Introduction: A Reflection on Years

The year following Ronald Reagan’s 1982 deployment of US Marines into Lebanon after the Israeli invasion, June Jordan published the poem “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon.”¹ The poem, an admonition of American complicity with the US military siege on the people of Palestine and Lebanon, is a reflection on years, a declaration of time. Dedicating the poem “to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948–1983,” the speaker’s claim “I didn’t know and nobody told me and what / could I do or say, anyway?” highlights over three decades of inaction amidst devastation as an iterative, longlasting history of militarized assault.

I write this in March 2026, and Jordan’s poem, as it often does, makes a new impact, as does her oeuvre. For many, 2026 sparks a feeling of familiarity, a sense that we have been here before, that we are watching something we have seen sometime else. For the past month, the US military, along with its Israeli counterpart, has waged a war over Iran—with Israeli incursions into Lebanon—as it continues to support the Israeli genocide in Palestine. This multipronged war is also a reflection on years, a declaration of time. 

In 2023, the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for what would eventually become Trump’s “culture war.”² Project 2025 cites Ronald Reagan’s presidency as successfully reconceptualizing US culture in a vision of conservatism. In 2025, a writer for the Heritage Foundation declared that Trump’s “culture war is working.” Accusing the Left of using “culture” to “tear down America’s cultural narrative and historical narrative and put in place a distorted counternarrative,” the writer promises that the culture war will become a “reconquista.”³ By harkening back to the Christian defeat of Muslim-ruled al-Andalus and the 1492 Catholic capture of the Iberian peninsula, the year 2025 summons 1492 to do the work of staging the present as a widescale assault on “wokeness” to return the United States to “greatness.”

Of course, any culture war is a smokescreen for a concerted attack on people. Articulating the definitive struggle of the country as one between the morals of the Right and the destructive values of the Left, “culture war” renames what is actually a battle to arrest self-determination, particularly of Black, Indigenous, queer and trans communities, immigrant, women, and disabled people. The culture war of 2026 materializes as the dehumanization of trans people and Palestinian people, the destruction of higher education, and the vilification and detention of immigrants, for example. It is—and as June Jordan reminds us, as it was in the 1980s—the ideological and political ground for the fortification of settler colonialism and the hot wars in Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Venezuela, and Ecuador.

In the decades when cultural studies began to emerge as a field of inquiry, cultural studies practitioners analyzed the culture war as a consolidation of postwar cultures, the tensions between British culture and working-class diasporic cultures, the decline of the British empire, and the Americanization of media. As Stuart Hall would explain, it was this kind of moral panic that became the center of British class and race struggles.⁴ Interrogations of culture wars strike at much of the core of cultural studies as an intellectual and political practice, an attempt to evaluate not only the shifts and transformations of cultural life but also the reflections on time that people invoke when they talk about culture. 

In other words, the present, as we know of the past, is a reflection on years, a declaration of time. A year can say a lot. Its invocation can serve as rallying cry, an attempt to organize a tale around a revised version of events. It can serve as origin story or conclusion depending on who tells it and why.

The Years in Cultural Studies section began as a project of careful storytelling by Rob Gehl and his students at the University of Utah to map the “historical and intellectual contexts” of cultural studies.⁵ It charted key moments in the formation of cultural studies as a field, highlighting the events and crises that constituted some of its early formations. The project began and unfolded in a spirit of innovation and collaboration.

In a similar spirit of experimentation and collective study, I reintroduce the Years project through another set of provocations. Rather than attempt to tell the story of cultural studies, I ask: How do we practice cultural studies by attending to a year? What are the multiple, myriad, overlapping, and conflicting stories that a year holds? How do these stories upend and undo each other? How does one attend to the historical in ways that remain committed to the messy, unwieldy transformations of cultural life? How does one grapple with culture in ways that heed the urgency of politics? 

The animating spirit of Years is an invitation to think about the year, and the frame of the year, as a point of organization and possibility for thinking creatively and expansively. The year as prompt asks who and what is made possible by a particular retelling and who and what is occluded by that retelling. It makes room for recollection and memory by asking how one’s experience of a year helps us comprehend something difficult to fathom. It draws connection, summons relation, urges affiliation between unlikely texts, people, places, and worlds. It asks that we wrestle with the confines of historical analysis to trace a complex story that may not always neatly fit within a year or years.

In some ways, it is also an attempt to redefine the terms of the political away from the grandness of the event or the danger of crisis and to consider the moments that play seemingly minor roles in the popular narrative of a year but which tell us something important. The culture war of the 1970s and 1980s, even as it saw the rise of a new kind of neoliberal conservatism, also saw new forms of literary, cultural, intellectual, and political work emerge. The culture war of the present is also marked by a thousand creative and local instantiations of mutual aid, free libraries and community pantries, international solidarities, and antifascist art and protest.

What does it mean to invoke culture as time?

Ultimately, the goal of this section is to present a meandering timeline of culture that rejects static and overdetermined pronouncements of culture and, instead, commits to it as the big and small moments that constitute working, thinking, struggling, and living. It is a call to consider the many times that constitute a year.