In a powerful but frequently overlooked passage in The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon describes expressive culture as a register of incipient social relations. He maintains that long before liberation struggles assume organized political form, perceptive observers will detect the emergence of unusual kinds of expression popping up to summon the people to view the status quo as both unreal and unacceptable.Footnote ¹ The essays in this special issue dedicated to the theme of Inhabiting Cultures display precisely this evidence of incipient critique and transformation. They demonstrate that tomorrow is today; that the reigning cultural forms authored and authorized by domination, exclusion and oppression have become exhausted and obsolete; and that the stirrings of a new world in the making are already here.

In a historical moment shaped by mass dispossession, displacement, and disposability, new forms of cultural practice are starting to turn poison into medicine by producing off-centered forms of art that are as ephemeral, transitory, and mobile as the social world from which they emerge. They challenge expert knowledge; question received wisdom; and provoke people to imagine, act, and invent. The authors of these essays, like the cultural creators depicted in them, find, fabricate, and forge cultural products and practices with profound epistemological implications. They trouble binary distinctions between the truth and the lie, the originator and the imitator, the real and the imagined, the object and the artist, and the performer and the audience. Like many other postmodern art products and practices, they privilege the creative act over the created object, aspiring to an art that goes beyond ornamentation, celebration, or condemnation to instead see art as a force capable of bringing about concrete changes in social relations. At a historical moment when the authoritarian single-mindedness of expert knowledge has been deeply discredited by seemingly unstoppable social crises, they emphasize the contingent and relational qualities of truth and the indeterminacy of meaning. Yet artistic creations analyzed in this collection are not mere ludic escapes from the hard facts of history, but, on the contrary, they evidence efforts to provoke people to live lives that are not based on lies. Like the Afro-diasporic art analyzed so astutely by Robert Farris Thompson, the provocations advanced in these articles proceed from the premise that “[i]f you know where you are going, and where you are coming from, you can decorate the way to other worlds.”Footnote ²

The systemic breakdown of key social institutions, the failed promises of scientific and technological solutions to political problems, and the rise of racist revanchism, coupled with the indecent social relations required by neoliberal regimes of extreme austerity, unending warfare, and radically racialized security have discredited the authority of expert knowledge. Millions of people around the world have come to see that the price of enabling a small number of people to live well and be treated as exceptional is that large numbers of people have to live poorly and be treated as disposable. Decades of experts articulating noble creeds while excusing and even endorsing ignoble deeds have exposed the calculated cruelty and the mean-spirited mendacity of those in power. As the people of the world experience collectively a social disintegration that requires a collective response, we need to find each other and forge solutions together. Artistic provocations and social-movement mobilizations alike seek to deepen popular capacity for democratic deliberation and decision making. It has become clear that no one will do for us what we fail to do for ourselves. Both radical art and radical politics, as Michel Foucault argues, constitute opposition to the effects of power, to the practices of classification, quantification, and rational administration promoted by privileged knowledge and the “secrecy, deformation and mystifying representations attendant to them.”Footnote ³

The works of art discussed in Inhabiting Cultures emerge from a historical moment when people are being asked repeatedly to pledge allegiance to fraudulent, fabricated, and false ideals. From the fictions of free-market fundamentalism to the never-realized promises of political liberalism, we confront on a daily basis official proclamations and formulations replete with what Martin Luther King Jr., quoting G. K. Chesterton, described as “cures that don't cure, blessings that don't bless, and solutions that don't solve.”Footnote ⁴ The artistry analyzed in Inhabiting Cultures sardonically and satirically promotes blatant and transparent falsehoods as vehicles for noticing how we have been lied to systematically, as invitations to confront the harm that has come about as a result. From the reenactment of nineteenth-century slave rebellions and riots in the United States to the invention of a virtual twenty-first-century K-Pop boy band that has no Korean members, from the fabrication of imagined primary documents delineating the experiences of an eighteenth-century state bureaucrat who never actually existed to ruminations about the decisions that led remnants of Ku Klux Klan regalia to be placed in local history museums, these articles inhabit culture by contesting, inverting, subverting, lampooning, and transforming habitual practices. They challenge not only the traditional objects of cultural creation, reception, and critique, but also the practices, processes, and social relations of art.

The authors and artists at the center of this issue formulate new cultural imaginaries and find new research objects on the go, in transit, seemingly unmoored to the ties of hearth and home and the linear chronologies of history. Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd identifies being in transit as an epistemological advantage, as a way of being actively present “in a world of relational movements and counter-movements,” to inhabit a state of existing relationally and multiply.Footnote ⁵ The art examined in this issue proceeds from the premise that at this moment of systemic structural breakdown of the economy, the environment, and the educational system, this time when seemingly ever-increasing levels of hate, hurt, and fear permeate the political system and popular culture, the old songs, speeches, and symbols will no longer suffice. Inhabiting culture in this context is more than a matter of dwelling in new spaces, but also a project that entails dispensing with habits, especially the habitual practices of artistic instruction, apprenticeship, creation, curation, display, and critique.

In her eloquent, insightful, and generative book The Work of Art in the World, literary scholar Doris Sommer reminds us that one of the traditional virtues of art is that it can interrupt habit, promote presence of mind, and make people fully cognizant of both the peril and the promise of the social world. Books and works of art are not sacred objects, Sommer insists, but rather provocations for creative play.Footnote ⁶ Yet when criticism gets transformed into canonization, habit takes over. If we are not prepared to break away boldly from our habits, explains Swedish anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, our work will come to resemble his definition of Scandinavian cooking, i.e. a practice “passed down from generation to generation for no apparent reason.”Footnote ⁷ The contributors to Inhabiting Cultures, however, are cooking in a different way, envisioning and enacting new recipes that require novel combinations of ingredients; new forms of mixing, stirring, and blending; and previously unexplored understandings of taste.

The members of the John Q collective explain the guiding logic behind this issue through an introductory essay written while literally in transit – riding on a train. They forge a traveling theory along the way. The occasion of writing evokes new perceptions about the act of riding, and the ride itself throws forth new things about which to write. Considered abstractly, trains are spaces of confinement and predictability. They create an involuntary and ephemeral community, traveling only where the tracks lead. Their routes and schedules are routine and predictable. Yet the dynamism and unresolved contradictions of the social world provoke the authors to “read” their train ride as a text replete with remnants of the past and premonitions about the future. Riding past the Chicago Art Institute reveals a window created nearly four decades earlier by artist Daniel Buren for his exhibit Watch the Doors, Please!. Buren painted stripes on commuter rail cars that passed by the aperture. He posted the train schedule by the window so museum patrons would know when the “art” would come into view. Buren's innovation literarily broke through the walls, connecting the museum to the outside world. His piece challenged the idea that the proper place for art is in captivity in museums and rejected the idea that the proper role for visual imagery is to be displayed on a wall for the pleasure of spectators. Cordoning off the museum as the place for significant acts of seeing constrains rather than enhances the possibilities of perception. Breaking through the walls of the museum to see beyond them, however, calls into question the habits of art curation and exhibition that make aesthetic display a refuge from everyday life, rather than an engagement with it or an intervention into it.

The John Q collective note that the art museum window no longer provides an unimpeded view of the tracks. The trains that pass by the edifice today no longer sport Buren's stripes. Yet the sheer curtains that cover the window created for Buren's exhibit do not fully keep out the outside world, but instead display the contours of the train yard in shadows that evoke the aura of an impressionist painting. The stasis of this view, however, stands in sharp contrast to the vibrant social life lived on the trains, which despite their utilitarian functions and regimented schedules and routes produce new and ever-changing combinations of passengers with every ride. The train passengers inhabit a peculiar public space, one jointly occupied by executives on their way to promote capital accumulation in plush downtown offices and poor people selling loose cigarettes to strangers in hopes of surviving one more day, of fending off the unlivable fate to which they have been relegated by a winner-take-all economy. Writing while riding on the train for the John Q collective makes visible the inescapably social nature of cultural and intellectual work. Artists, writers, and composers often labor in isolation, but never really in solitude. The created art object derives its meaning, impact, and influence from the ways in which it is understood by knowing subjects. As Stuart Hall famously argues, cultural creators encode particular meanings in their artworks that hail an imagined maximally competent viewer, reader, or listener, but it is the shared social act of decoding that gives expressive culture a public life. Like the other contributions to Inhabiting Cultures, the John Q collective statement highlights innovative forms of encoding that encourage active forms of decoding.

Each of the contributions to this special issue challenges the technologies of meaning and memory that are dominant in the arts and humanities. They identify photography and ethnography as managerial tools structured in dominance. They call into question the neutrality of the historical archive, the map, the museum, and the census. They treat authenticity and sincerity as performative affects mobilized for commercial ends. Because the arts and the humanities are structured in dominance, they cannot be innocent. Because they are central to how people understand the world, they cannot be evaded. Because they are technologies deployed relentlessly in the service of hierarchy, hatred, and harm, they cannot be embraced. In the space between evasion and embrace, the articles that make up the Inhabiting Cultures issue confront these realities by engaging with art, evidence, and ideas in satirical and sarcastic, yet serious, ways. Their transparent deceptions are intended to provoke a break with habitual ways of looking, listening, reading, and writing.

Jason Francisco's “A Land of Shadows” combines photography, a forged notebook, and a blank parody of historical writing in a mixed-media piece that evokes the long history of surveillance of racialized immigrant working-class populations by scholars and the state. It is a false archive that calls into question the impartiality and reliability of actual archives. The text that Francisco invites us to “find” has been crafted by someone at a particular time for particular purposes, just like the official archives where the truths we “find” have been crafted for us by knowing and self-interested subjects. In “The Running Stitch,” Katherine Lennard ruminates and speculates about the mysterious history of a quilt made of fragments of Ku Klux Klan robes exhibited in a local history museum. Part of a larger project that focusses on the nettling and disturbing effects of the survival of Klan regalia in museums, libraries, and private collections, “The Running Stitch” explores how reverent and celebratory approaches to the past leave historians and historical institutions ill-equipped to engage the shameful parts of history. This discovery leads Lennard to questions about her own relation to the objects she studies. Just as the curators and exhibit designers run the risk of condoning the objects and practices they seek to critique, Lennard notes how her training as a historian leads her to eschew first-person narrative and to deploy the third-person form that Francisco satirized and critiques in “A Land of Shadows.” Ultimately, Lennard turns to the practice of quilting itself as the guiding metaphor for her work. She stitches together unfinished fragments of evidence, descriptions of material culture, and ruminations about the creators and owners of Klan regalia that might not fit together smoothly. This does not enable her, or her readers, to find narrative or ideological closure, but rather to engage the hurts of history in perpetuity, to let the piece hang in the present as a disturbing presence that makes us come “undone, again and again,” each time we encounter them.

Dread Scott's historical reenactment of the 1811 Louisiana slave rebellion and Paul Durica's reenactment of the 1877 Battle of the Viaduct in Chicago both seem to hail “spectators,” but in truth they call out for “spect-actors” whose participation shapes the performances in unpredictable ways. What appear to be simple reenactments or commemorations of a completed past instead propose that the patterns of the past that endure in the present are incomplete, unfinished, and constantly undergoing revision. They help us see that what the 13th Amendment calls the badges and incidents of slavery still shape opportunities and life chances in the present, that the suppression of the slave rebellion of 1811 and of the working-class insurgency of 1877 accounts in part for the grotesque inequalities of today. Perhaps most important, the erasures and distortions of these freedom struggles in official histories and historical commemorations persist as part of a linked chain of occlusions and obfuscations that are central rather than peripheral to our shared social life. Durica situates his reenactment as a response to his frustrations with the limits of both the local-history tours he conducted under the name Pocket Guide to Hell and his graduate training at the university. A key component of his article is a cross-cutting parallel narrative about sculptor Alexander Calder's efforts to produce art in public places, especially his history of producing lasting monuments to war on the basis of his service during World War II, while later emerging as an opponent of that militaristic nationalism during the Vietnam War. These detours constitute a refusal to tell a linear cause-and-effect story. They manifest a deep suspicion of narrative and ideological closure. Discovering truth – or truths – about the rioters of 1877, the participants in its reenactment, and the public sculptures of Alexander Calder reveals long chains of deception and dissimilation that are not easy to discern, much less dismantle. Similarly, Dread Scott's work is less a reenactment of the 1811 slave rebellion than a performed rumination about the unreliability of the archive. Consistent with Donald Lowe's formulation that history is not the past but a fabulation and interpretation based on the partial remnants of the past that survive as historical evidence, Scott describes his discovery of Daniel Rasmussen's history of the rebellion, which in turn was brought into existence because of the insistent citation of that part of the past in the oral traditions of the families of Leon Waters and Albert Thrasher. Scott concedes that there are some small facts about the past that are unrecoverable, that have to be guessed at through reasoned speculation. These small facts are not all that is missing, however. Historians’ reliance on written archives put together by the winners of historical battles and structured in dominance in perpetuity means that some very big parts of the past will be forgotten unless they are accessed, acknowledged, appreciated, analyzed, and interpreted in alternative community-based memories and archives.

The tenuous lines separating fact from fiction in contemporary culture are explored by the I'm Making a Boy Band (IMMABB) collective. Their art project created a Korean pop boy band with all US members as a send-up of commercial culture and a provocation for rethinking the nature of authenticity, sincerity, commodification, and commercialization. Yet the fiction became fact once EXP, the act they created, attracted an actual popular following in South Korea. Their contribution to Inhabiting Cultures is an ersatz “manual” on how to create a K-pop boy band that is as fake and as real as Jason Francisco's forgery, Katherine Lennard's quilt stories, and the historical reenactments of Dread Scott and Paul Durica. The IMMABB manual contains the photorealism and putatively objective social-science rhetoric of “A Land of Shadows,” the material presence but always receding absence of “The Running Stitch,” and the same claims to both a false historical fidelity and an improvised revision of the past as the reenactments of Scott and Durica.

A Hungarian proverb holds that if you stare too long at the Devil, you start to look like the Devil. In their roles as authors and artistic provocateurs, the contributors to Inhabiting Cultures walk a fine line. Their provocations are always susceptible to reinforcing unwittingly the very cultural categories and hierarchies they seek to critique. Yet there is no choosing not to choose, and the choice of performance offers aleatory possibilities that seem foreclosed (at least for the time being) in the realms of politics and scholarly debate. The move toward performance is also a move toward the unofficial archives and alternative academies that aggrieved social groups have always had to create in the face of exclusion from the centers of power and authority. As Vincent Harding wrote decades ago from within the ethos of the black radical tradition,

The performances that Harding references have not been exclusively aesthetic and expressive. Performing entails many different kinds of doing, different ways of standing and stepping up, of speaking out and of fighting back. But as important as the “word” has been and will likely always be, being possessed by the truth has never been a mere matter of writing or speaking. In their explorations of the mixed-media simulated archive, the Klan quiit, historical reenactments, and the pervasive performative presence of commercial culture, the articles in this special issue propose new ways to decorate the path to other worlds.

The mischievous and playful performances analyzed in this issue cannot be understood in isolation. They are counterperformances speaking back to the spectacles of state and capital staged for purposes of domination all around the world. The Ferguson and St. Louis County police produced just such a spectacle on 9 August 2014 by leaving Michael Brown's body on the street in the hot summer sun for more than four hours after he was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson. As Rita Laura Segato points out in another context, the public display of the corpse of the vanquished is an expressive rather than utilitarian imperative for the dominator. She observes that white supremacist misogyny requires turning its victims into spectators of the discretionary death power of their oppressors. Yet the spectacle is not just for the oppressed. Writing about the public display of murdered women in Mexico, Segato notes that the aggressor always addresses himself to other aggressors, seeking to earn entry into what she calls “the virile brotherhood” that requires display of the raped and murdered woman “to satisfy a group's demands to become and remain cohesive as a group.”Footnote ⁹ The performance is an end in itself, according to Segato. She insists that “the feminicides of Ciudad Juarez can be better understood if we stop thinking of them as a consequence of impunity and imagine them as producers of impunity.”Footnote ¹⁰

In a similar vein, writing about the terroristic state spectacle of the ruling junta's “disappearing” of citizens in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, Diana Taylor analyzes counterperformance as a response to the performative violence of the state in the service of capital. Faced with spectacles designed to confirm their subordination, aggrieved people and groups stage counterspectacles to affirm their subjectivity. Taylor argues, however, that entering the realm of the performative entails great risks, that spectacle intended to contest power can unwittingly reaffirm it. The relentless display of horror by sovereign power wears down spectators. Counterspectacles run the risk of asking us to either overidentify with the dominant spectacle or to disidentify with it, to imagine oneself as either the powerless victim or the powerless accomplice in torture, rather than the ethical witness charged with the responsibility of finding the way to other worlds. Taylor advocates counterperformances grounded in a reciprocity that allows no safe vantage point and does not tolerate resignation. Counterperformances in her formulation need to produce witnesses not content to remain spectators, subjects infused with responsibility. “My role in this drama,” Taylor proclaims, “is not to keep quiet, but to be a better spect-actor. For it is against the diminishment of our complex and interconnected visions that we must struggle.”Footnote ¹¹

When the Chicago Transit Authority trains that the John Q. collective rode as they composed their article discharge passengers at stations and are poised to resume their journey, the conductor announces over the loudspeaker system that “doors are closing.” Sadly, in the realms of economic opportunity and human dignity, doors are closing all around the world. Yet while increasing numbers of people find themselves broke, they are not yet broken. They envision and enact new social relations in forms of art and activism that signal an emerging mass refusal of an unlivable destiny. The articles in Inhabiting Cultures embrace the challenge of that refusal at this important moment in history. They signal restlessness with the way things are and point toward the way things can be.