Cultural Political Economy Research Articles

The Illusion of Isolation: The Gullah/Geechees and the Political Economy of African Culture in the Americas

The Gullah/Geechee people are the locus classicus for the study of “African survivals” in North American culture. As such, they have been saddled with the duty to generate universal principles for the explanation of Africans’ acculturation, adaptation, and cultural resistance in the Western hemisphere, and they provide the main North American test case for explanatory principles generated elsewhere in the Americas. Yet, the well-studied Gullah/Geechee case, like the Afro-Atlantic world generally, holds untapped lessons about the historical genesis of cultures and ethnic identities worldwide. Is isolation the normal precondition and conservator of cultural and ethnic distinctiveness? And do the enslaved and their descendants choose their ancestors’ ways and identities mainly when and where isolation from the oppressor has made the oppressor's cultural alternatives unavailable? The existing literature on the Gullah/Geechee people of the southeastern U.S. coast and islands says “yes” to these questions, which also stand at the heart of both black Atlantic and global cultural history.

Analyser le développement régional. De l'innovation territoriale à la géographie de « dépendance du sentier »

This paper gives an overview of models which can be used to analyse regional development as well as to design policies and strategies for the future of regions and localities. It evaluates the analytical and policy relevance of these models, and offers some recommendations for a more structural realist approach to spatial development analysis. Section 1 provides an overview of Territorial Innovation Models (TIM) ­ models theorising local and regional development from a New Regionalism point of view - and explains why they fall short of `realist' regional development analysis, strategy and policy design. Section 2 then makes a plea for a return to the `old' institutionalist and structuralist tradition of regional development analysis (German Historical School, Gunnar Myrdal, Francois Perroux, Alain Lipietz, etc.). Indeed these approaches are more ad rem to distinguishing the analytical from the strategy and policy perspective of regional development, and could be made appropriate for spatial analysis relatively easily in this era of globalization. Section 3 makes some methodological recommendations, focusing on contemporary spatial development analysis within a framework of integrated regulationist, cultural political economy and network theoretical approaches, and taking full cognisance of the structural-institutional, scalar and cultural dimensions of development processes and strategies.

The Political Economy of the Car

“What happens if the Chinese all have cars?” This question, posed on page 3 of Matthew Paterson’s Automobile Politics: Ecology and Cultural Political Economy, provides a thematic link between the two books reviewed in this essay, Paterson’s and Kelly Sims Gallagher’s China Shifts Gears: Automakers, Oil, Pollution, and Development. At one level, this link is quite loose. For Paterson, China is one among many examples of the growth in the geographical spread of, and therefore the environmental impact of, car culture, an example that he does not discuss in any particular detail. For Gallagher, China is the focus of the study. Beyond a common focus on cars and the environment the books have little in common, in terms of empirics or methodology. At another level, however, the common focus on the effects of car culture provides an important link. The two books offer radically different approaches to a fundamentally similar set of concerns. These two approaches are emblematic of two distinct literatures in the aeld of global environmental politics. Gallagher’s book is an example of what might be called the policy approach to global environmental politics. This approach is consistent with the mainstream approach to international political economy as practiced in the United States, as found in journals such as International Organization. This approach focuses on minimizing environmental externalities from international economic activity while at the same time minimizing the cost to that activity of controlling environmental externalities. Paterson’s book is an example of the critical approach to global environmental politics, consistent with an approach to international political economy that is more likely to be considered mainstream in Britain than the United States, and is found in journals such as Review of International Political Economy. This approach focuses on the ways in which environmental degradation is part and parcel of

Recovering a sense of political economy

Political economy remains a pressing agenda for political geography and human geography more generally. This is evident from recent exchanges between (variously defined) Marxists and post-structuralists on the nature of society and space, via themes such as scale, space, region, public policy, being political, etc. The paper explores imaginative spaces for discussing differences and considers the potential of cultural political economy (CPE)—being advocated by amongst others Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum—to deliver on this. I highlight some of CPEs strengths and weaknesses, identify missing links, and then make recommendations on how to develop the geographical dimensions of cultural political economy, and, finally, urge serious engagement with the sited complexities and contradictions of re-presentations and material practices. This is done via a study of the ‘skills society’ in the UK.

Automobile politics: ecology and cultural political economy

1. Introduction: (auto)mobility, ecology, and global politics 2. Automobility and its discontents 3. Don't stop movin': the pro-car backlash 4. Automobile political economy 5. The car's cultural politics: producing the (auto)mobile subject 6. Swampy fever, Mondeo man 7. Greening automobility? 8. Conclusions'.

Cultural political economy meets global production networks: a productive meeting?

In this article, I explore some of the implications of pursuing a cultural political economy (CPE) approach to the analysis of global production networks (GPNs). This raises three sets of issues: the current state of knowledge about GPNs; the current state of knowledge about CPE and the current state of relationships between analyses of GPNs and CPE. GPNs can be seen as encompassing the entirety of the circuit of production and to be constituted via a variety of flows (of capital in various forms such as commodities and money, knowledge and people) between a variety of nodes, sites and spaces (of production, exchange and consumption), with varying governance arrangements, both multi-scalar (supra-national, national, regional and urban) and non-scalar networked forms of governance. As these are Global Production Networks these nodes and the flows linking them are, by definition, distributed around the globe, albeit unevenly. CPE seeks to conjoin a more thorough treatment of the semiotic to more established concepts of political economy and there has been some considerable success in this regard [for example see Jessop and Sum (2006 Beyond the Regulation Approach. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar)]. As yet, however, there has been little serious engagement with the materiality of the economy and so with the relations between the material, semiotic and political economic within CPE. A similar criticism can be made of work on GPNs. Integrating considerations of the materiality of the economy more systematically enriches a CPE perspective, while exploring common ground between CPE and GPN approaches enables these advantages to be translated into the latter and further enhance its conceptual reach.

Toward a Carribean cultural political economy

[First paragraph]The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism and Cultural Hybridity. Shalini Puri. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ix + 300 pp. (Paper US$ 24.95)Miraculous Weapons: Revolutionary Ideology in Caribbean Culture. Joy A.I. Mahabir. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. ix + 167 pp. (Cloth US$ 58.95)The relation between cultural production and political struggle, and between the aesthetic and the material as expressions of social relations, are absolutely central themes within Caribbean studies in all of its disciplinary and interdisciplinary guises. A key question for the field as a whole is what role it might play in generating new approaches to “cultural political economy,” which is emerging as an effective bridging concept at the intersections of anthropology, sociology, economics, political theory, and literary and cultural studies.

International Political Economy/Development Otherwise

The opening to cultural differences in IPE/development is presented in academic circles as a disciplinary breakthrough. The cultural turn welcomes contributions from semiotics, ethnology, sociology, geography, and ethics. Surprisingly, despite the claim for this being a ‘cultural approach’, there have been few attempts to incorporate proposals from marginalized cultures. Absent from a cultural political economy are counter-discourses coming from critical development studies, including from subaltern, postcolonial, and postdevelopment scholars. This paper argues for an international political economy/development otherwise which leads to a ‘different place’, a different ‘beginning’, and ‘spatial sites of struggles and building rather than to a new temporality within the same space’ (Walter Mignolo). Thinking otherwise includes theorizing from economies and subjectivities that were never fully capitalist, the use of ‘in-between’ epistemologies, the incorporation of coloniality as the other side of modernity, and the envisioning of noncapitalist possibilities. The forgetting of colonialism and the suppression of noncapitalist alternatives has important consequences for the fields of development and political economy: the critique of capitalism is incomplete; different forms of resistance are overlooked, and alternative sources of innovation and creativity are ignored. This paper analyses cultural, ethnological, oppositional, postcapitalist, and decolonial political economies/development, and considers the extent to which these alternatives allow for decolonization and disidentification from capitalism. La apertura a las diferencias culturales en la Economía Política Internacional/Desarrollo (IPE, por sus siglas en inglés) se presenta dentro de los círculos académicos como un logro disciplinario. El ‘giro cultural’ acepta contribuciones de semiótica, etnología, sociología, geografía y ética. A pesar de pretender ser una ‘estrategia cultural’, sorprendentemente han habido pocos intentos de incorporar propuestas que se originan en culturas marginales. Los argumentos que provienen de estudios críticos de desarrollo, que incluyen estudios subalternos, postcoloniales y del postdesarrollo, están ausentes de una economía política cultural (CPE, por sus siglas en inglés). Este documento propone una economía política internacional/desarrollo que conduce a un ‘lugar diferente’, un ‘inicio’ diferente y ‘a sitios espaciales de luchas y desarrollos en lugar de una nueva temporalidad dentro del mismo espacio’ (Walter Mignolo). Pensar de otra manera incluye teorizar sobre economías y subjetividades que nunca fueron completamente capitalistas, el uso de epistemologías intermedias, la incorporación de la colonialidad como la otra cara de la modernidad y la visualización de posibilidades emancipadoras. El olvido del colonialismo y la eliminación de alternativas no capitalistas tienen consecuencias importantes para los campos del desarrollo y la economía política: la crítica del capitalismo es incompleta; se descuidaron diferentes formas de resistencia y se ignoraron alternativas de fuentes de innovación y creatividad. Este documento analiza las economías políticas/desarrollo culturales, etnológicas, de oposición, poscapitalistas y descoloniales y considera la amplitud que estas alternativas contemplan para la descolonización y desidentificación del capitalismo.

Introduction: Social Innovation and Governance in European Cities

This introductory article does three things. First, it compares neo-liberal and social innovation discourses about urban socio-economic change, including associated policies and key agencies. Second, it seeks to improve the analytical framework of urban development by combining `spatialized' Regulation Theory with elements from Cultural Political Economy and from Urban Regime Theory.Third, with the help of case-studies, the article illustrates how social innovation is a potentially powerful concept, capable of anchoring urban change movements more firmly into the local social and political fabric. The case-studies, some of which are included in this special issue, analyse examples of social innovation in a number of European urban contexts, within the framework of the FP5 SINGOCOM research project.

Cultural political economy: On making the cultural turn without falling into soft economic sociology

This article explores the implications of making the cultural turn in the engagement of economic and political geography with issues of political economy. It seeks to steer a path between a fetishistic, reified economics that naturalizes economic categories and a soft economic sociology that focuses on the similarities between economic and other socio-cultural activities at the expense of the specificity of the economic. We show how combining critical semiotic analysis with an evolutionary and institutional approach to political economy offers one interesting way to achieve this goal. An evolutionary and institutional approach to semiosis enables us to recognize the semiotic dimensions of political economy at the same time as establishing how and why only some economic imaginaries among the many that circulate actually come to be selected and institutionalized; and Marxian political economy enables us to identify the contradictions and conflicts that make capital accumulation inherently improbable and crisis-prone, creating the space for economic imaginaries to play a role in stabilizing accumulation in specific spatio-temporal fixes and/or pointing the way forward from recurrent crises. The paper illustrates these arguments with a case study on the Flemish ‘anchoring strategy’ as a specific regional economic development strategy. It concludes with a set of guidelines for the further development of cultural political economy.

Making Space for Art : the Culture Debate and the Studio Arts Movement in Hong-Kong

In Hong Kong, the recent emergence of studio arts districts is taking place in the context of public debate over state visions of cultural facilities and creative industries. While government invests in a planned culture district, artists struggle for working space in an environment of volatile rents. To contribute to a critical geography of art, this discussion engages the struggle to produce contemporary and alternative art in Hong Kong after 1997 at the theoretical intersection of the production of space, cultural political economy and the Deleuzian idea of art as sensation.

Unesco’s Road Toward Knowledge Societies

Though traditionally perceived as a more liberal international organisation, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) is part and parcel of the “development machine”. Inspired by post-structural thinking in development studies and Jessop’s (2004) cultural political economy approach, we examine the organisation’s 2005 World Report Towards Knowledge Societies as a text of development construing and constructing particular discourses. First, we introduce the knowledge-based economy discourse and the information society discourse. Then we situate UNESCO’s report as an attempt to provide an alternative to the die-hard information society discourse. Next, we argue that through its allegiance to knowledge-based economy reasoning (concerning education and learning; globalisation and development), UNESCO in this report actually endorses and helps to construct the discourse on the information society. The convergence of information society, knowledge-based economy and neo-liberal thinking has very real material consequences because it provides the ideal discursive context for the ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) paradigm, the newest development craze which may belittle more than a reissue of the old modernisation paradigm.

Scalar Narratives in Bilbao: A Cultural Politics of Scales Approach to the Study of Urban Policy

AbstractIn this article I explore how theoretical metaphors about the contemporary rescaling of the capitalist economy are used by local policy actors to justify an entrepreneurial urban policy. I develop a new theoretical concept (scalar narrative), suggest an analytical approach (cultural politics of scales) and give evidence of a particular case (Bilbao). The article is structured in the following way. First, I briefly review the literature on politics of scales and contribute to the debate with an approach that incorporates elements from cultural political economy and interpretative policy analysis. Within this approach I mobilize the concept of ‘scalar narrative’ that has already been suggested in the literature but not fully explored. I then put this approach into practice with a particular case study, Bilbao, a city in the north of Spain, which has recently gone through extensive urban regeneration, where I describe the appropriation of three scalar narratives by the policymakers. To show this I draw from empirical work done in Bilbao that looks at statutory and strategic planning documents as well as urban marketing literature and interviews with key informants.

Book Review: Toward a Political Economy of Culture: Capitalism and Communication in the Twenty-First Century

Book Review: Toward a Political Economy of Culture: Capitalism and Communication in the Twenty-First Century

Intellectual property rights and the political economy of culture

The domain of intellectual property rights, along with the regulations that govern them, has a steadily, almost visibly incremental bearing these days upon the ordinary lives of people across the globe, in the rich world and the poor and in the North and the South. Its influence has escalated to the point where for some it may mean the difference between life and death; on it are now founded industries in the first rank of corporate power and thrust. As a modus for wealth creation it is being transferred onto other previously unthought-of sectors outside the familiar orbit of the market: indigenous cultural forms, music, fabric and other designs, symbols, artefacts, knowledge of natural resources, dance steps, motifs, advertising catch phrases, logos and brand names …

A Warm Embrace? New Zealand, Universities and the “Knowledge‐based Economy”

This article deploys a cultural political economy framework to explore New Zealand’s “embrace” of globally‐sourced knowledge economy discourse. It argues that the diffusion of such knowledge in this locale has been mediated by electoral shifts and rising economic prosperity but in one of the few fields where some level of institutionalization has occurred––higher education––it has been used to increase state control of a highly marketized tertiary sector. The article then discusses the implications of this investigation for researchers in non‐metropolitan locales.

Toward a Carribean cultural political economy

[First paragraph]The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism and Cultural Hybridity. Shalini Puri. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ix + 300 pp. (Paper US$ 24.95)Miraculous Weapons: Revolutionary Ideology in Caribbean Culture. Joy A.I. Mahabir. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. ix + 167 pp. (Cloth US$ 58.95)The relation between cultural production and political struggle, and between the aesthetic and the material as expressions of social relations, are absolutely central themes within Caribbean studies in all of its disciplinary and interdisciplinary guises. A key question for the field as a whole is what role it might play in generating new approaches to “cultural political economy,” which is emerging as an effective bridging concept at the intersections of anthropology, sociology, economics, political theory, and literary and cultural studies.

Toward a Political Economy of Culture: Capitalism and Communication in the 21st Century

Toward a Political Economy of Culture: Capitalism and Communication in the 21st Century

The Children Act 2004: Child Protection and Social Surveillance

This article considers the passage of the Children Act 2004 through Parliament. Drawing on recent debates in social science, particularly those concerned with informationalism, governance and cultural political economy, the article examines how welfare policies can be used as a vehicle for pursuing broader political goals. In particular, the development of information, retrieval and tracking systems (IRT) raise questions concerning the rapid growth in the use of instruments of surveillance. The aims of the article are, firstly, to analyse the use of surveillance as a mode of societal governance and, secondly, to illustrate how attempts to exercise governance take place through a particular discursive construction of children and their protection, a construction which presents the Children Act as a solution to some technical problems of information‐sharing and inter‐agency working in the service of children's welfare. The article argues that such a discursive construction is necessary in order to delegitimise and obscure key political questions of civil liberties and human rights that are raised by the Children Act.

Culture, labour and subjectivity: For a political economy from below

The central theme of this article is the relationship between political economy and culture. This raises related questions of the place and valuation of subjectivity, and of immaterial cultural labour within the cultural economy. These relationships and questions have been articulated in a relatively narrow way, if at all, by contemporary debates, which have not sufficiently taken into account recent social and cultural transformations. So this article attempts to discuss how a political economy of culture might develop a broader approach towards labour, culture, and subjectivity. The objective is to identify some of the problematic, under-researched and under-illuminated issues and areas. It culminates in the speculative discussion of a ‘political economy from below’, inherently geared to understanding the micro-productive activities of cultural producers themselves.