Unruly traditions of critical/cultural studies

ABSTRACT

Much of critical/cultural studies in communication has fallen into a comfortable disciplinarity. This is due in part to its reliance on media studies and the “encoding/decoding” model. This essay renews calls for a more expansive, transgressive, and unruly critical/cultural studies that tackles the complexities of culture, contexts, effects, and power. It focuses on three key points. The first is expanding critical/cultural studies beyond Euroamerican traditions. The next turns to modes of being and consciousness beyond Western history and culture. The final point emphasizes exercising our political imaginations in service of radical world-building.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical/cultural studies
• Black studies
• Beatriz Nascimento
• Amilcar Cabral
• Frantz Fanon

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Dr. Manoucheka Celeste for reading an earlier draft of this essay. I also would like to thank Dr. Eric Watts for inviting me to this special issue and to Dr. Robin Boylorn for stewarding this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972–1979, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (New York: Routledge, 1980), 128–38.

2 Lawrence Grossberg, “Can Cultural Studies Find True Happiness in Communication?” Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 92.

3 Grossberg, “Can Cultural Studies Find True Happiness in Communication?” 94.

4 Ibid., 93.

5 Of course, the latter part of this sentence is gesturing towards the journal’s own framing of culture and communication.

6 C.L.R. James, “Black Studies and the Contemporary Student,” in The C.L.R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 390–404.

7 I say this because too often scholars use a Euroamerican cultural studies framework, with a few Black scholars sprinkled in, to analyze Black people and/or culture and then call that Black cultural studies. The “Black” is not just an additive to a [Euroamerican] cultural studies base. Black studies has its own tradition, critical theory, and mode of thinking that informs Black cultural studies. In his book Black Like Who?: Writing • Black • Canada, Rinaldo Walcott makes a similar argument that, for him, Black cultural studies is the convergence of both Black studies and cultural studies. That is, one must be grounded in both traditions. In communication, this would be then Black studies, cultural studies, and communication. For examples of this, see Fernanda Carrera and Denise Carvalho, “Algoritmos racistas: a hiper-ritualização da solidão da mulher negra em bancos de imagens digitais,” Galáxia (São Paulo) (March 20, 2020): 99–114, https://doi.org/10.1590/1982-25532020141614; Manoucheka Celeste, Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the African Diaspora: Travelling Blackness (New York: Routledge, 2016); Laura Guimarães Corrêa, “Intersectionality: A Challenge for Cultural Studies in the 2020s,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 23, no. 6 (2020): 823–32, https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920944181; Bryce Henson, Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023); John L. Jackson, Jr, Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Ralina L. Joseph, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Muniz Sodré, Claros e escuros: Identidade, povo, mídia e cotas no Brasil, 3rd ed. (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 2015); Armond R. Towns, On Black Media Philosophy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022).

8 Laura Guimarães Corrêa, “Four Concepts to Think from the South,” International Journal of Cultural Studies (2023): 13678779231218395, https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231218395.

9 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004).

10 In O Quilombismo: Documentos de Uma Militância Pan-Africanista, 3rd ed. (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2019), Black Brazilian intellectual Abdias Nascimento critiques Marx’s notion that slavery is necessary for capitalist development with the following: “We still have African slavery treated as a necessary condition to modern industrialism, with it even becoming an ‘economic category’” (translation mine, 198). He goes on to argue that to accept these logics is to also accept the continued colonialization of Angola and Mozambique.

11 See Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!,” in Let Nobody Turn Us Around: An African American Anthology, eds Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 316–26; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill, N.C: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Brooklyn: Verso, 2018).

12 Sueli Carneiro, Escritos de Uma Vida (São Paulo: Pólen Livros, 2019); bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 2003); Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

13 Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History, eds Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2016).

14 Hall, Cultural Studies 1983.

15 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978).

16 Amilcar Cabral, Resistance and Decolonization (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016).

17 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2017); Robinson, Black Marxism.

18 Robinson, Black Marxism, 73–4.

19 Hall, Cultural Studies 1983.

20 See for example Beatriz Nascimento, The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento, eds Christen A. Smith, Bethânia N.F. Gomes, and Archie Davies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023); Robinson, Black Marxism.

21 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).

22 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 97.

23 Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea: An African People’s Struggle (London: Stage 1, 1969). For scholarship on the racialization of Africans in Africa, see the work of Jemima Pierre The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); “Slavery, Anthropological Knowledge, and the Racialization of Africans,” Current Anthropology 61, no. S22 (2020): S220–31, https://doi.org/10.1086/709844; “The Racial Vernaculars of Development: A View from West Africa,” American Anthropologist 122, no. 1 (2020): 86–98, https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13352. as well as Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

24 Emphasis mine, Robinson, Black Marxism, 170–71.

25 For example, see Robin D.G. Kelley’s “Foreword,” in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, ed. Cedric Robinson, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill, N.C: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), xi–xxvi.

26 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 123.

27 Nascimento, The Dialectic Is in the Sea; Robinson, Black Marxism.

28 It bears mentioning that these processes never produced the same sense of being and consciousness. What could be considered African in Brazil could be entirely different than say Cuba, Trinidad, Jamaica, or Guyana. This is the result of not only the different African nations that Black people in the West come from but also the different processes they used in the context of colonialism, slavery, and the modern world to construct this alternative sense of being and consciousness that clashes with hegemonic constructions.

29 Robinson, Black Marxism, 168.

30 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2005).

31 Robinson, Black Marxism, 169.

32 As Nascimento notes, the quilombo can be traced back to the kilombo institution by the Imbangala peoples in Angola. See “The Concept of Quilombo and Black Cultural Resistance,” in The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento, eds Christen A. Smith, Bethânia N.F. Gomes, and Archie Davies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), 246–56. Also, see Clóvis Moura, Quilombos, Resistência Ao Escravismo, Série Princípios, v. 106 (São Paulo: Editora Atica, 1987).

33 Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Robinson, Black Marxism.

34 Pedro Paulo A. Funari and Aline Vieira de Carvalho, “Palmares: A Rebel Polity through Archaeological Lenses,” in Freedom by a Thread: The History of Quilombos in Brazil, eds Flavio Dos Santos Gomes, and Joao Jose Reis (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2016), 19–42.

35 Nascimento, “The Concept of Quilombo and Black Cultural Resistance,” 251.

36 Beatriz Nascimento, “Quilombo: Em Palmares, Na Favela, No Carnaval,” in Beatriz Nascimento, Quilombola e Intelectual: Possibilidade Nos Dias Da Destruição (Editora Filhos da África, 2018), 189–94; Beatriz Nascimento, “Historiografia Do Quilombo,” in Beatriz Nascimento, Quilombola e Intelectual: Possibilidade Nos Dias Da Destruição (Editora Filhos da África, 2018), 125–65.

37 Henson, Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil.

38 See also Antônio Bispo dos Santos, A Terra Dá, a Terra Quer (São Paulo: Ubu Editora, 2023).

39 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York City: Oxford University Press, USA, 2007); David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, USA, 2010).

40 Robinson, Black Marxism, 3.

41 Robin D. G. Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?,” Text, Boston Review, January 12, 2017, http://bostonreview.net/race/robin-d-g-kelley-what-did-cedric-robinson-mean-racial-capitalism.

42 João Costa Vargas and Joy James, “Refusing Blackness-as-Victimization: Trayvon Martin and the Black Cyborgs,” in Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations, eds George Yancy and Janine Jones (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 193.

43 Harvey, The Enigma of Capital; Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism; Michael Hanchard, The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York, NY: Picador, 2003); Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2019).

44 For more on the false equivalencies between freedom and liberation, see Rinaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation: Moving toward Black Freedom (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).

45 Paul Joseph López Oro, “Black Caribs/Garifuna: Maroon Geographies of Indigenous Blackness,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 25, no. 3 (66) (2021): 134–46, https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9583488; Kyle T. Mays, “Decolonial Hip Hop: Indigenous Hip Hop and the Disruption of Settler Colonialism,” Cultural Studies 33, no. 3 (2019): 460–79, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2019.1584908; Tiara R. Na’puti, “‘The Ocean Is Our Legacy:’ Values of Care and Reciprocity,” Environmental Communication, 2023, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17524032.2023.2296841; Tiara R Na’puti and Sylvia C Frain, “Indigenous Environmental Perspectives: Challenging the Oceanic Security State,” Security Dialogue 54, no. 2 (2023): 115–36, https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106221139765; Alvaro Reyes and Mara Kaufman, “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, Territory: Zapatista Autonomy and the New Practices of Decolonization,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (2011): 505–25, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1162561.

46 Cedric Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019).