Not yet the postcolonial era: The (super) nation-state and transnationalism of cultural studies: Response to Ang and Stratton

Abstract

What is the epistemological and political status of the nation-state in the current practices of Cultural Studies? What is the relationship between the transnationalization of capital/super-states and the transnational turn of Cultural Studies? Through analyzing discursive sites of ‘regionalization’, ‘the Postcolonial’, ‘globalization’, this essay attempts to pinpoint unquestioned assumptions in the critical phase of ‘internationalizing’ Cultural Studies. Unless counter-hegemony positions and strategies can be collectively discussed, argued over and formulated, Cultural Studies as an internationalist project will run the risk of losing its critical edges and even reproducing the existing power structure of the nation-states and global capital. An openended geo-colonial historical materialism is proposed to revitalize Cultural Studies as part of a global decolonization movement.     

CULTURAL STUDIES IN THE CORPORATE UNIVERSITY

This essay is about the fate of Cultural Studies in the new context of the market-based reform of Higher Education and the resurgence of liberal capitalism. As the global corporate demand for educational services increases, universities are becoming more like businesses. The trend toward a corporate style university can be seen in the way that its educational mission is being subordinated to the criteria of the flexible labour market. Neo-Liberal forms of governance introduce economic calculation into what were previously social and bureaucratic domains. The emergence of Cultural Studies in the 1960s was a challenge from the New Left to both the humanities and to the historic national mission of the university. The rise of the corporate university and its Benthamite utilitarianism in the 1980s confronted Cultural Studies with its own hiatus. The essay argues that we need to revisit Cultural Studies’ early rejection of humanism and work out a new kind of'humanism without guarantees, if we are to adequately confront this conjuncture and find the moral and intellectual resources to restore Cultural Studies as a critical and engaged practice.     

On ‘telling better stories’*

Over the course of his forty-year career, Lawrence Grossberg has modelled a form of rigorous, politically-engaged, radically contextual social research. Writing about Cultural Studies in the abstract, he has often characterized this work as, principally, about ‘telling better stories,’ and he attempts to tell them in his work on the contemporary conjuncture through analyses of political struggles in the United States. However, in a moment where calls for and claims of ‘better’ cultural stories abound on both the Left and the Right, what exactly does it mean for Cultural Studies to tell them better? I suggest we can locate attempts to grapple with Cultural Studies’ ‘better stories’ problem in the space between Grossberg’s conjunctural work and his work on the identity and future of Cultural Studies. Highlighting these efforts, I clarify what it means for Cultural Studies to assume the responsibility of telling better stories given the specific contours of the present context.     

Cultural studies of extraction

The special double issue at hand offers Cultural Studies engagements with extractivism and the myriad of conflicts, struggles and other processes and phenomena that have risen together with the on-going intensification and expansion of extractivist industries and exploitation. In this article, we examine the political and epistemological stakes of these engagements, and introduce the different perspectives from which the notions of extractivism and extraction are approached within this issue. We argue that as a conceptual framework loaded with political meaning and potential, and able to address the on-going moment of dwindling resources, environmental degradation and heightened social and economic inequality, extractivism and studies of extraction are crucial for the discipline’s efforts to engage contemporary culture politically, and to examine on-going processes of exploitation and subjectification through specific context and cases. Many of the articles included in this issue expand understandings of extraction, and present a broad range of methods and analytical frameworks through which different forms of ‘extractivism’ and its consequences might be examined, deciphered and discussed within Cultural Studies. And yet, what emerges out of these efforts eventually, is the ultimate centrality of the war between climate and capital for contemporary politics of globalization.     

Between and among the boundaries of culture: Bridging text and lived experience in the third timespace

Abstract

The anthropological notion of Culture is founded on the presupposition of a radical difference between self and other, here and there, Eurocenter and Third World. This conceptual foundation has increasingly been under challenge, as the Eurocenter is being forcibly relativized by national liberation movements from without and ‘new’ social movements from within. The relativisitc notion of cultures that are autonomous and bounded is now contested by a notion of historically grounded multiple subject positions. A jumble of cultural-political practices and forms of resistance have emerged that have variously been named hybrid, border, or diasporic. The most creative and dynamic of these resistances are located on the borders of essentialism and conjuncturalism. They refuse the binarism of identity politics versus post-modernist fragmentation, opting instead for what Sandoval terms ‘differential consciousness’. We name this terrain of practice and theory, this zone of shifting and mobile resistances that refuse fixity yet practice their own arbitrary provisional closures, the third timespace.

The third study of third timespaces aims to displace the canonical anthropological notion of Culture as well as to nudge Cultural Studies away from its text — a Western-centered focus. Such an undertaking will require a revision of the ethnographic distinctions between ‘home’ and ‘the field’. Fieldwork becomes ‘homework’, as differences between the ethnographer and the subject under study are broken down, as the ethnographer is incorporated into the text, and as theory and text reflect and participate in the multiply-positioned and fluctuating realities of quotidian life.     

‘ … half-sick of shadows’: figure and ground in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s imagination of the subaltern

ABSTRACT

This essay moves the category of the subaltern out of the exclusive domain of colonial historiography and resituates it in the context of contemporaneity. Taking my cue from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s insistence on the dream of postcoloniality in the realm of the global, I examine two ‘empirical anomalies’ that redefine subaltern insurgency, cultivate democratic reflexes, and defeat the expectations of their moment and milieu. Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial theory and the specter of capital serves as a framing device to elicit the still-persuasive dimensions of Spivak’s landmark essay for our historical moment. While I remain unpersuaded by both his premises and his conclusions, his argument does throw Spivak’s interventions in the project of Subaltern Studies into relief. My method throughout, in the manner of Spivak and Paul de Man, is one of interruption and undoing; my aim is to delineate what Spivak describes as ‘the resistance fitting our time’.     

Power,capital, and artistic freedom: contemporary Chinese art communities and the city

This paper offers a critical review of the proliferation of the contemporary art colony in China since the beginning of the twenty-first century in the context of China's promotion of cultural creative industries as one of the strategies for urban development and economic growth. Through analyzing cases in Beijing, Xi’an, and Sanya, cities ranging from ‘first-tier’ to ‘third-tier’ in their size and status, the paper explores the challenges and opportunities many contemporary Chinese art professionals find themselves face amid the competitive city image building campaign, a top-down movement led by local state and private investors in cities across China. It is evident that contemporary art and alternative art spaces associated with it have been drawn into the process of commodification, inadvertently recruited to play an ancillary role in the reproduction of the hegemonic collusion between political power and capitalism in a rapidly urbanizing China. Nonetheless, I argue that the inclusion of contemporary art communities as a player in the production and reproduction of the urban space has provided critical-minded artists, critics, and curators opportunities to participate in the reconfiguration of the physical and cultural landscape of Chinese cities, albeit not always with positive outcomes. As such, some art professionals are able to appropriate the process of capitalist urbanization to create their own ‘infrastructures of resonance’ [Thompson 2015. Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Twenty-first Century. Brooklyn: Melville House], which support artistic freedom and facilitate the growth of diverse forms of cultural creation and exchange despite the coming dominance of ‘power plus capital’ [X. Wang 2003. A Manifesto for Cultural Studies. In: C. Wang, ed. One China, many paths. London: Verso, 274–291].     

FROM INEQUALITY TO DIFFERENCE: COLONIAL CONTRADICTIONS OF CLASS AND ETHNICITY IN 'SOCIALIST' CHINA

Through an historical ethnography of the imbrication of class and ethnicity in socialist China, this paper studies socialism as another kind of colonialism with its peculiar, contradictory ramifications of universalism and particularism. The ‘colonial’ cultural politics of socialism is explored in Inner Mongolia, the northern frontier of China, where the historical formation of the social and ethnic relationship defies any clear-cut dichotomy of colonizer and colonized. In the first half of the twentieth century, Inner Mongolia was colonized by Chinese warlords. Yet, at the same time, the majority of the Chinese population in Inner Mongolia were poor peasants leasing Mongol land. Nonetheless, the Mongols won a limited ethnic autonomy within China in 1947 by applying Leninist colonial liberation ideology, defining the Mongols as a collective group colonized by the Chinese. However,the socialist ideology based on class analysis of the social relationship during the land reform, effectively enabled the Chinese to designate many Mongols as class enemies, thereby justifying the redistribution of Mongol land among the Chinese who constituted the majority in Inner Mongolia. The ensuing ethnic violence forced Mongol leaders, who were both agents of the Chinese Communist Party and representatives of the Mongolian nationality, to press for an explicit nationality policy to defend the nominal ethnic autonomy of Inner Mongolia. Yet, this deployment of ethnic priniciple amid China's class struggle campaign was interpreted as betrayal of the socialist principle, thus leading to a collective Chinese violence against the Mongols during the Cultural Revolution. The paper suggests that, instead of a sterile debate of subaltern representation, which often reflects the scholars' own ‘position’ devoid of social context, an historical ethnography may better illustrate the historical contingencies in the practice of subalternity in socialist China.     

Aesthetic matters: writing and Cultural Studies

What would it mean to treat Cultural Studies as a project that has had amongst its accomplishments the production of new forms and styles of writing, and a generative approach to aesthetics? An initial answer to this question would be that this would recognize how Cultural Studies interceded in an academic environment not only through its concern with supplying ambitious questions and insisting on a broad range of objects of scrutiny, but also by showing how this often entailed reconfiguring the forms through which intellectual inquiry conveyed its cargo. This article doesn’t seek to provide a taxonomy of Cultural Studies’ forms and styles; what it seeks to do is to encourage a self-reflexive attention to aesthetics within Cultural Studies as a form of practice. It suggests that there are two guiding questions that might frame such an attention: how might Cultural Studies generate forms that are adequate to the complexity of the configurations that it seeks to register; and how might Cultural Studies generate forms that could reach the ear of new audiences not attuned to the cadences of scholarly writing? The tension between these two questions should be seen as an invitation to purposeful experimentation within Cultural Studies.     

ON PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IN J. M. COETZEE

This essay reads J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year in its historical context (the moment of the US war in Iraq, Abu Graib, Guantanamo and the apparent triumph of neoliberalism), while also probing the problems at stake in the practice of contextual reading and of taking the work as staging the opinions of the biographical Coetzee. The essay teases out not only the question of whether Coetzee should be seen as a public intellectual (the short but not entirely satisfactory answer is ‘no’), but also how the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ play out in his oeuvre and are helpful in pondering Coetzee's approach to questions of genre, censorship and authorship.     

Cultural Studies in Black and White

Political intervention is deeply etched in the history and theory of Cultural Studies. The vehicle of intervention is typically understood as textual and the measure of success as ‘has it changed the world?’ This graphic and textual essay argues for and enacts thinking of and practising intervention more innovatively and more modestly: as equally extra-textual, and as a site for experimentation in the folds among theory, practice, and the quotidian. The author’s original black and white charcoal and pastel images are paired with text to explore the potential for an articulation of the visual and the textual to engage, convey, actualize, and produce concepts and insights of Cultural Studies. In evocative images and accessible language it enacts a new mode of engaging the theory and practice of Cultural Studies, specifically engaging concepts of articulation and assemblage, movement and things, questions of identity, the importance of affect, the power of transformation, youth cultures and resistance, The Black Lives Matter movement and matters of race, the struggles of women, the challenge of overcoming culturally engendered hatred of difference, and the difficulties of negotiating change in the precarious circumstances of contemporary culture.     

The body in sociology: tensions inside and outside sociological thought

The human body has in recent years become a ‘hot’ topic in sociology, not just in empirical research but also in sociological theorizing. In the latter context, the body has been variously a resource for broadening the parameters of traditional sociological thought deriving from the nineteenth century, and for overturning that paradigm and fundamentally reorienting the assumptions and concepts of sociological thinking. Attempts to abandon the old paradigm and foster a new one through the means of thinking about bodies are many and manifold, and in this paper we trace out the intricate history of moves towards a ‘corporeal sociology’. We identify the dilemmas that have attended these developments, especially as concerns the ways in which new modes of thinking sociologically have tended to founder over the classical sociological dichotomy between social structure and social action. Through tracing out the various moves and counter‐moves within this field, we identify a central contradiction that affects all contemporary sociological practice, not just that dealing with the body: an oscillation between judging the utility of conceptual tools in terms of criteria derived from the discipline of Cultural Studies, and evaluating the arguments created by those tools on the basis of the incompatible criteria of classical sociology. The paper challenges sociologists to choose one set of criteria or the other, for sociological practice cannot be based on both such antagonistic paradigms.     

At the intersection of globalization and ‘civilizational originality’: cultural production in Putin’s Russia

ABSTRACT

This special issue originates from a transnational collaboration of scholars in philology, comparative literature, social theory, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, and media studies. The collection strives to advance a research agenda built on the nexus of three intellectual and academic domains: post-Soviet ‘Russian cultural studies’, the research paradigm put forward by Cultural Studies, as well as empirical methods developed in sociology. The collection illustrates the importance of expanding the experience of Cultural Studies beyond its established spheres of national investigation, while it also speaks to the necessity to re-evaluate the hegemony of the English-language academic and cultural production on the global scale. The collection offers insights into the gamut of cultural practices and institutional environments in which Russian cultural production happens today. It shows how cultural industries and institutions in Russia are integrated into the global marketplace and transnational communities, while they also draw on and contribute to local lives and experiences by trying to create an autonomous space for symbolic production at personal and collective levels. Through diverse topics, the issue sheds light on the agency, i.e. practitioners and participants, creators and consumers, of Russian cultural production and the neoliberal practices implemented on creative work and cultural administration in Russia today. The Introduction outlines the development of academic studies on Russian cultural practices since 1991; describes main political developments shaping the cultural field in Putin’s Russia; and, finally, identifies the Cultural Studies debates the editors of the collection find most productive for investigations of Russia, i.e. the instrumentalization of culture and culture as resource. Relocated in an analysis of a post-socialist society, these conceptualisations seem increasingly problematic in a situation where local and federal policies governing cultural and creative work focus simultaneously on marketization and on nationalism as the main tools of legitimizing the federal government.     

Caring for Cultural Studies

This essay both inaugurates the editorship of Ted Striphas and reflects on the contributions of Cultural Studies’ longtime editor, Lawrence Grossberg. It opens by reflecting briefly on the journal's transformations over the last 28 years before taking stock of the wellbeing of Cultural Studies, the field. The claim here is that Cultural Studies devotes less time and attention than it used to in thinking through first principles, and thus that the future of the field hinges, in part, on asking whether core concepts are up to the task of answering to the urgent political questions of our time. The essay then recontextualizes the concept of culture, specifically with respect to the much-maligned (indeed, deservedly-maligned) ‘high culture’ tradition. In its recesses the author identifies a fugitive theoretical line in which culture signifies care, as opposed to subordination to patrician interests and aesthetic styles. This conceptual move sets the stage for the central argument of the essay, namely, that for Cultural Studies to live up to both its name and intellectual-political ambitions, it must devote significant time to caring for the infrastructure that sustains its body of ideas. The piece concludes by highlighting some of Lawrence Grossberg's efforts, as an infrastructuralist, to care for Cultural Studies and by observing how, moving forward, neither the field nor this journal will take care of itself.     

Assessing localization with its local sociocultural dynamics: how Hong Kong’s localized clubculture was undermined by wealth and power disparities

ABSTRACT

Localization has largely been assessed, by both its supporters and critics, with its local-global sociocultural dynamics. The local sociocultural dynamics of localization have either been ignored or simplistically understood as a ‘preference for the local’ or ‘local empowerment’. This study argues that localization’s local dynamics can be very complex and can yield negative social implications. There are likely multiple subgroups of local consumers, who localize in different ways and degrees due to their different resources, interests, and power positions. These differences likely generate emergent patterns of social contestations, stratification, and inequality. I empirically substantiate this argument by analyzing how Hong Kong’s rave-based clubculture was undermined by wealth and power disparities as it localized in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This study’s major methods include observant participation in dance clubs and rave parties in Hong Kong and informal and formal interviews of consumers and producers of clubculture.     

Operationalising professional supervision in this age of accountabilities

Abstract

The paper reviews the tensions, complexities, risks and ambiguities of the role and tasks of the social work supervisor: these can surface in efforts to negotiate individualised supervision agreements with colleagues and with students. Given the marked lack of national and international research attention to processes in social work supervision, the paper explores the skills, principles and arguments for a suggested model of ‘Developmental Supervision’ — in the context of a framework of supervision practice congruent with the knowledge, skills and values of social work. Finally, there is some exploration of the unintended consequences of ‘Quick-Fix’ Supervision for the cutture of decision-thinking and professional practice.     

The knowledge,skills and qualities needed for social work in a major paediatric teaching hospital

Abstract

The place of aged care in social work has long been ambiguous, if not marginal. Social work (as do other comparable professions) often displays a reluctance to place practice in this field within the core of the profession that embodies aspects of ageism in contemporary society. Working with older people is frequently characterised as ‘mundane’, ‘routine’ and even ‘not “real” social work’. This paper examines the practice implications of the current policy context. Forms of ‘indirect’ practice are identified as central to social work in aged care, and the implications of this for the standing of aged care social work in the wider profession are discussed. It is argued that ‘indirect’ practices are core to the development of the profession and so should be seen as ‘real’ social work. In conclusion, it is suggested that unless social work affirms practice with older people and their families we will fail to be congruent with our own values.     

Teaching & Learning Guide for ‘The Conflictual Model of Analysis in Studies on the Media Representation of Islam and Muslims: A Critical Review’

‘The Conflictual Model of Analysis in Studies on the Media Representation of Islam and Muslims: A Critical Review’ was published in Sociology Compass 9/5 (2015) pp. 321–335, DOI: 10.1111/soc4.12264 . This Teaching and Learning Guide is designed to accompany this article. In brief, the article examined the extent to which various studies on the media representation of Islam and Muslims use the conflictual model analysis that underpins theoretical frameworks, such as Orientalism, Clash of Civilisations, Cultural Racism and Islamophobia. It argued that in the context of a complex multicultural society, conflictual model of analysis is inadequate because it simply employs a binary way of thinking as clearly indicated in ‘the West versus Islam’ paradigm. In response to the inadequacy of this model of analysis, the article proposed an adoption of an alternative dialogical model of analysis in the light of the political theory of recognition. This guide provides useful information regarding the use of this article for teaching and learning purposes. It includes recommendation of readings, online resources, sample syllabus, focus questions and project idea.     

City of Quartz

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the production of Indian ethnicity in the United States through a close reading of the Cultural Festival of India, an event that took place over four weeks in 1991 in Edison, New Jersey. The festival, organized by the Gujarati Hindu sect, Bochasanwasi Swaminarayan Sanstha, presented an extravagant and general vision of ‘India’ for Indian as well as non-Indian Americans through arts performances, shopping displays, food stands and cultural exhibits. The Cultural Festival of India can be seen as an occasion for a new type of ‘imagined community’, or as an instance of diasporic nationalism, that is, produced by immigrant Indians intent on projecting a positive image of themselves, and is steeped in romantic notions of the home country.

As Indians in First World countries form larger and more visible populations, they begin to develop elaborate strategies for constructing associative identities. In the United States, the Indian middle class has chosen the terminology and the historical precedents of ‘ethnicity’ to construct itself as a group within the political and cultural landscapes of a ‘multicultural’ nation. The rapidly expanding Indian capitalist economy simultaneously procures foreign investment through connections maintained with these overseas Indians as well as through a new image projected abroad of India as a source of progress. Nationalism, diaspora, culture and identity become confounded both as theoretical categories and as material forces. The Cultural Festival of India illustrates these developments through the reification of Indian ‘culture’, the portrayal of idealized Indian social values and the celebration of technological innovation. Through an examination of the festival, the article explains the continuities in colonial and postcolonial strategies of building national and transnational communities.     

Is Domestic Abuse an Adult Social Work Issue?

Within a global profession with a stated definition that includes ‘promoting social change and development, social cohesion and the empowerment and liberation of people’ (online), it would be expected that the issue of domestic abuse would be integral to the training and role of all social workers. This article reports on research, which highlighted both a lack of understanding of the role of adult social worker within cases of domestic abuse and also a desire for further training around the issue. However, this article sets out how the current UK (in particular, English) context of social work marginalises the issue of domestic abuse within practice with adults. This marginalisation has been achieved through the construction of domestic abuse as a children and families issue and limited duties, powers and resources within statutory work to support victims/survivors in their own right, rather than as ‘failing’ parents. However, the article argues that the role of social work education should be wider than teaching to the current policy or procedures and instead encourage a wider appreciation of the social, historical and political context. The article concludes with tentative suggestions for how domestic abuse could be considered within the social work curriculum for adult practitioners. This is in acknowledgement that social workers can be well positioned for the detection, investigation and support of those experiencing abuse.