CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
PLENARY ABSTRACTS
Global Movements of
Crops Since the ‘Age of Discovery’ and Changing Culinary Cultures
Akhil Gupta
In this talk, I take a critical look at discourses of
globalization, using the movement of food crops and shifting culinary practices
to reflect on the long history of globalization. By examining crops such as
spices and sugarcane, I argue that food and foodstuffs might have played a
critical, if underappreciated, role in the story of globalization. The spice
trade played a critical role in the history of colonization during and after the
'Age of Discovery,' and, in the process, altered cuisines, cropping patterns,
and consumption habits around the world.
The Americanization of Subjectivity: A View of Globalization
from Asia Pacific
Ming-Bao Yue
In light of the symbolic significance and economic power
"globalization" has acquired in the 21st century, one of the most
urgent tasks for cultural critics today is to draw attention to the fundamental
unevenness of economic developments and the increased level of violence it has
generated in many countries. In order to gain a better understanding of the
growing transnational disparity between wealth and poverty, privilege and
disadvantage, and knowledge and ignorance, it is necessary to question the
ethico-political foundations of global capitalism. To be sure, the rapid
expansion of this economic trend would not be possible without the ambiguous
benefits of a cultural homogenization process which might be called the
americanization of subjectivity. While this process is not simply reducible to
the "Disneyfication" or "MacDonaldization" of human desire,
it does imply a particular way of conceptualizing social awareness and
collective identity that successfully obscures education as elitism, politics as
propaganda, and ignorance as individualism. But more importantly perhaps, the
americanization of subjectivity also refers to the emergence of global
discursive climate that universalizes US-inflected notions of democracy,
equality, and human rights. Acknowledging the rapid development of
inter-cultural, trans-cultural and multi-cultural communication networks all
around the world, this paper intends to focus on this yet unexamined aspect of
global identity trans-formation from the standpoint and experience of diverse
communities in Asia-Pacific, with a special emphasis on Hawaii. In doing so,
this paper hopes to initiate a series of interrogations, conversations, and
contestations generated by the following types of questions: Whose global
imaginary is at stake in current debates on globalization? For whom is the Cold
War already over and who is still affected by it? Is de-americanization
co-extensive with decolonization or does it require another form of critical
intervention? What are the alternatives to the americanization of global
subjectivity, i.e. can the process of popularizing democracy and technology lead
to a truly common humanity?
The
Value Chain of Meaning: from Cultural Studies to Creative Industries?
John Hartley
Cultural Studies is a philosophy of plenty,
differing from modernist notions of scarcity. It is convergent with the
creative industries both are exploring new ways of understanding the ‘value
chain’ of production, distribution and consumption. Critical and business
attention has shifted decisively to the consumer end of the chain --
location of Foucault’s ‘plenitude of the possible.’ A long-term
historical shift has also occurred along the ‘value chain of meaning,’
from author, through text, to reader. Indeed, the paper analyses a number of
similar shifts: in interpretive and creative forms; types of literacy;
citizenship; and modes of political address. Recognition of the historic
drift along various ‘value chains’ may assist analysts to avoid
evaluating emergent forms with legacy criteria. ‘Quality’ and ‘value’
may be easier to determine if we’re all on the same link of the chain.
What they might comprise in a philosophy of plenty remains an open question
(a question for Crossroads).
A
Perfect Match?
Tracing meeting points between political theory and cultural studies
Anu Kantola
How to study citizenship from the direction
of cultural studies? The talk tries to approach this question by looking at
the changing conditions and forms of contemporary citizenship.
Institutional politics have become
increasingly market oriented, consensual and therapeutic. This emerging form
of political governance relies on consensual expertise and paternal care
rather than on political differences and ideologies. These changes have an
impact on the ways citizenship is defined and articulated. The classical
ideals of an active polis citizenship, i.e. the ideas of dialogue, joint
political action and political process, seem to be loosing momentum.
Especially the state bound citizenship is loosing its ability to provide
means for meaningful political action and identities. Instead citizenship is
to an increasing extent defined by market oriented discourses and
institutions, which are constructing identities and governance overlapping
with the traditional political citizenship. There emerges a privatised
citizen who is making individual choices and facing alone also the
individualising market discipline. As political theory tends to concentrate
on political institutions and systems, it often fails to understand the
dynamics of citizenship. In order to overcome to problem cultural studies
could look at the cultural changes in the centres of political and economic
power in order to understand the changing conditions of citizenship. At the
same time cultural studies could look at the citizens' experiences in the
changing conditions.
Why is
Television still so National in the Age of Trans-Nationalization?
Domestication and Nationalization of Television in Post-war Japan
Shunya Yoshimi
In Japan, most of the early TV sets were placed
not in the home but on street corners, where large numbers of people gathered.
Thus, in the mid-1950s television was something like an "Open Air
Theater". People thronged around the tiny screens, especially when popular
professional wrestling matches were taking place. In this paper, I will first
show how television was domesticated from the street corner to the living room
after the end of the 1950s. During the 1960s, television became a symbol of
Japanese national identity and came to be seen as one of the new "Sacred
Treasures" of the modern family (based on the idea of the three
"Sacred Treasures" that had symbolized the emperor's legitimacy:
mirror, sword and jewel). Thus, the TV set functioned not only in McLuhan's
sense of the "media as message", but as the "affective
setting" of the national identity. At the same time, major Japanese TV
programs developed rapidly, and some "classic" programs appeared. An
interesting aspect of these emerging programs is the way they narrated history.
Especially on NHK, two very popular series from the early 1960s constituted the
narrative of "national history". Furthermore, the gender division is
clearly expressed in the audiences and images portrayed respectively in these
series. For the male audience, the heroic history of Japanese Samurai in the
16th century is presented, while for female viewers, the hard experience of
adversity during World War II is emphasized.
In the 1990s, while Japanese TV corporations
have tried to trans-nationalize their organizations, there has been no weakening
of the ideological control over their programming. For example, in January 2001,
the president of the NHK Corporation ordered a major revision in the content of
a documentary on the Asian comfort women who suffered at the hands of the
Japanese army, just before the program was due to be broadcast. The main reason
for this intervention was that the program showed Emperor Hirohito as bearing
war responsibility. Today, although television is no longer seen as a
"Sacred Treasure" by most Japanese, criticism of the emperor and
coverage of the comfort women problem is still taboo. I want to consider why
such nationalistic elements retain their tenacious hold on Japanese television
even in the age of the trans-nationalization of the media.
What`s `Home` Got to Do with It? The
Domestication of Technology and the Dislocation of Domesticity
David Morley
This paper will explore some of the contradictory dynamics in
play in the dual processes of the domestication of media and communications
technologies in the household and the current transformation of the idea of
`home` itself. The paper will attempt to integrate perspectives developed in
earlier work on family/household uses of information and communication
technologies with questions about the supposed dematerialisation of
place-based identities in a `post-geographical` world of all-round electronic
connexity. Current visions of the technological future will be addressed in
the context of the `politics of dislocation` - at both micro and maco levels -
of contemporary forms of identity and subjectivity.
Six Theses on Class, Global
Capital and Resistance
by Education and Other Cultural Workers
Dave Hill
1. Global Capital, in its current
Neo-Liberal form in particular, leads to human degradation and inhumanity
and increased social class inequalities within states and globally. This
process is accelerating.
These effects are:
- increasing (racialised and gendered)
social class inequality within states
- increasing (racialised and gendered)
social class inequality between states
- degradation and capitalisation of
humanity
- environmental degradation impacting
primarily in a social class related manner
2. Social Class exploitation- the
development of (`raced' and gendered) social class- based `labour-power'
and the subsequent extraction of `surplus value'- is the fundamental
characteristic of Capitalism. It is the primary explanation for economic,
political, cultural and ideological change.
It is the:
- essential form of capitalist
exploitation and oppression
- dominant form of capitalist
exploitation and oppression
3. Education and the Media are the
dominant Ideological State Apparatuses.
Each of these Ideological State
Apparatuses contains disciplinary Repressive moments and effects.
Each has the functions of (gendered and `raced') social class based
- Economic Reproduction
- Ideological Reproduction
- Cultural Reproduction.
4. Global Neo-Liberal Capital and its
international and national apparatuses have an anti-human and
anti-critical agenda for Education and the Media.
Within Education, this comprises a:
- Business Agenda for Schooling and
Education
- Business Agenda in Schooling and
Education
- New Public Managerialism mode of
organisation and control
5. Forms and Ideologies of Resistance to
Neo-Liberal Capital should be critiqued from a democratic structuralist
neo-Marxist political and ideological perspective.
Thus non-Marxist political forces fail to
recognise and combat the essentially class-based oppressive nature of
Neo-Liberal Capital. Such forces include Extreme Right Racist/Fascist,
Extreme Right Populist, Conservative neo-liberal, Third Way/ Revised
Social Democratic (e.g. Die Neue Mitte/ New Labour), Christian Democratic,
centre-Left Social Democratic, and religious fundamentalist movements and
parties.
Similarly, the ideological support
systems for such forces within the Academy and the Media fail to recognise
and thereby work to suppress Marxist analysis and programmes. Support
systems for Capital include not only various of the above movements,
parties and their political ideologies.
Support systems for Capital within
Educational and Media and Cultural Studies include, to varying degrees,
Critical Theory, culturalist neo-Marxist analyses and programmes. They
also include ludic postmodernist and resistance postmodernist (non-)
programmes where programmatic metanarratives are debilitatingly eschewed
by postmodernists as oppressive.
6. Critical Revolutionary Education for
Economic and Social Justice can play a role in resisting the depredations
and the `common-sense' of Global Neo-Liberal Capital and play a role in
developing class-consciousness and an egalitarian sustainable future.
Critical Revolutionary Education for
Economic and Social Justice is where teachers and other Cultural Workers
act as Critical Transformative and Public Intellectuals within and outside
of sites of economic, ideological and cultural reproduction. Such activity
is both deconstructive and reconstructive, offering a Utopian Politics of
Anger, Analysis and Hope based on a materialised Critical Pedagogy that
recognises, yet challenges, the strength of the structures and apparatuses
of Capital.
Such activity encompasses activity within
different arenas of Resistant and Revolutionary activity. These arenas
encompass
- Activism within the Cultural Sites of
Schooling/Education and the Media within the workforce, within the
curriculum/ knowledge validation systems, and within pedagogy/social
relations
- Activism locally outside of these
sites, exposing the Capitalist reproductive nature of those sites both
per se, and Activism locally, linked to other sites of economic,
ideological and cultural contestation, mobilisations and struggle
- Activism within Mass movements, United
Fronts, and within democratic Marxist/ Socialist groupings, fractions
and organisations.
On the Matrix of Hybridisation: Challenges to the Frames of
Representation and Communication of Knowledge
Yvonne Spielmann
Changes in the production, access and communication of knowledge
under the sign of digitization and mediatization demonstrate that we need other
forms of literacy to understand cross-relations and transformations within and
between different forms of media culture. The problem of defining parameters of
knowledge production and forms of representation results from the increase of
hybridisation. In order to come to terms with hybrid phenomena viewed together
on an intercultural and intermedial level, I propose "Cultural
literacy" as a concept that works on different media levels and also
address shifts in cultural processes as these have effects on 'global cultures'
and the manufacturing of 'knowledge', encompassing decentralisation, media
convergence and networked communications
The End(s) of
Critical Pedagogy
Handel Kashope
With many prominent critical pedagogy theorists and critics
(Elizabeth Ellsworth, Henry Giroux, Patti Lather, Peter McLaren, Roger
Simon) apparently having moved on- Ellsworth to feminist pedagogy and
media studies, Giroux to cultural studies, Lather to feminist qualitative
research, McLaren to multiculturalism and Simon to memorywork, it appeared
that the theorizing of critical pedagogy (as opposed to its thriving
application as educational praxis) had died. Whether its final gasps or
indications of a revival, a recent flurry of activity (e.g. 1998 special
issue of Educational Theory and the forthcoming (2002) special issue of
Educational Philosophy and Theory on critical pedagogy), has signaled the
patient is still alive. However, the essays of the revived theorizing of
critical pedagogy reiterate (though with some interesting changes in
political and discursive emphasis) the gendered impasse the discourse was
thrown into in the early-1990s (1991 special issue of Education and
Society). Feminists like Lather assert that the future of critical
pedagogy lies in more modest poststructuralist investigation of local and
personal pedagogy while male neo-Marxists like McLaren assert that the
future of critical pedagogy lies in a more expansive political economy
based examination of global capital. This divergence has not only created
an impasse but has probably contributed to the turn away from theorizing
critical pedagogy in North America. In this paper, I point to the
arguments that have contributed to the current impasse and attempt to use
both a black identity/identification politics, the notion of a floating
signifier and Stuart Hall's notion of a politics without guarantees as
tools for moving beyond the current impasse. More specifically, I argue
that critical pedagogy be (re)conceptualized as a floating signifier and
that "function" dictate the version of the discourse most apt
for different projects. Secondly, I use the example of blackness to point
to the fact that the revived theorizing of critical pedagogy de-emphasizes
social difference and I indicate how addressing the politics of
representation could contribute to the revival of a vibrant and
utilitarian theorizing of critical pedagogy. Without holding up this point
as a guarantee I conclude that addressing the ends of critical pedagogy in
a much more flexible manner is crucial to staving off the end of the
critical pedagogy.
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