Reorienting culture for decolonization

Abstract

I argue that decolonizing the practice of cultural studies calls for caution around the proposal to incorporate ‘other knowledges’. I posit Aotearoa New Zealand as a critically productive space for interrogating such moves precisely because it is often described as having ‘successfully’ incorporated indigenous knowledges in cultural studies, and in other cultural and institutional spheres. The implication of inclusion and perhaps even embodiment of such knowledges is haunted on the one hand by connotations of appropriation of indigenous resources for the legitimation of the colonialist hegemony and, on the other hand, by the emergence of commodified indigenous knowledge in the era of neo-liberal capitalism and the global cultural market. I invoke Frow and Morris's characterization of cultural studies as ‘suspicious of those totalising notions of culture which assume … the achievement of a whole and coherent “society” or “community”’ (1993, ix), along with Latouche's (1984) account of critical epistemology, to argue that even in-group cultural research in order to ‘know’ and record a culture risks fixing that culture as an object of knowledge, and is at least in tension with the project of revitalizing it. Cultural studies, to the extent that it is committed to the imperative of ongoing critique, and its challenge to discourses of reified and institutionalized culture, propose potentially more enabling pathways to the decolonization of culture than those committed to preserving culture in the name of tradition, or to entrepreneurial agency, subsuming culture to the instrumental terms of the neo-liberal market.