Page 196 - Cultural Theory

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••• Reconceptualizing Representation and Identity •••

practiced in many different parts of the world … and is rapidly becoming a
central site for critical intellectualism in the postmodern, postcolonial, post-
communist new world (dis)order.
(ibid.)

Cultural studies has now become recognized as a global interdisciplinary forum for a
range of intellectual and political debates and has been significant for advancing the
transcultural and transnational framing of debates on conceptualizations of repre-
sentation and identity. The focus of the second part of the chapter is on the concepts
of representation and identity as organizing principles for examining debates in the
area of cultural studies, film and media. It examines how feminist and postcolonial
theorists have interrogated cultural and filmic discourses in the process of reconcep-
tualizing colonial representation, subjectivity and identity.

The politics of representation and the construction of identity:
cultural studies – ‘transborder cultural flows’

Cultural studies has been the interdisciplinary matrix where contested debates on
representation and identity, the global (international) and the local (national), the
hegemonic ‘centre’ (Britain, America) and the ‘margins’ (Australia, Canada, New
Zealand) have occupied centre stage. As McKenzie Wark observes:

The growth of cultural studies, seen from the point of view of the effects of the
development of new media technologies, is part of the phenomenal increase in
1
the volume and velocity of transborder cultural flows that are increasingly
marking all of us into ‘cruising grammarians’, to borrow a phrase from Morris
(1988: 195).
(Wark, 1992: 435)

Wark’s argument has significant implications for those concerned with issues of cul-
tural hegemony. Writers and theorists such as Simon During claim that cultural stud-
ies has now developed into ‘a genuine global movement’ reminding us, (1993: 13),
however, that the ‘Australian cultural studies critic Meaghan Morris’s critical obser-
vation that “the word international” comes to work in cultural studies as it does in
the film and record industries as a euphemism for a process of streamlining work to
be “interesting” to American and European audiences’ (Morris, 1992a: 456).
The response of those involved in cultural studies ‘at the margins’ is, as Stratton
and Ang note, ‘the appropriation of the specifying category of the “post-colonial” by
Australian, Canadian and New Zealand practitioners of cultural studies’ (1996: 367).
They claim that this can be seen as ‘the strategic invocation of an alternative frame
of meaning of “international”, one that counters the hegemonic “world” order led
by American and British cultural studies’ (ibid.). While wary of those who uncritically
take ‘the national as the privileged site of the particular’ because of the inherent risks
of exclusivity, Stratton and Ang argue for a reconsideration of the ‘concrete, process
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