Reorienting culture for decolonization

Abstract

I argue that decolonizing the practice of cultural studies calls for caution around the proposal to incorporate ‘other knowledges’. I posit Aotearoa New Zealand as a critically productive space for interrogating such moves precisely because it is often described as having ‘successfully’ incorporated indigenous knowledges in cultural studies, and in other cultural and institutional spheres. The implication of inclusion and perhaps even embodiment of such knowledges is haunted on the one hand by connotations of appropriation of indigenous resources for the legitimation of the colonialist hegemony and, on the other hand, by the emergence of commodified indigenous knowledge in the era of neo-liberal capitalism and the global cultural market. I invoke Frow and Morris's characterization of cultural studies as ‘suspicious of those totalising notions of culture which assume … the achievement of a whole and coherent “society” or “community”’ (1993, ix), along with Latouche's (1984) account of critical epistemology, to argue that even in-group cultural research in order to ‘know’ and record a culture risks fixing that culture as an object of knowledge, and is at least in tension with the project of revitalizing it. Cultural studies, to the extent that it is committed to the imperative of ongoing critique, and its challenge to discourses of reified and institutionalized culture, propose potentially more enabling pathways to the decolonization of culture than those committed to preserving culture in the name of tradition, or to entrepreneurial agency, subsuming culture to the instrumental terms of the neo-liberal market.

Notes

1. See Smith and Wevers (2003) and Bell and Matthewman (2004). This implicitly questions Graeme Turner's claim that ‘the British influence [in cultural studies] … didn't necessarily assist in the production of an indigenized or locally inflected version of cultural studies in various locations. Whereas Australia was quick to develop such a version … New Zealand is arguably still to do this’ (2012, 11). While Turner traced cultural studies' ‘move from the [British] diasporic to the indigenous’ (144), he used the term ‘indigenous’ ‘in its broadest sense, to invoke forms of identity and locality rather than to reference the participation of … First Peoples or indigenous communities’, a participation that he describes as being ‘as rare in cultural studies as it is in most humanities disciplines in the West’ (151).

2. Throughout this essay I use macrons over Māori words that call for them other than when I quote from sources that do not use macrons.

3. I interpret the CSAA call for papers as somewhat different from Turner's (2012) attention to ‘internationalization’ of cultural studies. Where the latter emphasizes the development of local cultural studies practices outside of the Anglo-American (or European) academies, the former reflects more, I think, on how transnational and cross-cultural work might reorient cultural studies within the Anglo-derived practices of Australasian cultural studies. The two are not, of course, in principle mutually exclusive.

4. This highly contested term ranges in reference from a programme and policy to a visionary ideal. It is variously posited as socio-cultural aspiration, as de facto condition, as limited and exclusionary in its binary formulation, and as betrayal of historical assurances of cultural sovereignty given by the Crown to Māori at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840). It has a vast critical literature, but for an overview (see Prentice 2009).

5. The phrase ‘situated movements of cultural practice’ echoes the formulation of ‘situated knowledges’, which I discuss below. ‘Situated knowledges’ is a term most readily associated with Donna Haraway's work. Her article in Feminist Studies, ‘Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’ (1988) was republished as Chapter 9 of her Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991). My references will be to the article in Feminist Studies.

6. This point has much in common with Homi Bhabha's account of ‘cultural difference’ as importantly distinguished from ‘cultural diversity’ (1994, 34; see also 162–3).

7. Haraway argued that ‘Relativism is the perfect mirror twin of totalization in the ideologies of objectivity; both deny the stakes in location, embodiment, and partial perspective’ (1988, 584).

8. A similar concern was registered by the editors of Postcolonial Ecologies: ‘While we argue for the necessity to map the diversity of ecological discourse and its representations of alterity, an uncritical turn to other spaces of natural knowledge can also produce “environmental orientalism” (Sawyer and Agrawal)… Without considering … structural, historical, and methodological issues, a shallow green transnationalism may romanticize “primitive ecological wisdom”’ (Deloughrey and Handley 2011, 20).