This issue of Public Culture is my last as editor. With it comes the end of my regular contribution of editor’s notes. Writing these notes over the past four years has allowed me to experience some of the pleasures of the short essay, especially the essay style associated with the Spectator and the Tattler. I would never claim the poetic brilliance, let alone competence, of Joseph Addison or Richard Steele. And yet the editor’s note has always seemed to me less about conveying news than about speculating on the anxious, synergistic manner and style of thought found in the essays published in any one issue; on the enthusiasms they represent; and on the contagious effects they may have by circulating through this journal. The distributive agency of Public Culture, as with all scholarly journals, makes partisans of us all: campaigning as we review, advocating as we compose. This same agency was continually disrupted as we, certainly I, became astonished by what we read—became compelled into a field of thought, became beside ourselves, a productive place to be.

It was not, however, merely the texts moving through the offices of Public Culture that produced this effect. My colleagues at the journal were no less inspiring. I would like to end these notes with special thank-yous to Dilip Gaonkar, my executive editor, whose constant scholarly companionship was indispensable to the intellectual life of the journal; to the two managing editors who righted every sinking ship, Caitrin Lynch and Kaylin Goldstein; to two fabulous manuscript editors, Will Elison and James Rizzo, whose dedication to prose and thought amazed us all. And, of course, to the members of the editorial committees I worked with, including Claudio Lomnitz, Robert Gooding-Williams, Tom Gunning, Saba Mahmood, Patchen Markell, Candace Vogler, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Xiaobing Tang, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Katie Trumpener, Kyeong-Hee Choi, and Lisa Wedeen.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli
New York City
April 2005