The eight essays in Ben Davis’ Art in the After-Culture are centered on the interchanges between cultural production and economic development in contemporary society. Largely told through the lens of leftist aesthetic theory, the book pushes against exploitative notions of capitalist systems and ambitions towards decentralization. Davis likens art to a “survival kit” and advocates for creative practitioners to strategically influence the direction of society.
Issues
Review of Breathing Aesthetics by Jean-Thomas Tremblay (Duke University Press)
Jean-Thomas Tremblay’s Breathing Aesthetics draws our attention to how respiration as a cultural analytic maps the uneven distribution of risk in our contemporary moment. Intervening at the intersection of queer theory and the environmental humanities, Tremblay deciphers an archive of cultural texts that range from CAConrad’s ritualized poetry to Ana Mendieta’s elemental performance art and Toni Cade Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters. In so doing, they reveal an understanding of how breath registers precarity across race, gender, and disability, while also serving as a mechanism for healing and care. This discerning analysis, combined with a focus on the exchange between body and milieu, makes a case for respiration as a distinctly ecological and embodied relation. Ultimately, Breathing Aesthetics provides crucial insight into how aesthetic expressions of respiratory variations evidence a tension between morbidity and vitality within bodies whose ability to breathe is most endangered.
Review of Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective by Lorgia García Peña (Duke University Press)
In Translating Blackness, Lorgia García Peña offers a transnational conceptualization of Black Latinidad. Framing Black Latinidad as an epistemology, García Peña traces its historical and contemporary formations through the lives and the work of historical Black Latinx intellectuals as well as contemporary Black and Black Latinx individuals in the Carribean, Italy, and the United States. García Peña approaches Black Latinidad as produced through vaivén—coming and going across physical and symbolic borders of nation-state and migrant-citizen categories that characterizes the sociological position of Black Latinx individuals.
Review of The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment by Cameron Awkward-Rich (Duke University Press)
Simultaneously a project of metacritical reflections about disciplinary foundations at the intersections of the academic fields of transgender studies, disability studies, and Black feminist studies, and a series of close readings of cultural texts and artifacts central to those disciplinary developments, Awkward-Rich’s book is intellectually generous, beautifully written, and deftly argued. Critically investigating the production of disability and transgender theories, forged interdependently and through distancing trans authority from the specter of madness and disability, The Terrible We traces conflicts among trans, queer, and feminist perspectives in closely reading foundational texts and cultural contexts. It presents an invitation to consider forms of maladjustment a productive resource rather than an impediment to trans life, thought, and creativity.
Review of The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value by Seb Franklin (University of Minnesota Press)
The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value examines the convergence between the recursive function of value in capitalist economies and the functions of abstraction, ascription, and disposal that govern digital systems. Franklin argues that digitality’s most pernicious effects are apparent in how digital systems create the illusion of frictionlessness, connectivity, and access, while at the same time working to reinforce a logic of exclusion that externalizes the material realities of depletion. Participation in value-mediated social relations has become mandatory due to the global reach and ubiquitous extension of the informational and economic systems under which workers labor. Race and gender are social categories which position marginalized workers, especially workers from the Global South, as unreliable components in the system, the digitally disposed. Franklin argues, using the study of communication systems, that this positioning is not a flaw of the system, but is rather the intentional effect of forms of capitalist accumulation that depend on the precarity of the lives of those who generate the labor that the system depends on. A valuable contribution to the study of digitality, neoliberalism, political economy, racial capitalism, and technological history, this work shows that the social effects of digitality are not new, but rather are an intensification of the exclusions and forms of marginalization upon which capitalism depends.
Let’s Relax!
Andrew Culp and the Cultural Studies Association’s Performance Working Group Co-Chair Hui Peng discuss “relaxed performance” with Leigh Jackson, Director of Accessibility & EDI Programming at People’s Light outside of Philadelphia, and Dr. Hannah Simpson, Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and author of Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (Palgrave, 2022). This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Patrick McKelvey.
Review of Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics by V. Jo Hsu (The Ohio State University Press)
Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics by V. Jo Hsu examines how queer and trans Asian American (QTAPI) individuals have reshaped the narratives around their belonging in the United States or elsewhere. Hsu recognizes the ways pervasive narratives like the model minority myth have imbued the meaning of Asian American belonging with capitalist, heteronormative, ableist, racist, and patriarchal notions. Exploring oral histories, visual representations, essays, and numerous other forms of rhetoric, Hsu engages in “diasporic listening,” a method that unpacks how QTAPI individuals have wrestled with these pervasive narratives and found ways of redefining their belonging. By focusing on the stories of trans, nonbinary, disabled, and other minoritized groups within the Asian American diaspora, Hsu shows how these diverse and individual stories contribute more robust meaning around being and belonging as an Asian American.
Review of Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory by Cristina Visperas (New York University Press)
In Skin Theory, Cristina Visperas identifies how the captive body in the postwar era is positioned as the ideal test subject. She does so through a thorough interrogation of Albert Kligman’s primarily dermatological human experiments at Holmesburg Prison to argue that racial capture enables the research enterprise. Suturing conversations in Black studies, science and technology studies, and carceral studies, each chapter reads objects in relation to these experiments to argue that grounding its brutal procedures was a visual culture enabled by the figurative uses of the skin.
Review of Against Marginalization: Convergences in Black and Latinx Literatures by Jose O. Fernandez (The Ohio State University Press)
Jose O. Fernandez’s Against Marginalization: Convergences in Black and Latinx Literatures is an innovative project that takes conversations about literary and cultural history in a new direction. Recognizing the efforts of Black and Latinx scholars in crafting distinct literary traditions and histories, Fernandez uses his book to argue for cross-ethnic literary studies and identify similarities between Black and Latinx traditions. This endeavor revolutionizes conversations about literary history of the United States and challenges narratives of exclusion and silencing. This book serves to show the importance of knowing the names of authors and artists, and the communities that fought for them, because they make up the fabric of US history. To learn those names next to Faulkner, Twain, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald not only makes them part of American literary tradition but also spotlights their absence and exclusion in a way that expands the boundaries of “literary tradition.” This review takes seriously Fernandez’s project, which opens exciting avenues for cross-ethnic historic study while also examining opportunities for future study.
Editors’ Introduction: Lateral Changes
This issue marks the addition of a new co-editor and several special projects, including Lateral‘s first podcast, Positions. This issue presents two important sections of work, both building on conversations in the field and across publications: “The Black Shoals Dossier,” curated by Beenash Jafri, and the second part of “Crip Pandemic Life,” edited by Alyson Patsavas and Theodora Danylevich. In addition to these impressive sections, the issue features three research articles and ten book reviews.
Canada’s Colonial Project Begins in Africa: Undoing and Reworking the Inaugural Scenes of Colonial-Racial Violence
Black captivity and colonial violence in New France are distinct but interlinked social formations. This article develops an analysis of captive-colonial violence in Canada by tracing how these two formations are interlinked in practice and in discourse. It examines two “inaugural” scenes: the capture of a “Black Mooress” on the coast of present-day Mauritania in 1441 and the 1603 meeting between a French expedition and the people they called “Savages” on the shores of the St-Lawrence River in Canada. The first pertains to anti-Black violence and captivity. The second pertains to colonial violence and genocide. While the two scenes are usually treated as analytically distinct, as well as temporally and geographically distant, this article brings them together. Doing so is important as it shows how the practical and discursive conditions leading to the two scenes overlapped and how each scene depends on the other. This reading of captive-colonial violence disrupts linear conceptions of time and discrete conceptions of geography to pull “distant” scenes into proximity. Through this approach, the article shows how the two scenes are interlinked in the formation of a new lingua franca of anti-Black violence and genocidal colonial violence in Canada, however different and/or incommensurable they may be
“It Means Possibility”: Manifestations of Isolation in New Queer Cinema
Following the cataclysmic AIDS epidemic in the 1990s, a defiant embrace of the word “queer” and new technology sparked an influx of films by independent filmmakers that were later termed “New Queer Cinema.” As a product of its time, New Queer Cinema interrogates the heteronormativity it conflicts with and thus breeds a reimagining of what queer film can look like. The conflict between queer identity and its heteronormative surroundings drives distance between queer individuals and their communities, as well as larger social structures. This distance leads to a sense of isolation. This article explores themes of isolation within select New Queer Cinema films and offers a potential reference point from which we can understand queer life and cultural production in the midst of yet another global illness—COVID-19. Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) highlights isolation from heteronormative social structures, particularly the nuclear family unit. Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996) focuses on a curation of queer kinship as a survival tactic in the face of this isolation. Gregg Araki’s Totally Fucked Up (1993) and Thomas Bezucha’s Big Eden (2000) both explore themes of self-imposed isolation. Totally Fucked Up provides an essential New Queer Cinema perspective of this phenomenon; meanwhile, Big Eden challenges assumptions that queer individuals are destined to be isolated by imagining a future in which this is not the case. Themes of isolation are essential to the New Queer Cinema genre as a product of its circumstances. Yet, it also provides a basis from which the possibilities of future queer cinema and culture can be imagined. Understanding this relationship is critical as we begin to understand the effects of structural and social isolation on the queer community as exacerbated by COVID-19.
Hearing the Houma: Sound, Vision, and Urban Space in Moroccan Hip-Hop Videos
This paper seeks to engage the construction of urban “soundscapes” as a potential flashpoint for class conflict by analyzing auditory and visual representations of “the neighborhood” (al-houma) in a handful of Moroccan hip-hop videos. I begin by situating Moroccan hip-hop within transnationally circulating associations of hip-hop with “urban” life, as well as the political dynamics of North Africa’s colonial and postcolonial urban histories. I then analyze four videos comparatively, suggesting that each goes beyond lyrical and musical content of the songs to construct a sensory experience of the city—or neighborhood—for the listener-viewer. In giving attention to the political implications of each video, however, I argue that what distinguishes each is less what sort of “soundscape” emerges in his video but how each video teaches the audience to “hear” the Houma. While videos by mainstream rappers Muslim and Don Bigg figure urban space as threatening and in need of moral recuperation, they enact these pedagogies largely through indexical figurations of their respective soundscapes, that is, by directing the listener to attend to certain (inaudible) sounds and to interpret them in a certain way. By contrast, a video by El Haqed, known as a more staunchly oppositional figure, visually and sonically constructs a peri-urban lifeworld conditioned by neoliberal economic abandonment yet resistant to the postcolonial gaze. This contrast, I suggest, raises crucial questions about how hip-hop is linked to broader dynamics of cultural appropriation and “resistance” politics.
The Black Shoals Dossier
This dossier collects four reflections on The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (2019) with responses by its author Tiffany Lethabo King. This dossier is based on an American Studies Association 2021 roundtable organized by Beenash Jafri.
With Grief and Joy — Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry, Part II
This second installment of “Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry” opens with a reflection on transformative access and its visioning work. We weave this discussion through not only the eight new pieces found within this issue, but also through a reflection on the practices of access and care that enabled the writing, editing, and publication process itself. We conclude with two artifacts: The first is the “Accessible Knowledge Production Manifesto” that emerged as a collectively authored set of demands generated at a workshop we held in connection to the launch of our first installment of “Crip Pandemic Life.” The second is a link to a resource list, “Continuing Threads and Proliferations; Crip Pandemic Life Archive,” compiled by Corbin Outlaw, which links out to other pandemic projects documenting crip, disabled, chronically-ill, mad, and neurodivergent experiences, particularly highlighting experiences not captured within our tapestry of crip pandemic life.