Lateral is the peer-reviewed, open access digital journal and production site of the Cultural Studies Association, published semiannually each fall and spring.

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Illustration by Danijel Žeželj.

Courtesy of Guillaume Vieira.

Courtesy of Mohammed Salem.

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Positions

The Positions podcast aims to provide critical reflection and examination on topics in cultural studies for scholars, students, and a general audience.

Each episode is co-hosted by a different Cultural Studies Association Working Group and accompanied by a scholarly commentary.

Produced by Mark Nunes and Elaine Venter.

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Years in Cultural Studies

This special section is another iteration of cultural studies telling its own story. Here, we offer essays that interrogate cultural studies’ diverse, fragmented, and provocative history.

Essays in this collection focus on specific years in the history of cultural studies. Our aim is to provide a pedagogical resource, a place for documentation and excavation, and a forum for more storytelling.

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Logo, CCRRRC in block letters

The Cultural Constructions of Race and Racism Research Collective (CcRrrC) is an open access platform bringing together original analysis and curated resources about race and racism outside of the US. ⁠The platform hosts a global network of media makers, scholars, and activists turning to local and regional media and popular culture to identify and dismantle colorism and anti-Black racism. CcRrrC is a ResearchAMP project funded by SSRC.⁠

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Caribbean

The Caribbean is the convergence point for a culture of modernity, forged through histories of slavery, indentureship, migration, genocide, and colonialism. This section offers critical reflections on how this culture of modernity has informed constructions of race and anti-Blackness in popular culture. The Caribbean regional committee has chosen the spectral as its organizing theme to track how anti-Blackness haunts, lingers, appears and disappears in popular culture and quotidian life. This section is thus dedicated to tracking the spectral qualities of racism and anti-Blackness, by mapping its visual, material, sonic, and cultural apparitions in the everyday.

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East Asia

It is still widely believed that race and racism are not relevant to East Asia because of its perceived ethnic homogeneity. Yet race-based or ethnocentric violence—both physical and symbolic—are not only part of the social fabric in contemporary East Asia, but also rooted in the region’s modern history. On the other hand, complex issues of local politics and discrimination across East Asia are often flattened out in the eyes of Euro-American observers, who try to make sense of the local ethnoracial politics according to the Western racial hierarchy. Thus, the East Asia Regional Section aims to tackle this difficult question: How do we talk about race in the first place, when race is not considered a significant part of East Asian cultures?

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