Issue 15.1 (Spring 2026)
Editors’ Introduction: The Long 2025
By Eero Laine, SAJ, Yumi Pak, Robert F. Carley, Alyson K. Spurgas & Chris Alen Sula
On the one hand, the events of this long 2025 are exceptional for their dissolution of the status quo. Yet on the other hand, the unpredictable and uncontrollable consequences of racial capitalism, fascism and US imperialism, and global climate devastation are not new to this period of history and have long established precedents. Read more >
Documenting Displacement Through Art: Participatory Digital Archiving as Resistance and Solidarity
Archives primarily contain records about refugees rather than by refugees, while news media and political discourse often frame displacement through dehumanizing metaphors and crisis spectacle. This article examines how participatory digital archives can intervene in these representational regimes. Focusing on The Amplification Project—a community-led archive of displacement-related art—I theorize collective interventionist archiving as collaborative work that leverages digital archives to disrupt dominant frames and shift the terms through which refugee lives are represented. Through analysis of the archive’s founding, both relationship-based and crowdsourced collection development, and circulation practices, I demonstrate how such archives create infrastructure for encountering refugeedom on terms… Read more >
cryptojewish speculations for a black planetary
A movement is growing to reimagine jewishness in a decolonial frame. As zionism loses its grip over white and white-passing jews in the global north, and with increasing momentum after Israel’s genocidal reprisal following the events of October 2023, the geopolitical figuration of jewishness has never been more contested. Yet while profound conversations unfold between black and indigenous studies, and across ethnic and cultural studies more broadly, jewishness and jewish studies rarely find a place at the table of critically situated identities. This essay argues that contemporary discussions of possible antiracist and decolonial futures should include a robust analysis of… Read more >
The (Neo)colonial Sentimentality of 90 Day Fiancé and the Figure of the Heartless Filipina
In its depiction of interracial, international marriage, the reality television show 90 Day Fiancé has become an object of morbid fascination to US and global audiences alike. Featured prevalently in the series, couples consisting of white US men and Filipina women constitute a recurring motif through which 90 Day Fiancé solidifies the institution of marriage as a locus for creating and enforcing politics of global capital, heteronormative gender, racialization, and imperialism. This article focuses on the depiction of a couple, Larry and Jenny, as one example of how the series restages the abusive colonial relation between the US and the… Read more >
Blackness and the Sociality of Sports: A Conversation with Fred Moten
Using the management of Black athlete protest (e.g., Colin Kaepernick, Naomi Osaka, LeBron James, Brittney Griner) in the post-Ferguson era as a foil, Fred Moten, Roberto Sirvent, and Charles Athanasopoulos engage in a critical conversation surrounding Black sociality which has bearing on the arenas of sports, art, and the academy. The discussants ponder the appropriate terms for considering how Black athletes themselves may have their own investments in the logics which reduce them to countable units: perversity, codependency, co-option, complicity, ambivalence, do words even go there? How do such terms come each with their own assumptive and diagnostic logics? How… Read more >
Years in Cultural Studies
Edited by Josen Masangkay Diaz
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 year as prompt asks who and what is made possible by a particular retelling and who and what is occluded by that retelling.
Introduction: A Reflection on Years
As an introduction to the Years section of Lateral, this essay suggests that the present-day “culture war” offers an opportunity for cultural studies to reflect upon the narration of time, especially through the invocation of important years in history. Read more >
A Year of Baking, Building Community, and Developing Divergent Pedagogical Practices During Uncertain Times
During the COVID-19 lockdown, I joined a Facebook group of scholars with a non-scholarly focus called “Baking in Uncertain Times.” The online community offered participants a series of weekly baking challenges, intended in part to allow those who might be feeling alone and unfocused by the pandemic a chance to come together virtually to create food as well as a shared baking experience/memory. While the group wasn’t intended as a pedagogical model or outlet, my participation in this highly distributed baking community has transferred to my teaching, specifically with how I approach learning through doing. Drawing on Annemarie Mol’s concept… Read more >