Critical Times 8:1

Contributions to this issue of Critical Times work across historical, political, and theoretical contradictions. Scholarly essays historicize how institutions ostensibly dedicated to free speech foster censorship and repression during an ongoing genocide; examine how divergent ideological interests rely on their own versions of academic freedom; and read Ludwig Wittgenstein with Talal Asad to explore how “nonsense” permeates and structures ordinary language. An artistic intervention conveys the experiences of a range of Black South African women, challenging Western art institutions including the Venice Biennale. Two concluding scholarly essays consider the construction and maintenance of the category of “humanity.” The first offers imperial genealogies of two legal measures in India that have jeopardized the citizenship of religious minorities, while the second demonstrates that perpetrators of violence deemed to be terroristic are excluded from the category of the human and thus subject to a total eradication for which there can be no grief.