Abstract Stakeholders across an expanding range of fields—including public health, art history, politics, finance, and so on—agree that Bayard Rustin is an exemplary figure. Still, they remain divided over how he ought to be remembered. While some muse about the very idea of Bayard Rustin, projecting onto him a variety of personal and political aspirations, others tether memory of Rustin to specific facts and sources, advancing accounts of his record that appear unvarnished or merely true. This essay maps the conceptual-political labor of such competing representations. More than biographical uncertainty, what unfolds between them is disagreement regarding the role of cultural signification in political change. At the heart of popular debates over Bayard Rustin, in other words, is not just the man himself but also the boundary between politics (rationality, strategy, class) and culture (emotion, performance, identity). To defamiliarize Bayard Rustin—and move beyond the limits of “politics or culture” disputes—the second part of this essay reconsiders his own navigation of the politics-culture divide. Hardly identitarian, more than a socialist, Rustin was a fabulist known for his purposive, evocative, and sometimes cunning tales. Taking seriously his investment in narrativization requires unsettling his exemplary status: rather than distilling Bayard Rustin into topical examples, whether cultural or political, stakeholders ought to evaluate the impermanent critical purchase of the stories told by and about him.
Abstract This article traces the role of Latino capitalists and their efforts to expand the reach of their businesses and communities beyond the United States, a decades-long crusade that culminated in the 1993 passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It pushes back against the “new history of capitalism” literature, which largely ignores racialized and minoritized groups in historical economic analysis, relying instead on nations, institutions, and elites as the actors universally shaping economies and markets. This essay offers a new framework for considering how emergent Latino commercial power, operating at multiple scales, made a massive intervention in North American capitalism and neoliberalism—although not without complications for Latino communities. Within the global order that Latino capitalists championed (alongside multinational corporations), it was workers in maquiladoras who were exploited for profit and Latino workers in the United States who faced structural inequality. Small business crusaders nonetheless ascended the ranks within the business class and were welcomed into the halls of power as advisors for Latino business interests, offering a new voice speaking in favor of globalization. These actions had immense implications for the reconstitution of US capitalism, chief among them the embrace of free trade in the late twentieth century.
Abstract This essay narrates the recent rise and broad acceptance of the gender-affirmative model of care in American medicine. It calls into question the frequent claim that the rise of this model is attributable to the influence of political ideology on medicine. It argues instead that this rise has been enabled by a broader transformation within American medical thought and practice over the last half century. In particular, it situates the rise of the gender-affirmative model as part of a broader questioning of objectivist conceptions of disease, and a concomitant turn toward personally relative conceptions of pathology and health, that are now underway in many quarters of American medicine. Crucially, this questioning and turn have been motivated not by external influences on medicine but by the practical problems produced by modern scientific medicine itself.
Abstract This article deals with the Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch’s critique of historiography. In doing so, it seeks to produce an estrangement that will allow us to perceive the theoretical “other” of scientific historiography. The epistemological significance of Kusch’s definition of historiography comes from his radically situated perspective and its strong political stance. Following his example, this article offers an alternative conception of historical truth based not on correspondence or objectivity but on the category of the community as a strategy for living.
Abstract This essay asks how the contemporary university institutes life and avoids death. Inquiring into the “animating desires” that historically have sustained the university, it traces the ways in which the competing orders of church and state have shaped those desires, conditioned the university’s understanding of its own freedoms, and enabled the intergenerational continuity of the university’s body politic. It concludes by analyzing the late twentieth-century university endowment as a displaced, disavowed, and increasingly questionable site of intergenerational continuity.
