Contesting Identities, Contesting Nation

Abstract

The globalization process disturbs a rather deep-seated intuition that culture has a special relationship to geographical place. (Tomlinson, 2007, p. 151) Contributors to this Special Issue identify the problematic status of post-colonial identities within cultural studies scholarship as a point of departure. We maintain, in part, that a center–periphery thesis and a nation-bound ethnographic framework deeply inform the orientation of cultural studies scholars to the contemporary social order in the metropole and overseas in empire. Within this framework, ‘Britishness’ has been the silent organizing principle defining metropolitan working-class traditions and forms of cultural resistance as the sine qua non of cultural Marxism’s readings of contemporary life and proposals to transcend it. In ‘Contesting Identities, Contesting Nation’, then, we address these concerns, ultimately pointing to the specter of globalization and the way it challenges the relevance and insightfulness of the post-war cultural Marxism of British cultural studies. Contributors grapple theoretically and methodologically with the serviceable tradition that cultural studies draws on to authenticate and center the metropolitan working class as the subject-object of history and the point of embarkation for research. We point to the incommensurability of this approach with the contextual reality of present-day post-industrial society and the profoundly limiting framework of nationalism which undergirds the British cultural studies subcultural approach to date. We argue further that this ethnocentric approach to class in British cultural studies scholarship cuts at right angles to the postcolonial subjectivities and the presence of the Third World in the metropolitan working class. The fact is that there is a new context of post-colonialism and globalization that defines twenty-firstcentury social formations. This new context has precipitated a crisis of language in the neo-Marxist scholarly efforts to grasp the central dynamics of contemporary societies. The latter has led to a depreciation of the value and insightfulness of neo-Marxist analysis in our time – old metaphors associated with class, economy, state (‘production’, ‘reproduction’, ‘resistance’, ‘the labor/capital contradiction’) are all worn down by the transformations of the past decades in which the saturation of economic and political practices in aesthetic mediations has proceeded full scale (Klein, 2001; McCarthy et al, 2009; Tomlinson, 2007). ‘Contesting Identities, Contesting Nation’ is therefore aimed at a twofold intervention in the field of Cultural Studies. First, while mindful of the extraordinary venue that Cultural Studies has provided over the past few decades for theoretically, empirically and pragmatically grounded investigations into the conditions of production and the forms of existence of, particularly, white working-class youth of the metropole, contributors to this issue urgently announce new departures. Collectively, they maintain that the sub-cultural studies project undertaken by cultural