ABSTRACT Although the so-called migrant crisis has been ongoing for over a decade now, instead of dealing with migrant deaths more empathetically, populist agendas around the world have led to a hardening of ‘us versus them' narratives and ever more restrictive migration policies. 2023 was the deadliest year on record, with 8565 migrant deaths, with actual numbers thought to be even higher. The re-election of Donald Trump in the United States, followed quickly by his institution of blatantly anti-immigrant policies, coupled with ‘Fortress Europe'’ rhetoric in Europe, has fueled serious concerns for migrants globally. This is exacerbated by a confounding lack of care for the plight of refugees who die on their perilous migratory journeys. Their construction as illegitimate because they are undocumented, along with the frequent irretrievability of their bodies when they perish, normalizes the death of migrants and reinforces the impossibility of mourning. Turning to care ethics fraught by questions of relationality, we want to suggest that a transdisciplinary approach in which literature and the arts, along with the social sciences, play an important role, can offer alternative routes in thinking about migrant death.

ABSTRACT This article maps the emergence of Moroccan Cultural Studies within Departments of English in Morocco, tracing how postcolonial critique evolved from a critical sensibility into an institutionalized intellectual project. Postcolonial critique first emerged in Tetouan, where Mohamed Laamiri, Khalid Bekkaoui Jamal Eddine Benhayoun and Sadik Rddad – drawing on Edward Said – challenged the English literary canon by engaging non-canonical texts, including dramatic works, captivity narratives, and travel writing, to interrogate colonial representations of the Moors, Barbary, and North Africa. Building on this foundation, Moroccan Cultural Studies was institutionally founded in Fes through the Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre, under Khalid Bekkaoui’s leadership. There, these early interventions were transformed into a collective project of scholarly emancipation, grounded in location-specific practices of re-editing, re-reading, and re-writing. Moroccan Cultural Studies reframes English not as a lingua franca of imperial domination but as a discursive medium for critical knowledge production, enabling a decolonial turn in English Studies. By institutionalizing postcolonial critique and extending its analytical reach, this study positions Moroccan Cultural Studies as a model for future decolonial projects in English Studies that can be pursued across the Maghreb, Africa, and the Arabo-Islamic world, highlighting the interplay between place, pedagogy, and power in the formation of new postcolonial knowledge practices.

ABSTRACT This article examines food and cooking imaginaries on Instagram, focusing on themes of food waste, labour, and the infrastructures of hospitality. While vast quantities of food are discarded before reaching our plates, such waste, and the labour that accompanies it, remains largely invisible within the dominant aesthetic regimes of social media. Even on feeds aligned with low-waste living or circular economy values, Instagram’s food culture often privileges polished, high-end aesthetics over messier material realities. Drawing on de Sousa Santos’s concept of a ‘sociology of absences’, we explore how crucial elements of the culinary world – waste, labour, and infrastructure – are not merely overlooked but actively excluded. Instagram rarely acknowledges the precarious conditions of food workers or the ‘offcuts’ that never make it to the plate. These curated, waste-free food imaginaries reinforce exclusionary cultural norms and linear, carbon-intensive economic systems. Challenging these erasures, we use hospitality-related food waste and material practices as a lens through which to rethink the affordances of social media. Inspired by J.K. Gibson-Graham’s ‘politics of the possible’, we ask how Instagram might be used performatively to reveal its own absences. What if food images foregrounded underpaid workers, harried staff, and waste infrastructures – bins, compost, and discarded food – as central visual elements? How might such counter-narratives expand digital food imaginaries towards more inclusive, climate-conscious, and socially just representations? By interrogating Instagram’s visual politics, we call for a broader ethical engagement with food’s material realities, challenging dominant aesthetics and reimagining food’s place at a time of escalating climate and food justice crises.

ABSTRACT This article, written by two Dalit scholars from different religions and nationalities, reflects on the contours of Dalitness as an ethic and worldview. Drawing on Dalit and Black writers, they put forward the praxis of Dalitness as ‘rooted in the soil’ to present Dalitness as negotiated, as lived, and dreamt rather than as always understood on dominant-caste society’s dehumanizing terms as broken, crushed, and damaged. Thinking through the praxis of rooted in the soil, they argue, offers methodological and ethical challenges that should concern readers and writers interested in questions and alternatives of awareness, intention, worldview, method, and material life/s rooted in communal imaginations of beauty and remedy amidst violence of Brahminism. In order to not essentialize such Dalitness as guaranteed by those born outside the caste system, they turn to Dalit novelist Vauhini Vara’s much-celebrated novel, The Immortal King Rao, to reflect on the function of Dalitness of the main protagonist of the novel, King Rao. They argue that beyond a label, Dalitness is a dynamic lived reality – a reality that emerges alongside an itinerary of contradictions that Dalit people deal with throughout their lives and a reclamation of their humanity in and through critiques of structures of domination in a caste-hierarchized world.

ABSTRACT With the publication of Fossil Capital in 2016, Andreas Malm reshaped how scholars understand the relationship between capitalism and fossil fuels. Energy humanities scholars Caleb Wellum and Imre Szeman interviewed Malm in November 2024 about the arguments and impact of Fossil Capital, the development of his thought in several subsequent books, and the shifting landscape of climate politics. At a time when the stakes of climate politics have never been higher, Malm's work is indispensable. This interview provides an opportunity to revisit Fossil Capital in light of the past decade's developments while also exploring the more radical propositions his recent work has put forth. From the role of sabotage in climate activism to the geopolitical entanglements of energy politics, Malm dissects the complex forces obstructing climate action and explores the strategies that might still be able to disrupt them, however powerful they might be. Readers will find in this conversation reflections on Malm's intellectual evolution and a considered engagement with the urgent question that has animated his work: how to bring about the end of fossil capitalism before it brings about the end of all of us.

ABSTRACT This paper proceeds from the space of the Black imaginative to mark the mirings and modalities of Black Studies as creative practice in both form and content beyond the attempted capture of abjection. This paper works from both a speculative account of the slave ship as well as the mermaids of Black Minneapolis-based artist Phyllis Chatham, asking: What other modes of Black life open up if I look off-center of the historical engine called the slave ship, if I look overboard? Looking to and beyond repair, recovery, and redress as projects that haunt Black Studies, I trace questions of presence and exposure where prefigured models of recovery hold powerful spectral presence and practices that don’t easily fit within dominant models are not easily recognizable. Such ships mark out a violent modernity, colonial predicament, but also a promise, not necessarily or never fulfilled. As such this essay works at the rupture of differential rights claims inhering in a substantiation for different practices and possibilities of addressing the human. I draw on inherited genealogies of Black and Caribbean thought to perform a caring attention to form and method as an experimental Black queer and feminist praxis, holding and centring the space of Black invention.

ABSTRACT This piece develops haunting erotics as a Black femme and feminist methodology. Following the implications of Saidiya Hartman’s formulation of ghostly pain as part and parcel of the anchoring of Blackness in abjection, I read Mayfield Brooks and Molondi Zondi’s processional and haunting performance entitled Dancing in the Hold which premiered in April of 2018 at Gibney Dance New York. With poly-vocalic attention to embodied and expressive theorizations of Black life, I locate haunting within the field of Black Studies, and more specifically in conversations about abjection and Black art. I engage Fred Moten's formulation of ‘absolute nearness’ in my discussion of intimacy in the afterlife of slavery, and then turn to Audre Lorde’s erotics in order to analyse why Black performance’s engagement of spectrality, opacity and haunting marks an emergent and healing, site of Black experimentalism (Moten, F., 2018. Black and blur. Durham: Duke University Press; Lorde, A., 1978. Uses of the erotic : the erotic as power. New York: Out & Out Books).

ABSTRACT This essay introduces and grounds the conversation convened by this special issue, namely a rethinking of central methods of apprehending the global traffic in racialised death. The authors situate this conversation in ongoing work in cultural studies and interdisciplinary studies of race, gender, and empire surrounding haunting, unpacking its analytic and material possibilities as they are embedded in and emerge against the global catastrophe of capitalism. Where haunting marks relationalities across time and space beyond historicity and linear causality, contributors herein bring together these conversations with aesthetic and political economic attentions and concerns. We ask: How do bodies transgress the frames that construe them as exchangeable objects in global neoliberal imaginaries and economies, haunting and producing the unsmoothness of capitalist flow? What critical reimaginings of bodies, particularly the excesses and hauntings which characterise racialised death and the racialised condition of death in life, offer right relation with these transgressions? With what implications for global collective politics and life? In writing toward these questions and in the context of our commitments to our own bodies that haunt, this essay endeavours to take seriously practices of haunting and begin to model such practices in ways that rewrite relations to those we make life alongside: present, no longer, and not yet.

ABSTRACT This article examines the discursive construction of feminist economicus in South Korea, arguing that it has been shaped by the alliance of popular feminism and popular finance. As a form of neoliberal and entrepreneurial femininities, feminist economicus blends feminist thinking with the ideal of homo economicus by embracing both feminism and the norms of the capitalist economy. In order to illuminate how feminist economicus has emerged across different media spaces, I examine feminist manifestos, popular feminist discussions and debates on investing, financial advice books for women, and news reports about female investors. Feminist economicus is a subject who practices strategic frugality, is seen to invest better than men do, and assetizes herself. While feminist economicus integrates calculative rationality towards feminist ends in the name of women’s economic independence, I contend that this shows how feminist discontent has been subsumed by financial capitalism and the asset economy. Feminist economicus dismantles the dichotomy of male rationality versus female irrationality in ways that reinforce capitalist identification and the legitimacy of finance. In so doing, patriarchy is simultaneously criticized and legitimated.

ABSTRACT This paper covers three key scientific fields: Maritime Studies, Cultural Studies and Environmental Studies. Taking the ‘Anthropocene' as a culturally and ideologically constructed concept, with worldwide political implications, it discusses to what extent an entire generation around the world is still elaborating on a well-known iniquity: Eurocentrism. The paper argues that oceanic connections were the core condition for building a globalized world. Worldwide dynamics of exchange had a significant impact on seas, coastal areas and continental territories. Additionally, there was an insoluble connection between the Europeans’ use of the oceans and the global environmental impacts shaped by the European colonial settlements since the First Global Age. The oceans provided the means and the channels for these massive exchanges and depletion of resources on a scale until then unheard-of. This led to global processes of transfers, responsible for emerging syncretic biomes, for significant environmental distress, with an inevitable impact on local cultures, communal resources and even the resignificance of the uses and the cultural representations of riverine or oceanic water flows.