(un)precedented

There is no shortage of recent references to unprecedented events, whether in terms of political crises or climate disasters. Equally forceful, however, is the way such alarms are framed as iterations of precedents—more immediately in the resurgence of global fascisms, and more distantly in debates over how to name the current geological epoch. Titled “(un)precedented” to signal this unsettling parallax, this special issue asks what lies at the root of a temporality that appears at once a return of the familiar and yet strangely uncanny, and what its proliferation sublimates in terms of possibilities for critique and resistance.

Contributors: Sandeep Banerjee, Maggie Clinton, Katsuya Hirano, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Paola Iovene, Phil Kaffen, Robin D. G. Kelley, Suzy Kim, Yu-Kyung Lim, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Yukiko Shigeto, Ivan V. Small, Nicholas Y. H. Wong, Emily Jungmin Yoon, and Ayelet Zohar