ACLA 2018: Divided Public(s): On the Intellectual Vocation
In his contribution to an anthology of keywords for American cultural studies, Bruce Robbins registers an ambivalence at the heart of the term “public.” This ambivalence, Robbins writes, stems from the fact that the term’s “claim to represent the social whole has continued to bump up against evidence that large classes of people have been omitted from it.” Indeed, “public,” as a terminological category, requires universality. But in our contemporary historical situation – due to enduring social antagonisms, increasingly uneven distributions of resources and power, and ever-lengthening histories of exclusion and oppression – the fault lines of this never-universal are showing with renewed clarity, even as globalization continues to demand thinking