Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio foregrounds the intimate in aloha ʻāina, a Kanaka Maoli conception of caring for land, or that which feeds. She provides a close reading of the classic Hawaiian epic Hiʻiakaikapoliopele alongside contemporary Kanaka Maoli battles with settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy. Osorio engages the uniquely Kanaka Maoli genre of moʻolelo by modulating seamlessly between the interpersonal and structural, analysis and composition, and the nineteenth century and the present day.
Issues
Review of Trans Care by Hil Malatino (University of Minnesota Press)
Hil Malatino’s short book Trans Care critiques the heteronormativity of dominant theorizations of care. By taking trans lives seriously, he shows how trans care webs form the basis of trans survival. Malatino deftly weaves together the insights of trans studies and activism with care feminism to explore the archive, cultural production, healthcare, and politics. He broadens feminist and left perspectives on care and brings care from the margins into the center of trans studies. Trans Care is a plea for stronger, more egalitarian, and solidaristic relations of care.
Editors’ Introduction: New Milestones, New Initiatives
As we begin this second decade of Lateral, we reflect on the origins of the journal and new initiatives underway. We also consider the precarious nature of scholarly publishing and editing in the pandemic and reaffirm our commitment to this care work. This issue features three articles—two of which emerged from our articles-in-progress workshop at last year’s Cultural Studies Association annual meeting—as well as the 2021 Randy Martin Prize winning essay and a number of book reviews. We invite applications for our editorial team and proposals for new initiatives at the journal.
Wasted: Wastewater, Hygiene Theatrics, and Contaminated Imaginaries
This collaborative essay takes up three pungent streams of wastewater to address how environments, politics, communities, and power are mediated by liquid waste: urine, feces, and everything else recklessly flushed down toilets, washed down drains, stored in pits, and dumped in the ocean. “Wasted” looks to the multi-scalar worlds of wastewater by centering waste sites and COVID-19 concerns regarding wastewater virality. First, our tour of Santa Barbara’s El Estero Water Resource Center brings us to the variegated, embodied, multi-sensory, and multispecies communities of wastewater. El Estero provides an odoriferous infrastructural current through which we follow wastewater and the socialites and environments it mediates on California’s Central Coast. We then move to the ways wastewater has been interwoven with global pandemic fears to address how human waste retains infectious COVID-19 viral material even after it has been flushed away. COVID-19, in other words, haunts the infrastructural ports through which wastewater is funneled. We conclude with wastewater’s epochal effects within the Anthropocene. Throughout, we offer the term “hygiene theatrics” to identify how the performance of hygiene, cleanliness, and purity rely on dichotomous constructions of dirtiness and cleanliness that reinforce structural power dynamics including racism and homophobia. “Wasted” is a collaborative feminist and queer experiment in form and methodology that explores wastewater as both a material reality and a theoretical apparatus that is informed by and contributes to the environmental humanities, infrastructure studies, and feminist and queer science studies.
Satisfaction Guaranteed: Techno-Orientalism in Vaporwave
A characteristic frequently glossed over in scholarly examinations of the online electronic music genre vaporwave is its use of East Asian cultural imagery in its paratexts. One exception is a piece by musicologist Ken McLeod, who connects vaporwave’s use of visual references to Japanese culture to techno-Orientalism, a term that describes how paranoia around Japanese economic expansion in the late twentieth century manifested in American and European cultural products. This article extends McLeod’s argument to show how the uses and reproductions of East Asian cultural elements in vaporwave serve to reinforce stereotypes consistent with histories of techno-Orientalist representations, particularly with regard to gender. This article elaborates on the anonymous nature of the vaporwave scene to complicate approaches to techno-Orientalist analyses of digital artifacts. In doing so, this essay contributes to the growing body of scholarly literature addressing the roles representation, aesthetics, and affect play in the formation of communities around music genres online.
Scene Tracing: The Replication and Transformation of Global Industry, Movements, and Genres in Local Game Production
The notion of scenes has helped frame how particular clusters of cultural activities, practices, and “happenings” simultaneously replicate and transform global practices in specific localities. The study of scenes has aided us in examinations of how geographic and virtual localities create and shape global industries, movements, and genres. In this article, I focus on the Toronto game production scene to examine how it replicates and transforms the wider cultural norms, working conditions, and genre productions of the global game industry. Based on a two-year ethnography of the scene, I survey how gamemakers maintain and challenge the expected norms and practices of industry and platforms in the production of local games. To identify these clusters of cultural activity, I develop the notion of scenes as palimpsests to trace how gamemakers replicate and transform industry cultural norms and practices in the local scene. The last decade has seen the emergence of social media platforms as a venue for participants of scenes to discuss, create, and disseminate their works with geographically local and global audiences. The textual spaces of these platforms connect participants of local production scenes to a global community defined by geography, industry, and genre. By tracing scenes through its inscriptions, I examine how these platforms are centers for encounters between the values and practices of the Toronto game production scene and the wider industry. This article is about how the geographical cultural activities of scenes are shifting into virtual environments, and how these virtual spaces are transforming the cultural norms and practices of gamemaking and its associated activities, such as socials, game jams, and “talking shop.” I argue that analyses of globalization must consider the wider physical and virtual infrastructures of local production to understand how cultural media are produced and circulated around the globe.
Alter Egoing: The Shifting Affects of Janelle Monáe
In this article, I use alter egoing as a heuristic, a method for solving the problem of the evolving alter egos of Black women in popular music. When alter egos are analyzed through this lens, the refashioning of artistic imaginaries become legible as intellectual labor. The intellectual labor that Janelle Monáe primarily provides are critiques of notions of womanhood and Blackness in the United States. I understand Monáe’s alter egoing as a reaction to the affective political strategies mobilized in US electoral politics. Former President Barack Obama developed an affective strategy based on his personal brand of optimism, first presented in his book The Audacity of Hope (2006). He developed his signature optimistic politics while he was a senator and he continued to promote his “audacious hopefulness” into his 2008 presidential campaign. Former President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign also utilized an affective political strategy, as he rallied his supporters around culturally white (male) nostalgia with the cry, “Make America Great Again.” I track the affective evolution of Monáe’s alter egoing from pessimism to optimism in the context of the anti-Black populisms of the post-Obama era (2016–), culminating in a close reading of her 2018 album, Dirty Computer. In identifying Monáe’s troubled relationship with notions of normative identity through her first alter ego, I evaluate the relevance of posthumanism and Afrofuturism, which scholars have used to critique American notions of race, gender, and sexuality. In analyzing the shift in affect from her first alter ego to her most recent, I detect in Monáe’s alter egoing a critical optimism, a disidentifying strategy that begins to take shape in Dirty Computer.
Review of The Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment by Jillian Hernandez (Duke University Press)
The Aesthetics of Excess by Jillian Hernandez is a dazzling and provocative book that deploys the aesthetic as a category to grasp with great care the lives and representations of Black and Latina women whose performance of gender exceeds the white middle class norms of feminine comportment.
Review of History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies by Ma Vang (Duke University Press)
In History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies, Ma Vang deftly answers the question of how one can “recount a history that has systematically been kept secret” by centering Hmong refugees as sources of knowledge and critique (7). Her book scrutinizes the refugee archive to draw out stories that have been secreted away in other places: in a missing baggage claim, in the neutralization of Laos, in redacted documents, in the figure of the uncivilized Hmong soldier, in the naming of a war as “secret,” in the silenced bodies of Hmong women. Her central concept of “history on the run” refers to a form of fugitive knowledge that “does not remain still and cannot easily be found” (8). Vang’s book makes explicit the forms of knowledge that travel with and within refugee bodies, rather than the “official” history of the archive.
Review of The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Freedom by Rinaldo Walcott (Duke University Press)
In The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Freedom, Rinaldo Walcott argues, through the use of short essays, that the Black experience can be understood through the lens of the constant struggle for emancipation. For Walcott, true freedom for Black people was never attained with emancipation and in fact, emancipation is still an ongoing process. Each chapter interrogates an aspect of Black life and death that according to Walcott create the space for Black freedom to exist.
Review of Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures by Erin Suzuki (Temple University Press)
Erin Suzuki’s Ocean Passages is a sustained analysis of how various narratives of “ocean passages” disrupt and revise hegemonic constructions of the Pacific. Through analyses of contemporary Indigenous Pacific and Asian American literatures, Suzuki demonstrates what new paradigms can emerge by bringing Asian and Pacific Islander passages across the same sea into critical relationality.
Review of Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaiʻi by Candace Fujikane (Duke University Press)
Employing the teachings of Indigenous cartographic practices to trouble the Western epistemologies of subdivision that underpin private property development, Candace Fujikane’s Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future charts out an unabashedly hopeful vision for futures that exceed the dictates of capitalist accumulation. Abundance, as Fujikane shows throughout, is not an ungrounded future wish, or a hazily-defined otherwise that we must collectively imagine. It has already been mapped out for us by Indigenous peoples—in her example, Kanaka Maoli—who have long thrived according to fundamental philosophies of cultivation and relationality.
Review of A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific by Christine Hong (Stanford University Press)
Christine Hong’s A Violent Peace examines local and global democratization projects and the many ways that postwar US military tactics and strategies functioned to suppress both counterrevolutionaries abroad in Asia and Black radicals at home in the US. Through literary and visual analyses of works by Ralph Ellison, Ōe Kenzaburō, Miné Okubo, Carlos Bulosan, James Baldwin, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Hong questions how to navigate US post-World War II policies that claim a period of democratized “peace” and racial integration while simultaneously dehumanizing “foreign” bodies through military tactics that police cultural and political belonging.
Review of Television and the Afghan Culture Wars Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists by Wazhmah Osman (University of Illinois Press)
This review examines Wazhmah Osman’s book Television and the Afghan Culture Wars, an ethnographic study of television media in Afghanistan. The book explores the Afghan mediascape through richly detailed interviews with media industry professionals and local Afghans, which provide a realist portrayal of the perils and triumphs of media houses in Afghanistan, local cultural contestations, changing gender norms, and the role and reception of television in the nation’s rather tumultuous political and cultural life. Osman deflates the dominant notion in Western discourses of Afghanistan as a “hopeless landscape of powerless people,” (2) arguing that there is a thriving, internationally backed media infrastructure and a hopeful, culturally conscious citizenry in the nation. She argues that despite Afghanistan’s history of violence, ethnic tensions, atrocities against women, and imperialistic agendas by foreign powers, the Afghan media sector is a widely accessible platform for retribution against years of underdevelopment and war, with “the potential to underwrite democracy, national integration, and peace” (3).
Review of Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick (Duke University Press)
With Dear Science and Other Stories, Katherine McKittrick does the work of liberation and enacts new ways of being. Building on her previous studies, this collection engages in a story-sharing, collaborative praxis that emerges from a “black sense of place.” McKittrick’s Black and anti-colonial methodologies are “rebellious,” “relational, intertextual, and interdisciplinary”—thereby “breaching” the “recursive,” “self-replicating” logics of “our present order of knowledge” (44, 2, 23, 163). Dear Science invents, reinvents, and reimagines “being human as praxis” through an aesthetic practice of deciphering theoretical texts, photographs, sounds, dance, and song (159). Illustrating her commitment to Black intellectual life, McKittrick writes, listens, and feels in communion with other creatives. In so doing, McKittrick skillfully bursts open the gatekeeping conventions that limit thought, and challenges readers to question what they think they know.