Tag: Politics

Social Text thirty years after the Sokal affair


Social Text still exists. In the spring of 1996, when the journal was the object of an enthusiastically publicized hoax by the physicist Alan Sokal, its survival seemed a bad bet. You published an essay arguing that gravity is a “social and linguistic construct?” Really? The mainstream media, hitherto unaware of the existence of this very little, very marginal magazine, were uncertain what exactly they were mocking. Was Social Text’s foolishness postmodern? Left wing? Cultural? Academic? They were certain, however, that what they smelled in the water was blood. On their side, and for a not insignificant portion of the left, jubilation. On the other side, humiliation. (I should know: I was the journal’s coeditor at the time.) We seemed like the stupidest people in the world, or the stupidest people who had been pretending to speak on behalf of the most avant-garde sociopolitical views. One friend of the journal suggested that we fall on our swords. If we owned no swords, swords could be made available.

The journal did not fold. One reason was that it had published a lot of good work, none of it remotely resembling Sokal’s gravity-is-a-construct nonsense, and those who cared about such things knew it. Edward Said’s “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” had come out in the first issue in 1979; for U.S.-based critiques of Zionism, 1979 was early. Other issues contained Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” and Aijaz Ahmad’s Marxist critique of Marxist (and Social Text cofounder) Fredric Jameson.

Woke


“Wokeism” began as a call in African American communities to “stay woke” against racial injustice, later expanding to include gender, class, environment, and identity struggles. Today, it sits at the center of a global culture war—embraced by some as a moral compass for equality, and criticized by others as rigid ideology and cancel culture. In the U.S., it influences politics, media, and corporations, sparking both reform and backlash. Globally, its meanings vary, but the debate it fuels—justice versus tradition, equality versus freedom—remains one of the defining conversations of our time.

On Watching The Bengal Files: A “Complex Truth”


Watching Bengal Files reminded me of an old debate topic: “Truth is Complex.” The film doesn’t just depict communal carnage; it forces us to confront the deeper, persistent reality of violence. From history’s atrocities to the everyday sharp word or dismissive gesture, violence is not an exception—it is the undercurrent of human life. As Krishnamurti said, even separating ourselves by religion or nationality is a subtle form of violence. The movie, in its raw way, pushes us to ask: can truth ever be simple?