Page 56 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

little, one cannot help but feel: the invariable consequence of “going
through” nationality has been not its supersession but rather its
installation into a position of monopolistic cultural privilege, typically
the central site and source of a more or less conservative cultural
hegemony.
The left culturalist challenge to literary studies has been consistently
overshadowed in recent years and, as it were, out-radicalized by new
theoretical perspectives associated, in turn, with Western Marxism,
second wave feminism, structuralism and post-structuralism. Moreover,
each of these has very often affected a certain self-conscious theoretical
cosmopolitanism, essentially both anti-empirical and anti-nationalist
in character. It is to these other intellectual radicalisms that we turn in
the chapters that follow. But this is not to suggest that the theoretical
and practical questions typically posed by culturalisms of the left and
of the right were somehow either resolved or transcended. Quite the
contrary. The matters at issue in these older debates over community
and culture, class and nation, have repeatedly returned to haunt both
literary and cultural studies. The pretensions to theoretical and practical
adequacy variously advanced for Marxism and feminism, structuralism
and post-structuralism, will thus be adjudicated, in part at least, precisely
by the decision as to how well they each propose new answers these
older culturalist questions.

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