Page 53 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

CULTURALISM

The first of these two objections bears very directly on the subject
matter of those recent debates over “postmodernism” to which we
will turn in Chapter 6. To anticipate the argument a little, we need
only note here that many commentators have attributed a peculiarly
transnational character both to socio-economic postmodernity and
to cultural postmodernism. Such transnational cultural forms can be
represented as in some ways peculiarly American and, no doubt, this
internationalization has been massively facilitated by the brief American
imperium that endured for much of the second half of the twentieth
century. But the resultant politico-economic and cultural configurations
are no longer in any meaningful sense specifically American. Wherever
the origins of science fiction and jazz, rock and the Hollywood movie,
these have become internationally available cultural forms, part of
the common cultural heritage of the species. Postmodernity thus
threatens to reduced to redundancy all cultural nationalisms, including
the American. We already read Latin American novels and watch
Italian soccer on TV; we already live in a world in which Welsh people
will happily queue to watch a Scottish actor perform in an American
movie based on the bestselling novel by an Italian semiotician. The
problem for cultural theory and for cultural studies is to render this
actually existing transnational postmodernity comprehensible, and
thereby hopefully changeable. Neither traditional English studies nor
radical nationalist cultural criticism seem fully appropriate to the
task.
Williams’s own later work did in fact engage with arguments of
this kind. His Towards 2000, for example, displayed a very strong
sense of the internationalization of the contemporary world order. To
the “official community” of nation-states such as “the Yookay”, he
sought to counterpose an internationalism that would nonetheless be
compatible with the “lived and formed identities” of the “minority
peoples”, not only the Welsh, but also the Scots, Irish and West Indian,
and even the English “regions”. The particularities of the Welsh and
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the complexities of a “paranational” world system thus became
simultaneously more pressing than the peculiarities of a Britain
understood as English, an England understood as “the South”, and a
South understood as its ruling and intermediate classes. For Williams,
then, cultural internationalization threatens to subvert the false totalities
of the existing nation-state rather than the subnationalisms of more
local proto-communities. No doubt, he has a point: insofar as the

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