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The editors and contributors to Cultural Studies in the Interregnum mobilize transnational cultural studies as a tool for politically engaged intellectual critique. Alongside the work of emerging and established scholars and activists, they think through massive cultural shifts and explore the possibilities of the in-between.
Covering queer and feminist studies, critical disability studies, and critical race and ethnic studies, the essays in Cultural Studies in the Interregnum reflect on our shared political pasts and futures. Using examples ranging from media and literature to sex work, policing, and university systems, this exciting volume probes what cultural studies means in moments of social transformation.

Contributors include: Sean Johnson Andrews, C.M. Kaliko Baker, Mary Tuti Baker, James Bliss, Jorge E. Cuéllar, John R. Decker, Brian Dolber, Candace Fujikane, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Chris Hall, Rachel Lim, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Anna Karthika, Manu Karuka, Najwa Mayer, Kyle Mays, Andrew Ó Baoill, Yumi Pak, Therí A. Pickens, Sami Schalk, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Tia Trafford, and the editors

The fourth annual Alchemy Lecture brought together four “Alchemists”—thinkers and practitioners working across disciplines and geographies—to share a constellation of ideas for the future. Their urgent, poignant, and inventive lectures compose Sound—at the Interregnum, which asks what sounds we make and what sounds we should leave behind in a world on the cusp of becoming something else. At the interregnum, we meet oligarchs and fascists, ongoing genocides and displacements, deepening anti-intellectualism, the use of sonic weapons (Long Range Acoustic Devices), the complicit silences of mainstream media, and the refusal by those who have taken power to make a world in which everyone’s needs are met. Their sounds of avarice, capital accumulation, and immiseration do not enter the world uncontested. There are also the sounds of protest, of anthems, of chants and keening, noise of all kinds, blue notes, ghost notes, high notes—which also take us over as vibration, energy, atmosphere, and breath itself. The acclaimed thinkers, fiction writers, poets, and musicians who are in these pages have produced, reproduced, blown out, and made something counter to the sounds of the world at this interregnum—this period of great danger, and also great possibility.

A timely book addressing the burning concerns of our times, from the excesses of capitalism to the global crisis of leadership.
 
There is widespread agreement, across a voluble political spectrum and around the planet, that we live in times of intensifying insecurity and turmoil. If ours is an age of transition, its direction is anything but certain. Momentous transformations in ecology, geopolitics, and everyday life are shadowed by a suffocating sense of stasis. The limits to capital and the limits of nature are entangled in frightful ways, while the profoundly obsolete form of leadership, domination, and conflict exacerbate an already baleful situation. And yet struggles for liberation have not been quelled. Terms of Disorder confronts this moment by probing some of the defining terms in the modern vocabulary of emancipation, with the aim of testing their capacity to name and orient collective action set on abolishing the present state of things. Ranging from communism to leadership, the eleven keywords addressed in this book provide a set of interlocking points of entry into the common task of forging a political language capable of navigating our disorientation. If, as Gramsci famously noted, the interregnum is a time when the new struggles to be born while the old order is moribund, we may wish to heed Cedric Robinson’s call to “choose wisely among the dying.”