Contemporary Cultural Politics Research Articles

Aligning to ambivalence: White petty bourgeois masculinities, leisure and the contemporary cultural politics of gender in the UK

Drawing on an ethnography of 12 white, young, petty bourgeois, heterosexual men between the ages of 20–26 from Leicester, UK, and utilising Raymond Williams concept of ‘structure of feeling’, this article will critically explore how their masculinities are performed, constituted and articulated in games of five-a-side football and house parties. This will further understanding of white masculinities, the intersecting gendered, classed and racial identities of the petty bourgeoisie, and the gender politics of the current conjuncture in the United Kingdom in three ways. First, it will make an explicit link between the broader cultural politics of gender in the United Kingdom and petty bourgeois masculinities through leisure. Second, it will critically build upon recent insights into the ‘both ways’ politics of the petty bourgeoisie in the United Kingdom by focussing on how gender and race factor into this. Finally, it will show how ‘aligning’ to this broader politics of gender is enabled by intersecting social locations of advantage, primarily in terms of class, race and sexuality, showing how alignment to ambivalence can articulate and reinforce inequalities between men, while feeding into broader gendered inequalities.

Articulating whiteness

ABSTRACT In almost three decades of work on whiteness in communication studies, it has developed in a number of different directions. In contemporary cultural politics, whiteness has transformed into an even more powerful discursive force in society. This piece reflects on the history of the journal, Communication and Critical Cultural Studies, and argues that one of its legacies, articulation theory, offers a particularly productive approach for the further development of whiteness studies.

Fanon and Hair

What would it mean to think about Frantz Fanon’s work on race, embodiment, and identity in the context of the contemporary cultural politics of Black hair? Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks offers us some key terms for deepening our engagement with this issue and, in that continuing relevance, tells us something important about the persistence of the colonial gaze in contemporary life. The discourse around black hair has evolved to mean more than what it meant in the 1960s and 1970s. Though it continues to revolve around the symbol of black beauty, celebration and resistance, the symbol is not exclusive to one single hairstyle choice. One of the perils of freedom is the ability to exercise the right of choice. That includes the freedom to choose how you want to look and what language you want to speak. This is about giving agency to black bodies to make choices that make meaning for them and not define it around the white gaze or white ear. In trying to create safe spaces, we must take caution as not to create barriers around new thoughts and ideas that are uncategorizable. The existence of blackness has long been denied so we should take caution to not disqualify aesthetics that do not fit a specific type of mold. As a black woman born to Senegalese parents, raised in the United Arab Emirates and now living in the United States, I have always been around multiple cultures and that came with the ability to now speak multiple languages (Wolof, English, Arabic and French). And my hair journey…has ranged from having an Afro, braids, perming my hair, going through a period of transition, wearing it natural, adding extensions and the list goes on. Many have tried to disqualify my blackness for one reason or another. But, in no way am I less Black than another because of a hairstyle choice or the languages I speak. My blackness has always been spoken to me by my family. My blackness is a constant reminder to me by society. My blackness is rooted in my experiences. My blackness is rooted in my very existence. As long as I continue to live in my black body, no one can take away my blackness, and all the marvelousness it is capable of. To this, Fanon might suggest I read his Black Skin, White Masks as a way to explain my back-and-forth hair journey between natural and permed to further understand the effects of colonialism on the black psyche. Though Fanon’s perspective can explain so much this, I would like to put his text in dialogue with Rokhaya Diallo’s Afro where she compiles the experiences of 120 Afropeans, men and women, living in France and their experience of wearing their natural hair out. They range from professors, bankers to ministers and civil servants. Hair dictates a lot of factors in a black woman's life. Although they are talking about hair, their experience conveys what it means for a black body to exist in predominantly white spaces. By putting these two texts in dialogue, we can extend Fanon’s discourse around must black bodies conform when existing in white spaces? To what extent does Fanon’s theorization of black bodies in white spaces hold up?

“Special Feature: The Achievements of John Dennis,” ed. Claude Willan. 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Kevin L. Cope

“Special Feature: The Achievements of John Dennis,” ed. Claude Willan. <i>1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Kevin L. Cope</i>

Dangerous Play in an Age of Technofinance: From the GameStop Hunger Games to the Capitol Hill Jamboree

In this paper we explore one dimension of the contemporary cultural politics that gives rise to reactionary formations and movements: the desire for a kind of dangerous play within a financialized world where most people feel trapped in a game they can’t win. We take up three interwoven phenomena from the recent past in the United States, though with implications beyond that context: (a) the GameStop stock-buying frenzy of early 202l, (b) the storming of the US Capitol building on January 6 of that year, and (c) the dramatic rise in popularity of the QAnon conspiracy fantasy that appeared in 2017 and gained significant influence since. By locating these complex participatory phenomena in the context of digitized financialization characterized by gamification, alienation and profound inequalities, we supplement efforts to understand today’s reactionary imagination. We argue that all three might be seen as, in part, forms of dangerous play that both emerge from, rebel against and also, contradictorily, help to reproduce or entrench dominant inequalities. Hence those who wish to counter these reactionary tendencies or propose more radical responses cannot limit themselves to critique; they must also contend with what animates these forms of alienated play.

Musical spirits and poetic tongues: oral traditions in the cultural politics of Kurdish intellectuals (1920s-1940s)

ABSTRACT This article examines oral traditions in the discourse of Kurdish intellectuals between 1920s and 1940s. Through a critical and textual analysis of three main publications, namely Hawar [cry for help] (1932–1943), Ronahî [light] (1941–1943), and Roja Nû [new day] (1943 − 1946), it discusses the different ways in which oral traditions were seen as instrumental for crafting national selves, advancing literacy, and disseminating local histories. The article identifies the endeavours of Kurdish intellectuals as a form of romantic nationalism and approaches it within the theoretical framework of John Hutchinson’s cultural nationalism. It shows that Kurdish intellectuals’ interests in oral traditions were the outcome of complex, ideological positions and conditions, and that the cultural and the political were closely intertwined in their pursuits. Exploring those pursuits also informs us of the symbolic and political significance of expressive traditions in the contemporary cultural politics of Kurds in Turkey.

On the Beach

Abstract The phrase “on the beach” originates as naval slang for being between assignments or unemployed and was used as the title for Nevil Shute's bestselling novel of 1957 about the last remaining survivors of a global nuclear conflict as they await their inevitable demise. The novel is about a certain kind of anxious passivity in the face of incomprehensible catastrophe, but it is also a narrative about work and idleness. As such, the idea of being “on the beach” invites consideration of the shore as a liminal space where often conflicting social and existential issues of meaning and purpose are played out. The waves of so-called beach shaming that occurred during the early months of the global coronavirus pandemic have located, yet again, the beach as a key battleground in contemporary cultural politics.

Opening the Window on Higher Ed: An Interview with Christopher Newfield

Opening the Window on Higher Ed:An Interview with Christopher Newfield Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) The cost of college has skyrocketed, limiting access and causing the exponential growth of student debt. This is typically cast as a result of inevitable economic or historical change. Against that complacent view, Christopher Newfield shows how debt and many other current problems in American higher education arise from deliberate policies and politics, and he has become a leading figure in critical university studies. While most university budgets are forbiddingly complicated if not secret, in Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (2008) Newfield traces the money trail and the ways that state universities have been defunded, with support diverted from public uses to private coffers. And while reformers and administrators might target particular problems, in The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2016) he calls attention to the "devolutionary cycle," with problems like cuts in public funding answered by raising tuition, prompting rising student debt, in turn causing lack of confidence in public education, and so on, in an interlinking spiral. Overall, he argues that we need to reinfuse public higher education and the value of humanistic thinking for human development. Starting as a scholar of American literature, Newfield has focused on cultural politics and ideology, particularly the tension between liberal individualism and democratic equality. That tension is the topic of his first book, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (1996), which analyzes Ralph Waldo Emerson's imprint on American culture, which extols self-reliance but finally encourages "submissive individualism." Through the 1990s, Newfield turned to look at management culture and how it recirculates those values, writing on management theorist Tom Peters. In addition, he co-edited two collections about contemporary cultural politics, After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s (with Ronald Strickland; 1995) and Mapping Multiculturalism (with Avery Gordon; 1996). Relevant to this interview, see also his essays, "What Was 'Political Correctness'?: Race, the Right, and Managerial Democracy in the Humanities" (Critical Inquiry 19.2 [1993]); "Recapturing Academic Business" (Social Text 15.2 [1997]); and "Corporate Culture Wars" (Corporate Futures, ed. George Marcus [1998]). [End Page 743] Over the past two decades, Newfield has focused on the American university. His study of management culture fed into his analysis of the development of the research university in Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 (2003). In addition to his books Unmaking the Public University and The Great Mistake, and numerous essays and reports, he also co-founded, co-edits, and sometimes writes for the site, Remaking the University, at http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/, an influential clearinghouse for discussion of contemporary issues and events in higher education, especially in large public systems such as California's. Born in 1958, Newfield grew up in Los Angeles and attended Reed College (BA, 1980) and Cornell University (PhD, 1988). After a brief sojourn at Rice University (1987-89), he taught at UC-Santa Barbara from 1989 to 2020, where he is Distinguished Professor emeritus. Since 2020, he is Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London. This interview took place on July 16, 2021 via Zoom, with Newfield speaking from London. It was conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams in Pittsburgh, and transcribed by Bethie Wang, an MA in literary and cultural studies from Carnegie Mellon University. Jeffrey J. Williams: Over the past two decades, you have probably been the most persistent critic of higher education from the humanities. Could you encapsulate your analysis of contemporary higher education? Christopher Newfield: One overriding theme has been the shifting away from public to private rationales for higher education, which has been a disaster. This has been happening throughout my career, but was accelerated by the financial crisis. For example, there's been enormous state support for asset prices since the 1980s, starting when Greenspan was head of the Fed, through cheap money—that is, the constant flooding of the financial system whenever market prices start to fall with public dollars. That is very much the opposite of the state's treatment of the public sector...

Bolivia in the Age of Gas by Bret Gustafson

Reviewed by: Bolivia in the Age of Gas by Bret Gustafson Nicole Fabricant Bret Gustafson Bolivia in the Age of Gas. Durham, Duke University Press. 2020 309 pp; 22 b&w photos, notes, bibliography, index. $27.95 paper (ISBN 978-14-78010-999); $121 hardcover (ISBN 978-14-7800-931). Bret gustafson has been working on Indigenous movements in Bolivia since the 1990s focusing on questions of land and language rights in the Chaco region of lowland Bolivia. This book is a testament to decades of friendship, comradery, and commitment to the Guarani people and grew out of ongoing research collaborations. Perhaps this book surfaced out of Gustafson’s own excitement for the rise of a political party like MAS (Movement toward Socialism), a political party that promised to nationalize resource industries and redistribute wealth to Indigenous and poor people. Gustafson watched from afar as the MAS party came to power in 2006 out of series of popular mobilizations, from the “Water Wars” in Cochabamba in the early 2000s to the “Gas Wars” in 2003 in El Alto. Movement cries for nationalization of gas, radical land redistribution and a new constitution shaped his first year in office; yet very quickly Morales scaled back on some of his more radical proposals due to opposition from agrarian elites in Eastern Bolivia. Perhaps gas was one of them which went from nationalization (to a form of semi-nationalization, or what Gustafson calls nationalization-lite). While the government did not expropriate or expel the big foreign companies, instead they worked as “partners”. For example, the government bought back significant parts of the hydrocarbon infrastructure—filling stations, pipelines, and distributors—or at least reclaimed them while working alongside private investors. Furthermore, the expansion of the gas industry in Guarani territory has not brought the “development dreams” Indigenous peoples hoped for but rather brought new geopolitical, cultural, environmental, and territorial conflicts.1 Gustafson’s Bolivia in the Age of Gas examines the historical and contemporary cultural politics of Bolivia’s complex and often troubled relationship with natural gas. Bolivia’s fossil fuel resources – and the quest to extract and export them from this land-locked country – have entangled Bolivia in complicated international relationships, most notably with the United States. These conflicts date back more than a century when Standard Oil bullied Bolivia amid nationalist fever in the early 1920s. In the neoliberal era, as transnational corporations expropriated natural resources, Bolivians increasingly called for sovereignty in the form of national and territorial control over resource wealth. The popular challenge to neoliberal privatization peaked with the “Gas War” in the early 2000s, but fossil fuel resources have continued to be at the heart of Bolivia’s ever unfinished and conflictive project of nation-state formation and perhaps in the future there will need to be a clean break. Gustafson’s book is organized into three parts: time, space, and excess. The first section presents the longue durée of oil and gas extraction; the second hones in on questions [End Page 217] tied to national, regional, and indigenous territorialities; and the third addresses “the gaseous state’s interlocking struggles over different forms of excess—excess violence, excess work, and excess money” (p. 21). In the tradition of the great Bolivian sociologist and philosopher, René Zavaleta Mercado, Gustafson draws distinctions and makes connections between the past and present and juxtaposes historical events to deploy them in new ways. He brings a humanistic lens to the study of fossil fuel economies by unpacking the everyday toxicities tied to this industry, from the misogynistic and patriarchal relationships in the gas-rich Chaco region to the incessant machista humor and gossip that fills the oil camps. Beyond confronting climactic crisis, he aims to reveal how fossil economies reproduce the patriarchal, hetero-normative, racialized regimes which leave layers of “toxicit(ies) arrayed both against our own bodies and those of the natural world” (p. 13). Gustafson’s sharp analysis also seeks to “help North American readers understand the problem of ‘fossil capital’ and fossil fuel dependency in the U.S. as well as in Bolivia.” (p. 13). Perhaps, our own addictions to consumption and excess in the North (and in more industrialized...

Containment Matters: Set and Setting in Contemporary Psychedelic Psychiatry

Over the past decade and a half, psychedelic drug-induced experiences have been returning to psychiatry as promising new healing modalities. The case of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy can inform how we think about the context of drug use because psychedelics are commonly considered to be sensitive to the ‘[mind]set and setting’ of their use. As such, epistemic and therapeutic concerns amongst psychedelic researchers and therapists over the importance of set and setting are interwoven. My ethnography of psychedelic therapeutics both inside and outside of the clinical trials on the east coast of the US from 2015-2019 suggests that there are added political and economic imperatives to contain psychedelic use. Working with this insight, I suggest psychedelic researchers and therapists are producing immense experiences that tend to overflow the attempts at their containment. I also identify two qualities central to the set and setting of the emerging modality of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. The first is a labor of protecting spaces which reveals an attentiveness to disconnection that can be read as in tension with the more commonly-evoked emphasis on connection found within psychedelic discourses. The second is how psychedelic experiences (as ‘mind-manifesting’) are understood to reflect the self, and in so doing re-present epistemic disagreements about the nature of the self thus reflected. Taken together, I propose that these two qualities of psychedelic containment offer an analytics for reading the contemporary cultural politics of psychedelic use.

The celebritization of indigenous activism: Tame Iti as media figure

In recent years, a number of indigenous activists have gained celebrity status in ways that carry interesting implications for contemporary cultural politics. This article focuses on the celebrification of Tame Iti, arguably Aotearoa/New Zealand’s best-known Māori activist, within a wider cultural context characterized by intensifying media convergence, an expanding politics of decolonization, and the continuing elaboration of global indigenous mediascapes, including the Māori Television Service. We draw on forms of conjunctural analysis to explore how wider historical forces and social dynamics come to be embodied in particular flesh and blood individuals, who are thereby constituted as resonant media figures, who operate as both objects and agents of struggle, and who at once intervene in and shape, while also being shaped by, key terrains of contemporary discourse and cultural politics.

Veganwashing Israel’s Dirty Laundry? Animal Politics and Nationalism in Palestine-Israel

ABSTRACTIn popular media and public discourse, Israel has been referred to as ‘the first vegan nation’ and the ‘global centre for veganism’ because of the mainstreaming of veganism in the country in the 2010s. The article examines this triumphalist rhetoric and argues that animal welfare and veganism have been enrolled as a device to narrate the Israeli nation within terms of Jewish Israeli sovereignty. The contemporary cultural politics of veganism in Israel circulate and reinforce national myths of exceptionalism tethered to a Zionist exclusionary ideology, including claims to unique victimhood, pioneering achievements and moral rectitude, which further entrench Jewish Israeli belonging and Palestinian unbelonging. Indeed, Israeli institutions have co-opted an image of ‘vegan/animal-friendliness’ as makers of the nation’s modernity and morality. Yet, drawing on fieldwork with Jewish Israeli activists, the paper argues that both the deliberate practices of veganwashing and its well-intentioned critiques overlook the nuances and ambivalences of Israeli animal politics. The paper also highlights that critiques of veganwashing do not go far enough to show how it is negotiated by Palestinian animal advocates. It suggests that focus on veganwashing as the primary debate of settler-colonial injustice and animal politics has paradoxically rendered them inaudible, and calls instead for a politics of listening.

Discursive Construction of Genuine LGBT Refugees

This article discusses the ways in which different discourses construct a genuine LGBT refugee subject in Norway. In doing so, it problematizes the notion of a predetermined/ahistorical/context-free LGBT refugee subject who can be discovered at the national borders as the true claimant of the refugee status. Benefiting from queer theory, the discussion revolves around the performative aspects of refugeeness, arguing that refugeeness is discursively constructed in a particular legal, political, and cultural context and that there is no genuine refugee prior to its recognition. The article also draws on the notion of precarity as a constitutive of the so-called genuine refugee subject, and discusses how precarity for sexual minorities has been constituted within the contemporary cultural politics of immigration and sexual politics in Norway. It concludes by arguing for the need for increasing attentiveness to the reproduction and circulation of discourses around issues such as deserving immigrants, precarity, worthy asylum seekers, healthy sexualities, and good citizens within the field of refugee policies and practices.

Heroism and Comics Form: Feminist and Queer Speculations

Heroism and Comics Form: Feminist and Queer Speculations

Golden Places, Aesthetic Spaces

Golden Places, Aesthetic Spaces

Status Rivalry and the Politics of Biculturalism in Contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand

Could it be that despite a huge literature spanning decades from many disciplines, a corpus of writing that examines seemingly every twist and turn of a complex situation, we still are missing something basic and fundamental to a proper understanding of contemporary cultural politics in Aotearoa New Zealand? A thing so obvious and omnipresent, that it was characterized long ago in the anthropological literature as the fundamental dynamic of Polynesian culture, and acknowledged even further back by Maori in their ancestral sayings?He tauranga uta, he toka tu moana (a resting place ashore, a firm rock at sea). ‘This metaphor describes the chief whose influence is unchallenged in his territory which extends from the land to the sea’ (Mead and Grove 2003:125). But surely real chiefs, those solid anchoring points, no longer exist as they did before the coming of the Pakeha. Be that as it may, the elements of social organization and associated cultural values of chiefly status continue to resonate in contemporary society. This paper argues that Goldman's concept of status rivalry is that crucial overlooked aspect of cultural politics necessary to a full understanding of what is happening today in the Waitangi Tribunal, Parliament, and so many other places where biculturalism and multiculturalism are debated and discussed, and that it is an aspect of Polynesian culture that has been part of the interrelationship between the Crown and te tangata whenua (the indigenous people) since their first encounters.

The Body-That-Is-Not-One: Exception and Belonging on the US-Mexican Border in The Bridge

This paper discusses the ways in which the 2013-14 TV series Bridge/America interferes with current border politics and the creation of bare life (Agamben) at the U.S.-Mexican border. By engaging its viewers with the state and status of individual and communal bodies in the borderland region and using the corpse on The Bridge of the Americas – the body-that-is-not-one – as symbol and trigger for its investigation, the series presents a powerful critique of national border politics and their results: the precarity of human lives on the thresholds to the Global North and the states of exception that exist at the U.S.-Mexican border. However, as a cultural artifact, the series also symptomatically reflects the tensions and debates that inform the border as a highly charged terrain in contemporary national, transnational, and cultural politics and imaginaries.

Beyond Preservation: Post-Soviet Reconstructions of the Strelna and Tsaritsyno Palace-Parks

This essay tells the story of two Russian imperial palace-parks – Petersburg’s Strelna and Moscow’s Tsaritsyno, both federally protected imperial heritage sites reclaimed from physical ruin in twenty-first century post-Soviet Russia. Both palace-parks were subjected to major, highly controversial reconstruction, and in their new incarnations now assert post-Soviet Russia’s status as the inheritor-heir of imperial Russian cultural property. Both projects also bring into sharp relief the terms of contemporary debate and cultural politics surrounding heritage and preservation in the two cities. During the early post-Soviet years, the Strelna and Tsaritsyno palaces lay in ruins as “couldhave-beens,” intriguingly suggestive of alternative histories. At the turn of the twenty-first century, as Vladimir Putin began his first term as Russian President and Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov contemplated a second decade in office, Strelna and Tsaritsyno both offered ideal opportunities for the post-Soviet repurposing of cultural heritage – reclaiming the imperial past by fulfilling its unrealized promise, and reconstructing heritage with a creative hand. The major Russian imperial palace-parks in the environs of St. Petersburg (Tsarskoe Selo, Peterhof, etc.) are “classic” examples of Russian lieux de memoire, to use Pierre Nora’s famous term. To what extent, in what different ways, and to what effect do the new postSoviet versions of Strelna and Tsaritsyno assert their own status as Russian cultural lieux de memoire?

Remembering the Age of Iron

Over the past few years we have witnessed a minor cultural phenomenon in China, with the production and enthusiastic reception nationwide of several television dramas about Chinese workers in the socialist decades. Set in the industrial plants of Liaoning in China’s northeast, once the industrial powerhouse of the socialist nation, these drama series centre on the dramatic transformation in workers’ experiences from 1949 to the start of economic reforms. In this paper I explore these series, asking: what does the smallscale production but enthusiastic reception of this genre tell us about the contemporary cultural politics of class? This paper addresses this question by (1) highlighting the key aspects of workers’ experiences with socialism as depicted in these television narratives; (2) considering the creative agenda of Gao Mantang, the script writer of the most successful industrial-themed television series; and (3) identifying some crucial ways in which the subjectivity of workers and other social groups in contemporary Chinese society intersect to shape the cultural politics of class. This discussion shows that television dramas have indeed become the basis of a widely accessible public forum that helps forge a renewed appreciation of the moral integrity of China’s working class, vent a widespread sense of injustice, and foster a certain degree of solidarity between workers and other social classes. At the same time, while television dramas about workers may hold significant potential for mobilising public support for the working class and advocating workers’ interests, this discussion also suggests that so far this potential has not been fully exploited.

Assessing the sociology of sport: On controversies and scandals

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, Catherine Palmer, a wide-ranging scholar of sporting subcultures, examines one of more intriguing artifacts of sport in contemporary times: the inevitability of controversies and scandals. Palmer notes that the controversies, scandals and crimes that have become a regular feature of sport represent ‘empirical gold’ for sociological inquiry and cultural critique. While sporting scandals are most often ‘middle order moral events,’ their sociological analysis can lead to important changes in the governance of sport. Four key challenges in the ‘ecology of scandal’ in sport are identified and discussed: scandal susceptibility, polysemia, intertextuality and scandal hierarchy. It is argued that in the future, sociological inquiry will need to consider why it is that sports scandals are often presented in media and popular discourse with little critical reflection on specificity or context, given that such scandals can give rise to questions about a wider social logic which can help focus analyses of contemporary cultural politics that underpin sport.