Which ‘C’ Are You Talking About? Critical Meets Cultural IPE

Abstract

This review article maps the positions of critical and cultural IPE within this diverse field. To this end, I propose a stylised analogy as a heuristic mapping device. Think of IPE as a parliamentary polity with elections at regular intervals. There is the majority group of the incumbent government, which remains confident of running things properly despite the occasional mistake; there is the parliamentary opposition, which promises to run things differently from within the established institutions; and, finally, there is the extra-parliamentary opposition, which pushes for radical change from outside the dedicated platforms for political contestation. In this analogy, orthodox IPE acts like the government majority, cultural IPE like the parliamentary opposition and critical IPE like the extra-parliamentary opposition of the discipline. Similar to political alternatives that bring about only marginal change, however, this double opposition does not fully destabilise the underpinnings of the discipline. Applying post-racist insights from the works of John M. Hobson and J. M. Blaut, I instead contend that both ‘C’ strands are themselves riddled with unacknowledged traces of Eurocentric ontologies and epistemologies, albeit to different degrees. For the sake of informed research and teaching, it is necessary to reveal, unravel and overcome such foundational limitations. The review article is structured as follows. I begin with a summary of each volume to highlight what the contributors respectively regard as ‘critical’ and ‘cultural’ analyses of the global political economy. Next, I employ the analogy of the parliamentary polity to assess the engagements of critical and cultural IPE with orthodox IPE. In a related step, I discuss how Eurocentrism afflicts even these decidedly non-orthodox strands and why their limitations matter to the wider discipline. I conclude with a call for mapping further the territory where critical and cultural IPE meet.