Cultural Studies as “Export” Discipline and its Challenges

ABSTRACT

In response to [Tomaselli, Keyan, and Xiao Yao. 2023. “Cultural Studies in Interhemispherical Perspective. China, Africa, Asia and Australasia.” Critical Arts. doi: 10.1080/02560046.2023.2289315], this work locates the status of Cultural Studies as an export’ and “import” discipline in the wake of the Birmingham School being subject to two “restructures.” It is argued that in the face of inevitable audit cultures in the neoliberal University, the classics remain relevant for the purposes of preserving the legacies of Cultural Studies as a discipline of “export” rather than “import”. At a time when there are regimes of authoritarian governance curtailing academic freedom in Asian countries, I suggest that there is promise in the materialist and post-materialist perspectives found in Cultural Studies which facilitates the engagement of issues affecting wider publics.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural studies
• centre for contemporary cultural studies
• sociology
• neoliberalism

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Cultural Studies in Interhemispherical Perspective. China, Africa, Asia and Australasia

Introduction

Cultural studies has historically faced a shrinking institutional footprint (Striphas 2019). In 2005, I enrolled in the University of Birmingham’s Department of Sociology established in 2004 to replace an existing Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology preceded by the disbanded Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). The neoliberal structures responsible for the gradual marginalization and eventual demise of cultural studies in Birmingham have been chronicled by Gray (2003). Subsequently, the continuity of cultural studies in the Department where I completed doctoral candidature, though promised by Marsh (2005) in his rejoinder to outgoing Chair, Professor Frank Webster (2005), was about to be subject to closure a second time. Reflecting on the demise of sociology (and cultural studies) in Birmingham, Holmwood (2010) argued that due to regulatory audit cultures governing funding regimes, sociology’s interdisciplinary status as a weak “export” discipline lacking coherence, and at the same time open to “imports” from other disciplines had rendered it vulnerable to the exigencies of neoliberalism. Granted that Holmwood’s distinction between “exporter” and “importer” disciplines are behind instrumentally rational decisions in the wake of neoliberalism, the status of cultural studies as an “export” discipline, it could be argued, are also susceptible to sociology’s misfortunes because of cultural studies’ antecedents in the sociological canon. Ien Ang (2013, 413) notes the need for cultural studies to be positively defined and declared as a discipline and argued that “it needs to be much more articulate about its own protocols and operations as a discipline of sorts” to avoid being “undisciplined”. Thus, following Ang (2020), it is common for cultural studies to invite self-reflection from its practitioners when the absence of fixed topical boundaries which defines the field allows it to exist as a discipline marked by its ability to cross disciplinary boundaries. This work therefore discusses the opportunities for scholars of cultural studies to project its identity as a specialist canon fully capable of “exporting” concepts and theories to other disciplines.

State of flux: cultural studies as “export” and “import” discipline

Working within brute structures of neoliberalism in research-intensive universities, the endemic use of journal citation metrics as a form of managerialism which superimpose trends in the natural sciences to benchmark publications in cultural studies and the social sciences have been reported in South Africa (Tomaselli 2019). As there are countries which might not officially recognize cultural studies and sociology as legitimate fields of research or teaching for audit and funding purposes, the discipline risks being vulnerable to “imports.” Ang (2013, 434) notes that with neoliberal audit cultures, cultural studies “entrenches a more ivory-tower attitude to intellectual work—precisely the opposite of cultural studies’ original aspirations. It is a trend that only risks exacerbating cultural studies’ theoreticist tendencies.” Researchers can therefore exercise the choice to scale back on projects that will not necessarily benefit multiple publics or facilitate knowledge transfer beyond the academy.

Ang’s observations resonate with those that directly also affect the sociological canon: During his Presidential address to the American Sociological Association in 2004, Michael Buroway’s (2005, 4) called for sociologists to reinvigorate the discipline by engaging “multiple publics in multiple ways.” Burawoy contended that the “public sociology” which characterized American sociology before World War II was displaced by a professionalism in the wake of declining budgets, intensified competition for students and corporate-market solutions in the university. For Burawoy, the professional, market-based solution has failed to deliver and, paradoxically, “inspires the demand and, simultaneously, creates the obstacles to public sociology” (2005, 7). Indeed, the self-fulfilling and negative effects of the widespread “academic capitalism” that encourages universities to function as corporate businesses, according to Herminio Martins (2004, 28), are evident when “product-lines” (in the form of university departments, subjects and even faculties) are discontinued or “restructured” in accordance to market demands.

The capacity of cultural studies to “export” itself can be judged by the “cultural turn” which, as Ang (2013, 434) rightly observes, reinvigorated and rejuvenated the disciplines of English, anthropology, and sociology. In this prevailing porosity of academic disciplines, Ang states that cultural studies functions at its best when it functions as an “integrative, inter-discipline as simultaneously like and not like sociology, anthropology, literary studies, history, human geography, and so on”. The classics such as Stuart Hall’s New Ethnicities and Raymond Williams’ Structure of Feeling (and Keywords) are equipped to “export” cultural studies. The fecundity of Williams’ work is further judged by its uses to theorize emotions in discussions of the nexus between old and “new” materialities in human geography (see for example Rhose et al. 2020). In addition, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography was established during the “cultural turn” in geography to officially recognize questions of identity and difference in gender (Johnson 2008). In spite of this potential for a greater degree of “export”, Striphas (2019, 3) aptly posed the rhetorical question if we could claim that cultural studies dominates the liberal arts pedagogy the way it did during the Cold War. Because the cultural studies of today registers culture in a different way, Striphas (2019, 5) argues for the need to think through the basics.

Cultural studies has faced numerous risks since its founding and risks degenerating should interpenetrations between the market’s demands and research methodologies result in expert knowledge that will undermine the conditions required for dialogue in liberal, Western democracies (Tomaselli 2019). The nature of risks faced by cultural studies, as Striphas (2019, 6) notes in the current era include:

expanding and intensifying as new forms of surveillance are brought to bear on faculty—not infrequently women and people of colour—who, targeted by right wing media, lawmakers, intellectuals, and think tanks, are held publicly “accountable” for their actions and ideas through harassment, intimidation, purges, threats and instances of violence, and more.

In the case of Singapore, an authoritarian regime, the reining-in of academic freedom by politicians in the city-state’s universities ranked in the world’s top one percent has been noted (Holden 2019). Neoliberal managerial practices which prioritize metrics and hegemonic Western-based publication platforms may inevitably affect how Cultural Studies is taught; the foreseeable upshot of which is an attenuation of theory.

In East Asia, a new wave of authoritarianism and totalitarianism has been identified in the literature (Chan and Wang 2024). Authoritarian states often regulate academia to ensure it bolsters the legitimacy of their rule. In using the example of China, Perry (2020, 2), argues that:

The state structures academic activities in ways that promote its interests by directing intellectual production into officially approved and remunerated outlets and discouraging or disallowing independent critici. In these circumstances, academia may serve as an anchor of authoritarian stability rather than an engine of either revolution or democratization.

In Singapore, academics have expressed concern at digital censorship laws such as the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) which encourage academics to self-censor and align their research projects without challenging state-approved narratives. In the local cultural scenes of filmmaking, the government “politically co-opts cultural producers to encourage productions that offer viewing publics opportunities to consent to authoritarian governance” (Lowe and Wong 2023, 20). In view of an increasing surveillance on academic work and funding regimes structured by political ambits, Cultural Studies’ status as an “export” discipline can be jeopardized if used to preserve certain state-sanctioned narratives.

In China, it is often difficult to represent a totalizing, all-encompassing Han Chineseness at a time when multiple ethnicities and languages are subject to the state’s mechanisms of control and repression. Two sides of a coin cannot face one direction: with minority linguistic communities forcibly Sinicized in Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang facing the onslaught of the affective “killing” of their languages and their cultures (Roche 2021), it is important to avoid homogenizing Han-Chineseness. Prior to the 2019–2020 Anti-Extradition Bill Amendment Protests (Anti-ELAB) in Hong Kong, it would be acceptable to represent Hong Kong Chinese identities as constructed in opposition to the blood-based version of Chineseness promoted in the mainland (Lowe and Tsang 2017). Subsequently, Lowe and Tsang (2018) took inspiration from Raymond Williams’ Walking Backwards into the Future to theorize how ethnicities in Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement were based on unfulfilled promises of the past projected as hopes for the future. In the “new” Hong Kong, identities are increasingly performative (Lowe 2021) and do not disavow Chineseness as Beijing mandarinates suggest (Ortmann 2021). In the aftermath of Hong Kong’s failed 2020 movement, Beijing’s bringing to heel of the un-Chinese Taiwanese and Hongkongers broadly misrepresented as pursuing “Western” freedoms embodies a sense of intolerance towards multiple Chinese ethnicities. Vickers and Chen (2024, 7) surmise the issue in a nutshell:

Ironically, in dismissing criticism of China’s human rights record, post-colonial scholars betray a colonial – and arguably racist – strain in their own thinking. What are we to make of the Chinese citizens struggling for civil rights or political autonomy in Hong Kong, on China’s mainland and elsewhere? Decolonial political correctness conditions a wide-spread failure to critique stereotyped, Han-chauvinist narratives of Chineseness.

Currently, when there is emphasis on the hegemony of Western-centric theories of culture and their questionable relevance to Asian societies, it would be instructive to heed the warnings of Vickers and Chen (2024, 9): “The failure of Anglo-phone comparativists to accord China the same critical scrutiny as ‘the West' thus speaks to a chronic malaise in our field.” With social categories such as class, gender, race and ethnicity now embodying “global” and “local” dimensions of reality as transnational realities no longer respect the territorial boundaries of nation-states, the often cited argument is that the “nation-state” as “organising principle of modernity” (Chernilo 2006, 6) is questionable. In this regard, it is instructive to utilize theoretical perspectives from the classics which allow us to examine the simultaneity of the “global” and “local” in cultures around the world (Lowe and Ortmann 2020, 2022). In theorizing Chinese ethnicities in relation to filmic productions, there is merit in the very few examples placing the emphasis on shifting national discourses by deploying Raymond Williams’ Structures of Feeling. Shi and Liu (2020) innovatively locate pride as a structure of feeling in state-sanctioned national fantasies. In another paper on the dystopian Hong Kong omnibus Ten Years, Shi (2019) locates the politics of fear in Williams’ structures of feeling prevailing in Hong Kong society after the Umbrella Movement. Harding and Pribam (2002, 416) explain that it is possible to operationalize Williams’ structures of feeling as “the experiential results of living within a specific social and cultural context, particularly those results affectively experienced” so that structures of feelings from historical epochs can be recovered. The upshot of such an approach is that it is possible to avoid state-sanctioned narratives of identities by capturing a multi-dimensional view to identity and culture in places like China.

Even in countries without authoritarian surveillance of universities, there is merit in this return to the classics. The emphasis on metrics can encourage research that neglects marginalized groups. During the centenary of Williams’ birth, pleas were placed for a return to the “bloodstream” of cultural studies. In the words of Kay (2021, 1018):

The argument of ‘culture is ordinary’, in its more fulsome multidimensionality, is a still-radical concept whose ambitions have nowhere near yet been realised. Indeed, in a broader context of extreme and worsening material inequalities, as contemporary tech giants increasingly concentrate media and political power and decimate the possibility of a democratic common culture, we require renewed forms of struggle that are politically animated and intellectually strengthened by Williams’s insights.

When egregious value-laden solutions to socio-political problems will jostle for acceptance in the public sphere, the relevance of Williams’ materialist perspectives can offer conceptual tools to engage multiple publics in multiple ways. Since credible expert opinions to complement any political position can be easily obtained under the existing conditions of “academic capitalism”, Cultural Studies’ perspectives which adopt anti-foundationalist, interpretivist perspectives might be deemed less fundable. Though writing over three-decades ago, these contemporary problems that beset Western sociology were foreshadowed by Alvin Gouldner’s evocative claims about the changing character of the University. In his own words:

The university’s central problem is its failure as a community in which rational discourse about social worlds is possible. This is partly because rational discourse as such ceased to be its dominant value and was superseded by a quest for knowledge products and information products that could be sold or promised for funding, prestige and power—rewards bestowed by the state and the larger society that is most bent upon subverting discourse about itself. (Gouldner, 1973, 79)

For Gouldner, the uneasy relationship between market values and the production of social knowledge ought to be addressed through a “reflexive sociology” that establishes theoretical communities which are protected from the “impediments to rational discourse still growing within the university as much as from those in the larger society” (Gouldner 1973, 79). It is not difficult to discern the cause of Gouldner’s concerns. Because cultural studies likewise engages with material issues that reverberate in public policy, its highly specialized knowledge claims are usually accepted on trust by publics for whom such knowledge has implications.

Although democratic entry into debates about public policy issues by “the public” is impossible, Stephen Turner (2001, 124), maintains that democratic action can still rule over such activities through a “capitulation to ‘rule by experts’ or democratic rule which is ‘populist’—that is to say, that valorises the wisdom of the people even when ‘the people' are ignorant and operate on the basis of fear and rumour.” For this reason, Gouldner’s argument that theoretical collectives need to reach beyond the University whilst maintaining a foothold in the University appears to be the best way of ensuring that expertise will not compromise the conditions required for dialogue in liberal democracies. Gouldner’s claims, in contemporary conditions, with regard to Cultural Studies, remains moot for scholars writing in authoritarian regimes such as Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, and mainland China. In this regard, C. Wright Mills’ (1959, 4–5) manifesto for the sociological imagination remains pertinent to scholars writing in authoritarian regimes with curtailed academic freedom:

The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. And which values? Even when they do not panic, men often sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point 14 of moral stasis. Is it any wonder that ordinary men feel they cannot cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted? That they cannot understand the meanings of their epoch for their own lives? That—in defence of selfhood—they become morally insensible, trying to remain altogether private men? Is it any wonder that they come to be possessed by a sense of the trap?

The ideas of C. Wright Mills are, in many ways, also imbricated in the efforts of Cultural Studies scholars. In one way or another, they have been taken up by some authors who have contributed to Critical Arts (Falkof 2016; Mututa 2023). Though Mills’ seminal text The Sociological Imagination is over half a century old, the antecedent conditions which gave rise to its inception are still applicable to our current social conditions; in particular, the reasons why the society of his time responded with anxiety and fear due to their lack of social understanding.

In this decade, the populism, fear and expressions of xenophobia and other forms of exclusion require new connections from cultural studies. Striphas (2019, 9) aptly establishes the case for a preservation of the classics:

The point is to insist on another project: of caring for Cultural Studies, that is, of ensuring that the field—its concepts, institutions, and infrastructures—is prepared for and thus capable of enduring the demanding political and intellectual work that lies ahead.

Under contemporary cultures of neo-liberalism, there is a demand to produce research that can be marketed while Cultural Studies can be taught as a consumer “product” with a focus on student careers where intellectual theories are deemed less “transferable”. The upshot of this is an exposure to attenuation by way of “imports” from allied disciplines. With the applied focus on transferable skills in certain fields such as theatre studies, film-making and playwright, market tendencies which provide impetus for pedagogies to be detached from their theoretical origins in Cultural Studies also predisposes the discipline to “imports” from other disciplines such as English (Tomaselli 2012, 2015). To this end, Critical Arts’ roots as an anti-apartheid journal have sought to draw connections between the developed and developing world (Tomaselli and Yao 2023). The filmic discussions on China, South Africa, and the rest of the world have created a site of heteroglossia. Whilst there are a few perspectives which build on Williams’ classics (Chapman 1997; Tomaselli 2012; Knoetze 2018), the methodological framework of a nation-state has been subject to debate in European social theory as to whether it is now time to transcend the strictures of the nation-state. The globalization and uncertainty of the present era have presaged an end to the traditional categories used to direct research in Western countries (Holmwood 2007, 85). The task of de-centring Birmingham as hegemonic West has been met with the inter-referencing of Asia’s diverse cultures and postcoloniality as a work in progress in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. As an export discipline, the classics from cultural studies also find renewed resonance in feminist approaches to examining the fluidity of gendered subjectivities dedicating space to the spatial cultures of exclusion (Lowe 2019, 2023). In the field of Area Studies, Asian Studies Review is a well-recognized Area Studies journal addressing the relevance of culture as structure (see for example, Ortmann 2021; Lowe, Espena, and Wong 2023).

Conclusion: the promise of the classics

In their editorial and manifesto for Critical Arts, Tomaselli and Yao (2023) locate the large number of works adopting discourse analysis perspectives with other journals. I suggest that the reliance on the various theoretical approach under this common rubric, though neither an “import” nor a “bloodstream” or classic of Cultural Studies, could be supplemented with rigorously developed approaches from the classics. In addition, works undertaking corpus linguistics approaches from the field of Linguistics, it could be argued, gravitate towards “imports” which could be supplemented with for example, perspectives from Williams’ Keywords. In closing, this commentary relies on Holmwood’s (2010) crude distinction between “import” and “export” disciplines finding their basis in the neoliberal University’s audit cultures which, in turn conditions researchers to pursue fundable research agendas. With the pages of Critical Arts bearing testament to some historical epochs in cultural studies such as the transition to a post-Apartheid South Africa, the capacity of the journal to “export” concepts and theories to “import” disciplines such as Communication and Media Studies could be subject to further discussion and debate. This work calls for Cultural Studies’ approaches to facilitate C Wright Mills’ Sociological Imagination and to also develop perspectives capable of engaging multiple publics to maintain Cultural Studies’ status as an “export” discipline.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.