Page 19 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

INTRODUCTION 7

precursor of much recent debate around the figure of Mikhail Bakhtin (and/
or ‘P.N. Medvedev’ and ‘V.N.Volosinov’). This can be seen not only with
reference to the figures of the ‘dialogic imagination’ (see Volosinov, 1973;
Bakhtin, 1981; Bakhtin/Medvedev, 1978), and the symbolic space of
‘carnival’ but also, and most importantly for Hall’s argument here, in the
move from simplistic metaphors of transformation (thought in terms of
mere reversal and substitution) to the more complex metaphors of
transgression (with their implications of hybridity and impurity) which are
the focus of Stallybrass and White’s work, and of Hall’s own more recent
interests.
Part IV (‘Critical postmodernism, cultural imperialism and postcolonial
theory’) opens with Kuan-Hsing Chen’s ‘Post-marxism’ essay, which seeks
to negotiate a site between postmodernism and cultural studies, unravelling
the distinctive histories of what he terms the ‘dominant’ and ‘critical’ forms
of postmodernism, and outlining the possibilities for a post-marxist form
of cultural studies. This is followed by David Morley’s ‘EurAm, modernity,
reason and alterity’ which, rather than commenting directly on Hall’s work
(as we have done so, at length, in this Introduction), takes the opportunity
to develop some more general arguments concerning the linkages between
postmodernism and cultural imperialism. In particular, this essay focuses
on the EurAmerico-centric nature of much postmodern theory, in the
context of debates in contemporary anthropology and geography,
concerning the problematic status of concepts such as ‘the West’ or
‘modernity’, in the wake of the now well-established critique of
‘Orientalism’ (Said, 1978). Jon Stratton and Ien Ang’s ‘On the impossibility
of a global cultural studies’ is a forceful attempt, in a self-reflexive manner,
to confront the politics of ‘internationalizing’ cultural studies. Ang and
Stratton challenge the dominant myths of ‘origins’ presented in various
historical narratives of cultural studies, and seek to open up the possibility
of rethinking the global contexts within which ‘British’ cultural studies is
now constituted, and therefore has to be deconstructed. They are cautious
about the dangers of cultural studies becoming just another academic
discipline. More than anything else, they pinpoint the increasing tendency
of ‘nationalism’ in ‘international’ cultural studies and its tendency towards
a regrettable complicity with the political nation-state. In so far as it takes
the nation-state as the ‘natural’, unreflexively distinctive, and unquestioned
(local) context of analysis, cultural studies reconstitutes national(ist)
boundaries and betrays the fluid political figures of ‘the diasporic, the
postcolonial and the subaltern’. Again, in our view, rather than
reproducing existing global power relations/structures, and rather than
renaming itself as ‘transnational’ or ‘multinational’, cultural studies has to
put on its agenda the issue of how to come up with alternative ways of
operating, if people identified with the project are still to maintain a
counter-hegemonic political position.