CTSJ Volume 4: Critical Theory and Social Justice Journal of Undergraduate Research Occidental College

We chose the four articles featured in this volume foremost because they accord with and elaborate the principles of critical theory and social justice. What unifies these pieces is an ability to combine focus with openness. This factor we term their disruptive power, and it is the driving spirit behind this publication. We see in these pieces the demand to imagine something new in the face of totalizing systems of power; we se e the power to redefine the terms of this engagement; we see a willingness to hope for the impossible. With such goals in mind, we were not seeking answers, already too aware that such a search would circumscribe our vision as editors. Rather, what captured us in each article was its ability to engender new lines of questioning. In the first featured piece, “Criminally Insane: Discursive Mutations of the Dangerous Individual,” we were struck by the epistemological possibilities at play within hegemony when it reflexes, spirals, turns inside-out. Sadie Mohler details this movement, one that mirrors Orientalism in its reliance on totalizing knowledge of the “other,” but in this case it is not the racialized Muslim or Middle or Far “ Eastern” nation but the ambiguous, domestic, and thereby subversive “dangerous individual”—the psychopath— that both haunts and defines the normative or der of personhood. Mohler’s forays into discourse both anticipate and echo postcoloniality’s (if it even exists in the first place) trouble with language. But for Kate Keleher ’s article, “The Hegemonic Ha: English in a Neoliberal Information Economy,” language’s fundamentally contested nature as a system of signs introduces into this aporia a critical ambivalence. Contending that the English language operates within the cultural, political, and economic circuits of transnational capitalism according to a modality of investment and exchange, Keleher ’s critique outlines the possibility for a destabilization of Western determination of “proper English” and thereby also of “legitimate” power via subaltern transformation of English. Continuing with concerns of materiality and empire, Marcella Maki’s piece, “NAFTA, Environmental Crises, and Social Justice: Cases from the Agricultural Practices of Chiapanecos,” centers on the compounding environmental injustices effected by NAFTA and elaborates the continuing iterations of colonial power relations as they operate in the vectors of international trade, transnational migration, indigenous land rights, and consumerism. Nevertheless, in the face of such violence—a violence that spreads across the borders of nations and bodies and is waged on the interwoven terrains of materiality and discourse—one might begin to wonder at the possibility of interruption, and, moreover, reconciliation. Given, on the one hand, the current configuration of power and, on the other, the great and bloody debt owed to the colonized of history, such a hope is impossible, which makes a reimagination of the terms of engagement all the more imperative. With this in mind, this issue concludes with a piece by Lucy Britt, “Derrida and Conflict,” in which she examines this (im)possible hope in her application of Derrida’s aporia of forgiveness to the Rwandan genocide. The problems raised within this issue are not new. Rather, it is their recurrence, their stubborn repetition despite shifts in power, paradigm, and system of transnational magnitude, that makes them continually troubling. However, upon a closer examination through a kaleidoscopic lens, what becomes visible are the new possibilities within repetition, even the possibility of interruption.