This essay traces how social movements throughout the globe in 1968 heavily influenced the development, operations, and identity of cultural studies. Thus, 1968 remains a critical turning point for cultural studies and its goals. To demonstrate this, global struggles contextualize the micro expressions of unrest at The University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Secondly, the essay examines how the discipline negotiated studies of marginalized and subaltern cultures within this social context. And finally, an analysis of key texts of 1968 demonstrates how the sociopolitical moment produced work that is emblematic of cultural studies’ pursuits. Ultimately, the essay questions how our contemporary moment might necessitate new pursuits in scholarly praxis, like the moment of 1968 called forth new directions in cultural studies.
Issues
1988–The Crisis in Marxist Cultural Theory
1988 signaled a major year for cultural studies with the publication of several significant texts: The collection of essays Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Spivak, and The Hard Road to Renewal, Stuart Hall’s book on Thatcherism. Despite these texts’ divergent purposes, themes, and theories, they can be productively read together for their unique contributions to Marxist cultural theory. In the decades preceding their publication, a resurgence in scholarship devoted to Marxism had emerged, as scholars grappled with both its internal issues as well as its increasingly apparent insufficiency to explain current social formations. As Grossberg and Nelson explain in the introduction to Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Marxism was “paradoxically at once undergoing a renaissance of activity and a crisis of definition.” In this essay, we elucidate how each text contributed to cultural studies and particularly highlight how each intervened on this redefinition of Marxism.
Review of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman (W. W. Norton & Company)
This review considers how Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval poses a challenge to the reader. The invitation is to stay immersed within the everyday lives of Black women and girls, who navigated the terrains of New York City and Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century, without fleeting into spectacle or pathology. One may assume that such is an effortless proposition that is carried simply by the desire to think about Black women. However, Hartman tacitly demonstrates that a tremendous counter-historiography must be amassed to write the stories of those who have been underwritten by the tales of politics, great Black men, shining Black starlets, or the widely pathologized Black female figure. Thus, Wayward Lives weaves together a beautiful narrative of the social upheaval of Black women and girls at the dawning of Northern urban space, and what would later become known as the Black ghetto. At the same time, Hartman exposes the limits of the official record and narratives which relegate the lives of Black women as tertiary, as opposed to an integral political history in its own right.
Review of Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas by Jinah Kim (Duke University Press)
Jinah Kim’s Postcolonial Grief engages with the transnational politics of grief, mourning, and militarization across the Pacific. By examining literature and film produced by Japanese and Korean persons across the Asian diaspora, Kim reveals the ways in which loss and melancholia act as insurgent cultural forces. She considers how, despite silencing mechanisms which valorize narratives of reconciliation and pathologize the grief of colonized subjects, colonialism continues to haunt the present. A rich engagement with the overlapping histories of violence across the Pacific, Kim effectively and carefully considers the relationship between liberal narratives of reconciliation, loss, and colonial violence.
Review of Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right by Heather Suzanne Woods & Leslie A. Hahner (Peter Lang)
In Make America Meme Again, Heather Suzanne Woods and Leslie Hahner highlight the central role that memes play in the contemporary political landscape. Specifically, the authors show the ways in which members of the Alt-right have deftly used memes to forward their political agenda, to recruit new members, and to move the so-called “Overton window” rightward to expand the acceptable field of political discourse. In their schema, memes are not simply distractions from important political issues; rather, they function rhetorically and work to constitute the political field. The authors trace the origins of the Alt-right to the murky depths of the internet and show how discourses that emerged from these shadowy depths were able to appeal to a wider audience and cohere around mainstream political discourse. The authors carefully outline the ways that memes circulate, the rhetorical strategies that the Alt-right uses to deploy them, and the ways they work to disavow any charges of racism or extremism that critics might level against them. For Woods and Hahner, memes are the dominant mechanism through which the Alt-right is able to secure and enact its discursive power. Aware of the bleakness of this particular historical moment, Make America Meme Again provides a cogent argument for the ways the Alt-right has been able harness memetic power while also offering a blueprint through which future scholars and activists might reconfigure the present conjuncture so that the Alt-right does not have a stranglehold over the discursive power of memes in the future.
Review of Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance by Amber Jamilla Musser (NYU Press)
In Sensual Excess, Amber Jamilla Musser develops an epistemological project that calls into question modes of producing knowledge around black and brown bodies, especially in relationship to femininity and queerness. In doing so, she interrogates the kind of racialized understandings of femininity produced by what Hortense Spillers has called “pornotroping” in order to draw a contrast to something Musser calls “brown jouissance.” She is looking for those places where fleshly experience exceeds the ideological constraints of the pornotropic image, developing an epistemology based not on the visual, but on the affective experiences of the flesh. In doing so she analyzes Lyle Ashton Harris’s Billie #21 (2002), Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1979), Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014), Mickalene Thomas’s Origin of the Universe 1 (2012), Cheryl Dunye’s Mommy is Coming (2012), Amber Hawk Swanson and Sandra Ibarra’s Untitled Fucking (2013), Carrie Mae Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996), Nao Bustamantes’s Neapolitan (2003), and Maureen Catabagan’s Crush (2010–2012).
Review of The Cultural Production of Intellectual Property Rights: Law, Labor, and the Persistence of Primitive Accumulation by Sean Johnson Andrews (Temple University Press)
Sean Johnson Andrews’ new book is a timely critique of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) from a critical Marxist perspective. But the true goal of this work goes much deeper into tracing the history of the cultural foundations of the liberal state, private property laws, and labor relations, or what he calls the “reified culture of property.” Regarding the latter, Andrews argues that IPR are only the latest manifestation of this culture. It is an invention functioning like a bandage to hold together the privileged status and power of the capitalist property-owning elite, a power inevitably hemorrhaged by the twin processes of digitization and globalization. In fact, the very existence of IPR, he contends, exposes the fundamental flaws of neoliberal capitalism, presenting us with a unique opportunity. Starting with an examination of IPR, he works backwards to critically interrogate the ideology developed around problematic notions of value creation and the division of labor which both lie at the very heart of the culture of property.
Review of Premonitions: Selected Essays on the Culture of Revolt by AK Thompson (AK Press)
In this series of essays written over the last decade, AK Thompson offers a critical assessment of the analytical foundation underwriting contemporary social movement politics. Methodologically and conceptually influenced by Walter Benjamin, Thompson looks to visual culture, everyday life, and collective street actions as crystallizations of the logics saturating our culture of revolt. Through generative critique, creative conceptual development, and a consistent orientation toward identifying politically possibility, Premonitions lays the groundwork for social movement scholars and activists alike to develop a conceptual toolkit for moving beyond the mere existence of struggle as an end in itself.
Review of The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde by Stevphen Shukaitis (Rowman & Littlefield International)
Stevphen Shukaitis has produced an interesting text by situating a strategic conversation between artistic avant-gardes and autonomist political movements. He begins with a plea for rethinking strategy, and not just questions of tactics, in seeking radical aesthetic and socio-political change.
Review of Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance by Curtis Marez (University of Minnesota Press)
In this focused visual-cultural history of farm work in California over the course of the twentieth century, Curtis Marez draws on a materialist and critical approach to understand the representations, in various media and formats, of farm workers, and of the activist movements that they have championed. Marez frames analyses of cultural artifacts, including speculative and science-fiction books and films, documentaries, propaganda, and studio artworks, in the historical and material conditions of those farm workers’ movements. Throughout, he foregrounds the people who shaped modern labor movements, from the vineyards of the San Fernando and San Joaquin Valleys and beyond. Marez argues that competing material interests, socio-technical mediations, and historical conditions—the animating conflicts of this account, between agribusiness and farm laborers—have shaped broader expressions of “americanism”, imagined futures, and visual cultures across North American societies, through the very contradictions that animate and constitute them.
Review of Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism: Reading Real and Imagined Spaces by Helen Kapstein (Rowman & Littlefield International)
Helen Kapstein’s book Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism: Reading Real and Imagined Spaces positions tourism as a form of colonialism. Specifically, the author lays out the similarities between different forms of modern day tourism and how they reflect colonial practices, with reference to three foundational values: surveillance, control, and consumption. Kapstein’s book is a riveting read and is perfect for those interested in post-colonialism, tourism, the creation of real and imagined spaces and desire studies.
Editors’ Introduction: Opening Access
This introduction discusses the importance of open access scholarship and its relation to the academy. The introduction provides an overview of the articles in the journal, which include responses to the forum on universal basic income (UBI) published in issue 7.2. Finally, this issue marks the beginning of the Years in Cultural Studies project.
Context and Organization: Situating Antonio Negri’s Factory of Strategy in the Contemporary Debate on the Party Form
This paper begins by observing a tension in contemporary political discourse on the left: against a backdrop of social movements that prioritize “horizontal” organizational structures, there has been a renewed academic debate on the relevance of Lenin and the party form. In this paper I look at Antonio Negri’s recently translated Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin (a work based on a collection of lectures originally delivered by Negri in the 1970s). I suggest that Negri’s intervention can make a significant contribution to this debate, one that—without rejecting the Leninist project as such—reframes what it would mean to appropriate Lenin for today. By focusing on Lenin’s method of political analysis rather than his specific form of organization, I argue that Negri recovers from within Lenin’s writing a set of categories that can themselves provide the terms for a critique of contemporary Leninism. For Negri, this entails showing how Lenin’s system contains the means by which to theorize its own supersession. In presenting a theory of political intervention that is able to reflexively analyze its historical conditions of possibility, I suggest that Negri’s work on Lenin embodies several important theoretical and methodological commitments. This paper’s concluding section looks at recent work by Jodi Dean and critically interprets her endorsement of the party form in light of Negri’s intervention.
The Rationalization of Leisure: Marxist Feminism and the Fantasy of Machine Subordination
Critical analyses of domestic technological culture have emphasized the impact of domestic technologies on intensifying women’s labor and reinforcing its privatization within the home, all the while being marketed as laborsaving devices. Drawing from the ways the marketing of domestic technologies framed the home as a space in need of technological administration, this article offers a Marxist feminist analysis of online surveillance during leisure time, examining how the marketing of technologies for both domestic labor and online leisure helps produce relationships between subjects and technologies that double as vehicles for capital accumulation. The article argues that we should look to the history of domestic technological design to understand the ways online surveillance and data collection are used to produce revenue and impact consumer behavior, given that both domestic technologies and contemporary information technologies work to rationalize non-waged time. The article begins with the Taylorization of the home popularized in 1912, followed by the rise of domestic technologies in the 1950s, in order to demonstrate how the ideological framing of the home as a space in need of rationalization informs the marketing of today’s personalization technologies. The marketing of personalization technologies reproduces the racialized and gendered logic of machine subordination that framed domestic technologies for the home in the 20th century. The article concludes with a discussion of how Marxist feminism is a useful theoretical framework for understanding and developing a political response to online data collection, given that both the domestic sphere and online leisure time are traditionally understood to be outside the workday, and therefore supposedly outside the scope of capitalist workplace relations of surveillance and exploitation.
Sex Work and Social Media: Policy, Identity, and Privacy in Networked Publics and Counterpublics
Using the online practices of sex workers as a focal point, this project examines how the public/private dichotomy is governed and complicated within Social Networking Sites (SNS). It concentrates in particular on Facebook and FetLife, arguing that the former functions as a normative public and the latter as a counterpublic due, in part, to the differing regulations each site implements regarding sex work. The project centers on a qualitative study of the rhetorical strategies online sex workers use to self-identify and self-advocate, as well as the tactics they employ to maintain privacy and avoid the phenomenon of “context collapse.” Through the results of this study, I discuss the theoretical and practical implications of end user cyber security tactics, considering the scholarship on digital surveillance and privacy. In addressing these strategies, it underscores the importance of privacy specifically for vulnerable populations of digital publics.