A cultural studies without guarantees: response to Kuan-Hsing Chen (original) (raw)
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Perspectives in Cultural Studies I
This course introduces students to the work and significance of representation and power in the understanding of culture as social practice. It helps students to understand the relationships among sign, culture and the making of meanings in society. From this base it approaches the question of ideology and subjectivity in the shaping of culture. With reference to various cultural texts and social contexts, we study examples of cultural production from history and politics to lived experiences of the everyday, from photography and art to cinema and museum, from popular culture to lifestyle etc. In appreciating divergent concerns in the critical analysis of culture and power, we focus on selected topics both mainstream and emergent, with an emphasis on contemporary developments in the Asian contexts. A brief account of the intellectual formations of Cultural Studies will be provided to allow students to appreciate the global, regional and local perspectives in the evolving field of study.
International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies (Volume, 2, Issue2)
Editorial Dear Colleagues and Readers I am so glad to present the sixth issue of the International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies (IJHCS). With this issue, the IJHCS enters its second year with more diligence and confidence. This sixth issue includes different research articles on various topics in humanities, linguistics and cultural studies both in English and French languages. This reflects the multidisciplinary, multilingual and interdisciplinary scope of the IJHCS. This new issue includes works of the research scholars from different countries such Barbados, Brunei, China, Fiji, France, Indonesia, Iraq, Italy, Kenya, Morocco, Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia, and United Arab Emirates. As usual, I sincerely thank our respected authors for selecting the IJHCS, our reviewers for reviewing the selected articles for this issue and the Administrative Board for its contribution to helping the IJHCS achieve this success. With Best Regards, Dr. Hassen Zriba Editor-in-Chief The International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies (IJHCS)
International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies (Volume 2, Issue 1)
Editorial Dear Colleagues, I am so glad to present the fifth issue of the International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies (IJHCS). With this issue, the IJHCS enters its second year with more diligence and confidence. This fifth issue includes different research articles on various topics in humanities, linguistics and cultural studies both in English and French languages. This reflects the multidisciplinary, multilingual and interdisciplinary scope of the IJHCS. This new issue includes works of the research scholars from different countries such Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Fiji, Finland, France, Ghana, Kenya, Kuwait, Iraq, Lesotho, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Tunisia, UK, USA and Zambia. As usual, I sincerely thank our respected contributors for selecting the IJHCS, our reviewers for reviewing the selected articles for this issue and the Administrative Board for its contribution to helping the IJHCS achieve this success. With Best Regards, Dr. Hassen Zriba Editor-in-Chief The International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies (IJHCS)
A Puzzle Constantly Changing Itself: Cultural Studies in the 21st Century A review of
Cultural studies is a field constantly questioning itself, with its practitioners reflecting on its objects of study, methods and the politics of the knowledge it produces. For some, this reflexivity represents a problem with the field. It is seen as a relic of cultural studies' struggle to constitute itself as a particular form of scholarly practice that is no longer necessary because of its increasing institutionalization within the university. For others, this inquisitiveness and commitment to consider its own assumptions are cultural studies' greatest strengths and a reason why the field has the potential to improve our knowledge of a constantly changing world. These positions (and various points between them) have been taken up in a number of recent works on cultural studies, of which I will here discuss Lawrence Grossberg's Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (CSFT), Paul Smith's edited collection e Renewal of Cultural Studies (RCS), and Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader (CCS), edited by Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman and Gail Faurschou. With cultural studies itself as their subject, these works help to provide different perspectives of the field as they map its key themes, issues, and debates. However, they may also be seen as working to take cultural studies into the future, with each book suggesting ways to ensure the discipline's value as an interdisciplinary intellectual and institutional practice.
Cultural Studies Review, 2020
Two prevailing inflections of ‘persistence’ occupy the social imagination. In the first, generally considered the domain of toddlers, journalists and telemarketers, persistence comes as something troublesome, incessant, and largely irritating. In the other, persistence is held as a virtue; a capacity maintained by those capable of ‘seeing things through’. Each version of the term may well share a common foundation (hanging on too long can, after all, descend to irritation), but either way, persistence is a capacity that declares its presence; a signifier of the ‘stuff’ of its bearer, and the nature of the situation. Persistence notifies the intention that whatever may come is here to stay. I want to outline two visions of Cultural Studies in light of these inflections of persistence in order to pose questions of what it is that Cultural Studies should hope to achieve in a world grown precarious. In extension to recent, notable expressions that have surveyed this consideration1, I make the point that Cultural Studies needs to be a little more careful in how it continues to understand itself, and perhaps more crucially, how it should continue to imagine its ‘project’. What I mean by this is that, in this current moment of direct challenge to all that seems reasonable and rational, from multiple angles both within the University (as the primary site of Cultural Studies’ practice; we are institutionalised, after all) and those wider publics from which we claim we speak, it is with the persistence of troubling ways of doing things that Cultural Studies has customarily identified a primary purpose.
History of Cultural Studies (Graduate Seminar)
This course introduces students to the field of cultural studies through an exploration of two distinct yet related questions: where did cultural studies come from, and what has it made possible? As such, we will set out to trace the history of the field and to map the debates, practices, and theories that have informed the political and intellectual project of cultural studies. The goals of the course are twofold: 1) to familiarize students with the texts, thinkers, and traditions that have shaped the ways in which scholars approach the study of culture today; 2) to invite students to reflect critically on their own work and to situate themselves within the larger field. Rather than attempting to answer the question that will inevitably haunt the syllabus – “What is cultural studies?” – we will shift our attention toward the theoretical and disciplinary stakes of raising such a question. Our intention is not to nail down a definition of cultural studies but to examine the polemics and histories that have sparked its delineations. We will read a combination of primary documents and meta-criticism on the emergence of cultural studies in Britain and the United States as well as commentaries on the current state of the field in other national and regional contexts. This course will pay particular attention to the ways in which feminist and queer theory, postcolonial and transnational approaches, and critical race and ethnic studies have shaped the formation of the field and are pushing cultural studies in new directions.