Page 194 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

RATIONALITY

The meanings of ‘race’ change and are struggled over so that different groups are
differentially racialized and subject to different forms of racism. Thus there are
racisms rather than a single racism. Further, the meanings of race differ between,
say, the United States and Britain. In Britain, the arrival of migrants from the 171
Caribbean and Indian sub-continent in the 1950s enabled racialization to occur in
and through the category of national identity. However, the history of the modern
United States began with the dispossession and genocide of native American
peoples and continued through the long history of slavery. Thus, questions of race
are posed at the very inception of the United States in ways that are more
longstanding, but less concerned with nationality, than in Britain.
Links Anti-essentialism, ethnicity, identity, national identity, performativity, representation

Radway,Janice (1949– ) Janice Radway is Frances Hill Fox Professor in Humanities at
Duke University (USA). Radway has written extensively on issues of gender, popular
culture, ethnography and the subjects of reading and literary consumption in the
age of mass media. Her current research interests are in the history of literacy and
reading in the United States, particularly as they bear on the lives of women. She
is perhaps best known for her book Reading the Romance, an ethnographic study of
the ways women read romantic fiction and the uses to which it is put. She has also
explored the act of reading in relation to the Book-of-the-Month Club where she
examines issues of class, gender and literary taste.
• Associated concepts Active audience, consumption, gender, reading, text, writing.
• Tradition(s) Cultural studies, ethnography, feminism, hermeneutics.
• Reading Radway, J. (1987) Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular
Literature. London: Verso.

Rationality The concept of rationality refers to the grounds on which beliefs are held:
namely, that they are coherent, logical and compatible with experience. That is,
rational beliefs and actions are said to be the outcome of sound reasoning and valid
inference. Since it is irrational to hold beliefs known to be false, then rationality
implies that the grounds for holding beliefs are the foundations of truth.
The modern and/or Enlightenment conception of rationality has upheld the idea
of a universal rationality that underpins science and other logical methods by
which to pursue and discover immutable truths. Enlightenment philosophy of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose legacy still remains in contemporary
realist epistemology, championed rationality as the source of progress in knowledge
and society as it demystified religion, myth and superstition. By contrast,
poststructuralism, postmodernism and pragmatism all argue that truth and
knowledge are perspectival in character and do not possess metaphysical,
transcendental or universal properties. In this view, since truth and knowledge are
specific to particular times and spaces, there cannot be a single form of rationality
that is able to grasp the ‘objective’ character of the world.
Most writers in cultural studies accept the idea that rationality is grounded in the
rule-governed social and cultural conventions of local reason-giving rather than in