This issue has Lateral working with a newly expanded team of editors and collaborators. We’ve grown significantly in the past year and are well positioned to continue our work into the new decade. We have noted it before, but it does bear repeating that academic publishing is a collective effort that relies intensely on the good will and often unremunerated efforts of its participants. We are committed to the ongoing and developing project of cultural studies in it various strains and especially as a political project that exposes and fights against racism, fascism, homophobia, misogyny, ableism, and capitalism in all of their exploitative forms. We see Lateral as a site of shared academic work, where theories can develop into and through action and vice versa. One of the ways we build this is through our continued emphasis on collaboration.
We’re quite proud of this issue as it is exemplary of this collaboration and of the ways that the journal has grown in the past year. We have six full length articles, the final section in the universal basic income forum that has spanned three issues, the expansion of our Years in Cultural Studies project, and a number of book reviews.
In our lead article, “Webs of Relationships: Pedagogies of Citizenship and Modalities of Settlement for ‘Musims’ in Canada,” Lucy El-Sherif tracks the racial politics of the citizenship process in Canada through an Arab lens and an indigenous analytic. El-Sherif’s essay offers a case study that theorizes the entwinement of racialization and colonization in citizenship processes. El-Sherif theorizes the socio-spatial operation of citizenship where settler colonial histories are reproduced as a racial project, El-Sherif exploring how, for Canadians racialized as Muslim, belonging in Canada is contingent on subscribing to white settler capitalist colonial relations to land. Bringing together Sunera Thobani’s concept of exalting the white subject and Sherene Razack’s theorizations on Muslim eviction from Western politics, El-Sherif argues that those racialized as Muslim are compelled to either exalt whiteness or be evicted. The citizenship process, then, reinscribes the histories of white settler colonialism where every new immigrant’s allegiance to the nation-state and uneasy subjection to a neoliberal multicultural identity at the same time persistently fractures potential forms of indigenous and black racial solidarity.
Stevphen Shukaitis and Joanna Figiel’s contribution to this issue, “Publishing to Find Comrades: Constructions of Temporality and Solidarity in Autonomous Print Cultures” takes on a set of theoretical and research questions connected to open source publishing and expands these questions into the political field. By looking at open source publishing as a theoretical issue about cultural production and grounding it in concerns about social (and political) reproduction–specifically the reproduction of the labor that sustains it–Shukaitis and Figiel trace the role of editorial workers, and include all other associated forms of cultural labor undertaken in the production chain, from distribution to retail. Their expansive and labor-based focus on “autonomous print cultures” politicizes the question of cultural reproduction showing how the sustainability of these instances of cultural production, whether virtual, digital, or print-based, is, in fact, largely a political question regarding how these projects relate to and are embedded within the goals of the social movement organizing that they emerge from. In Shukaitis’s and Figiel’s work, questions about labor, conditions, and the sustainability of these projects become all the more pressing for the continuity of the political communities that engender them. Their work also deepens and complicates cultural production by connecting it to social and political reproduction.
In “Viewing Japanese Incarceration from Above & Below: Imperial Landscape and Racial Liberalism in Ansel Adams’s Born Free and Equal,” Christian Ravela analyzes the “visual grammar” of this work for insights into frontier mythology, incarceration, and US domestic and imperial politics. Arguing that photographic gaze and the relationship between landscape and portrait in Born Free articulates the structure of feeling of mid-century racial liberalism, Ravela reveals the centrality of the landscape in powerfully linking viewers to this project. Americanization of incarcerated Japanese American bodies as deserving of rights claims within the US perversely positions the US as moral authority on democracy.
In “Producing Art in the Ruins of a Former Colonial Industrial Hub: Arts Practices in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe (2000–2017),” Khanyile Mlotshwa investigates how the conditions of cultural workers are affected by a specific conjuncture which he calls, “an imploding cultural landscape.” With foundations in Marxist political economy that specify crucial dynamics in urban African post-industrial landscapes, this paper looks at how cultural workers in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, negotiate “the informalization of their labour, wage squeezes, temporariness, uncertainty, and pernicious risks in their work.” Based on in-depth interviews with a representative variety of creative artists and other content producers, Mlotshwa constructs and investigates a cultural landscape–disembedded from society and abandoned by economic forces–where, although, many artists have abandoned their work finding the risks of continuing too grave, there still exists a handful of artists who continue to struggle against all odds with the hope of building a sustainable arts industry in Zimbabwe’s second largest city.
Corinne Mitsuye Sugino takes on a contemporary pop culture object in “Multicultural Redemption: Crazy Rich Asians and the Politics of Representation.” In this piece Sugino analyzes the film and its reception to reveal the workings of contemporary narratives of racial reconciliation, “in which inclusion within hierarchy is rendered synonymous with redemption from racial violence.” Because this project works through the enforcement of capitalism, white supremacy, and anti-black racism, multicultural redemption as a political strategy for Asian Americans utilizes hope to curtail liberatory political action. By illuminating this strategy, Sugino argues that “an uncompromising refusal of reconciling with an endemically racist society” is the necessary political alternative.
In “Crip Twitter and Utopic Feeling: How Disabled Twitter Users Reorganize Public Affect,” Sohum Pal follows three Twitter accounts to explore answers to the question, “what can disabled protest look like?” Exploring the relationship between affect and political practice, Pal suggests that these twitter users establish an affect-based “bounded network” and explores what political action looks like in such a network. Finally, Pal demonstrates how these users and their followers circulate a powerful utopic affect of hope as a means of articulating demands, building community, and ensuring survival.
This issue includes the final part of the forum on Universal Basic Income (UBI), edited by David Zeglen. The forum began one year ago in the Fall 2018 issue of Lateral with initial arguments from David Zeglen, Kimberly Klinger, Caroline West, and Lindsey Macdonald. In the Spring 2019 issue, Daniel Zamora and Anton Jäger offered a response to Zeglen, Tai Neilson responded to Lindsey Macdonald, John Carl Baker replied to Kimberly Klinger, and Richard Todd Stafford responded to Caroline West. Following the last issue, the original authors were offered the opportunity to respond to the responses, that is, to have the last word on the matter (at least for the moment). Two of the authors, Zegelen and West, wrote additional arguments. Taken as a whole, the forum examines the theories, policies, and potential for UBI in a number of contexts. Spanning three issues, the forum is a significant editorial project for Zeglen and entails an extended form of intellectual inquiry that is absent in most public discourse and news cycles. The long-term forum extends even beyond the form of the singular and yearly academic conference, asking authors and readers to engage a topic in a sustained manner. The entire forum with the original articles, responses, and responses to the responses will be archived on the Lateral site along with other forums as they are published. As with all other material published at Lateral, we invite readers to engage and respond, to continue the conversation, by contributing articles and other work.
This issue marks a major advance in the Years in Cultural Studies timeline project with three new articles exploring the years 1956, 1968, and 1988. In “1956: The British New Left and The ‘Big-Bang’ Theory of Cultural Studies,” Steven Gotzler frames an intellectual history of the emergent British New Left including several other notable “big-bang” moments happening elsewhere in 1956. Each of these moments and events, Gotzler argues, should have considerable bearing on the articulation of cultural studies in Britain given their broader resonances across literature, global labor history, the visual arts, and the women’s movement. Gotzler’s expansive versioning of the year 1956 provides a needed internationally and globally diverse and textured ground upon which to reconsider the mid-century foundations of the emergence of cultural studies beyond the customary focus on new left politics. “1968: A Turning Point in Cultural Studies,” links the explosion in new social movements to our contemporary conjuncture wondering how these times might necessitate new pursuits in scholarly praxis, just as 1968 provided new directions for cultural studies. In “1968,” Charnell Peters, Oreoluwa Olaniyan, Duncan Stewart, and Julia Berger argue that new social movements unsettled our collective understanding of “nation, belonging, and peoplehood” influencing the development and direction of cultural studies, as it attempted to investigate and understand the multifaceted socio-political shifts that constitute the events of 1968. The authors provide context for the “micro expressions of unrest” in The University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) by analyzing the broader historical and social events in which the CCCS was embedded. The authors then turn to an examination of the ways that cultural studies reflected on and negotiated studies of “marginalized and subaltern cultures” both in their respective historical contexts and for the emerging field of cultural studies. Lastly, they focus on the emergence of key texts within cultural studies in 1968 including cultural studies’ responses to the texts that shaped it. In “1988: The Crisis in Marxist Cultural Theory,” Sebastiaan Gorissen, Elise Homan, and Ryan Kor-Sins consider the year 1988 as a “turning point” for cultural theory through three key texts: Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Spivak, and The Hard Road to Renewal, Stuart Hall’s book on Thatcherism. These texts, they argue, redefined Marxism through their focus on underrepresented and undertheorized concepts that held unique value for cultural studies’ understanding of social formations, conjunctural analysis, and concepts of the subject. Although each of these texts had different purposes, themes, and theories, the authors argue that if productively read together the year 1988 exhibits a unique moment in Marxist cultural theory bursting forth from out of a prior, decades-long, resurgence in scholarship devoted to Marxism.
We are happy to note here the excellent work of book review editors, Beenash Jafri and David L. Reznik, who have greatly expanded the section and the breadth of coverage we can offer in our reviews. We’ll continue to publish book reviews on a rolling basis. Please be in touch with the book review editors regarding a book you want to review or to arrange for a copy of your own book to be sent to Lateral for review.
Many thanks to all of the Lateral contributors and editors for all of their work in bringing this issue to press. Thanks also to the CSA leadership and board for their continued support and various efforts to continue developing the project of cultural studies.
Finally, in continuing our efforts to make work available as soon as possible, in early 2020 we will be publishing a forum on “US Gun Culture and the Performance of Racial Sovereignty,” edited by Lindsay Livingston and Alex Young. Like the book reviews, which are published on a rolling basis, the forum will be archived with the next full issue.
