitalism, and the so-called War on Terror.
HIJACKING THE HUMAN Human bodies can be taken over by outside agents in manifold ways. In certain contexts, the severing of will from one's own body is sought and cultivated, as in ritual events calling for the presence of a god, spirit, or ancestor to displace the conscious mind; or in theatrical performances when an actor is taken over by the role of a character to persuade and enchant an audience. Too often, though, the human body is not willingly given up but rather stolen, commandeered for the labor, accountability, or pleasure of others. The essays juxtaposed in this section explore three methods of hijacking the human.
In “Slavery and Its Transformations: Prolegomena for a Global and Comparative Research Agenda,” Matthias van Rossum asks readers to rethink the old institution in more capacious terms than usual. Moving beyond the Atlantic trade and what Van Rossum calls the formal bias in reading the history of slavery, this wide-angle view offers an integrated analytical framework including all forms of coerced labor. Van Rossum turns to the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, where different slavery regimes existed and developed in interaction with one another, continuing to the present day. In this essay, the usual analytical, geographical, and temporal brackets placed around slavery begin to blur. No longer kept at arm's length, slavery thus reframed demands a new moral and political reckoning.
Humans are also hijacked by meta- and nonhuman powers. Sonia Rupcic's “Mens Daemonica: Guilt, Justice, and the Occult in South Africa,” contemplates cases of violent rape and murder attributed to demonic forces taking over a man's body, and how these fluid assignments of liability are leveraged in legal procedures of prosecution, defense, and public ceremonies of reconciliation. Rupcic's analysis shows how the “demonic mind” is distinguished from the “criminal mind” in South African trials, destabilizing inherited or imposed ideas of individual responsibility, and sometimes opening new avenues to configure justice.
Finally, human bodies can also be used as disposable boundaries and barriers, protective peripheries forced to shelter and front other bodies at the center of power. Charles Anderson's “When Palestinians Became Human Shields: Counterinsurgency, Racialization, and the Great Revolt (1936–1939)” examines uses of hostages on the battlefield in Arab Palestine during the Great Revolt in the 1930s, when British forces used Palestinians as human shields to stave off insurgent attacks. Quite apart from its bare effectiveness, the British “dirty war” tactic instated a new moral order, unhinged from traditional or legal barometers. It asserted total colonial control through terror. The conversion of colonized bodies into shields indexed a racialization that stripped Palestinians of legal rights or protections, situating them as subjects outside of the political process.
SENTIMENTAL STATES It might seem that states cannot properly have affect, though they often act as if they do, mobilizing performances and discourses of love, hate, friendship, fear, or rage. Perhaps then, we should consider states as not only clusters of institutional formations and territorial claims, but also as affective networks. Think of the frontispiece engraving used on the cover of Hobbes’ Leviathan, by Abraham Bosse, depicting a multitude of heads occupying and comprising the sovereign's body. An early draft by Bosse showed the inhabiting bodies’ faces turned outward, expressing a range of emotions. One of the drawing's effects is to reveal the state as an organic, living thing, dynamic and riven by sentiments. What is the state, the drawing asks the viewer, but a gathering of individual affinities and repulsions? The essays joined here begin to flesh out this possibility.
Jon Piccini and Duncan Money's “‘A Fundamental Human Right’? Mixed-Race Marriage and the Meaning of Rights in the Postwar British Commonwealth,” explores the removal or exclusion in the late 1940s of people in interracial marriages from two sites of the newly formed Commonwealth of Nations, in Australia and the southern African colonies. As the British Empire morphed into a Commonwealth, it began to codify ideas of universal human rights “irrespective of race, color, or creed.” The sanctity of marriage and family and the ways they served as the affective sutures of the new union became a key issue, clashing with and challenging notions of racial purity. Images of contented domesticity and sentiments of family loyalty were applied to subvert discourses of racial essentialism and policies of segregation. Among other things, then, the article shows how state sentiments about marriage and family life infiltrated the histories of racialization and human rights.
In “Differences over Difference: Sino-Russian Friendship at Interstate and Interpersonal Scales,” Ed Pulford contemplates how rapprochements between states are framed in the terms of human relations—as partners, rivals, enemies, or allies—such that polities, like persons, appear to engage in diverse sentimental relationships. “Friendship,” Pulford shows, was first applied to states in eighteenth-century Europe and has been mobilized in the (post)socialist world since the 1930s, articulating both the promise and the limitations of harmonized personal and state ties. Because understandings of friendship vary widely, though, invocations of state-state friendship may cause friction among resident populations, even as local friendships between different ethnonational groups may contravene state-level hostilities. Working in a border town between China and Russia, Pulford explores the micro- and macro-level scales of notions of “friendship,” and the tensions between state-level claims and local interactions.
Charles A. MacDonald's contribution, “Rancor: Sephardi Jews, Spanish Citizenship, and the Politics of Sentiment,” evaluates Spain's 2015 law offering citizenship to descendants of Sephardi Jews, expelled in 1492. Drawing on ethnographic and historical sources, MacDonald shows how the love of Jews, philosephardism, is imagined as a way to inaugurate or revive a renewed sense of Spanish modernity. Sephardi Jews come to be seen as living repositories of an earlier moment of national greatness. Here a racial logic is joined to an affective one, as evaluations of putative Sephardi rancor, love, and nostalgia for Spain were joined to an actual social program. MacDonald demonstrates that affective criteria are part and parcel of state policy debates on inclusion and exclusion.
INEQUALITY IN PIKETTY In their timely review essay, “Piketty and the Political Origins of Inequality,” Richard Lachmann and Peter Brandon at once examine Thomas Piketty's explanations for economic inequality and scrutinize the unevenness and inequality of his analyses. Lachman and Brandon point to empirical and conceptual problems with Piketty's history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, issues that stem from his presentation of causality at an overly general level. This leads to a certain confusion of causal relations among economic forces, changes in technological innovation, population growth, ideology, and governmental policies. Even more, Lachman and Brandon critique Piketty's conception of ideology in relation to how mass opposition to inequality is produced. They present an expanded conception of ideology that accounts for how ideology affects parties, states, voters, and activists alike.
