Studies of seriality have long tended to focus on its consequences. Seriality is often posed as an existential condition accruing to distinct media forms: the serial novel’s inevitable delays, the newspaper’s predictable supplement, the television episode’s necessary cliff hanger. In the broad body of seriality studies scholarship, serial formats structure the reception and experiences of their audiences. The range of these studies demonstrates the importance of understanding seriality. Perhaps most famously, Benedict Anderson invoked the “ceremony” through which each day’s issue of a newspaper naturalized the rise of the modern capitalist nation-state. More recently, a special issue of Narrative (2019) has emphasized the “sprawl. . . . the sometimes inexhaustible elements” of serial narrative (Sullivan 47). Contrasting the specific serial elements of printed texts, a collection of essays in Velvet Light Trap (2017) asks if “seriality in the movies [is] not the same in substance and function as that in print fiction” (Abel 81).

The papers on this panel argue for a different approach. Rather than seeing seriality as a consequence of certain media forms, we recast serial forms as a complex set of arguments. Those arguments can be hard to trace because they obtain largely in behind-the-scenes and collaborative environments. Editors and agents, directors and producers–these cultural actors speak in and through the practical language of serial formats. The arguments about seriality examined in each of the panel’s four papers envision seriality as the practical form of context-specific arguments about sociality and disaffiliation.

We focus on specific serial forms within Black, Indigenous, Latin American, and eroticized communities to highlight the collective work performed by serialization. Each paper develops critical methods for reading and interpreting collaborative formal languages, re-envisioning serial texts as contingent, iterative, intentionally constructed and reconstructed cultural works. This panel makes a broader argument that serial forms are tools for setting political and social conditions and for collective action and affiliation; seriality both creates and frames social coherence. The serial process of creating and sustaining sociality is especially important for communities beyond the exclusionary bounds of white, monolingual, heteronormative hegemony.

The four papers on this panel take up non-Anglo and non-normative communities and serial forms across a range of periods and regions. Dorri Beam’s “Serial Generativity” builds on world-making notions of human passion drawn from Charles Fourier’s Utopian Socialism to explore “seriality’s formal challenge to the heteronormative family.” Using Martin Delany’s Blake and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Beam proposes a form of serial poetics that crosses generic and social contexts, undercutting familial orders and racial capitalism. Kelly Wisecup’s “Serial Forms, Settler Colonialism, and Indigenous Periodicals” places the foundational Indigenous publication The Cherokee Phoenix alongside newspaper scrapbooks of Native writers (1830-1890). Connecting autobiography, fiction, and newspaper accounts of settler brutality, Wisecup describes how Indigenous writers and editors across the US “illuminate and theorize the connections among seriality and settler colonialism.” This paper engages a wide range of Indigenous perspectives and contributes a theory of seriality as a kinship model. Gloria Morales’s “Building National Pasts Book by Book: Two Colombian Book Series in a Bipartisan Chaos” uses two mid-20th century Colombian book series–and their politically opposed editors–to reconstruct “how the State. . . serializes and commodifies what citizens should read in the name of nation-building.” Expanding the panel’s focus beyond the United States to explore state-sponsored anthologies and their political implications, Morales brings important comparative context–of language, nation, and labor–to our exploration of serial form. Sarah Salter’s “Now With That Eternal Nowness” uses the ephemera of New Orleans’s queer Mardi Gras Krewes to re-imagine print seriality as a generative collective ritual. This paper highlights how serial forms both create and refuse their own temporal limits, suggesting that serialized texts–here associated with repeated action over time–can propose themselves as a quasi-eternal presence in people’s social lives.

The papers on this panel span contexts and media by design. Rather than develop a theory of seriality through a starkly periodized or deliberately genre-based collection of papers, we imagine the transhistorical and multimodal opportunities of serial forms to articulate and invigorate social affiliation. The diversity of approaches to seriality on this panel offers fertile conceptual ground to theorize social collectivity in the overlaps of repetition, innovation, and reception.