CELEBRITY AND SCHADENFREUDE: The cultural economy of fame in freefall

This paper explores the popularity of contemporary expressions of delight in celebrity downfall, or Schadenfreude towards celebrity culture, and questions to what extent they can be understood as cultural critiques of economic inequality. For just as the economy has its own parables, so do 'cultural' expressions contain parables of normativity about economic life. We argue that Schadenfreude's …

TAXI CAB PUBLICS AND THE PRODUCTION OF BROWN SPACE AFTER 9/11

This paper introduces Brown Space as a conceptual category to understand the particular spatial politics of Brown as an 'identificatory strategy' after 9/11. I use the taxi cab and the daily life of the 'brown' taxi driver as a vehicle to navigate the new micro-politics of brown in public space. Within the popular imaginary I locate two dominating configurations of the taxi post-9/11 which work…

SUSPECTS IN THE CITY: Browning the 'not-quite' Canadian citizen

This essay explores the circulation of fear and suspicion in Toronto and Montreal during perceived national security crises, which in recent years have been heavily influenced by post-9/11 US events, discourses and legal acts. It discusses how non-status residents and 'Canadian-born brown' residents have both become the focus of suspicion and intensified their own suspicion of fellow residents …

TINGS BROWN!: Nationalists, regionalists and tourists making claims on the state

In Barbados economic hardship has a color. Ask Barbadians 'how're you doing?' and, if things are difficult in any way they might answer, 'Tings brown!' This seems to be an especially appropriate phrase for this paper which explores the inter-relations between contemporary racialized identificatory strategies and economic hardship in the Caribbean. My interest is in exploring the challenges Cari…

475° FROM SEPTEMBER 11: Citizenship, immigration, same-sex marriage, and the…

Under US leadership, political structures in the post-9/11 world have developed and deployed rhetorical techniques aimed at identifying, excluding, and prosecuting specific bodies. In this paper, we analyze governmental and cultural rhetoric in the United States during 2006 on the issues of immigration (including immigration policies and proposed reform) and same-sex marriage (including bans to…

ISLAMOPHOBIA, CULTURE AND RACE IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE

This paper offers a genealogical sketch of the figure of the Muslim Other as it is figured in the post-Cold War popular and political imaginary. It explores why 'culture' has acquired a putative explanatory power in the post-Cold War (geo)politics. In addressing differentialist racism, it posits Islamophobia as an ideological response that conflates histories, politics, societies and cultures o…

LATIN AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS: Alternative modernizations, post-liberalism, o…

This paper examines the socio-economic, political, and cultural transformations that have been taking place in South America during the past ten years, particularly in Ecuador, Venezuela, and Bolivia. Whereas at the level of the states the transformations do not seem to venture beyond alternative forms of modernization, the discourses and strategies of some social movements suggest radical poss…

PERFORMING SOMALI IDENTITY IN THE DIASPORA: 'Wherever I go I know who I am'

Somali refugees who fled the collapse of their homeland and resettled in the US narrate 'who they are' within a bewildering entanglement of cultural differences layered with diasporic tensions. This analysis examines the storytelling of a young woman refugee to Lewiston, Maine, who embodies the performative tensions that animate Somali identity at this intense historical moment and in this dens…

CHOOSING USING: Drug policy, consumer culture and 'junkie' manquees

This article investigates the shaping of contemporary drug-using (and non-drug-using) subjectivities through operations of choice and consumption. Examining various registers of 'possession,' it argues that in the construction of both docile and irredeemably flawed consumers, 'choice' (and its negation) is pivotal. Exploring motifs of choice, possession and pleasure in the operations of 'normal…

REPRODUCING REGIMES OF IMPUNITY: Fake encounters and the informalization of e…

In India, the phrase 'fake encounter' refers to the extrajudicial killing of a civilian followed by the official claim that the victim was a Pakistani infiltrator killed in a legitimate military encounter with police or army forces. This article explores the widespread pattern of fake encounters in Kashmir Valley in order to shed light on the processes through which violence and terror become f…

PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION, EMINENT DOMAIN, AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF NEO-LIBERALISM

One of the distinguishing characteristics of neo-liberal capitalism, as Paul Smith has argued, is the prominent role played by primitive accumulation - that is, the process through which social resources currently outside the circuit of capital are expropriated, often by the state, and thrust into circulation. The persistence of primitive forms of accumulation raises an important contradiction …

POST-COLONIAL REFLECTIONS ON THE 'INTERNATIONALIZATION' OF CULTURAL STUDIES

This essay addresses the difficult politics of 'internationalizing' cultural studies. In an effort to participate in ongoing conversations about, and around, 'internationalizing' cultural studies, this essay invites us to attend to the frames of reference that can sometimes underlie our efforts at 'internationalizing' cultural studies. Examining larger issues such as our frequent unexamined poi…

HIGHER EDUCATION 'REFORM', HEGEMONY, AND NEO-COLD WAR IDEOLOGY: Lessons from …

Examining some of the specifics of educational 'reform' in the post-state socialist political landscape, this article argues that the reproduction of Western hegemony in Eastern Europe and within the academic global political economy is more complex than we can grasp through idealist critiques of travelling theory and of representations alone. We need to attend to the materiality of hegemony, i…

INTERPRETING TRANSNATIONAL CULTURAL PRACTICES: Social discourses on a Korean …

This article explores the ways in which East Asian countries approach and understand the transnational flows of Korean cultural products. Specifically, it examines newspaper discourses from Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and China concerning the high popularity of a transnationalized Korean drama, Dae Jang-geum, across those societies. By adopting a quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis, th…

NEGOTIATING A COMMON TRANSNATIONAL SPACE: Mapping performance in Jamaican Dan…

At the interstices of cultural geography and performance studies, this article continues the author's earlier research and writing on Jamaica's Dancehall culture, and analyzes the applicability of insights gained to other black performance genres, most notably South African Kwaito. Through research methods including interviews and participant observation, a comparative perspective on Dancehall …

BEYOND ETHNICITY, INTO EQUALITY: Re-thinking hybridity and transnationalism i…

Edition

Volume 23, Issue 5 & 6 September 2009 , pages 775

ISBN/ISSN

09502386

Collation

-

Series Title

Cultural Studies

Call Number

-

TRANSLATING THE TRANSNATIONAL: Teaching the 'Other' in translation

This article is concerned with the uneven landscape of cultural flows across the global south and north. By examining geo-political hierarchies in the production of knowledge through translation and teaching, the article raises questions about the shortcomings of the term, 'transnational' as it is employed in post-colonial and cultural studies today. Reception of Middle Eastern cultural texts w…

TRANSGEOGRAPHICAL PRACTICES OF MARRONAGE IN SOME AFRICAN FILMS: Peck, Sissako…

In this article, I mobilize the notion of 'marronage' to analyze the ways in which specific practices of representation allow us to observe transgeographical practices of expression in the films of Raoul Peck, Abderrahmane Sissako, and Jean-Marie Teacuteno. I suggest that the works of these three filmmakers are not relational and do not attempt to recuperate colonial and imperial experience in …

FROM CULTURAL STUDIES TO TUDES CULTURELLES, TUDES DE LA CULTURE, AND SCIENC…

The starting point of our reflexion about the place of Cultural Studies in France and the development of French Cultural Studies lies in a double paradox. The first paradox consists in the absence of any stable terminology and taxonomy, whereas Cultural Studies has already, though implicitly - almost secretly, encroached on the French scientific realm in the shape of very plastic and dynamic fo…

'A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN'?: Cultural Studies' relationship to institutionalizatio…

The phrase, 'a room of one's own,' coined by Virginia Woolf, refers not only to the physical space necessary for creating art but also to the hitherto ungranted space within the canon for women artists. In an attempt to relate to the dilemma posed by Woolf, my aim in this paper is to assess whether, as a physical site, the Spanish University (its departments and curricula) provides the intellec…