Cultural studies in Africa: Positioning difference

Abstract

DOES AN AFRICAN cultural studies exist? If so, is it a unified field of study? What links does this domain / domains--or perspectives within it/them--have with the First and Second World metropoles? A perusal of the World Wide Web identifies an explosion of African sites in 1996, mainly from South Africa, in which these questions are occasionally asked, but only partially resolved. (1) The UNISA Web site, for example, has valiantly listed the rather vexing and tense interchange between Christo van Staden (1996, 1997) and Arnold Shepperson (1996) which occurred in Communicatio over African intellectual and discussions of cultural studies. Questions on the historical lineage of cultural studies offer one trajectory of current discussion (McNeil 1997). Another offers an alternative account of (Wright, 1998:39). Handel Wright's decentring of the seminal influence of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (BCCCS), was published in the first issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies. Wright is a Kenyan and educationist working at the University of Tennessee. He locates early forms of cultural studies in Russian culturology of the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance, the Negritude Movement of the 1930s and the Kamiriithu community project in Kenya in the late 1970s. These, and other unnamed cultural studies are present, he argues, in the absence of Africa in of the field. Wright might have added that even those initiatives which are `named' are often ignored by different constituencies competing for the soul of cultural studies. Wright's cites Manthia Diawara's (1992) notion of as a central component of an African cultural studies. This orientation separates Wright's approach from cultural studies solely as an academic discipline. It also perhaps asserts a unity and area--specificity where one does not really exist. However, if community-based performative acts are indeed a criterion of African approaches, then some Southern African interventions should be listed amongst these precursors to cultural studies (Baxter, 1992; Dalrymple, 1987; Hoosain, 1984; Steadman, 1985; Kerr, 1995; Journal of Communication Inquiry, 1988). Some of these Other, non-British origins (Wright 1988:39) were elaborated from local South African frames of reference and performance with regard to labour issues and class struggle (eg. Sitas, 1984; Von Kotze. 1988). Others rearticulated a kind of culturalist Marxism, mixed with cultural theory and materialist semiotics, into not only analysis of local contexts, but also into strategies for political action. Many of these differently-inflected applications linked the academy to the community, rather than necessarily assuming the dichotomy between the head and the hand as Wright has noted of the Western, and especially the US, experience. Unlike the UK, USA, and Kenya, various kinds of cultural studies in South Africa can claim an affirmative application in terms of praxis and the trajectory of history, with regard to both the micro- and macro-levels of ideological engagement. As currently unnamed applications, Wright might like to see them moved to the `named' within international genealogies of the field. It is not my intention here to make a claim for South African cultural studies--of which there are many kinds--but to revisit the debate from specifically African perspectives. A brief history of cultural studies may be in order. Contemporary Cultural Studies was the name popularised by BCCCS in the mid-1950s as an oppositional academic orientation. The field spread globally from there both geographically and disciplinarily. Its penchant for theoretical incorporation by disciplines ranging from history, geography, literature, and politics to accounting is legion. (2) Most of the ensuing studies were about power relations, social and class struggles, and the ways in which meanings are made and contested in discursive contexts of meaning formation. …