Issue 20 -
Spring 2026
Celebration
Read here: On_Culture's Issue 20 (Spring 2026): "Celebration"
_Editorial
_Articles
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Las Fiestas against
Displacement -
Between Tulle and
Tears -
Ancient Roman Columns, Eagles, Sciences, and Other
Representations -
Coffee, Cocaine, and Roller
Coasters
_Essays
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Absolutist Celebration in Late Ancien
Régimes -
Notes Towards an Aesthetics of
Celebration -
The Limits of
Celebration
_Perspectives
Las Fiestas against Displacement
Religious Celebrations as Socio-Territorial Resistance in San Andrés Cholula, Mexico
_Abstract
The region of Cholula, comprising the municipalities of San Andrés Cholula and San Pedro Cholula in Puebla, Mexico, has experienced rapid urban expansion and increased real estate development in recent decades. This transformation has led to an intensification of processes of commodification and demographic change. However, indigenous communities in San Andrés Cholula have persisted in their organization and sustenance of religious festivities that are deeply rooted in neighborhood-based structures, such as mayordomías. This _Article explores the function of these celebrations as forms of spatial appropriation and everyday resistance within the context of urban restructuring, emphasizing their role beyond mere expressions of cultural continuity. The study draws on long-term ethnographic research to analyze three key celebrations—Christmas Day, Candlemas, and the Feast of Santiago Xicotenco—in order to explore how ritual practices reinforce social networks, reproduce local authority, and sustain territorial belonging. The _Article’s argument is supported by theories of ritual, the production of space, and urban indigeneity. The institutionalization of social and cultural capital enables Indigenous residents to maintain their material presence and collective visibility in an increasingly commodified urban context. In this manner, they assert their right to remain and to define the social and spatial meaning of their city.
Between Tulle and Tears
Ritual Practices of Bridal Fashion
_Abstract
The question of appropriate clothing becomes especially significant on special occasions—particularly during rites of passage such as weddings. That the choice of a bridal gown is consistently at the center of attention is also reflected in diverse (social) media portrayals. The various levels of meaning and attribu-tions of bridal fashion are expressed not only in the acquisition of a bridal outfit (including bridal insignia such as the veil, flower bouquet, etc.), but also on the wedding day itself. Furthermore, the elements of wedding fashion often function as objects of embodied memory, even years after the wedding. What kind of ritualized practices surrounding Westernized bridalwear can be currently observed? Which attributions of meaning—individual as well as medi-al—are recognizable, and what role does the bridal dress play as a vestimentary object within the broader context of the wedding? These research questions will be addressed through a multi-sited ethnograph-ic approach. Augsburg in Germany lends itself as a focal point for research, not least due to its transnational ‘bridal fashion mile’ and its historical significance as a former center of the textile industry. The aim of this article is to highlight the specific value of bridal fashion as a (vestimentary) ritual practice. By interweaving empirically collected data with approaches from ritual and fashion theory, I will argue that ritual fashion prac-tices are clearly distinct from those of everyday fashion.
Ancient Roman Columns, Eagles, Sciences, and Other Representations
Centerpieces and the Ornamentation of the Early Modern European Festive Table Setting
_Abstract
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, the iconography and apparatus of dining on festive occasions—particularly the numerous elaborate centerpieces—served to narrate, enhance, and reiterate the occasion or aspects thereof. These functions, integral in shaping the participants’ understanding and experience of the celebration, were made possible through the ‘representational’ character of those objects. This paper aims to bring forward and discuss the reasoning behind the use of diverse iconographical elements in the centerpieces of the time for the purposes of meaning creation and the communication of ideas. Four cases of centerpieces from around Europe are discussed extensively towards this aim, as used in four distinctive but equally important spheres of the contemporaneous European societies: the celebration of a military victory at Versailles in 1674; an ecclesiastical jubilee of an abbot at the Zwettl Monastery in 1768; a secular wedding of a noble couple in the Kingdom of Naples in 1687; finally, a queen’s diplomatic visit to Venice in 1768.
Coffee, Cocaine, and Roller Coasters
The Making of Memory in Colombian Theme Parks
_Abstract
In Colombia, where histories of colonial dispossession, civil war, and narco terror resist resolution, the theme park has emerged as an unlikely instrument of national memory-making. At two of Colombia’s most visited theme parks, Parque del Café in Quindío and Hacienda Nápoles in Antioquia, this _Article traces what happens when Colombia’s contested histories and mythologies are given gates, entrance fees, and roller coasters. At these parks, I argue that celebration works as a technology of historical resolution, producing and selling a coherent narrative scrubbed clean of complexity. Parque del Café freezes time, embalming a cafetero heritage built on colonial dispossession and celebrating a lifestyle it claims to honor even as it hastens its disappearance. Hacienda Nápoles, built from the ruins of infamous narcotrafficker Pablo Escobar’s estate, accelerates time, declaring narco terror transcended and the state triumphant. But in practice, buried violence and histories resurface through the very practices of celebration as visitors project their own desires, griefs, and fantasies onto curated space. Through historical analysis and participant observation in the parks and surrounding communities of Montenegro and Puerto Triunfo, combined with semi-structured interviews with visitors, workers, residents, and local experts, this _Article traces how celebration becomes not only the mode through which history is tamed, but the very arena in which the impossibility of its taming is revealed.
Absolutist Celebration in Late Ancien Régimes
Reflections on the Ruler Rituals of Empress Catherine II of Russia and King Gustav III of Sweden
_Abstract
This _Essay aims to flesh out and systematize a series of reflections on the inversely proportional relationship between the eroding conceptual basis, in terms of legitimacy and sovereignty, of absolute rulership in the mid- to late eighteenth century, on the one hand, and the proliferation and growth of public celebrations thereof, on the other. The analysis is based on the life circumstances and ceremonial trajectories of empress Catherine II of Russia (r. 1762–1796) and king Gustav III of Sweden (r. 1771–1792). By offering an overarching typology of ruler celebrations and their attendant principles and patterns, the Essay serves as a stepping stone towards a) systematic exploration of other eighteenth-century ruler-ruled equations in Europe and beyond, and b) connecting this burgeoning framework to an already existing apparatus for studying ‘ruler visibility’ and ‘popular belonging’ in nineteenth-century and later contexts globally.
Notes Towards an Aesthetics of Celebration
_Abstract
This _Essay explores how the notion of celebration can reveal some aspects of the social life of literature that are rarely considered in literary theory. Defining celebration as the production of a festive and appreciative event by gathering together, it is argued that literature can accordingly be seen as a locus of celebration where different peoples’ lives cross and a sense of ‘we’ is negotiated and experimented. To make this argument, focus is shifted from individual texts to literature as an infrastructure for producing, circulating, and using texts, assembling writers, editors and critics, libraries and bookshops, discourses about literature, and the teaching of and research into literature. This infrastructure, it is argued, can instantiate a celebrative being-together due to three qualities: 1) Because it allows writers and readers take a reflective stance toward language, it endows literary language with the power to describe the word differently and to conjure imaginary universes and beings. 2) It installs an aesthetic relation between writer and reader where the reader puts her own sensibility in the service of realizing the potential offered by the literary work, making the life of literature into an exercise in being together, being interdependent and premised on one another. 3) We not only interact with literature; we also interact with each other about literature. Each of us have different capacities and capabilities when we use the affordances for imagination provided by the text, and we will realize a text’s potential using our imaginative powers each in our own ways. These three characteristics of the modern infrastructure of literature are indispensable components in experiencing literature as a celebration: it gathers us into a public and creates a common for our interaction.
The Limits of Celebration
National Days as ‘Commemobrative’ Rituals
_Abstract
This _Essay challenges the taken-for-granted ‘celebratory paradigm’ that dominates scholarly understandings of national days. Drawing on comparative evidence from Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe, it argues that national days are frequently not occasions of unambiguous celebration but hybrid ritual formations that intertwine joy, commemoration, and mourning. To capture this ambivalence, the article advances the concept of commemobration, denoting national day rituals that blend celebratory performances of nationhood with solemn practices of remembrance and grief. The argument unfolds through a comparative analysis of national day ceremonies in Poland, Hungary, Finland, and the Baltic states. Particular attention is devoted to Poland’s Independence Day on 11 November, which exemplifies a conflicted commemobrative pattern shaped by historical trauma, political polarization, and the rise of illiberal populism. The analysis shows how state-centered commemorations coexist with, and are increasingly overshadowed by, nationalist counter-rituals such as the March of Independence, producing a ritual landscape marked by both heroic glorification and collective victimhood. By situating national days along a continuum ranging from celebration and commemoration to grief and mourning, the article reconceptualizes national days as complex ritual events. It concludes by arguing that national day studies should move beyond the sociology of celebration and nationalism studies to engage more systematically with memory studies and death studies.
Reenactments and the Politics of Remembrance
A Tribute to Ana Mendieta, 40 Years after Her Death
_Abstract
Forty years ago, on September 8th, 1985, Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta died after falling from the window of the 34th-floor Manhattan apartment she shared with her husband, the Minimalist artist Carl Andre. Andre was accused of murder but later acquitted in a highly publicized trial that split the art world. Born in Havana in 1948 and exiled to the United States at the age of twelve, Mendieta became a prominent voice of the 1970s feminist art movement. Her ‘earth-body art’ combined elements of ‘land art’ and ‘body art,’ transforming her experience as a woman into the central theme of her work. At the same time, she challenged Western conceptions of both ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ drawing on pre-Hispanic cultures in Mexico and Cuba and asserting her identity as Other. For all these reasons, recent major exhibitions and scholarly debates on feminism and decoloniality have returned to Mendieta’s work with renewed attention. I take the fortieth anniversary of Mendieta’s death as an occasion to investigate the intersection of performance and remembrance. One way of considering this is by examining how various artists engage in reenactments of Mendieta’s work as acts of cultural memory and collective remembrance. My goal is to understand how these reenactments open up possibilities for affective, embodied modes of celebration.
Perrear hasta el piso or How to Dance Reggaetón in Germany
_Abstract
This auto-ethnographic _Perspective reflects on reggaetón music, its festive experience, and the cultural changes it has undergone in the Latin migrant context. Two years ago, a collective of Latin American DJs founded La Casa del Perreo in Germany. Since then, they have hosted reggaetón parties in various European cities. The _Perspective traces the cultural meanings behind this music scene in the context of migration. These festive events become a space of socialization and celebration of Latin American culture. At the disco, reggaetón music and culture are showcased not only as a mainstream product, but also as a landscape within which the Latin American experience is performed and celebrated. Through my personal experience of attending various reggaetón parties in Germany, I explore the cultural significance of the reggaetón scene.
Black Joy as Cultural Resistance
On Celebration and Visibility in When We See Us
_Abstract
This _Perspective explores Black Joy as a mode of cultural resistance and collective self-representation through a critical engagement with the 2024 exhibition When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, held at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Framing celebration not as a passive emotion but as a political method, the piece moves through five thematic reflections: visual sovereignty, spatial presence, sensorial engagement, everyday vitality, and shared empowerment. Drawing on bell hooks’ “The Oppositional Gaze,” Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Stuart Hall’s writing on cultural identity, and Tina Campt’s Listening to Images, the essay situates joy as a curatorial strategy and relational force that exceeds representation. Through a blend of theoretical analysis and autoethnographic reflection, this _Perspective considers how the exhibition mobilizes joy not only through visual representation, but by crafting an immersive environment—through color palettes, spatial layout, soundscapes, and moments of embodied encounter—which invites visitors to feel, dwell in, and move with joy as a shared affective force. The result is a counter-archive of Black life that refuses trauma as its only frame. When We See Us offers a radically intimate vision of Black presence, where quiet pleasure, softness, and collectivity emerge as acts of aesthetic and political power.