Editors’ Introduction: A Decade of Open Access in Cultural Studies

We are pleased to publish the first issue of the tenth volume of Lateral—one of the largest issues the journal has ever published. In the decade since the journal’s inception, Lateral has published timely and important scholarship, and this issue is no exception. The groundbreaking work of the early issues in establishing a digital platform for cultural studies scholarship and activism has developed and deepened through recent strides in engaged and accessible scholarship. 

Extending Work on Race and Racism

This spring, we published Cultural Constructions of Race and Racism in the Middle East and North Africa / Southwest Asia and North Africa (MENA/SWANA), edited and introduced by Rayya El Zein. Like other Lateral forums, this work is imagined as a tool for conversation, education, and agitation. The forum features an outstanding collection of reflections on white supremacy, colonialism, and colorism in the region, and, importantly, this forum had an immediate impact on the discourse around and the practice of blackface. During Nowruz, the Persian new year celebration, Tehran’s deputy mayor suspended blackface performances, citing Beeta Baghoolizadeh’s contribution to the Lateral forum: “The Myths of Haji Firuz: The Racist Contours of the Iranian Minstrel.”¹ In an effort to extend the reach of this scholarship beyond English-speaking readers, we were pleased to also publish a Persian-langauge version of this article, translated by Elahe Nezhadhossein. Also included in the forum are Parisa Vaziri’s “Thaumaturgic, Cartoon Blackface,” which explores the narratives of blackface in Persian comics, and Bam Willoughby’s “Opposing A Spectacle of Blackness: Arap Baci, Baci Kalfa, Dadi, and the Invention of African Presence in Turkey,” which traces the combined use of blackface-like and drag-like techniques in three figures within Turkish popular culture. 

Two pieces in the forum consider colonial histories with respect to race and racism. “‘Incommensurate Ontologies’? Anti-Black Racism and the Question of Islam in French Algeria” by Muriam Haleh Davis looks at race, religion, and colonial history, drawing on Frantz Fanon’s analysis of anti-Black racism in mainland France to understand the dynamics of settler colonialism in Algeria. Leila Tayeb’s “What is Whiteness in North Africa?” takes up the legal, colonial, and state histories under and through which racialization proceeded in North and Saharan Africa since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

Several authors in the forum engage questions of racecraft in various sites, including Shayna Silverstein and Darci Sprengel’s “An (Un)Marked Foreigner: Race-Making in Egyptian, Syrian, and German Popular Cultures Black,” which presents two ethnographic studies: how Syrian musicians negotiate musical multiculturalism as they integrate into German society and how independent musicians in Egypt navigate the racialized entanglements of national and international security logics that privilege Western foreigners. In “On Blackness and the Nation in Arabic Hip Hop: Case Studies from Lebanon and Libya,” Chris Nickell and Adam Benkato explore anti-Blackness in Arabic hip hop through discussions of a rap battle in Beirut, Lebanon and music videos from Benghazi, Libya, offering glimpse at “the discursive level at which racecraft functions.” Sascha Crasnow’s “Co-option and Erasure: Mizrahi Culture in Israel” explores racism and white supremacy through the privileging of Ashkenazi Jews in Israeli mainstream culture and the co-option of Mizrahi and Palestinian cultural elements. Greg Burris theorizes Israeli whiteness with respect to African migrants in “Black Skin, White Cameras: African Asylum-Seekers in Israeli Documentary Film.”

The relevance of this work cannot be understated amidst ongoing violence in the settler colonial state of Israel. We join many academics, departments, societies, and publishers² in supporting Palestinian rights and calling for an end to Israel’s regime of occupation, apartheid, and oppression over the Palestinian people. Work in the forum and elsewhere in the journal³ furthers the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) denunciation of propaganda initiatives that promote Israel or whitewash its violations of international law. We welcome current and future scholarship that exposes this violence, builds support for Palestinian rights, and highlights Palestinian culture and scholarship.

In presenting a forum on race, we must also note ongoing attacks on “critical race theory” in the United States, which have increased sharply over the past two months⁴ and created a chilling effect in higher education, even beyond the borders of the states in which legislators have attempted to censor public schools from teaching the history of racism.⁵ Notably, pressure from conservatives has led the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees to withhold approval of tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones,⁶ Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism and creator of The 1619 Project published by The New York Times, which “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative.”⁷

These assaults on academic freedom underscore the growing importance of venues, including open access journals, that are independent of large-scale power structures that influence knowledge production and dissemination. Relatedly, the acquisition of ProQuest by Clarivate Analytics now places unprecedented power in the hands of single company, which may “prioritize profit over knowledge, negatively impacting the authority, integrity and independence of research.”⁸ In supporting open access, we are mindful not only of digital access, but also accessibility in the broadest sense. Imperialism and racial capitalism are enacted through the body, as states and extra-state actors target populations for injury and premature death in ways that both produce and exceed boundaries of “disability” as well as of race and class.⁹ Attacks on academic freedom and the ongoing privatization of scholarship are struggles over capital, one front in the concerted, racially-hierarchical production of vulnerability, precarity, debility, and death. “Accessibility,” broadly conceived, must also indicate interventions against the “inaccessibility” of these regimes of structured and targeted violence.

Cripistemologies of Crisis

Grappling head-on with the ableist violences of racial capitalism, specifically under everyday conditions of emergency, this issue features Theodora Danylevich and Alyson Patsavas’s special section, Cripistemologies of Crisis: Emergent Knowledges for the Present. This prescient work, underway before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, centers on disability’s epistemological insights for understanding, surviving, and transforming crisis. In the introduction to this section, Danylevich and Patsavas build from the example of the organized abandonment of the 2019 California power shut-offs to argue for the importance of crip interventions that both interrupt produced vulnerabilities and center the survival of the vulnerable. Through their introduction, Danylevich and Patsavas outline the urgency of uplifting and learning from disabled peoples’ knowledge of how to survive crisis and of the nature of “crisis” itself, as well as the urgency of transforming the lived conditions of precarity. The section’s explorations of crip time and cripistemologies illuminate ways of being in and thinking of the world that are essential to our collective survival of the proliferating crises of the contemporary world. 

Angela Carter continues the special section in “When Silence Said Everything: Reconceptualizing Trauma Through Critical Disability Studies.” Through a critical disability studies-informed reading and reflective interpretation of X González’s 2018 “March For Our Lives” speech, the article explores “trauma’s attributes of instability.” Carter offers a political/relational model as a modus by which trauma may become a site of collective reimagining.

Alyson K. Spurgas works against narratives of trauma’s unnarratability to amplify experiences of feminized trauma specifically in “Solidarity in Falling Apart: Toward a Crip, Collectivist, and Justice-Seeking Theory of Feminine Fracture.” The article outlines how psychology’s use of dissociation delimits trauma through/to the experiences and diagnoses of white, wealthy, cis-normative, and heteronormative femininity. Instead, Spurgas advocates for a dissociative-adjacent focus through examples of the chronic, mundane, and accumulative experiences of trauma shaped by structures such as anti-Black racism, immigrant detention, and neoliberal capitalism. From this re-framing of trauma, Spurgas explores how “feminine fracturing and falling apart” can function as practice of radical, collective care for those who live with raced, classed, and gendered trauma. 

Jess Whatcott’s “Crip Collectivity Beyond Neoliberalism in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower” also engages collectivity. With attention to cripistemologies in science/speculative fiction, Whatcott joins Pickens’s and Shalk’s analyses of Parable of the Sower as a Black feminist theory of disability and madness. Whatcott’s reading of the novel explores and illuminates Butler’s theorization of the relationship between political economy and disability, and highlights how Parable of the Sower is engaged by activists and organizers actively building collective futures. 

As a continuation of this special section, Danylevich and Patsavas call for contributions to an archive or tapestry of “evidence” of ephemeral and everyday modes of living and surviving during crises, particularly the current pandemic. In keeping with Lateral’s expansive and flexible submission scope, they specifically solicit a range of contributions, including mementos, dreams, reflections, poetry, and essays, by July 31, 2021.

Original Articles

This issue features several original articles that break new ground in the theory and practice of cultural studies across various locations and times.

In our lead article, Richard Simpson examines “the emergence of the cruise ship city as inseparable from the onset of globalized urbanization” and the necessity of a critical pedagogy that can respond and reshape regional understandings and resistances. Simpson’s “Toward an Alaskan Critical Regionalist Pedagogy: Mapping the Cruise Ship Industry through Visual Spatial Tactics” insightfully reads globalizing capital through particular zones of regionality from the port to the city to the state, while questioning the ways that cultural imaginaries are built and sustained through pedagogical methods. Simpson describes his own classroom research project with students and unpacks the possibilities of mapping and countermapping as praxis.

In “‘A Program of Complete Disorder’: The Black Iconoclasm Within Fanonian Thought,” Charles Athansopoulos takes up Wilderson’s and Sexton’s afropessimisms to challenge Taussig’s critique of iconoclasms and to expand and explode Fanonian humanisms. Athanasopoulos argues that Fanon’s “un programme de désordre absolu” is a “Black iconoclasm” that uniquely remains anti-icon. As a means of bringing “ending the world into the realm of everyday practice” through the “ritual orientation of chaos” of Fanon’s theory, Athanasopoulos strives to hold the reader in the dialectical liminal of and against the promise of any particular agenda for redemption in the anti-Black world.

Academic hoaxing has, since at least the well-known Sokal Affair, often involved targeting sub-fields engaged in cultural inquiry or those that explore controversial questions (pertaining to, for example, sexuality and gender studies), or, finally, that pursue highly-specialized and sophisticated forms of theoretical research and production. In this issue, Ian Reilly offers a systematic and comprehensive study of academic hoaxing in his article, “Airing Grievances: Academic Hoaxing and the Performance of Boundary Work.” Through an examination of the recent and incendiary 2018 “grievance studies” hoax, Reilly shows how hoaxing performs an institutional critique that pertains to the production, verification, and dissemination of knowledge. Taking a broader and more historical view of recent hoaxes in the media and in academia, Reilly’s work situates the 2018 hoax with other contemporary examples and illustrates the different kinds of boundary work that are performed and enacted by academics to shed light on the conflicting ways knowledge production and academic labour are currently contextualized and understood.

Steff Nellis’s “Enacting Law: The Dramaturgy of the Courtroom on the Contemporary Stage” points us toward the dramaturgical possibilities of “how contemporary theatrical tribunals could contribute to the enlargement of public knowledge on historical and contemporary examples of injustice, and whether they could obtain effective changes in our societies.” In doing so, Nellis examines the tribunal as a legal and dramatic genre, asking how justice is not only enacted and re-enacted, but how pre-enactments can shape and reshape systems and perceptions. The article imbricates the legal with the theatrical and asks us to imagine the ways the two function both onstage and in the courtroom.

In “On Remembering Le premier festival culturel panafricain d’Alger 1969: An Assembled Interview” Anna Kimmel speaks with Elaine Mokhtefi, tracing her memories and impressions of the 1969 event. Kimmel’s interview with Mokhtefi is augmented and structured through an interweaving of archival, theoretical, and scholarly materials. The work thus offers a new look back at the festival and its lasting cultural importance while enacting a cultural materialist historiography. 

Finally, we continue to expand the Years in Cultural Studies timeline with Sebastiaan Gorissen’s “1986—The Marxist Disciplining of the Cultural Studies Project.” Gorissen approaches this year as the moment where cultural studies—and what, in hindsight, has been dubbed post-Marxist (more specifically, post-Gramscian) approaches—begins to move past the structural Marxism inaugurated by Louis Althusser. By engaging with Althusser’s conception of ideology and agency both Stuart Hall and, additionally, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, make their own moves to rethink the role that class and agency play in culture, ideology theory, and ideology critique. Gorissen argues that cultural studies’ grappling with Althusser and, additionally, that the theoretical implications of cultural studies and related neo-Gramscian approaches to culture and power remain a core methodological and theoretical issue for cultural studies today.

Calls for Papers

In addition to the call for Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry, two other special calls close at the end of July.

The Civic Paths Group at the University of Southern California invites practitioners, artists, community leaders, scholars, and others who want to share their lived and observed experiences with baking, cooking, and eating as a shared, emotional, critical, challenging, creative, civic, even nostalgic experience to submit their work to a new forum Feeding the Civic Imagination! Proposals describing experiences, case studies, annotated recipes, or critical short pieces that provoke thought and reflection are due by July 30, 2021 via instructions at https://csalateral.org/upcoming/#food.

Finally, in reflecting on this decennial milestone for the journal, we began to think about moments that punctuate the history of cultural studies—and the important gaps between them. An interregnum is most often associated with general uncertainty, a lack of collective political will, and an opaque horizon concealing abysmal futures. Equally, an interregnum can offer radically new conditions of possibility. The editorial team at Lateral seeks contributions for an edited volume that trace a genealogy of the recent past to help analyze the present and point toward a future that may or may not arrive. We seek contributions that assume a strategic posture and that consider the interregnum as it might be experienced from various social positions and sites around the world. We welcome contributors from various theoretical approaches, fields, and disciplines, whether they be humanistic, social-scientific, or, at times, outside of liberal arts proper. In addressing this call, some may find evidence or symptoms of the interregnum in political unrest, electoral politics, leftist and populist movements, emergent economic models, and new platforms—among other regimes of order—while others may look to literature, arts, film, music, or other cultural artifacts. Abstract proposals are due by July 31, 2021; full details of the call are available at https://csalateral.org/cfp-cultural-studies-in-the-interregnum.