Featured Journal Issues

Theorizing Racial Capitalism in (Post)Imperial Europe

an issue of SAQ
Sarah Bufkin and Ida Danewid, issue editors

For all that Cedric Robinson first deployed the concept of “racial capitalism” to describe the racialist hierarchies that early modern Europe entrenched and exported to the rest of the world, much of the scholarly literature on racial capitalism has centered North American histories of colonization, Indigenous dispossession, racial slavery, and indentured labor. More recently, scholars have begun to explore how theories of colonial and racial capitalism might be transplanted to and critically revised for other postcolonial conjunctures. This issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly joins that generative conversation by asking how we might theorize racial capitalism for the heart of empire.

Queer Apocalypse

an issue of GLQ
Curran Nault, Justin L. Mann, and Samantha Pinto, issue editors

Queer Apocalypse explores the subcultural limits and pleasures of creating queer art, scholarship, and community across hostile terrains and turbulent times. This issue’s imaginative and engaged mix of approaches to the apocalyptic includes conversations, brief essays, and full-length articles–all of which reflect and mobilize the embodied stakes of queer studies today. Spanning disciplines, geographies, and temporalities, Queer Apocalypse surveys strategies for living trans, crip, and queer lives within ongoing structures of violence and crisis, offering not just critique, but radical possibilities.

Writing History in Place

an issue of Agricultural History
Andrew C. Baker and William Thomas Okie, issue editors

The interpretive introduction and accompanying articles in this special issue explore the uses of place as a concept, method, and narrative tool in agricultural, environmental, and rural history. The wide-ranging essays demonstrate how an attention to place can lead historians to highlight the human scale, the inhabited, the particular, and the contingent. The issue provides readers with interpretive models and suggestive examples of the value of place in framing historical thinking, research, and writing.

Marine Worlds of the Long Eighteenth Century: Selected Papers from the Eighteenth-Century Life

an issue of Eighteenth-Century Life
Killian Quigley, Kate Fullagar, and Kristie Flannery, issue editors

Theaters of Post-Truth

an issue of Theater
Lily Climenhaga, issue editor

Contributors: Julian Blaue, Luanda Casella, Chokri Ben Chikha, Gibson Alessandro Cima, Lily Climenhaga, Ameera Conrad, Yves Degryse, Daria Kerschenbaum, Stefani Kuo 郭佳怡, Kfir Lapid-Mashall, Cuixi Lin, Sawako Nakayasu, Edy Poppy, Georgia Petersen, Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Kenneth T. Williams, Alex Wilson

Radical Histories of Decolonization

an issue of Radical History Review
Manan Ahmed, Marissa Moorman, Jessica Namakkal, and Golnar Nikpour, issue editors

Radical Histories of Decolonization takes as its starting point the foundational truth that despite global waves of decolonization in the mid-20th century, colonialism persists into the present day. The articles in this issue ask questions about both the horizons and limits of decolonization, both in the past and in the present, exploring how concepts of sovereignty, self-determination, indigeneity, and independence have changed over time.

Crossing the Indian Ocean: The Oceanic Flow of Cultures and Ideas

an issue of Monsoon
Crispin Bates, issue editor

Emphasizing the transmission of ideas, cultural forms, artistic styles, and design across the Indian Ocean in the early modern and modern periods, this special issue moves beyond the usual focus on economic and political relationships — including labor migration — highlighting the non-material exchanges among societies along the margins of the ocean.

The History of Economics Unbound

an issue of History of Political Economy
Philippe Fontaine and Joel Isaac, issue editors

The history of economics may no longer be a central subfield of economics, but to think of its fate in terms of decline and marginalization is misleading. Since the 1990s, intellectual historians more generally have taken an increased interest in the place of economic ideas and practices in modern societies. With contributions by, among others, historians of science, international studies scholars, and experts on global development, this issue of HOPE seeks to demonstrate that the narrative of decline can usefully be replaced by a narrative of disciplinary diversification and renewal.

Lyric Beyond Containment

an issue of differences
Sarah Dowling and Claire Grandy, issue editors

This special issue of differences expands on debates in lyric theory by reconsidering the bounds of poetic and lyric forms. Contributors explore the fictions of lyric subjectivity and aesthetic autonomy, the presumed whiteness of the lyric “I,” and the colonial legacies of key lyric theorists. At the same time, they theorize lyric tropes beyond these limitations by considering abstraction, figuration, apostrophe, confessionalism, and intimacy apart from the presupposed individual expression that still largely defines and derails lyric studies. The collection reflects on records of subjectivity enmeshed in complex political and historical worlds, opening new possibilities for reading lyric and for poetry studies more broadly.

Filming Capital

an issue of South Atlantic Quarterly
Pietro Bianchi and Joshua Harold Wiebe, issue editors

This special issue of SAQ examines how Marxism can be used to illuminate the problem of the visual representation of contemporary global capitalism. Capitalism structurally conceals itself: it projects a harmonious image in the spheres of circulation and the market, while masking the antagonisms embedded in production. This contradiction poses challenges for visualizing capitalism and for grasping its increasing reliance on this very discrepancy. Visual and film studies provide a distinctive lens through which to unravel and confront the complexities of capitalism’s elusive appearance.

Aestheticism Now!

an issue of Genre
James Zeigler and Justin Sider, issue editors

This year marks the twenty‐fifth anniversary of Isobel Armstrong's The Radical Aesthetic (2000), a powerful work of critical theory that aimed to “rethink the aesthetic” in the face of an antiaesthetic disposition that had come to dominate literary theory by the end of the 1990s. This issue convenes scholars from across literary studies to consider both how Armstrong's volume might remain a timely intervention into debates about beauty, value, affect, and gender, and how the two and a half decades of the so-called method wars and metacritical debate might look different with Armstrong's critical voice in the conversation.

neng and china′s long 1980s

an issue of positions: asia critique
Nicholas Bartlett and Ying Qian, issue editors

This special issue explores the interconnected economic, political, material, and cultural developments in China’s long 1980s (1978–92) by taking up the Chinese character neng 能. Essays argue that the thematic compounds nengyuan 能源 (energy source, resource), nengli 能力 (capacity), and nengliang 能量 (energetics, momentum), which frequently appear in source materials, illuminate interconnections between reform policies, emergent cultural forms, production practices, and regional, generational, and personal experiences of China’s long 1980s. 

JHPPL at 50

an issue of Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law
Jonathan Oberlander and Sarah E. Gollust, issue editors

This special issue commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, honoring its legacy as a pioneering interdisciplinary forum for scholarship on health policy-making. Reflecting the journal’s enduring commitment to methodological and theoretical diversity, the issue features articles that explore a wide range of contemporary topics—from health care reform and long-term care policy to misinformation, political polarization, and LGBTQ health—highlighting both the journal’s historical impact and its vision for the future.

Milestones and Momentum: The Meridians Project at Twenty-Five

an issue of Meridians
Ginetta E. B. Candelario, issue editor

This issue solidifies Meridians as a vital platform for transnational feminist scholarship by addressing critical and timely topics such as racial capitalism, queer poetics, and feminist resistance. The contributions highlight diverse global perspectives, with case studies ranging from feminist curatorial practices in diaspora communities to the role of activism and creative expression in East Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By amplifying voices historically marginalized in academic discourse, the issue not only challenges entrenched paradigms but also provides actionable insights for scholars, activists, and policymakers.

New Directions in Medieval Postcolonialism

an issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Marcel Elias, issue editor

This special issue introduces new postcolonial voices, paradigms, and analytical methods into medieval studies. It aims to enlarge the conceptual and theoretical arsenal used by medievalists to understand cultural contact in the distant past; to invite new ways of thinking about the relations between the medieval and modern; and to advance urgent conversations on premodern race, Mediterranean history, and the global Middle Ages.

Medicare at 60

an issue of Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law
Jonathan Oberlander, issue editor

Covering the political transformation of Medicare over the past six decades, “Medicare at 60” includes articles on Medicare reform and financing, efforts to privatize Medicare, benefit gaps leading to out-of-pocket expenses, and the concept of Medicare for All.

Merleau-Ponty Today

an issue of South Atlantic Quarterly
Judith Revel, issue editor

How can we read Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s important yet largely overlooked work today? How can we draw on his thought to contribute to contemporary debates? The essays collected in this special issue attempt to answer these questions by highlighting the singularity of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical journey and demonstrating its relevance to our own times.

Infrastructures of Spanish Empire

an issue of Hispanic American Historical Review
Lauren H. Derby, Katherine M. Marino, Elizabeth O′Brien, Fernando Pérez-Montesinos, William Summerhill, and Kevin Terraciano, issue editors

This special issue features four articles that discuss the construction of infrastructure in Latin America across the entirety of the colonial period. The essays highlight the connection between infrastructure, power, and knowledge in the Spanish Empire, as well as how Spanish, Spanish American, and Indigenous actors used and influenced this infrastructure.

Refuge and Displacement: Solidarity, Care, Worldmaking

an issue of English Language Notes
Beverly Weber and Ervin Malakaj, issue editors

Institutional Dramaturgies

an issue of Theater
Lily Climenhaga, Noah Lena Vercauteren, and Tom Sellar, issue editors

This issue examines new tendencies in institutional dramaturgy through theater landscapes across the world: both the stagnations and transformations of theaters on public-facing and internal fronts. What’s onstage meets only part of their relationship with the public. As they respond to ongoing political, social, cultural, and economic societal demands and discourses, theater institutions face questions about how their public identities are constituted, who their constituent public is, and how to satisfy calls for equity, diversity, and inclusion.