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Keyan G. Tomaselli and Nyasha Mboti cultural studies: What is literacy in the age of the post?Doing

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Doing cultural studies: What is literacy in the age of the post?

Keyan G. TomaselliUniversity of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Nyasha MbotiUniversity of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

AbstractLiteracy in the context of cultural studies (CS) in Africa concerns less the ability to read and write than the quotidian practice of doing. This intervention argues that CS as taught and as its texts are imagined, in general terms, is the source of a continuing institutionalized limitation. CS for Africans is first and foremost a lived practice, before it is a discipline or ready-for-study academic subject. We discuss the notion of lived CS to confront a pedagogical issue: how much of CS should be text, and how much ‘doing’?

KeywordsAfrica, doing, literacy, lived CS, text

At the beginning of this academic year, I was walking one day from the English Department to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning such as encouraged friendli-ness to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously freshmen in their first flush of enthusiasm. An older man going the same way as I turned and remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a student too. I said no, I was a teacher. What did I teach? African lit-erature. Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who also taught the same thing, or perhaps it was African history, in a certain community college not far from here. It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know. (Achebe, 1978: 1)

Corresponding author:Keyan G. Tomaselli, Centre for Communication Media and Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Howard College Campus, Durban 4041, South Africa. Email: [email protected]

474564 ICS16510.1177/1367877912474564International Journal of Cultural StudiesTomaselli and Mboti2013

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522 International Journal of Cultural Studies 16(5)

The conventional history of cultural studies (CS) is well documented (Agger, 1992; Blundell et al., 1992; Brantlinger, 1990; Couldry, 2000; Durham and Kellner, 2001; During, 1992, 2005; Gray, 2003; Gray and McGuigan, 1993; Grossberg, 1989; Grossberg et al., 1992; Hall et al., 1980; Johnson, 1986; Mulhern, 2000; O’Connor, 1989; Tudor, 1999; Turner, 1990 [2003]; Storey, 1994). We need not, therefore, dwell on it here. How much of this history poses the question about CS as a form of ‘doing’? That is, to what extent has the notion of a lived CS been posed? There is some agreement that pedagogy has been neglected (Bethlehem and Harris, 2012; Couldry, 2000: 7). There is no word, however, on what hap-pens when conventional CS theory falls into disuse, especially in locations like Africa where global contradictions are sharpest (Tomaselli, 2005). If CS theory were an umbrella (Grossberg, 1996: 11–12), everyday contradictions in Africa are a hail storm, with gale-force winds, thunder and lightning. Our umbrellas (texts) have their uses, but in what sense have they offered protection against all questions everywhere every time? This article addresses a type of literacy of encounter found within CS. By encounter we mean the reflex-ive experiences of the research field which tend, more often than not, to exceed known modes of textual inscription. It is this type of literacy of praxis that we refer to as doing.

Doing is a term that we use to refer to those moments when CS theory reaches the limits of its disciplinary oxygen during research projects in squatter camps, remote areas, jails, fishing communities, corporate boardrooms; with the indigenous; in busy city streets, ‘black markets’ and with informal traders; with victims of unemployment, poverty and HIV, structural adjustment, endemic corruption and injustice. CS breathes the oxygen of texts, and there is plentiful breathing space in academia. An example is how we control words on the page, such that word upon word and sentence upon sentence soon morph into blocks of argument that we call a finished research proposal which qualifies for grants. Once we leave the clean air of our offices and texts, however, fumes of incomprehension follow us everywhere. Clarity and completeness are supplanted by mess.

Our work in everyday African contexts begins by locating itself within the conven-tional frameworks of enquiry assumed by CS before struggles over epistemic prescrip-tions cause us to treat CS theory as if it were a donor package of diapers. By ‘cultural studies’ Nick Couldry (2000: 5) means ‘the discipline that studies the relations between culture and power, using a method the primary orientation of which is broadly sociologi-cal rather than literary (but allowing for borrowings from literary and anthropological analysis and elsewhere)’. Unmarked in Couldry’s definition are the epistemic limits and ramifications of a primary orientation that is ‘very broadly’ sociological. Is to be ‘very broadly’ sociological the same as ‘doing’? Is a sociological orientation also lived? This kind of definition, though spacious enough to allow for a diversity of concerns, is per-haps still too restrictive, refusing to clarify its limits or to say when that which starts as CS will take on the character of ‘doing’, if ever.

CS is commonly articulated around problems (or debates), chiefly: (1) the claim that culture (and hence CS) has strong political force; (2) the determining power of economic structures on cultural formations; and (3) the debate over the role that individual experi-ence should play in analysis (During, 2005: 38).

These definitions are instructive when we start the research process, beginning with applications for grants. Asked about the discipline, we fill out the phrase ‘cultural stud-ies’. As with Couldry’s and Simon During’s definitions, grant applications and reporting



Tomaselli and Mboti 523

spreadsheets seldom contain the word ‘doing’. Theoretical frameworks also, by exten-sion, disallow epistemic roots in ‘doing’. The use of ‘doing’ would necessitate justifica-tions that bureaucrats and auditors rarely understand.

During (2005) uses the word engage – observing that ‘cultural studies aspires to join – to engage in – the world’. Certainly, the term ‘engage’ has an interesting semantic prosody, from marriage to rugby. For Couldry, CS consists of six core topics, namely Time, Space, Media and the Public Sphere, Identity, Sexuality and Gender, and Value. These cover the following sub-themes: for Time – the past: cultural history/cultural memory; the present; the future: policies and prophecies; for Space – thinking globalization; the regional, national and local; for Media and the Public Sphere – television; popular music; the inter-net and technoculture; for Identity – debating identity; multiculturalism; race; Sexuality and Gender – feminism’s aftermath: gender today; queer culture; and, finally, Value – culture high and low; and the nature of culture. To help him address ‘the central issue – the links between culture and power’ – Couldry emphasizes ‘three principles’, namely ‘open-ness, complexity and reflexivity’ (2000: 4). Moreover, he sees CS as a question of voices, in terms of their concentration or dispersal.1 Reduction of CS to six ‘core topics’ and ‘core principles’, we suspect, textualizes and depoliticizes CS into an accessible over-the-counter prescription which it rarely is when viewed through the prism of contradictions.

Categorization, at the very least, makes study possible. Frow and Morris (1993), for instance, frame such disparate materials as computer games, music, television series, film, tourism, media, artworks and diplomacy under the rubric of ‘cultural studies texts’. Similarly, Graeme Turner (2003) offers a five-pronged thematic study of ‘Texts and contexts’, ‘Audiences’, ‘Ethnographies, histories and sociologies’, ‘Ideology’ and ‘Politics’. CS con-tains common elements: principles, motivations, preoccupations and theoretical categories (Turner, 1990: 9). These are ‘language and culture’; ‘semiotics and signification’; ‘Marxism and ideology’; ‘individualism and subjectivity’; ‘texts, contexts and discourses’. The central categories within the field, on the other hand, are texts, audiences, the social production of everyday life, ideology and, finally, the politics of CS through race, gender and identity.

The allocation of CS into core topics, whether five, six or three, is certainly helpful for a certain type of CS pedagogy. The field is thereby simplified, making it teachable and readable, and administratively manageable. However, as praxis, it fails to account fully for the validity or invalidity of the notion of ‘doing’. Hall (1996: 267–8) has sug-gested that CS academics had then failed to constitute themselves as organic intellectu-als working within new socio-political formations. This kind of positioning, we argue, results from a type of question that requires an answer instead of leading to further questions, but is actually a question that turns textuality into a seemingly equally important form of ‘doing’. Couldry (2000: 1), for instance, asks what should CS be doing and what problems does it face?’ The asking of such a question is in itself, for some, a form of doing. Once asked, however, an over-provision of formulaic answers often results. An example is how conventional frameworks tend to assert common locations and definitions of CS that assume that CS theory is not only essentially pro-gressive but is spacious enough for everyone.

CS theory that assumes that there is enough space for everyone within its interstices carries a false dilemma. Such a dilemma is constructed around the supposed need to open up CS and to make it truly global and democratic:




A broad working definition is also crucial if we want to think of cultural studies as a global discipline.… To raise the question of the global reach of cultural studies opens up a host of further questions: Can cultural studies be globalized? How can it overcome its original ties to a rather parochial agenda in Britain? (Couldry, 2000: 15)

This dilemma, first, perhaps mutes the point that it wishes to make: that CS originated in the West and diffused from there. Second, this dilemma, as is argued below, tends to emphasize textuality. Why, for instance, should CS have origins or original ties? Why should it need globalizing?

A lived CS demonstrates that there are no ties, let alone original ties, to overcome. To return to the diapers metaphor: original ties, if they ever existed, are fully dispensable. The metaphor relates to the question of whether we can, as Handel Wright (1998) asked, decentre Birmingham. Decentring Birmingham, while possible and even desirable, not only seems to feed the urge to create new centres somewhere else but also partly misses the fact that there may be no fixed Birminghams to decentre. What can be decentred, however, is the illusion of Birmingham. To say, as Couldry (2000: 16) does, that his intention ‘is to undermine the sense that CS has a necessary trajectory built into it, tied to a particular national origin or source (whether British or otherwise)’ is indicative of a primary understanding about the nature of the practice on which illusion is grounded.2 British hegemony in texts needs undermining, especially as they affect the daily lives of formerly perhaps still-colonized Africans.

During (2005: 5) discusses CS as ‘Going global’, noting that ‘once culture is treated globally, method becomes a real problem for the academic study of culture.’ ‘What kind of concepts and practices should we bring to our material?’. The rather disconcerting argument is made that CS’s methodological difficulties are linked to its having ‘gone global’ (During, 2005: 7). Distinguishing ‘three national inflections of Anglophone CS – British, American and Australian’, During (2005: 19) argues that:

if cultural studies is appearing in different forms and out of different genealogies in many localities it can’t be denied that the work which circulates most widely tends to refer back to what has been produced in the old Anglophone imperial nations. Flows of knowledge are by no means unidirectional – from the centre out – but it’s not as if centres don’t exert a centripetal force even on the resistance to Eurocentrism.

The ‘global dispersion’ of CS ‘both in a disciplinary sense and in a geographical sense’ means that that ‘history has been radically dispersed’ such that there can now be no sin-gle history of CS (During, 2005: 34). If CS is lived, was there ever a dispersal? Could there ever be a single history of CS?

Cultural studies in Africa

Our article began with reference to Achebe’s musings about images of Africa. We want to compare the American gentleman’s expression of pleasant surprise at the existence of African literature with the conventional thinking that marginalizes certain forms of African CS into area studies, or as part of the global ‘dispersal’. The expression of intel-lectual and epistemic ‘surprise’ at the prospect of Africa having ‘such things’ as CS is one




we develop here. The relegation of CS in Africa to mere ‘area’ and ‘local’ studies (During, 2005: 27) is part and parcel of what we will call the Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) argument against non-western forms of CS and literacies. The interest in literacies that divert from ‘doing’ and focus largely on the generation of auto-erotic textual pleasures we will call WANXER (Western, Anglocentric, Normative, Xenophobic, Eurocentric, Rich, and Spoilt) pedagogies.

Turner’s (2003: 225) final chapter is titled ‘“Doing” cultural studies’, with the term doing thoughtfully enclosed in quotes. This enclosure is illuminating because it func-tions to limit ‘doing’ to questions of methodologies for collecting cultural data and for analysing and thinking about it. Reference is made, for instance, to ‘triangulation’ and its use in Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (du Gay et al., 1997), as well as to the ‘circuit of culture’. The chapter, Turner admits, is a reaction to criticisms that CS lacks method or that its methods lack thoroughness and rigour.

Studies that move ‘across methodological and disciplinary divisions’ are offered as examples of ‘doing’ CS (Turner, 2003: 229). Turner argues that the point of CS is ‘particu-larly pragmatic’, as a means of generating knowledge about the structures in which we live. The knowledge it generates, he observes, is meant to be used. His examples are John Hartley’s (1999) historical account of the social function of television since the 1930s to reinforce textual analysis; Richard Dyer’s (1999) study of the meaning of the colour ‘white’ in western contemporary media, which incorporates a history of the film industry’s adapta-tion of technology to its economic and ideological ends; David Morley’s (2000) study of the meaning of ‘home’ in discourses that invoke television programmes, migrant memoirs, family snapshots and theories of postmodernity; and Jackie Stacey’s (1994) analysis of the relationship between female fans and their screen idols in post-war Britain.

Doing, at least in the cases explicated above, remains ‘textual’. The authors not only do not decentre the text, but retain interest in its ‘pleasures’. Contrast this to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s attitude to the literary novel once he began ‘doing’ CS: ‘My work at Kamiriithu in 1977 made me lose all interest in the novel’ (1993: 81). His performative practice is not that dissimilar to Jürgen Habermas’s (1989) theory of the public sphere:

The four acres reserved for the Youth Centre had … in 1977, only a falling-apart mud-walled barrack of four rooms which we used for adult literacy. The rest was grass.… The peasants and workers from the village … built the stage: just a raised semi-circular platform backed by a semi-circular bamboo wall behind which was a small three-roomed house which served as the store and changing room.… It was an open-air theatre with large empty spaces surrounding the stage and the auditorium. The flow of actors and people between the auditorium and the stage, and around the stage and the entire auditorium, was uninhibited. Behind the auditorium were some tall eucalyptus trees. Birds could watch performances from these or from the top of the outer bamboo fence. And during one performance some actors, unrehearsed, had the idea of climbing up the trees and joining the singing from up there. They were performing not only to those seated before them, but to whoever could now see them and hear them – the entire village of 10,000 people was their audience. (wa Thiong’o, 1993: 42)

Kamiriithu, as one of several villages in Limuru originally set up in the 1950s by the British as a way of cutting links between the people and the Mau Mau resistance, becomes located within a larger nexus that suggests that the roots of postcolonial CS in Africa




actually begin with the European carving up Africa. Literacy, therefore, becomes a lived awareness of history and outstrips the text. In wa Thiong’o’s words:

Berlin of 1884 was effected through the sword and the bullet. But the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. (1993: 9)

Kamiriithu was thus a ‘delayed’ cultural response to the chain reaction set in motion at Berlin. The ‘wind’ of democracy sweeping through southern Africa in the 1990s appears to fall within the same pattern of colonial/postcolonial and apartheid/democratic exchange which later spawned critical variants of African cultural and media studies (Nyamnjoh, 2011; Tomaselli, 1999; Tomaselli, Mboti and Ronning, 2013)

Many African scholars, whether relocated to the North or working from the South, have tended to locate themselves in trajectories of conceptual mobility that leverage, mobilize and re-create Northern codes of conduct/doing, language and theory. These scholars re-process CS jargon within a de-territorialized discursive western conceptual space that obscures the experientiality of the local and the ordinary as lived beyond texts. Preferred is the building of grand hyper-theory from which scholars on the supposed periphery are largely excluded, or relegated to obscure footnotes.

The South, then, simply provides the backdrop for the popularization of Northern-based approaches. While working among indigenous communities in the Kalahari Desert on the topic of child (over)-imitation3 with Mark Neilsen, an Australian research psy-chologist, he mentioned an article entitled ‘The weirdest people in the world’. Joseph Henrich et al. (2010) argue that 96 percent of psychology research is focused on only 4 percent of the planet’s population: WEIRD societies. While in the hot desert sun interact-ing with malnourished pre-school children of illiterate, unemployed and despondent par-ents, the rather absurd idea of ‘the WEIRD’ struck us as one to which we could relate. How are we, in the South, known? Do they know how we live or do they merely know that we live? Certainly, knowing how seems conceptually distinct from knowing that. The object of Gilbert Ryle’s (1971) argument was the relevance of Cartesian ontology. Classroom-bound WEIRD students would know ‘that’, but not know much about the ‘how’.

CS suggests two forms of doing: desk-doing via texts and/or doing it in the field of lived contradictions. Textual doing appears most rewarding in forging a career in terms of institutional requirements. Research, however, is much rougher and messier in the field. There is little to hold onto – no ready, clear-cut theory. Theory is marshalled as we go and, like diapers, is fully disposable. Fieldworkers are cautious of the reified theoriz-ing of the text-doers who seem largely contemptuous of travel tropes, or of those who work with subjects who evade WEIRD constructions of them. Graham Murdock (1997: 88) urges CS to be more adventurous in ‘crossing intellectual check-points’. While we suspect that, indeed, very little crossing has happened, it is not merely a question of intel-lectual check-points. The issue is much more complex, and much more intractable, than the question of the intellect of cultural intellectuals. For us, it is a question of crossing textual check-points.

Where one does CS is important – including in the academy itself. The early Birmingham Centre tactically popularized its work via publication and academic praxis.




CS is argued by Larry Grossberg (2010: 9) to be ‘intellectual-political work’ that ‘mat-ters inside and outside of the academy’ (emphasis added).

Location – as well as theoretical coordinates – tends to divide CS down the middle. African variants developed theories in situ, partly through performative work (Dalrymple, 1987; wa Thiong’o, 1993; Wright, 2004). ‘Performative acts’ (Diawara, 1992a, 1992b) occur mostly beyond the academy (Wright, 1998). Dick Hebdige (1979: 139–40) observes that CS scholars often produce ‘analyses of popular culture which are them-selves anything but popular’, an observation that seems to support the need for an even stronger performative turn. Northern (and some Southern) CS seem largely oblivious of this. Along with the shift into post-critical studies, the usual struggles for the voice of CS on different continents have occurred (see e.g. Dienst, 1990; Grossberg et al., 1992; Nelson and Grossberg, 1988). Some Northern applications, which once tended to be praxis-oriented, have to some extent become variants of ‘post-critical’ poetic writing, indistinguishable from loose postmodernism and deconstruction. Following the WEIRD naming, we characterize post-LitCrit as being done by the WANXERS.

WANXING our way into post-futures

Reverse signification and noumenal4 conditions tend to predominate in non-WANXER societies, often making nonsense of Cartesian logic and Enlightenment rationality. In reverse CS,5 conducted among people who live beyond written texts, we have a culturally sensitive strategy that understands the daily conditions of mess, confusion and, for the industrial subject’s mind, the often ‘incomprehensible’ ontology of project beneficiaries.

Our finding in non-WANXER communities is that few research findings are to be found. Rather, there is lived knowledge to be gained through the process of being-here and doing-research-here. Being-here and doing-research-here cannot be reduced to neat findings and/or textualized/taken-away as theoretical trophy. If findings are worth finding – in the sense of making ‘discoveries’ – we would regress to doing ethnography-as-colonialism. As Sonja Narunsky-Laden and Nate Kohn (2007: 11) observe in evaluating Writing in the San/d (Tomaselli, 2007):

Each researcher sees the events somewhat differently, each reads the individual Bushman in highly individual and sometimes contradictory ways, giving us a nuanced picture of people and place. Yet, it is not a mystery to be unraveled – What are the Bushmen really like? What is the true picture? – but a testament to the complexity of the human condition, to the vagaries of interpretation, and ultimately to the hard fact that perception is all we have, and that it is never enough.

This type of reflexive CS admits (il)literacy as a form of knowing ‘about’, through rais-ing questions (Ryle, 1971). It deals with facts of place and facts of people as the grounds of cultural theory. Tomaselli’s (2007) authors apply autoethnography to find a cultural praxis literally based on the reality of shifting san/ds. Writing on desert sand, because it shifts as the subject shifts, is like writing reality. The realities of places such as desert settlements, for instance, are almost impossible to textualize about. Rather, they have to be lived. Conditions can be described and textualized, but, like hunger, they are excru-ciatingly real. Researching requires that we reassess our air-conditioned theory-forming differently. How else will we arrive on the sand dunes of context – the lived? The quest




for a theory of the ‘messy’, crafted in situ, on the move, is a thirst that is unlikely ever to be fully quenched. The more researchers immerse themselves in doing fieldwork, the more they discover the inappropriateness of some kinds of CS scholarship.

Ethnography-as-colonialism/colonialism-as-ethnography generalizes, universalizes and carries an illusion of completeness. Prescriptive completeness, indeed, is a norm within WANXER literacy. Consider Nielsen’s lived (from the field) example of a non-WANXER context,

Jakarta is filled with kind, generous people who flourish amidst chaos. Part of this chaos is the refuse discarded by its 10 million inhabitants, much of which finds its way to unmanaged dumpsites where trash pickers dig through the waste for scrap they can sell on. The pickers are frequently accompanied by their children who are exposed to potentially dangerous disease (e.g. by walking over mountains of trash wearing only ragged sandals), who are not encouraged to attend school, and whose homes consist of a cardboard shack no bigger than 3 × 5 metres. These children live at the margins. If the entire corpus of research devoted to young children’s psychological development came from here it would be treated as little more than a curiosity. A perhaps interesting encapsulation of a minority group, but not one that ‘speaks’ for all children. After all, the majority of the world’s children do not live this way. It is equally true though that the majority of the world’s children are not products of WEIRD environments. Yet we assume studies of these children are representative of ALL children – this is just plain nonsense. (Mark Nielsen, 2011, personal communication).

Jakarta is similar to many parts of the world. If so many children are foragers of junk, how is their condition reflected in literature? There is, of course, nothing wrong with just studying WEIRDs. The reality is that most developmental psychology studies couch their ‘universal’ findings in terms of the way ‘children’ develop, without acknowledging the possibility that findings may be limited to those with privileged upbringings. Statements such as ‘2-year-olds … may be considered habitual imitators’ (Nielsen, 2006: 556) are commonplace. They occur without acknowledgement that, in this case, ‘2-year-olds’ actually means ‘2-year-old WEIRDs’. Problems thus occur when unreconstituted models, theories and paradigms developed to answer problems and offer explanations of WEIRD processes – whether in CS or psychology – are applied irrespective of local ways of making sense and doing things.

How does CS travel, and in what ways is it, in the application, literate or illiterate? What is the nature of this (il)literacy? What does the notion of ‘post-’ mean in non-WEIRD societies where development periodizations are scrambled caricatures of overlapping and simultaneous pre-modernity, modernity and postmodernity? What kind of relevance does CS comprise in these kinds of contexts? What happens when Northern scholars traipse around Africa force-feeding Africans their imported theories (see Stoller, 1984)? Why are Africans exported to study in the North expected to study Africa rather than casting an African’s eye on Europeans themselves? Why do they get to study us, but we don’t get to study them? Who are the unusuals in this world? Who, really, are the weirdos?

Theories, methods and paradigms migrate; they reconstitute initial emphases, and forget their origins. The way that CS has travelled ‘to’ and ‘within’ regions other than ‘the West’ is similar to its trans-Atlantic mutations, and to the trajectories and emphases




it assumed in Australasia, Scandinavia and Asia (see e.g. Cooper and Steyn, 1996). When such theories do ‘arrive’, they are often unproblematically applied in unreconstituted forms to different conditions at their destinations. The CS code itself operates like a recycling plant, as theory becomes ever more abstract in the face of startling differences in practice, object/subject and ontology.

One mechanism available to address unresolved problems in WEIRD societies is to be found in mobilizing the humanities to address pressing social problems. This objec-tive, however, is compromised in the perceived Eurocentrism of disciplines that draw from primarily western epistemological (and colonial) histories. Where the objects of study may now be African, their theory and methodologies (and the conceptual assump-tions that underlie these) remain those of the (post)industrial, Cartesian-led ontological world. It is within this indeterminacy of translation that the conflict occurs between intermediaries for the different paradigms who remain rooted in one or the other (cf. Mudimbe, 1988). The real challenge is how to engage simultaneously with multivocal paradigms.

Doing, doing, done: origins and praxis

Doing CS à la early Birmingham left Handel Wright feeling ‘uncomfortable as an African attempting to do cultural studies’ (1998: 39), and that living in ‘the shadow of Birmingham’ (1998: 38) relegated him to speaking from ‘an already marginalized posi-tion’ (1998: 39). Wright suggests that CS ‘needs multiple discourses of its origins and histories to throw a wrench into the disciplining process, to ensure that even if it does become a discipline, it at least remains an undisciplined discipline’ (1998: 48–9). Wright (see also Baker, 1993: 23) advocates ‘the confluence of social activism and academic work’ and ‘cultural studies in action’ (1998: 46). He concludes:

My position is that cultural studies cannot afford to be legitimated in the academy at the expense of undertaking community-oriented, project driven, social justice agendas; that its fractured and multiple identity (or identities) should be reflected not only in its present and future manifestations but also should be revealed as always already present in its history (or histories); that its internationalization can be democratic and empowering rather than ironically imperialistic. (1998: 38)

Revealing African CS as always already present is certainly important. The interesting question, however, is: how should African CS be revealed? The problem for Wright is that marginalized CS may only be ‘revealed’ textually. Textuality, at that moment, will largely spell the end of doing. Responding to Wright, Maureen McNeil admitted that ‘it was virtually impossible to speak or write about CCCS without centring that centre’ (1998: 58) and that this response ‘re-enacted and reinforced centre–periphery relation-ships’ (1998: 59).

Other questions arise from McNeil’s admission. What is CS if it cannot reveal itself to itself? Does CS re-enact a benign imperialism? It had been difficult, before Wright, to write about CCCS without centring that centre. The admission is, ironically, recognition of the gradual failure of Anglocentric CS as a political project. McNeil acknowledges




Birmingham’s inexorable slide towards Textuality, that her writing against Birmingham had failed:

Handel’s account does not register the burden of intellectual labour and the normalizing regimes that keep many of us trapped in our academic (ivory, brick or concrete) towers. Nor does he reflect about the increased monitoring of academic productivity. If we don’t keep up, we risk not only our own careers (and economic well-being) but letting our colleagues and students down as well – given the competition for scarce resources in higher education today. It is difficult to push outside of the academy in an era when educational institutions are exacting ever more of our time and resources. (McNeil, 1998: 61)

McNeil’s answer, ironically, is a defence of Textuality – of the impossibility of writing against the academy from within it. Indeed, the Birmingham CS track was terminated in 2002 following a Research Assessment Evaluation which was interpreted by that univer-sity as CCCS’s work lacking international calibre (Webster, 2004: 851). To survive, then, in the context of post-millennium higher education market instrumentalism, CS cannot be too local, activist or actively counter-ideological. CS is hamstrung to ‘manifestations of disciplinarity’ as well as to the influence of institutions. Wright’s concluding remarks suggest that being inside/outside is merely a subtle version of being inside/inside – or just inside.

Responses by Tomaselli (1998, 1999) undercut both writers’ cautious optimism in the future of a rehabilitated field by suggesting that CS as it is now done cannot be done: its very tenability is in question.6 He resists being sucked into the debate about origins, but instead writes about the pitfalls of a CS shorn of praxis. Wright observes that McNeil’s concern with the sloganeering about CS’s anti-disciplinarity is, itself, subtle sloganeering – partly because her dissection of the problem lacks praxis.

The naming of African CS is contradictory, one that can only succeed through suicide as the naming will happen only through and because of the corporatizing sign. Posts are the new Textuality where, apparently, anything goes and everything can be commodified and sold in the academic supermarket.

The value of performed theory

‘[P]erformance in general is central to both CS and African creative expression’ (Wright, 2004: 15). Autoethnography implies that research is performed/lived. This is the basic finding of Writing in the San/d (Tomaselli, 2007), a record of encounters with First People that advocate caution with regard to received theories about our subjects and about ourselves as researchers. Last year’s theories do not suffice – one’s performance is measured by what one finds on each excursion.

Performance is about two things: ‘positioning’ oneself as well as choosing where to do the doing (i.e. location, place, cause or venue). The first kind of CS, often done in conditions of extreme exposure, does not attract many participant-observers. We do this first type of CS because of its social relevance. A Nigerian working in the USA who thinks of returning to his home country to do things from there sent the following unso-licited comment to Tomaselli:




I am not sure how you’ve managed to escape head-hunters and remained in South Africa thus far but I’m sure you realize that your impact on the academic world from your home base is partly responsible for your phenomenal success. (Anthony Olorunnisola, 2011, personal communication)

Olorunnisola got us thinking about the implications of place, space, even race, in doing CS – and thus in building one’s academic career. Multicultural, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual teams conduct CS wherever they find them, but mostly in localized, places and with NGO partners. It is rewarding doing things out there in the open – but also risky – involving a kind of indecent exposure.7

Messy theory and the ‘brute material of information’ (Malinowski, 1922) calls for acquaintance with the facts we describe. Field researchers are often confronted by the very same facts which are disparaged by the theorists: vehicle breakdowns in remote places; subject communities destroyed by structural and political conditions beyond their and the researchers’ control; and students, who, unable to cope with poverty on any scale, unadvisedly take on the liberal guilt of centuries of western colonialism (Tomaselli, 2005: 24). We are thus perhaps trying to correct what Ntongela Masilela (1988: 1) calls an ‘error of emphasis’. We should, as he asserts, learn to live historically. What contexts and methods of doing CS should we emphasize and what histories are we to live?

Can the non-WEIRD speak?

How much dialogue occurs when WANXER researchers talk ‘about’ Africans, for instance?

If we are to read the problem of researcher and researched within Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) prism, in order to be heard at all the researched must first adopt and speak through the WANXER researcher’s filters of thought, reasoning and language. This is why it is necessary to decentre the expert. Dialogue disassembles the expert who is programmed to arrive at some ultimate finding (see Freire, 1972). Since no findings are to be found, there is nothing to incorporate. The researched are required to be amenable to the grand interpretive activity of the researcher. In this way, the researched can be subjected to being known or not-known, and to be found or not-found, according to the researcher’s needs at any particular time.

Dialogue invests research with potential to decolonize the future. The term research itself can be hyphenated – re-search – to question and search anew. The irrational fear of the (un)known is what nourishes the Expert, as well as constructs the researched in a complex, dependent relationship. The expert uses the researcher’s silence to perpetuate both the arbitrary naming of the researched and the arbitrary zoning of society into the known, not-known and to-be-known. Arbitrary zones of the supposedly not-known and to-be-known, it seems, justify applications for, and approval of, research grants.

The WEIRD expert-complex, then, tends to create the researched. The unspeaking-researched seem to exist mainly in the ‘deep structure’ of the researcher’s mind and in the products of that mind: Texts. The show of empiricism (statistics, numbers, graphs) oper-ates as cover for WEIRD researchers’ lack of context. This lack is reflected by the inabil-ity to understand the researched on their own terms, and in their contexts.




By way of conclusion

The post-Cold War conjuncture turned CS (one of the grand narratives impacting the humanities) into a commodity. CS is now often taught as a playful form of writing, rec-reation, consumption and perhaps ‘procreation’. It is necessary to know the code to play and fool around with it. This is often how undergraduates first encounter CS. If they don’t understand it, they simply memorize the jargon. They know ‘that’ but not much ‘about’ or ‘how’. In this ungrounded guise CS has largely lost its political relevance, its strategic potential and its objective of popular empowerment. It has generated ideas such as that of the ‘active consumer’ – inappropriately linked to the idea of the active reader. These postmodern propagandists for unfettered capitalism falsely implicate CS within a project for which it was never intended.

Postmodernism, properly done, offers rigorous critiques of modernity, but to be socially relevant it needs to recover standpoint, position, rights and justice. When taught as celebration of the banal it loses its critical, institutionally democratizing focus. Fetishized CS cannot incorporate the grand narratives of social justice, human rights and dynamical justice (Shepperson, 2008). Postmodernism initially became a refuge for ‘embittered intellectuals who gave up hope for social change’ (Best and Kellner, 1991: 297, 285). But for those who celebrate postmodernism, social change is not an issue. This sign-community has returned CS to analysis of the personal relation to particular texts. Such opacity refuses the empirical, is scornful of material realities and of ethical position. These, however, are the very sites through which democracy is constituted.

Our work in Africa (in relation to the West/East/North/South) requires a new imagi-nary that is locationally relevant, pro-active and acquisitive, all-inclusive, democratizing and useful, that admits critical and indigenous methodologies (Denzin et al., 2008) and invests analysis with new, diverse, pluralistic ways of making sense which include rather than exclude the subjects of research. The new imaginary would take into account the plurality of ontologies that now jostle for legitimation in a postmodern multicultural, spreadsheet-led instrumentalizing world.

What is to be protected is not abstract western notions of civilization and canonical Texts. Rather, the new imaginary requires that instead of defending unchanging para-digms and western civilization (and its Philosophy enabled by the Enlightenment), that we rather critically engage this corpus and build a more inclusively dynamic science that responds to the myriad contexts in which the diversity of interconnected multicultural generations across the world now find themselves. WEIRD societies are the minority, though they historically tend to leverage and minoritize the majority (via the UN, Bretton-Woods institutions, World Trade Organization and so on).

Cultural studies, it seems, does matter (Grossberg, 2010). However, we are back where we started: can the ‘pleasure’ of auto-erotic texts replace historicized, daily con-texts of struggles that characterize our world? If, as we argue, these contexts are primar-ily knowable through empirical methods read through appropriate theories, and understood via theories of literacy then CS needs to be doing more than laying claim to knowing all sorts of things.8 CS needs to know what to do with what it knows. It was CS’s evasiveness on the question of method that led it, at the end of the 20th century, into crisis (cf. Tudor, 1999: 187–94).




How does CS relate to interventions like the short-lived Cultural Environmental Movement (CEM)? (see Duncan, 1999). Can social activism be coherently reconciled with analysis? How do movements like CEM that proposed social action fit with ‘intel-lectual-political work’? Where can they cooperate and how can they sustain the alliance in the face of postmodernist anarchic impulses?

To respond adequately, CS should embrace both theorizing and performative acts. However, theorizing needs to happen ‘in place’ and not in isolation from the lived con-texts of the everyday. The reason we keep doing ‘messy’ CS is because we realize that CS is not easily done/articulated in the extremely challenging African context. Researchers, as practitioners, need to get dirty and not be afraid to mess their well-manicured theories in their efforts to address Africa’s problems. The notion of place, risky as it is, is crucial to the type of CS we do. Place, for us and for now, fills up and goes beyond Text. In this regard, one knows the type of CS one belongs to empirically – by following coordinates of place. Some of the coordinates lead to text-choked offices and others to the peopled field. Where will you do your cultural studies?

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. Couldry (2000: 1) asks ‘what is the space from which cultural studies speaks?’ His ‘answer, in essence, is that CS is an expanding space for sustained, rigorous and self-reflexive empirical research into the massive, power-laden complexity of contemporary culture’.

2. Couldry (2000: 15) makes connections between theory and research developed in different parts of the world, and attempts to decentre British perspectives. ‘Nothing less will do if the democratic vision of cultural studies is to be fulfilled on an international scale.’

3. Children develop in environments saturated with objects that they must learn to use by imitat-ing. In contrast to non-human primates, when children imitate they focus more on reproduc-ing the specific actions observed rather than the actual outcomes achieved. From 18 months, children routinely copy arbitrary and unnecessary actions. This puzzling behaviour is called ‘over-imitation’. By documenting similarities exhibited by children from a large, industrial-ized city and children from remote Bushman communities, Nielsen and Tomaselli (2010) provide the first evidence that over-imitation may be a universal human trait.

4. Phenomena explained through secondary representation such as rituals, possessions, ceremo-nies, often scientifically unexplainable (Kant, 1989: 286ff.).

5. Tomaselli (2005, 2007), takes the idea of ‘reverse’ from the video, Rouch in Reverse (1995), in which Manthia Diawara as a metropolitan African tries to reverse the gaze of French film maker Jean Rouch on Africa.

6. For examples of how the Durban Centre has fused inside–outside, student–faculty, researcher–community relationships see its research magazine, SUBtexthttp://ccms.ukzn.ac.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=24&id=96&Itemid=142 (accessed January 2013).

7. Olorunnisola observes in response to our analysis:

It is fascinating to ‘see’, through the eyes of scholars located in the global South the chal-lenges that are posed to those who do cultural studies. I was re-informed – at least by the




words on the pages – about my own positionality. Doing CS from the South poses the chal-lenge of convincing the rest of the world that what you do do [no typo] qualifies as CS. You have learned to speak the language of the field, you know the theories and methodologies, you contend with their limitations when confronted with phenomena that were not considered in crafting those tools – yet you face challenges when you buck the system by setting your own rules. CCMS [Centre for Communication, Media and Society], by setting itself up with the accoutrements of an institute – it plays by some of the rules while contending with the outside world from the South, but without closing doors to expressions by others including Northerners. By so doing, you have built constructive bridges … (Anthony Olorunnisola, 2011, personal communication)

8. For Rutten et al. (2010) rhetoric starts from a recognition that people always are inevitably engaged in rhetoric when they construct meaning in interaction with others (so moving away from the negative connotation of ‘mere’ rhetoric to a focus on the ‘pervasiveness of persua-siveness’). Rosteck (1999: 2) writes:

Cultural studies and rhetorical studies seem to share in much that is taken to be important these days: both aiming to reveal the relationship between expressive forms and social order; both existing within the field of discursive practices; both sharing an interest in how ideas are caused to materialize in texts; both concerned with how these structures are actually effective at the point of ‘consumption’; and both interested in grasping textual practices as forms of power and performance.

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Filmography

Diawara, Manthia (1995) Rouch in Reverse. Video.




Author biographies

Keyan G.Tomaselli is director of the Centre for Communication, Media and Society (CCMS), at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. He is editor of Critical Arts: South–North Cultural and Media Studies and co-editor of Journal of African Cinemas.

Nyasha Mboti is a post-doctoral fellow in the Centre for Communication, Media and Society (CCMS), at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, and a University of Zimbabwe graduate who has published in African Identities and Critical Arts and serves on the editorial board of Journal of African Cinemas.



Documents

International Journal of Cultural Studies-2013-Tomaselli-521-37.pdf