Abstract

The current American political crisis is appalling but not unique. Long in the making yet somehow still shocking, the election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States is symptomatic of broader transformations unfolding across the globe. We are bearing witness to a toxic mix of populism, patriarchy, nationalism, neoliberalism, and financialization—locked, perhaps, in a fight to the death; or, potentially more catastrophic, mutating into some new hybrid form for which, as yet, we have no name.

Meeting only days after the election, the editors of Grey Room recognized that we could not let this moment pass in silence despite the inevitable logistical limitations of scholarly publishing. Academic journals are ill-equipped to seize the decisive time of kairos, which, as Antonio Negri writes, “is power at precisely the moment that the experience of time restlessly observes the edge over which it leans.” What we could offer at this juncture is a minor gesture of solidarity: to temporarily suspend academic business as usual, stopping the presses in order to assemble a collective response, opening the pages of Grey Room to a multitude of voices from within and outside the U.S., which were curated in part by us, the editors, and in part by the artists themselves, who were free to extend the invitation to others. Future issues of Grey Room will assist in the task of naming the current crisis. The present dossier aims simply to register the state of emergency in which we find ourselves.