All the essays unpack and rethink the political entanglements, investments, and effects of cultural artifacts, narratives, and sentiments. Some contributors approach this interface expressly; others take its power and validity as givens and proceed by example. In the first mode, Judith Grant and Paul Apostolidis establish criteria for determining whether cultural work has political purchase. Grant examines the turn toward art and culture in the tradition of critical theory as a positive expansion of politics and meaning-making spaces that turns away from economics. But Grant also warns that, without consciousness, cultural work is not emancipating, and its commentary is not political action. Apostolidis argues that criticism on its own is not political without a commitment to democratic leadership, which he defines as “the task of forging alliances between political intellectuals and groups of ordinary people” (p. 144).

The majority of contributors fall in the second mode, sitting more easily with the cultural studies/political theory interface. Mark Reinhardt concludes that even the most generous incarnations of communitarian thought (represented in his essay by Daniel Bell) still fail to conceptualize and therefore obfuscate myriad forms of “cultural struggle” (p. 108). Priscilla Wald reads “carrier narratives” from Typhoid Mary to Robin Cook's Invasion to show how communicative disease renders us “all related” and therefore consolidates and decimates community (p. 201). Linda Zerilli examines the U.S. investment in seeing itself as the “real” democracy vis-à-vis national narratives about the Statue of the Liberty as the referent for the Goddess of Democracy held up in Tiananmen Square. She chronicles the history of the statue from its beginnings, as the “gift that nobody wanted,” to the miniatures produced for tourist consumption today. Dean's concluding essay celebrates conspiracy theory, typically debunked as paranoid fanaticism, as part of the American tradition of political resistance present in the Declaration of Independence, whose conspiratorial tone unsettled the certainty of who held legitimate power.

Because these essays embrace, without regret, the pluralization of politics, they are meaningful contributions to debates about the expanding or shrinking public and political. Such debates are often played out in terms of a geography of public and private wherein certain concerns are considered essentially public, others indubitably private, artistic, cultural, economic, and so on. Hannah Arendt (On Revolution, 1963; The Human Condition, 1958), Sheldon Wolin (“Political Theory as a Vocation,” American Political Science Review 63:4 [December 1969]: 1062–1082 and “What Time is It?” Theory & Event 1 [No. 1, 1997]), Michael Walzer (Spheres of Justice, 1993), Jean Bethke Elshtain (Democracy on Trial, 1995), their commentators, and others have been engaged in debates about this kind of political mapping. Even contemporary feminist scholarship has become uncertain about its stake in making the personal and cultural political.

These essays neither police what counts as political nor make everything so. They detail the workings of power that proliferate beyond the so-called public sphere (and are often constitutive of it) and affect our politics and our culture, and they show us the political failures in working to keep the two distinct. Thomas Dumm discusses the ostensibly mundane act of a group of people in a bar singing the lyrics to “Wild Thing.” He examines the political meaning of how the audience (all but Jean Baudrillard, whom Dumm explains was quite baffled by the singing delirium) knew that the opening chords signaled “Wild Thing” and not its chordic sibling, “Louie, Louie.” Michael Shapiro juxtaposies the story of his grandfather with the movie Dead Man, an approach well outside the domain of mainstream political theory, as he invokes not only film but also family history and personal experience to show the “radical contingency of the family” (p. 270, emphasis in original). It is not that everything is now political in this interface of political theory and cultural studies, but nothing is essentially not political either. To equate the political with everything would have a paradoxically depoliticizing effect. But to show how political meaning is configured and reconfigured through cultural phenomena is to work in the spirit of the essays collected here.

This book challenges political theorists to be more capacious in their treatment of the political, more attuned to cultural work that untidies their precious categories. It calls on cultural studies scholars to be more deliberate about the political potential of their insights into the subtle cultural feedback that they so convincingly deconstruct. Given that global capitalism lurks as a persona non grata throughout the text, its entailments could be illuminated more directly. Specific attention to the flow of global capital, examination of the economic and cultural imperatives that fashion the global citizen as global consumer, and closer engagement with non-American culture on its own terms would have expanded this volume's already inspiring effort to problematize, pluralize, specify, and contextualize the production, meaning, and circulation of politics. As individual essays and as a collection, however, this book will reach far into the bookshelves and classrooms of critical legal theory, democratic theory, American studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, and other untapped resources for political/cultural imagination.