The origins of a source: Edward Long,Coromantee slave revolts and The History of Jamaica

Since the 1960s, historians of the early-modern era have been working with colonial sources to uncover the ways that Africans with connections to the Gold Coast – often known as ‘Coromantees’ in the Anglo-American colonies – shaped the history of the Atlantic World. One of the most influential primary sources used in this literature is a 32-page section of the second volume of The History of Jamaica, written by the planter-historian Edward Long in 1774. ‘The origins of a source’ uses Long’s life and works, both published and unpublished, to tell the story of this source’s creation. In doing so, it provides a detailed case study for how a prominent and controversial intellectual acquired knowledge of African culture, and then repurposed and deployed that knowledge as a tool in the abolitionist debates. It argues that the political context of abolition is essential to understanding Long’s writings on the Coromantee.     

READING THE FUTURE

This essay asks how cultural studies practitioners can begin to found a critical practice that responds to the events of September 11 and their aftermath. Using Theodor Adorno' concept of ‘semi-erudition’, as developed in his analysis of horoscope readers in ‘The Stars Down to Earth’, together with Homi Bhabha' arguments about the links between racial stereotyping and fetishism, it is argued that those working in the discipline of cultural studies must respond to the multi-layered address of the official discourse regarding the ‘war on terrorism’ without becoming complacent about our own position vis-à-vis this discourse. The author connects this argument with a reading of Herman Melville' novella Benito Cereno to discuss the problem of American ‘innocence’ in this context. The concluding question is how, in the face of the current crisis, to begin to practice a truly responsive ‘criticism’, in the full sense of the term, one able to provide a different reading of the present and in turn affect the future.     

Of monsters

Monsters gave birth to modernity: those unnamable figures of horror and fascination shadow civilization as its constitutive and abjected discontent. In Europe, from the late eighteenth century on, the term monstrosity mobilized a set of discursive practices that tied racial and sexual deviancy to an overall apparatus of discipline, and, later in the nineteenth century, to the emergence of biopolitics. This article draws a history of monstrosity through overlapping discourses, tying the contemporary figure of the monster-terrorist to the sexual and racial deviancy of what Michel Foucault termed the ‘Abnormals.’ Beginning with an engagement with Deleuze's and Foucault's notion of ‘biopolitics,’ this article follows the emergence of the monster-terrorist in that subfield of policy studies known as ‘terrorism studies.’ This article argues that specific and implicit conceptions of the civilized psyche, linked to norms of the heterosexual family, ground the figure of the Islamic terrorist in an older colonial discourse of the despotic and licentious Oriental male.     

Reason's other: the emergence of the disabled subject in the Northern renaissance

By the late fifteenth century, the debate over the role of reason and the constitution of the human subject freed public discourse from its reliance on God and placed the rational individual at the centre of social and political thought. The emphasis on rationality necessitated a parallel discourse on its opposite—‘reason’s Other'. In this period, representations of disabled people change in response to this new paradigm. Late medieval cultural documents, such as those of Brant and Bosch, employ folly as a metaphorical device, associated with the qualities of Everyman. However, with the rise of renaissance humanism, the benign metaphors of folly associated with the abstract everyman quickly become inscribed on the bodies of those people who would be constructed as reason's ‘Other’—people with intellectual and physical disabilities—and the abstract discourse of folly is transformed into a much more direct representational association of disability with depravity.

What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! … the paragon of animals! Hamlet II.ii     

Expertise and forms of knowledge in the government of families

This paper examines the relationship between the state and the individual in relation to an aspect of mundane family life – the feeding of babies and young children. The nutritional status of children has long been a matter of national concern and infant feeding is an aspect of family life that has been subjected to substantial state intervention. It exemplifies the imposition upon women the ‘biologico‐moral responsibility’ for the welfare of children ( Foucault, 1991b ). The state's attempts to influence mothers’ feeding practices operate largely through education and persuasion. Through an elaborate state‐sponsored apparatus, a strongly medicalised expert discourse is disseminated to mothers. This discourse warns mothers of the risks of certain feeding practices and the benefits of others. It constrains mothers through a series of ‘quiet coercions’ ( Foucault, 1991c ) which seek to render them self‐regulating subjects. Using data from a longitudinal interview study, this paper explores how mothers who are made responsible in these medical discourses around child nutrition, engage with, resist and refuse expert advice. It examines, in particular, the rhetorical strategies which mothers use to defend themselves against the charges of maternal irresponsibility that arise when their practices do not conform to expert medical recommendations.     

Cultural Sociology and Other Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity in the Cultural Sciences

The subject of this article is the relationship between cultural sociology and approaches to culture in other social science disciplines. What are the characteristics of the theoretical environment, in which cultural sociology is operating? The article begins by reviewing the literature on interdisciplinarity. Many authors argue that interdisciplinarity is increasing or should be increasing, but the general consensus is that disciplinary isolation is the norm. From this perspective, the relationships between disciplines can be understood in terms of trading zones, in which fields in different disciplines have little in common, theoretically, or empirically. Interdisciplinary communication in ‘trading zones’ requires that participants laboriously construct a set of terms that permits them to exchange ideas. Alternatively, I propose that clusters of fields in different disciplines are linked by free-floating paradigms. Participants in disciplines that share ‘free-floating paradigms’ are able to communicate with one another more readily. The article presents evidence for the second interpretation, drawn from survey articles in disciplinary handbooks. Disciplines and fields in which the study of culture draws from the same pool of paradigms and models and shares a set of lines of inquiry with cultural sociology include traditional disciplines, such as anthropology, communication, geography, history and psychology, and interdisciplinary fields, such as cultural studies, communication, feminist theory, material culture, science studies, and visual culture. Interdisciplinary fields – particularly cultural studies – perform an important role in diffusing paradigms across disciplinary boundaries. Free-floating paradigms are associated with the work of major theorists, such as Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault, Bourdieu, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Clifford Geertz, Bruno Latour, Adorno, Gramsci, and Habermas.     

Governing the liberal self in a ‘post-truth’ era: science,class and the debate over GMOs

ABSTRACT

This essay examines four case studies in which prominent commentators in media sites that target the liberal-leaning, educated class – The Daily Show, Slate magazine, the New York Times, and Real Time with Bill Maher – announced that they had changed their minds on the issue of genetically modified foods (GMOs). Though each had previously been sceptical of the technology, they now embraced it in the name of science and humanitarianism, and urged audiences to do the same. These cases were flashpoints in a broader shift in which the liberal, educated middle class – a formation historically critical of GMOs–has increasingly denounced scepticism about biotechnology as a pernicious ‘anti-science’ conservatism. This liberal pro-GMO discourse posits itself as a matter of truth versus lies. We argue, however, that the manner in which it framed GMO opposition as irrational and immoral threatened attachments that have long been central to liberal, educated middle class selfhood and capital – attachments to being a caring and rational self. Moreover, this discourse intensified as this class was experiencing heightened cultural and economic instability under neoliberalism, the post-industrial labour economy, and the aftermath of the Great Recession. Through their narratives of coming to believe in GMOs, our case studies provide their audiences with technologies, in the Foucauldian sense, for making classed selves and shoring up this class’ claims to authority under these conditions. We suggest that this swell of cultural technologies aiming to cultivate liberal support for GMOs has a great deal to teach us about the class dynamics of the so-called ‘post-truth’ era.     

Through a filtered lens: unauthorized picture-taking of people with dwarfism in public spaces

People with dwarfism often encounter discrimination in their daily interactions with strangers. Staring, harassment and infantilization are some of the behaviours they have reported to encounter. Through two qualitative research studies conducted in 2013 and 2015/16 it was revealed that people with dwarfism also experience strangers taking unauthorized pictures of them. This article explores this phenomenon in depth, utilizing the perspective of individuals who have experienced it first hand and analysing the relevant socio-historical influences. These include the history of the photographic exploitation of ‘abnormal’ bodies, and the cultural construction of a ‘dwarf’ as an object of entertainment. This article engages gaze theories in gender and race and ethnicity studies as well as a discussion of Foucault’s interpretation of the ‘panopticon’, positing that the advent of the cell-phone camera in the twenty-first century has altered how ‘abnormal’ bodies are recorded within oppressive ideological beliefs.     

Disinformation,performed: self-presentation of a Russian IRA account on Twitter

ABSTRACT

How disinformation campaigns operate and how they fit into the broader social communication environment – which has been described as a ‘disinformation order’ [Bennett & Livingston, (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122–139] – represent critical, ongoing questions for political communication. We offer a thorough analysis of a highly successful disinformation account run by Russia’s Internet Research Agency: the so-called ‘Jenna Abrams’ account. We analyze Abrams’ tweets and other content such as blogposts with qualitative discourse analysis, assisted by quantitative content analysis and metadata analysis. This yields an in-depth understanding of how the IRA team behind the Abrams account presented this persona across multiple platforms and over time. Especially, we describe the techniques used to perform personal authenticity and cultural competence. The performance of personal authenticity was central to her persona building as a likeable American woman, whereas the performance of cultural competence enabled her to infiltrate American conservative communities with resonant messages. Implications for understanding disinformation processes, and how some aspects of the hybrid media system are especially vulnerable to hijacking by bad actors are discussed.     

Which is the ‘self’ in ‘self‐interest’?

This article contends that homogenisation of the term ‘self‐interest’– in sociological and economic discourse – has resulted in many misconceptions about what particular doctrines of ‘self‐interest’ were instituted to achieve at certain historical periods and in specific cultural milieux. At its worst, the article argues, this has led to a misunderstanding of the import of particular doctrines of self interest,which are read in terms of general tradition – such as that which views self‐interested conduct as a natural faculty – rather than in terms of the context specific aims of those advocating them. The article attempts to show how, historically, there have been quite significant changes in the characterisation of the ‘self’ deemed to be ‘self‐interested’. In particular, it focuses on the ‘self’ of certain early modern conceptions of self interest, and suggests this creation is best viewed not as a subjectivity transcendentally presupposed by experience, but as one historically cultivated to counter the exigencies of particular circumstances – the disaster of perpetual ‘warre’ in 17th century Europe – and to meet the purposes of a certain way of life – existence in the civitas.     

The Ministry of Culture in Syria: history,production and restriction of official culture

The official aspect of Syrian culture has been for long shaped and controlled by wizarat al-thaqafa, or the Ministry of Culture in a country whose government for long prided itself as culturally progressive. The history of this important government department reflects the political developments of the country, and the cultural activities and materials it produces deeply influence the intellectual development of Syrian society. I argue in this article that even though the Ministry is part of the Syrian government and regime, it attempts to be a more independent and democratic enterprise that produces a great deal of cultural resources and allows artistic and intellectual spaces for the Syrian public. Many Syrian voices of dissent were provoked by the performance of the Ministry which is often viewed as an extension of the leading Ba’ath Party and its outdated literature and ideologies. This Ministry has impacted cultural movements within Syria, regardless of being sponsored by the regime, which has attempted to control public and private media outlets and the educational system to pass its discourse to the public. This paper shows that the Ministry of Culture has successfully escaped serving as a mouthpiece for the party and how the ministry’s role in Syrian cultural development goes beyond offering legitimation to the regime in exchange for institutional support. It also aims to demonstrate how the way we view and understand cultural outputs in Syria enables us to comprehend the complexities of the country.     

Translating ‘Sustainability’ in Hawai'i: The Utility of Semiotic Transformation in the Transmission of Culture

This paper examines how businessmen and educators in Hawai'i have semiotically ‘translated’ sustainability to promote sustainability practices. Using data gathered from an educational institute that was co-founded by a corporation and a college, I analyse how the source discourse was, using Silverstein's term, ‘transformed’ so that the target discourse (or the signs used in the target discourse) invokes Hawaiian imageries rather than imageries of capitalism. Analyses reveal that changes to keywords of sustainability occur in a way that shifts possible local interpretations of them as cultural heritage, that is, as something ‘of Hawaiian’ and not ‘of white capitalists’. I argue that this translation effort assisted the concept's transmission by making ‘sustainability’ an inhabitable category of identity and by providing a model of a future in which locals can participate because it is now interpretable as having been modelled on the narrated past.     

Race for Cures: Rethinking the Racial Logics of ‘Trust’ in Biomedicine

This article examines the normative underpinnings of ‘trust talk’, asking how biomedical discourse constructs racial group boundaries and what implications this has for our understanding of the politics of medicine more broadly. Drawing upon a 2‐year multi‐method study of the world's largest stem cell research initiative and extending key insights from the sociology of race–ethnicity and social studies of science and medicine, this paper identifies three ways in which discourse in the stem cell field constructs racial group boundaries – through diversity outreach, clinical gatekeeping, and charismatic collaborations. In so doing, the paper also explicates counter‐narratives – medical racial profiling, subversive whiteness, and biopolitical minstrelsy – as forms of discursive resistance that challenge the normative underpinnings of recruitment discourse.     

They are all ‘doing gender’ but are they are all passing? A case study of the appropriation of a sociological concept1

The concept of ‘doing gender’ was placed on the sociological agenda by West and Zimmerman . In their seminal paper published in 1987, they provided a systematic theory of gender as a routine and ongoing process and outlined a distinctly ethnomethodological approach to investigating how gender is enacted, understood and rendered accountable. West and Zimmerman's notion of ‘doing gender’ has subsequently become a central concept in many fields of sociological research, however, upon closer examination although many authors claim to be using the concept – in effect to be doing‘doing gender’– the concept's intellectual roots in ethnomethodology are not always recognised or reflected: in short not all are passing. The purpose of our study is to explore the career trajectory of this concept and to systematically assess the manner in which ‘doing’ has been employed. From a review of 226 journal articles, books, dissertations and association papers, we provide an overview of the uses of this construct and examine the ways in which ‘doing gender’ has been assimilated into current theoretical and methodological practice.     

SCALING GOVERNMENTALITY

This article explores contemporary uses of museum co-production for public policy through a sustained theoretical engagement with Tony Bennett's work on museums as an ‘object of government’. The specific focus is a theoretical discussion of the ‘logic of culture’ as it relates to new UK policy uses of participants' ‘experience’ as the desired site of authenticity at the very same time as the process of expressing this authenticity is located as a site for reform. It is argued that Bennett mobilizes two techniques of scale (fixing the analytic lens of governmentality and drawing on a strong scalar correspondence of power) in order to secure a relatively disciplinary reading of governmentality and to foreclose the resistant possibilities of cultural politics. Drawing on the differences between practices associated in UK museums with ‘access’ (which works through the dis-intensification of the difference between the museum and everyday life) and with ‘social impact’ (which requires a re-intensification of this difference in order to increase the visibility of effect), this article concludes by countering Bennett's more disciplinary uses of Foucault with the Foucault of ‘The Subject and Power’. It is argued that the ‘logic of culture’ can be calibrated to varying intensities in considering the coming-into-relationship between the museums and those-to-be-involved. It is specifically argued – following Foucault's spatializaton of ‘thought’ as distance (limit-attitude) and ‘counter-conduct’ as proximity – that the ‘logic of culture’ might be actively re-calibrated to use the spatialized dynamic of distance and proximity to create spaces which might allow the museum and its associated policy – not just those involved – to be affected by the co-production encounter.     

The power of discourse: Michel Foucault and critical theory

Abstract

The debate that contrasts Marxism and the work of Michel Foucault often overlooks that both projects share a political and ethical commitment. Both have moreover engaged that commitment by challenging what Marx called ‘traditional ideas’, viewing them as historically compilcit with the exercise of power. This ‘radical rupture’ with traditional ideas has been the hallmark of the critical theory project since The Communist Manifesto. By challenging traditional notions of power and language, however, Michel Foucault went further than the Marxist tradition in carrying out the critical theory project. Foucault's alternative ideas of discourse/practice and of power as ‘positive’ are moreover intricately linked in a way that has not been sufficiently appreciated. This is evident in a genealogy of Foucault's early work, where neither notion is able to take hold in the absence of the other. It only after The Archaeology of Knowledge, where Foucault rethought the relationship of language to reality, that he was able to formulate the notion of power as positive in works to come. This link should cause us to rethink our relationship to Foucault's work, of it to Marxism, and of the critical theory project to the power.     

Orientalism as Cultural Practices and the Production of Sociological Knowledge

Since the 1990s, sociologists and others have increasingly used the term orientalism to refer commonly to ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism, prejudicial stereotyping, and cultural misrepresentations of non-'western' societies, particularly those influenced by Islamic knowledge and practices. I chart how theorist Edward Said has helped initiate the sociology of orientalism by emphasizing the relationship of orientalism as a set of cultural practice and discourse to modern empires and global imperialism. I discuss the prominent clusters of studies published in English in the sociology of orientalism: (i) cultural representations and (ii) cultural regulation and social-identity formation. I argue that these studies have examined the ways orientalisms have deployed signifying practices of abstraction, difference, and desire in constructing problematic images and social relations. Furthermore, I contend that sociology as an intellectual endeavor still needs to confront seriously the issues raised by critics of orientalisms.     

The Passagenwerk and the place of Walter Benjamin in cultural studies: Benjamin,cultural studies,Marxist theories of art

This essay is a reflection on the circumstances that led me to a particular research project, on Cajun dance and music spaces, and also on the project's mutations through subsequent phases of development. Above all, this essay attempts to take stock of the difficulties – personal, scholarly, and theoretical – as well as the personal choices that have gone into developing an ongoing scholarly project. While I indicate the importance of the experiences of personal pleasure that originally inspired my research, I also show how the personal and the pleasurable often necessarily encounter tensions and even certain kinds of conflict when linked to a ‘disciplinary’ domain. This essay therefore traces a particular example of how ‘cultural studies travels’ both geographically within a life and disciplinarily within something that has come to be known as‘French cultural studies’.