Cultural Literacies in Transition

ABSTRACT

The topic of this special issue is Cultural Literacies in Transition. Contemporary societal transitions raise a number of important questions about what can or should currently be considered as relevant or valuable knowledge about culture and the arts, about what is currently considered to be the societal and educational value of knowledge about and engagement with culture and the arts, both in policy as well as in the public debate, and about the ways cultural institutions address their changing and increasingly even contested roles as mediator and go-between of such literacies. This introduction sets the scene for the special issue and introduces the different contributions.

KEYWORDS:

• cultural literacies
• societal transitions
• policy
• public debate
• institutions

This edition of Critical Arts focuses on Cultural Literacies in Transition, a focus that raises some important questions from the outset, given that “cultural literacies” is an umbrella term for a broad range of approaches and discussions about the importance, necessity, desirability or even possibility of producing and reproducing “knowledge” about culture and the arts, ranging from more conservative to very critical approaches about what cultural literacies are or should be. Adding the question of how cultural literacies are currently “in transition” adds an additional complexity to the discussion as there are currently many transitions at play in (radically) different cultural, geographical and geopolitical contexts. The notion of transition also makes clear that a reflection about what cultural literacies are, can or should be, is always restricted to a specific temporal context. An exploration of “cultural literacies in transition” is therefore inevitably a “history of the present moment” and an “anthropology of the current condition”.

Traditional approaches to cultural literacy emphasized the importance of a shared (national) imagined community, achieved by the reading of books—or at least an engagement with traditional media—and a cultural canon. This traditional approach often started from a problematization of an increased lack of such cultural knowledge and emphasized the importance on an individual as well as on a societal level to “remedy” or “cure” this lack (from this perspective the notion of cultural literacy was coined by the literary critic E.D. Hirsch; on this see e.g., Hirsch 1988, 2006, 2010; Soetaert, Mottart, and Verdoodt 2004; Soetaert and Rutten 2013). Although the conception that “relevant” knowledge about culture and the arts constitutes (Western) High Culture—and as such should be at the core of the curriculum—has of course for a long time already been strongly criticized from a broad range of perspectives (e.g. Graff 1991, 1995; Eldred and Mortensen 1992; Luke 1997; Williams and Zenger 2007; Hall 2008; Bryson 2012), this idea still rings true in more conservative approaches to the importance of cultural literacy, sometimes combined with a nostalgic longing for an idealized past. However, the past few decades there has been an increasing exploration of what cultural literacies can or should imply in the current globalized, pluralized and media-saturated condition (Graff 2003; Street 2005; Duffy 2003, 2004; Lanham 2006; Hartley 2009; Rutten et al. 2013; Tomaselli and Mboti 2013).

Contemporary societal transitions indeed raise a number of important questions about what can or should currently be considered as relevant or valuable knowledge about culture and the arts (i.e. about the specific content of cultural literacies), about what is currently considered to be the societal and educational value of knowledge about and engagement with culture and arts both in policy as well as in the public debate (i.e. about the potential functions and value of culture and the arts for individuals and for society) and about the ways cultural institutions address their changing and increasingly even contested roles as mediator and go-between (or gate-keeper) of knowledge about culture and the arts.

This special issue seeks to reframe the discussion about cultural literacies by critically addressing a number of interrelated perspectives. The concept of literacy in general and cultural literacy in particular needs to be approached as a normative concept that is embedded in a highly selective (and for some even problematic) approach towards economic progress, political democracy, and social, cultural and educational mobility (Bryson 2012). This has been referred to as the so-called “literacy myth” and there has been a vast growing body of research that critically addresses the possibility and the implications of becoming “literate”, and more specifically on whose terms and for what purposes this transition into cultural literacy occurs (Graff 1991, 1995; Eldred and Mortensen 1992; NLG 1996; Gee 1999; Street 2005; Mortensen 2012). This implies that if we want to explore cultural literacies as “equipment” (Rutten 2011) to navigate the complexities of contemporary society, we need to be critical about the normativity of what it implies to “become” culturally literate and what this implies for different forms of cultural knowledges. What counts as a legitimate argument when discussing the value of knowledge about culture and the arts is also inevitably related to particular perspectives on its societal functions. This implies we need a critical examination of the claims that are made about the “importance” and “value” of culture and the arts for individuals and for society and therefore we also need to focus on the larger societal context in which this debate is taking place. Furthermore, we need to re-asses the (institutionalized) spaces where such mediation of cultural knowledges takes place.

For this special issue, we therefore collected contributions that explore cultural literacies by focusing on the following discussions: What is currently considered to be valuable knowledge about culture, art and aesthetics? How is this knowledge being challenged and how is it redefined? What does this imply for (art) education and for the curriculum in general? How are the (societal) functions of culture and the arts framed in the public and academic debate? What are the societal and educational values that are attributed to knowledge about and engagement with the arts? What is the role of cultural and art institutions? What new forms of cultural mediation are emerging or how can such new forms be conceptualized, specifically in an increasingly media-saturated society?

This special issue builds on the large body of multi-disciplinary work on (cultural) literacies that has been developed over the past few decades (for an overview, see for example Rutten et al. 2013). It is impossible to revisit this debate within the scope of this introduction or even within the scope of this special issue as a whole. We follow Mortensen’s (2012) lead who states:

I have just compressed an enormous amount of multi-disciplinary thought about literacy into a handful of sentences that lack nuance [… .] What is important here are not details, but rather recognition that the details inform what has become a distinct field of academic inquiry, literacy studies. (770)

While Mortensen (2012) recognizes the importance and legitimacy of claiming disciplinary expertise, he emphasizes that in the field of (cultural) literacy studies, there is “a yearning for literacy to have nameable—or even blameable—consequences” (770, emphasis added, see also Rutten et al. 2013) and he therefore argues that the question “does literacy have consequences, and if so, what are they?” (770), needs to be explored in a broad range of geographical, disciplinary and institutional spaces that are also invested in understanding and theorizing what literacy is and what it does, and thus in what cultural literacies are and what they do. For this special issue, we have therefore collected contributions from different geopolitical contexts, from different disciplinary and institutional spaces, and from different approaches towards literacy (from more straightforward to very critical), that explore how cultural literacies are defined, practiced, contested and negotiated in relation to current and contextualized societal transitions.

Contributions

In the first contribution, Geopoetic Praxis in European Diversity/ Decoloniality, Hari Prasad Adhikari-Sacré, Hoda Siahtiri and Kopano Maroga introduce the notion of geopoetics to explore the position of their performance art in current debates on race, gender and sexuality. They specifically speak from a position of displacement in Belgium, where they engage in decolonial work in art and academia. By each writing from different translocalities, the authors bring together European, South-African, Nepali, Iranian, sexual, gendered, religious and racial geographies into geopoetics and they explore what “geopoetics as praxis” implies in their respective academic-artistic practices. Based on these practices, the authors present different, but interconnected perspectives on literacy and they develop a shared framework for exploring “translocal disidentifications as geopoetic literacy”. As such, the issue opens with an exploration of what cultural literacies imply in different “geopoetic” (rather than geopolitical) relationalities.

The next set of articles focuses on cultural literacies from the perspective of transitions in technology and digitization. In their contribution Beyond Rebellion of the Net: Infrastructural Commoning as Critical Cultural Literacy, Gabriela Méndez Cota and Alberto López Cuenca develop a critical discussion of the recent cultural and political history of artistic engagements with digital technologies in contemporary Mexico, specifically by exploring these in relation to changing notions of cultural literacy under neoliberal globalization. The authors postulate that despite the fact that educational social research in Latin America has its own critical traditions for studying literacy as a social practice that is embedded in specific power relations, art theory and criticism in Mexico has thus far not extensively raised the question of what the relevance is of new media art in relation to questions of (cultural) literacy. The authors aim to address this gap by exploring how artistic engagements with digital technologies developed cultural experimentation with grassroots political struggles and mediated processes of economic and technological transformation. The authors furthermore argue that new media art introduced questions of digital commoning as a concern for cultural literacy and they plead for a non-instrumental and open-ended infrastructural understanding of the educational role in relation to current and ongoing historical conjunctures.

In their article, Integrative Research in Art and Science: A Framework for Proactive Humanities, Micheline Lesaffre and Marc Leman argue that cultural developments that are increasingly driven by innovative technology, necessitate a reconsideration of the role of the humanities as a field of study that integrates art and science. The authors claim that such an integration would generate possibilities for the humanities to work towards a more proactive approach that can co-steer and co-develop innovative developments in the current techno-culture. The authors make their argument based on art-science research in contexts where specifically interaction with multimedia is studied. In this domain, the humanities can contribute to cultural developments by integrating art-science research on human interaction, interaction systems and cultural and societal interaction outcomes. From this perspective, the authors postulate that the humanities should have a new ambition in which knowledge about culture (i.e. cultural literacy) is not only reflective, critical and descriptive, but also has the intrinsic power to actively contribute to innovative techno-cultural developments.

The following paper focuses specifically on the affordances of new technologies for critically engaging with museum exhibitions. In the article Performing Chineseness, Translated Histories: Taiwanese Cartoonist Chen Uen's Ink-Brush Comic Aesthetics and Digital Pedagogy, Hong-Chi Shiau explores the notion of multimodal digital pedagogy based on participatory paratexts that are created by students in response to Chen Uen's ink-brush comic exhibition at Taiwan’s National Palace Museum. The author argues that Chen Uen's work presents an ideal opportunity for educators and students to engage with challenging transnational symbolic dimensions, starting from the consideration that Taiwan has been confronted with an increasing pluralism of aesthetic pedagogy which is exemplified by this exhibition. Starting from a design ethnography, this study analyses the paratexts that are developed by students and how such collaborative productions can stimulate students to re-interpret and re-create Chen Uen’s work.

Next, we turn to the paper by Kristine Michelle L. Santos on Queer Affective Literacies: Examining “Rotten” Women's Literacies in Japan. The author begins by explaining that in Japan there is a group of women who are notoriously known as “rotten” because of their fantasies that perceive male homosocial relationships as homoromantic or homosexual. It is argued that these transformative homoerotic fantasies are central to Boys Love culture and that these “rotten women” engage with Japanese popular culture by using what the author refers to as Boys Love literacies that challenge normative notions of male intimacy. The author analyses Boys Love literacies that are embedded in women’s fan comics and discusses how these can potentially function as pedagogical tools to understand the logics of such nuanced literacies. As such, this paper explores a mediation of cultural literacy that operates on a grassroots level and that is produced by young actors who are actively exploring the queer potential of Japanese media.

Another form of grassroots literacy is explored in the article Staging the World: Cross-Cultural (Il)literacy, Taiwan’s Mobile Stage Phenomenon, and Shen Chao-liang’s Stage Series by Li-Chun Hsiao. This paper examines—through the lens of photographer Shen Chao-liang—the cultural implications of the mobile stages of wandering vaudeville troupes in Taiwan. The author argues that what characterizes these stages are the remarkable and recognizable “global images” that are featured on the backdrops in flashy colours and patterns such as the Sydney Opera House, Hello Kitty and Arc de Triomphe. Based on both the phenomenon of the mobile stages itself and Shen’s representations of this phenomenon, the author explores what cultural literacy might entail and mean when it comes to such cross-cultural encounters. The author furthermore explores how Shen initially intended to capture the image of a plebeian society in Taiwan by documenting these vaudeville troupes, but ended up focusing on the mobile stages that exemplify particular forms of cross-cultural (ill)literacy and, as such, the author postulates that Chao-liang enacts a situated form of art (and cultural) mediation.

As stated at the outset, an exploration of cultural literacy also needs to focus on the values and functions that are attached to knowledge about culture and the arts in cultural policy and in the public debate. In the article Democratising Goals in a Neoliberal Context—The Multiple Temporalities in Finnish Cultural Policy Discourses, Kaisa Murtoniemi discusses how changes in cultural policy have often been presented by focusing on periodization. For example, it is argued that in the Nordic countries during the late twentieth-century cultural policy moved from the welfare state era to a competition state era where “instrumental cultural policy” has been claimed to be hegemonic. However, because such periodization does not necessarily address the possible continuity between periods, the author focuses on the multiple historical forces that are present in recent discourses of Finnish cultural policy. As such, the paper reports on a critical discourse analysis of two specific cultural policy projects that focuses not only on the hegemonic instrumental focus in these policy discourses but on its relations with other temporalities in the present. Based on this analysis, the author argues that the values essential to a welfare state cultural policy, such as democratization of culture and cultural democracy, are rearticulated in such a manner that constructs them as a medium for neoliberal governance.

In the following paper, Ersa Yildiz also touches upon cultural policy, but specifically discusses how current policy by the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) impacts the way that cultural literacy is mediated in Turkey trough contemporary art institutions and independent art spaces. In An Overview of Cultural Literacy in Turkey through Private Contemporary Art Institutions and Independent Arts and Cultural Spaces under the AKP Rule, the author discusses how neoliberalism, which had an impact on various fields of Turkish society during the past decades, has come to dominate the arts and cultural scene more explicitly with the rule of the AKP. Museums of modern and contemporary art founded by private companies, as well as the Istanbul Biennial which had an increasing impact on the contemporary art scene, have become important mediators of the contemporary cultural scene. The kind of art historical narratives that are formed through exhibitions are critically explored by the author to understand how these institutions regulate and reformulate what counts as cultural literacy. The author discusses the recent cultural and educational policies of Turkey's ruling right-wing conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP), the impact of the privatization of culture and the arts, and how these transformations affect cultural literacy in Turkey. As such, the article explores the transformations in the educational and cultural scene and discusses how private contemporary art institutions and independent arts and cultural organizations shape cultural literacy in relation to the current political atmosphere and recent transitions.

The special issue ends with two explorations of cultural literacies in educational institutions in South-Africa. In Between a Formalist Rock and a Contextually Hard Place: The Gaps and Tensions Challenging Visual Arts Curricula in South African Higher Education, Kathy Arbuckle explores the complexities of visual arts curricula within the institutional setting of a South African university and focuses on the characteristics and experiences of undergraduate students. She argues that the concept of cultural literacies provides a framework to discuss the paradoxes in the field of visual art education as the criteria for academic achievement are difficult to make explicit and concrete, while at the same time the discourses of contemporary art practice seem to contradict institutional assessment requirements. The author postulates that the discord between the knowledge of students and lecturers, skills and expectations are contextualized within the realities of higher education on the one hand and the nature of the “artworld” in South Africa on the other. Based on a theoretical exploration of the issue and empirical reflections on challenges facing an undergraduate curriculum in visual arts, the author draws a number of conclusions about the often-tacit nature of visual culture and art practice and argues for dialectical, research-based approaches to stimulate more responsive and effective curricula.

In the final article, Pathways Indra Congress: Cultural Literacy for Social Change, Luthando Ngazile Ngema and Mary Elizabeth Lange, discuss the Indra Congress as an “alternative mediator” of arts and culture for intra- and inter-personal social change, by providing a safe space for youth to communicate social issues. The authors argue that the art-based approach of the network challenges stereotypes, prejudices, inequalities and descriptive myths and as such has the potential to build bridges, to promote empathy and to help develop positive relationships. In this article, a reflection on the Indra Congress and the use of arts for social change is related to critical questions and on-going discussions about cultural literacy. The analysis by the authors focuses on the analogy upon which the Indra Congress is built. The article explores how themes of diversity and local and personal narratives intersect with critical cultural diversity. From this perspective, the authors postulate that the Indra Congress represents and embodies a practice of cultural literacies that promotes the sharing of differences and commonalities through collaboration in arts and culture.

The above summary of the different contributions tends to make clear that the special issue indeed offers an exploration of how cultural literacies are defined, practiced, contested and negotiated in relation to current and contextualized societal transitions. Although this did pose a number of challenges throughout the editorial and reviewing process, there is a clear added value of addressing the topic of cultural literacies in transition by bringing together perspectives on cultural knowledges from different geopolitical contexts, from different disciplinary and institutional spaces, and from different approaches towards literacy. However, because an exploration of “cultural literacies in transition” is indeed as stated above a “history of the present moment”, and an “anthropology of the current condition”, there will be a continuous need to explore what cultural literacies are and what they do from a broad range of disciplinary, geographical, geopolitical and institutional spaces.

Disclosure statement

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