Cultural studies under Mediterranean skies

Abstract

This commentary arose from discussions and presentations held at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies' 50 years on (CCCS50) conference. Held at the University of Binningham on 24-25 June, the conference examined the legacy that the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies fostered since its inception in 1964. Despite the closure of the centre in 2002, the maverick research tracks that were created then are still followed now. This is a rather disturbing return to the scene of the crime (deepened by Stuart's recent death). Here in Birmingham, cultural studies was founded and then closed down. Perhaps this is the parabola of the intellectual shutdown presently underway in Western academia, where knowledge is increasingly packaged as information to be rendered transparent to the metaphysics of the market. In an epoch characterised by the ethical bankruptcy of neoliberalism sustained in a political positivism that denies the idea of justice and implicitly refuses to cultivate a critical citizenship what John Berger not so long ago called 'economic fascism'--then the freedoms that once permitted critical thought and led to cultural studies are today clearly on very difficult ground. The fundamental premise that I have personally inherited from cultural studies and the heady days at Birmingham in the 1970s is that of operating with the idea of critical work as a cut or wound that cannot be healed. This would subsequently resonate in my encounters with Foucault and Fanon, along with feminism and critical thought in Italy. I would suggest, obviously completely against the grain of the present-day neoliberal organisation of higher education and its managerial and market-orientated protocols, that this means to transform inherited intellectual fields and disciplines into ruins, rather than simply to fine-tune and renovate them: the cut, the crisis, the critical interrogation is constant. This also means that doing anthropology, fieldwork, sociology or historical research--crossing and contesting their languages and premises--can never be the same again. As it travels into other geographies, sustained in translation and confronting the indecipherable that registers the complexities of historical differences, this wound can only deepen in order to accommodate other narratives and other needs. But the critical configuration of cultural studies in transit and translation can also return to re-invest its so-called origins and sources with further interrogations. (These unsuspected consequences of travelling theory were famously rehearsed by Edward Said.) So, in my case, referring to the locations of analysis is to consider the transit, transformation and translation of cultural studies in a non-Anglophone space and series of practices. This is to suggest connections leading to both a resonance and dissonance seeded outside the North Atlantic axis. What interests me here is the re-routing of cultural studies in a southern European and Mediterranean context. It inevitably leads to asking often recognisable questions while simultaneously drawing upon diverse cultural, conjunctural and critical lexicons. This particular exit from an Anglo-American world historically dominated by empiricism has not occurred so much through the fetishisation of theory (another Anglo-American phenomenon), as by cutting into the sedimented inheritance of European humanism and the inevitable undoing (after Nietzsche, after Freud) of the abstract Kantian categories and Hegelian dialectic that presume reason is truth and truth is reason. As James Baldwin would have put it, or Frantz Fanon or Assia Djebar for that matter, critical possibility is not produced by deliberate rationality, rather it is dependent on coming to terms with the past that cruelly configures our present. Here, where I tend to run the inheritance of cultural and postcolonial studies into what 1 today practise as Mediterranean studies, let me very rapidly offer two perspectives. …