[Working Title] Transnational Pedagogy & Scholarship: Moving Beyond
the Culture of Complaint
The transnational cultural studies issue of Cultural Studies[1]
is dominated by a metadiscursive consideration of its topic’s role in cultural
studies as a discipline. The issue’s introduction succinctly presents a
recurring sentiment throughout the issue, that: “[a] counter-ideal for Cultural
Studies, then, might be one in which different norms of academic practice
co-exist, no one ethos dominates, and people feel able to be adventurous and
open about listening to others as well as speaking or reading ourselves[...]”[2] rather than rely on a Western European/North American tradition.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, the journal presents its critique using these same: “North
Atlantic centered logics for studying culture[…]”[3],
and often contains lamentations about the state of cultural studies and calls
for greater inclusiveness without any praxis-oriented proposals for
alternatives. Is this metadiscourse not an example of what Slavoj Žižek
identifies as the ‘culture of complaint,’[4]
wherein we attempt to address the symptoms of late capitalism with impossible
(or highly improbable) demands, while the condition itself is accepted as an
irreversible norm? After all, the economics of academic publishing that favors
English-language publishing, resource disparities allowing for American and
Western European universities to disseminate market ideology in the academe of India
and Eastern Europe[5] , and
similar phenomenon aren’t merely consequences of a manufactured (or unwitting) consensus
of academics that Western norms of cultural studies should dominate, but is
instead configured by the larger economic organization of late capitalism. The
tendency to acknowledge these systemic issues while proposing changes that
these very structures make impossible adds an uncomfortable whisper to the chant of the crowd: “we,
the academic Left, want to appear critical, while fully enjoying the privileges
the system offers us. So let's bombard the system with impossible demands: we
all know that these demands won't be met, so we can be sure that nothing will
actually change, and we'll maintain our privileged status!”[6]
The goals of this paper are threefold; first, a metadiscursive
critique of tendencies in contemporary Cultural Studies to concede to the logic
of neoliberal capitalism by operating in the register of impossible demands
addressed to nebulous sources of authority. Second, a consideration of the
radical possibilities offered by transnational approaches to Cultural Studies;
rather than serving merely as an endgoal that can comfortably coexist with late
capitalism, this assessment specifically focuses on its transgressive
possibilities, such as the ways in which it might serve to alienate scholars,
readers, and students from the ideological assumptions of late capitalism.
Third, to redeem, in the Benjaminian sense of the word, the traditions of Western
Cultural Studies and reaffirm their value within transnational Cultural Studies
discourses through an analysis of Hong Kong/Singapore co-production Gin Gwai (2002).
[1] CULTURAL STUDIES 2009 5-6: Transnational
and Cultural Studies
[2] “Introduction”
(Pg. 690), Meaghan Morris and Handel K. Wright
[3] “POST-COLONIAL
REFLECTIONS ON THE ‘INTERNATIONALIZATION’ OF CULTURAL STUDIES” (Pg. 694), Raka
Shome
[5]
Among other regions; I select these two not to suggest that they’re the only
examples of this phenomenon, but because they are used to illustrate this
phenomenon in the first two articles included in the issue.
[6] Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Pg.
61), Slavoj Žižek
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