Editors’ Introduction: Expanding Laterally

This issue marks a number of important milestones for the journal and features a combination of peer-reviewed academic articles, a forum on universal basic income (UBI), and book reviews. We are also pleased announce changes to the Lateral editorial team. These changes significantly extend the possibilities for the journal into the future, while reinforcing the work that is already underway.

Over a number of recent issues, Lateral has expanded its readership and its base of authors through special issues and sections, which have featured focused considerations of particular theoretical, historical, and political points of entry.¹ In order to further such work, we are incredibly pleased to welcome Rayya El Zein, who will join the editorial team as the inaugural Forum Editor. Comprised of shorter articles that are nonetheless rigorously cited and argued, forums can be standalone sections or might invite a variety of responses across journal issues and media. The forum in this issue, for instance, began as a session at the Cultural Studies Association (CSA) Conference in Pittsburgh in 2018, was significantly developed and revised, and will continue with responses that will be curated and published in an upcoming issue of Lateral. Rayya brings an impressive vision for the future of this section and we hope that forum entries will continue to provide a venue for a variety of voices and act as a site of debate and critique within cultural studies.

As a way of moving book reviews towards publication quickly while highlighting even more of the incredible range of scholarship being done in cultural studies, we are very pleased to welcome Beenash Jafri and David Reznik as co-editors of the book review section. With complementary areas of expertise, this team of book review editors also represents the continued development of that section of the journal. Both Beenash and David push cultural studies in important directions in their own work, and we look forward to the ways that they will also shape Lateral.

Lastly, we’re delighted to welcome Rob Carley to the editorial team. As the very first book review editor at Lateral, Rob has impressively developed a space for careful consideration of books in the field, while establishing Lateral as a journal positioned to offer the first reviews of new work. Under his direction, the book review section became an important venue for authors, publishers, and readers to engage with emerging and newly established ideas in cultural studies. Rob is leaving the book review section in excellent condition and with room to grow. Now, as Rob becomes a member of the editorial team, the journal will further benefit from his intellect, tenacity, and keen understanding of the work of the journal and cultural studies broadly. All of these changes make for an exciting time for Lateral.

In this issue’s lead article, “Killer Drones, Legal Ethics, and the Inconvenient Referent,” Vaheed Ramazani examines the discourses surrounding the US drone program. Though the Obama administration put an end to some of the most inhumane practices of the program, it remained committed to the killing of non-combatants as an acceptable operation in the pursuit of identified targets. Through a critique of just war theory and the administration’s own statements about drone strikes, Ramazani unmasks the logics of humanitarianism and intention that serve, hypocritically, to justify killing of non-combatants for the sake of the “greater good.”

Allia Ida Griffin uses an intersectional framework to interpret the television show Homeland in “Troubling the Home/Land in Showtime’s Homeland: The Ghost of 1979 and the Haunting Presence of Iran in the American Imaginary.” Griffin focuses on the character Fara, and analyzes six key scenes from throughout the third season of the show in conversation with critical race theorists ranging from Hortense Spillers and W.E.B. DuBois to Neda Maghbouleh and Michael Eric Dyson. Through this analysis, Griffin demonstrates the impossibility which early 21st century US cultural frameworks make for Fara and women like her, an impossibility to be both Iranian and American that has immense stakes for people’s lives.

Considering the ways that the arts are bound up with urban planning and real estate, Olive Mckeon offers analysis and critique of the philanthropy of Glorya Kaufman in “Dance, Real Estate, and Institutional Critique: Reconsidering Glorya Kaufman’s Dance Philanthropy in Los Angeles.” Mckeon examines Kaufman’s institutional giving and status as a dance patron as opportunity “to chart the relation between concert dance and capital accumulation and to consider how dance patronage might function to legitimate real estate development.” The article offers insight into the sources of wealth that allow for substantial voice in the dance community of Los Angeles, as well as an important understanding of the material effects of cultural patronage more broadly.

Marina Tyquiengco’s visits to the Alaska Native Heritage Center (ANHC) in Anchorage, Alaska form the basis for “Indigenous Cosmopolitanism: The Alaska Native Heritage Center,” which looks at the interplay between two different strands of cosmopolitanism at this site: cosmopolitan curiosity and indigenous cosmopolitanism. Tyquiengco explores indigenous involvement in the ANHC’s foundation and operations, especially the work of the staff of cultural guides who make it “a site of living culture,” to demonstrate how the ANHC operates with cosmopolitan abplomb as a site of indigenous self-determination. Drawing from the cultural interactions that take place at the ANHC among Alaska Natives and between Alaska Natives and non-Native visitors, Tyquiengco argues that, while the ANHC does evoke the colonialist nostalgia at the heart of cosmopolitan curiosity, the site powerfully disrupts this dynamic and shatters the “conceptualized timelessness of Alaska Natives” by defining “heritage” as the continuation of tradition into the future.

Lily Wei provides essential insights into the housing rights movement in Taipei in “Art as Protest, Cooking as Resistance: Everyday Life in Taipei’s Housing Rights Movement.” The article provides interviews, photos, and perceptive analysis of “the relationship between protest art and the neoliberal city.” Set against the broad background of neoliberal policy-making and socioeconomic stratification, Wei examines on-the-ground tactics of protest movements in Taipei that resist the eviction and displacement that so often accompany “development” projects and city “renewal.” With special attention to the aesthetic choices and deliberate use of artistic and culinary processes, the article puts the reader on the front line, as it were, of housing struggles in Taipei. In doing so, Wei opens lines of comparison to other fronts and struggles in many other parts of the world.

In “How Makers and Preppers Converge in Premodern and Post-Apocalyptic Ruin,” Josef Nguyen traces a history of the maker movement in the United States, with particular attention to how contemporary apocalyptic thought has influenced this tradition to generate prepping and its logics. Nguyen demonstrates how prepping constructs catastrophe as a daily event, apocalypse as punishment for those who are not prepared, and the post-apocalypse as a playground for US dominance, through analysis of a variety of contemporary cultural objects. From the American Preppers Network website to the reality television show The Colony, US prepper culture constructs individual responsibility, competition, and white male supremacy as necessary values for the future. In the process, Nguyen argues, these logics deploy a white American exceptionalism, positioning non-Western and non-white locales, from the “Global South” to Los Angeles and New Orleans, as sites that are both premodern and already post-apocalyptic. Because these are locations of timeless decay, they cannot really experience the apocalypse and are thus doomed to their ruin.

This issue of Lateral features the article resulting from the 2018 Randy Martin Prize. The prize is given by the Cultural Studies Association to an outstanding graduate student essay presented at the annual CSA conference each spring. This year, Ned Randolph has developed the 2018-award-winning essay into the article “License to Extract: How Louisiana’s Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast is Sinking It.” In the article, Randolph examines Louisiana governmental policies and the “historically extractive nature of Louisiana’s industries and their deleterious effects on the environment through a neoliberal valuation of the landscape.” The article is a model for close reading of state and corporate documents and Randolph’s methodology opens a significant space for critique of actions and ideologies that shape both the economy and ecology.

This issue of Lateral also contains a forum on Universal Basic Income edited by David Zeglen. Zeglen’s own contribution to the forum, “Basic Income as Ideology from Below,” offers an important and original theoretical contribution that is connected to contemporary approaches to organizing a left front Zeglen identifies the forces which close off meaningful and potentially strategic discourses which could be used to frame arguments about UBI politically, as an ideology from below, in the current conjuncture. In the process, Zeglen’s piece contributes to an important and underrepresented tradition in cultural studies (particularly its Marxist methodological influences in the 1970s) by reordering cultural theory to better articulate connections between Marxist approaches to political economy and ideology theory.

In “From Company Town to Post-industrial: Inquiry on the Redistribution of Space and Capital with a Universal Basic Income,” Caroline West approaches UBI as a potential way to address the long historical trajectory of resource extraction and market redistribution from country-to-city. West highlights how, in Appalachia, this takes the civil and social form of the “company town” which has degenerated, through post-industry, into neoliberal structurelessness, malaise, and both glib and more social forms of entrepreneurialism culturally appropriate to Appalachia. West’s analysis operates in the historical and social context of the mass industrial development of energy commodity production (in the form of primary and secondary commodities) and it describes the post-industrial decline that follows and its effects on the region. By identifying key points in the cultural and social history of the region, which is uniquely dependent upon a culture family-centered networks, West’s work on Appalachia and its people, who have been lost to an American style neoliberal condensation of posterity demonstrates, not unlike E.P. Thompson, the importance of situating and prioritizing cultural life within historical contexts.

In “Species Being in Crisis: UBI and The Nature of Work,” Kimberly Klinger analyzes the distinction and the dialectic between labor as alienation and labor as species being. The relationship between alienation and species being, in Klinger’s argument, is predicated on the political, social organizational, and relational framework in which labor is imbedded. Invoking the humanist tradition in Marx’s work, Klinger argues that UBI, as a political tool in the right hands, has the potential to rearrange social relations so that species being, as a form of conscious life-activity, intervenes in the capital-labor relation and re-centers social relations as, what Marx calls in his earlier work, the relations of direct producers to one another.

In “‘We Are All Housewives’: Universal Basic Income as Wages for Housework” Lindsey Macdonald offers an important, original, and knife-edge sharp political-economic analysis of UBI in the context of contemporary threads of Marxist thought. Macdonald connects political economy to social and cultural theory to address power; identifying the constraints and opportunities in the strategic conjuncture that could assist in identifying and specifying the extent to which UBI could work to tip the forces in class struggles. Where capital can co-opt UBI as either a stop-gap measure or a framework for weak reformism (as a kind of “poor law”); UBI, on the side of labor, could provide the basis for a revolutionary socialist project. Working through Silvia Federici and Tithi Bhattacharya’s contributions to the contemporary renewal of Social Reproduction Theory, Macdonald articulates how the potentially revolutionary connections between class, race, gender, and inequality in the context of UBI can serve as the conditio sin qua non that could either heighten or explode capital’s social contradictions.

Finally, journals exist through the collective labor of a community. We are humbled to work alongside so many truly extraordinary scholars, artists, and activists. The editorial team has expanded significantly as has the journal’s reach and future vision. We hope you will be in touch with your articles and project proposals, forum ideas, and books to review. We look forward to working with you.