Cultural Dynamics

This article examines the post-earthquake politics of space via the literal and cultural mapping of internally displaced persons in Haiti to consider the cartographic dimensions of humanitarian biopower. I begin by analyzing OpenStreetMap Haiti, an online collaborative cartographic project, which mapped Haiti’s roads and refugee camps after the earthquake by using high-resolution satellite imagery, global positioning system technologies, and aerial photographs—much of which is derived from US military data—in order to facilitate “humanitarian” efforts on the ground. I contend that the visual text produced by OpenStreetMap Haiti, which functions as a map to locate and situate refugees, represents a particular form of humanitarian biopower. In the second half of this article, I analyze a 2012 work of comics journalism titled Tents beyond Tents, which offers a critique of humanitarian “aid” from the perspective of Haitians who occupy the internally displaced persons camps created after the earthquake. I consider how the comic functions as a cartographic project, or cartoon mapping, through depictions of the spaces of the refugee camps in and around Port-au-Prince.

Inter-collegiate Indian dance competitions emerged in the late 1990s in the United States and have since become wildly popular. Why dance? Why now? We explore these questions through Nachte Raho, a competition hosted by a University of Iowa student organization. Such events allow participants to publicly embody the contradictions they experience as minoritized children of immigrants on a predominantly White campus. Thus, dance enables community building among minoritized students and has entertainment value to non-Indians. Students distinguish Nachte Raho from unruly “community functions” organized by immigrant parents and aim instead to produce a professionalized show intended primarily for peers.

Recent scholarship has highlighted the ways in which new models of international and community development have been emerging in Latin America. Many of these have been associated with the idea of indigeneity. This article is meant to contribute to the larger attempt to understand this new turn in development thinking by studying one such model—enacted on a community level under the moniker of “culturally sustainable development” by a Maya organization in Guatemala. The case study and institutional ethnography exemplify the ways in which community development can be culturally situated, yet broadly informed. It also illuminates how the post-Washington consensus development policy environment provides opportunities for alternative indigenous development models at the same time as it imposes potentially debilitating constraints. Finally, it is argued that indigenous organizations often act in ways that are transmodern as opposed to anti-modern and that this transmodern positioning has allowed for some success in asserting alternative concepts of development and shaking free some of the snares of the global post-Washington consensus development policy climate.

This article presents ethnography of Black cultural politics in post-flood New Orleans during the summer and fall of 2009. I engage in three interrelated subjects: (1) life histories and oral narratives in which I trace a history of Black queer performances locally referred to as “Punk Shows”; (2) my observations of a community play in which heritage, Black queer subjectivity, and the struggle over communal memory intersect; and (3) a broader discussion of the ways power is constituted by the shaping of history and communal memory to narrate race and sexuality. I argue that some ways of life are constructed as timeless, recuperable, and productive to the nation rather than ephemeral and contradictory. In arguing for a theory of Black queer generation, I deploy performance studies to valorize the “ephemeral” history of their cultural labor.

The 1890s were a period of tremendous social and political upheaval. The intimate nature of boom-bust economies and the end of the Indian wars influenced US–Mexico borderlands social life, forming the basis of this article. A 23 March 1893 murder-suicide attempt by ex-Congressman Hiram Stevens against his wife Petra Santa Cruz in the Arizona territory sets the stage for how larger socioeconomic shifts in racialized capitalist production influenced historical memory. In particular, analyzing Petra Santa Cruz Stevens’ life history in the context of capitalism provides a window for a reassessment of borderlands history as it is currently practiced, the ways in which material objects account for the affective and social labor of producing legible subjects, the ways in which sexual and racial modalities informed property relations of capital, and finally, a feminist critique of social history and national formation by shifting our attention to how borderlands negotiations of violence and history were, and continue to be, central to US history. I argue that the murder-suicide reordered systems of meaning, serving as a microeconomic index of racial capital and nation-state formation.