Policy Futures in Education

ISSN 1478-2103

Volume 7 Number 2 2009

CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text]

SPECIAL ISSUE
Contesting Identities, Contesting Nation
Guest Editors: CAMERON McCARTHY, AISHA DURHAM, C. MICHAEL ELAVSKY, ALICE FILMER, MICHAEL GIARDINA, SUSAN HAREWOOD, SOOCHUL KIM, JENNIFER LOGUE, MIGUEL MALAGRECA & RASUL MOWATT


Introduction. Contesting Identities, Contesting Nation, pages 138‑144 doi:10.2304/pfie.2009.7.2.138 VIEW FULL TEXT
Cameron McCarthy & Jennifer Logue. Reading against the Grain: examining the status of the categories of class and tradition in the scholarship of British cultural studies in light of contemporary popular culture and literature, pages 145‑160
Susan Harewood. Metaphor and the Work of Cultural Studies, pages 161‑171
Michael D. Giardina. Flexibly Global? Performing Culture and Identity in an Age of Uncertainty, pages 172‑184
Rasul Mowatt. The King of the Damned: reading lynching as leisure, pages 185‑199
Alice A. Filmer. Discourses of Legitimacy: a love song to our mongrel selves, pages 200‑216
Aisha S. Durham. Behind Beats and Rhymes: working class from a Hampton Roads hip hop homeplace, pages 217‑229
C. Michael Elavsky. Moving Beyond the Wall(s): theorizing, corporate identity for global cultural studies, pages 230‑243
Miguel A. Malagreca. Writing Queer across the Borders of Geography and Desire, pages 244‑255
Soochul Kim. Re-locating the National: spatialization of the national past in Seoul, pages 256‑265

OBAMA’S AMERICA
Michael A. Peters. Automobilism, Americanism and the End of Fordism, pages 266‑270 doi:10.2304/pfie.2009.7.2.266 VIEW FULL TEXT

OCCASIONAL THOUGHTS
Henry A. Giroux. Beyond the Audacity of Hope: the promise of an educated citizenry, pages 271‑274 doi:10.2304/pfie.2009.7.2.271 VIEW FULL TEXT

Reading against the Grain: examining the status of the categories of class and tradition in the scholarship of British cultural studies in light of contemporary popular culture and literature

CAMERON MCCARTHY Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
JENNIFER LOGUE Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2009.7.2.145

This article addresses the turbulent relationship that British cultural studies scholars have with the concepts of ‘class’ and ‘tradition’ and the problematic status of these key terms within the cultural studies literature. The authors maintain, in part, that these concepts have been deployed within a center–periphery thesis and a field-bound ethnographic framework by cultural studies scholars pursuing a sub-cultural studies approach. Within this framework, ‘Britishness’ has been the silent organizing principle defining metropolitan working-class traditions and forms of cultural resistance. British cultural studies proponents have therefore pursued the study of class and culture as a localized, nation-bound set of interests. This has placed cultural studies in tension with post-colonial subjectivities. The authors write against the grain of the textual production of the working class within cultural studies scholarship, insisting that recent films and literary works offer a more complex story of class identities in the age of globalization and transnationalism.

Metaphor and the Work of Cultural Studies

SUSAN HAREWOOD University of Washington, Bothell, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2009.7.2.161

This article examines the political project of Cultural Studies by calling for a re-examination of the cultural studies research practices. The metaphors used by cultural studies researchers are explored, as these demonstrate the ways in which researchers have sought to emphasize openness and fluidity. However, it is argued that the desire for openness is not enough; that without rigorous consideration of methodology Cultural Studies lays itself open to many of the academic research problems it seeks to challenge. The article therefore offers a rethinking of the metaphors of cultural studies research.

Flexibly Global? Performing Culture and Identity in an Age of Uncertainty

MICHAEL D. GIARDINA University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2009.7.2.172

Presented as a symbolic interactive messy performance text, Michael Giardina sutures himself into and through the landscape of global social relations, including his own interpretive interactions of disconnection and reconnection with place, home, and nation. In so doing, and in these collages of lived textuality, he examines the complex, conflictual, and continually shifting identity performances revealed in and through our fleeting experiences with one another. Whether brushing up against the hyphenated spatial histories of British colonialism and Asian diaspora in London and Manchester or witnessing the rampant expressions of xenophobic nationalism pervading the US popular public sphere in sites ranging from Yankee Stadium in New York to a fast food restaurant in Champaign, Illinois, each narrative turn brings us into head-on collisions with each ‘Other’.

The King of the Damned: reading lynching as leisure

RASUL MOWATT Indiana University, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2009.7.2.185

The racial domination that is showcased in the spectacle of lynching leads to an intersection of discourse, critique, and reflection on identity. Utilizing visual methodologies along with a critical theory focus, the documented history in photographic images and textual accounts provides a window to human leisure behavior as it is situated in a setting through displays of power. Tortured black bodies are situated in a reversed position of authority with those in power that have condemned them through a Foucault perspective, and the role of the ‘king’ or figure of authority that places judgment withi these leisure festivals of racial violence. The discussion of lynchings as violent acts of leisure in various settings creates a vehicle for the field of leisure studies to contribute to dialogues on meaning(s) of place and the significance of race, more specifically.

Discourses of Legitimacy: a love song to our mongrel selves

ALICE A. FILMER Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2009.7.2.200

In an intervention that blurs methodological boundaries traditionally separating the researcher from the researched, history from poetry, and the personal from the political, the author weaves a narrative account of her Euro-American family’s early history in California into a larger set of social and historical events taking place during the nineteenth century. She employs the metaphor of ‘legitimacy’ to trace her growing awareness of the physical, psychological, and political parallels at work in the colonization of lands, cultures, and bodies in the ‘New World’. Providing context for the mid-nineteenth century war between the USA and Mexico, she analyzes discursive constructs such as hybridity, impurity, and ‘mongrelization’ as they are evoked in the legend of Malinche – the sixteenth-century, indigenous translator and lover of the Spanish conquistador, Hernan Cortés. Four centuries later, echoes of that ‘intermarriage’ and the transgression of many other kinds of boundaries can be heard in the author’s unconventional relationship with her son’s Mexican father. She offers a ‘post-critical’ perspective in the conclusion by bringing her own voice into dialogue with those of several post-colonial theorists. This ethnography integrates autoethnography, voices from history, and textual analysis into seldom-heard conversations about the conventional and unconventional workings of power and identity. In so doing, both the fixity and fluidity of concepts such as culture, nation, family, language, social class, race, and gender are revealed.

Behind Beats and Rhymes: working class from a Hampton Roads hip hop homeplace

AISHA S. DURHAM Texas A&M University, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2009.7.2.217

The film documentary titled Hip Hop: beyond beats and rhymes captures ongoing conversations among scholars, cultural critics, and hip hop insiders about the state of African Americans by interrogating distinct expressive forms associated with hip hop culture. Durham draws from two scenes to describe her memories as the researched underclass and as the graduate researcher returning to her childhood public housing community to explore the shifting discursive terrain of hip hop as a struggle over meaning waged through class performances. Class is articulated through taste values and notions of respectability. Durham connects the hip hop mantra emphasizing lived, embodied culture with bell hooks’ description of a homeplace to recount her researcher/ed self during the Virginia Beach Greekfest race riots and her visit home where she talks about hip hop feminism with a group of African American women from the Norfolk public housing community. By recalling autoethnographic encounters of hip hop at home, Durham calls attention to the politics of class that echoes behind beats and rhymes.

Moving Beyond the Wall(s): theorizing corporate identity for global cultural studies

C. MICHAEL ELAVSKY Pennsylvania State University, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2009.7.2.230

This article examines the set of research considerations that went into investigating the relationship between the Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) and Czech music culture as a means of exploring alternative avenues and frameworks for understanding and doing global cultural studies. Outlining the theoretical and methodological trajectories, as well as some of the findings, underscores the necessity for both the field of cultural studies and us as scholars to reconfigure conceptions for investigating the complexities of global phenomena. More important, it seeks to draw attention to how we might construct new alliances, stimulate new forms of activism, and enact new engagements with the logics and reality of global capital, such that the project of cultural studies can be reinvigorated within our global age.

Writing Queer across the Borders of Geography and Desire

MIGUEL A. MALAGRECA Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina

doi:10.2304/pfie.2009.7.2.244

In this article, the author merges biographical notes, autoethnography and experimental writing to situate his migrant self as a self that performs through writing, i.e. planned, experimental writing that subverts the centrality of the monolingual heterosexual identity. He explores the intersections of time, desire, and power across time and space, crossing national and linguistic borders and changing legal, ‘marital’ and work status in Argentina, the United States and Italy. In particular, in addressing the exclusion of immigrants from the current Italian Civil Union law project (written and presented to parliament by gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender [GLBT] political representatives), his presentation criticizes any romanticized version of a homogeneous queer community. This is a piece that questions the existence of regular, pre-existing identities that are distributed within the space of the nation. An interpretive perspective like this one criticizes the reification of the nation as an object or essence, inhabited by groups of people whose nationality defines their cultural identities (e.g., the Italians) or groups of people whose sexual choices define who they are (e.g. the homosexuals). Against this view, the author explores personal and political contexts where the self performs a critique of national, sexual and ethnic boundaries. This writing choice is a political one, for it makes audible subjectivities that escape the historic or current distribution of roles and identities imposed by multicultural politics or academic impositions.

Re-locating the National: spatialization of the national past in Seoul

SOOCHUL KIM Yonsei University, Korea

doi:10.2304/pfie.2009.7.2.256

This article is an attempt to make sense of the emerging culture of mobility in Seoul in the 1990s. The 1990s in a South Korean context is emblematic of a changed social reality and transformation. Grand narratives of development, anti-state democratization activism and Cold War politics were losing their effect and authority. Meanwhile, new forces of consumption, individualism, westernization and globalization were increasingly claiming a central presence in society and accentuating the crisis of identification and representation in cultural life and production. Looking at this particular historical situation, this article argues that the culture of mobility, in terms of the reorganization of mobility and visuality, interrupted the existing norms and mode of national identity and culture in South Korean society. The article focuses upon a new socio-cultural phenomenon known as ‘Yu Hong Jun Syndrome’, which emerged in the early and mid 1990s. It asks how a culture of mobility, while providing cues for ways of experiencing and seeing national landscapes and cityscapes, makes Seoulites rediscover the nation and locality as a potential space of belonging and, further, allows them to renegotiate alienated forms of social relations and everyday experiences in a globalizing metropolitan city.

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