Reading Sara Ahmed: February 17, 4:30pm

In prep for Sara Ahmed's upcoming visit to McMaster, the csrg is reading a couple of excerpts from The Promise of Happiness. If you've had a chance to read the introduction or conclusion, or just feel like chatting about Ahmed's work, drop by for this week's meeting.

Thursday, February 17, 4:30pm
CNH 332

Wendy Brown at McMaster - Thursday, February 10, 2011

All are welcome to join us in taking advantage of the opportunity to see and hear Wendy Brown speak at McMaster this Thursday.

The Graduate Program in Gender Studies and Feminist Research Presents:

Wendy Brown
Heller Professor of Political Science, Berkeley
Thursday, 1:30 pm Council Chambers (Gilmour Hall 111)

Civilizational Delusions:  Equality, Secularism, Tolerance

"Burka bans"—restrictions on Islamic female dress in public—have been established in France, Belgium, and the German state of Hesse.  They have been proposed in Denmark, the Netherlands, French Canada and parts of Spain.   What are the assumptions in Western secularism that make such bans possible and legitimate, despite their patent affront to principles of cultural pluralism, individual choice and religious freedom?   Revisiting certain legacies of the Protestant Reformation in Locke and Marx, and examining the ways that the secular West is depicted by thinkers such as Samuel Huntington, this lecture challenges the conceits of cultural, religious, gender and civilizational neutrality at the heart of Western secular discourse.

reading more Wendy Brown

Our winter schedule continues with two more chapters by Wendy Brown from Edgework - chapters six and seven.

Join us Thursday, February 3 in CNH 332 at 4.30pm. Any and all are welcome.

New term, new meeting time and place, new readings

After much deliberation the Cultural Studies Reading Group has determined our winter schedule, which will be focused around works that make the most of the exciting scholars visiting the university this semester. To this end we will be begin by tackling work by Wendy Brown and Sara Ahmed, before (probably) engaging with the new anthology The Idea of Communism nearer the end of semester.

More specifically, we will be beginning with selections from Wendy Brown's Edgework - chapters two and five - which we will be addressing in our first meeting scheduled for Thursday January 27 in CNH 332 at 4.30pm. Any and all are welcome, and if you need to get your hands on a copy of the reading, please get in touch. Also, if you are interested in maybe dropping in later in the semester, you can email us at readingculturalstudies [at] gmail.com for further information about times and readings, or check out back here at the blog.

Best,
Cultural Studies Reading Group folk

boundary 2

Another journal founded in the poststructural moment of early 1970s, boundary 2 today has taken a turn away from its initial concerns, but seems unsure of where it's going. Initially edited at SUNY-Buffalo, it once mixed theory with postmodern poetry (Black Mountain and SUNY-Buffalo poets like Creeley, Olsen, and Bernstein), publishing as many poems as essays in its early issues. boundary 2 implicated itself in the debates around deconstruction and postmodern aesthetics through the 70s and 80s. Postmodernism for this journal was, with few exceptions, celebrated as a sort of Nietzschean anti-enlightenment discourse full of liberatory potential, leveraged against the totalizing knowledges of scientific modernity and the ambitious aesthetic and architectural works of high modernism.

Now edited at the University of Pittsburgh, boundary 2 has reimagined itself. In the early 2000s, its submissions page was revised to read the following:

The editors of boundary 2 announce that they no longer intend to publish in the standard professional areas, but only materials that identify and analyze the tyrannies of thought and action spreading around the world and that suggest alternatives to these emerging configurations of power. To this end, we wish to inform our readers that, until further notice, the journal will not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

(We should note in passing that they haven't closed submissions: each issue tends to contain CFPs for upcoming special issues.) Whether they've lived up to this re-politicization, though, is a matter of debate. They haven't entirely abandoned the literary forms on which they staked their initial reputation (recent special issue on contemporary poetics from Chistian Bok to flarf; another on “big” novels since Gravity's Rainbow; essays discussing Bernstein, Ashberry, and Baraka). But beyond these literary interests, boundary 2 appears to have taken seriously questions raised by the globalization of culture. Special issues on Chinese cultural politics and political form, as well as on the 1960s as a multi-polar “event” (in France's May '68, but also Latin America, Poland, the Caribbean, and the “New” South [U.S.]), as well as a continuing interest in global film, suggest a genuine attempt to engage with non-western epistemologies and political forms. This despite the obvious constraints of a journal published and largely written within the American academy.

Other recent concerns include the fate of the university; the Tea Party; techno-animality; the Catholic Church's relationship to science; Said on Zionism; Gramsci on civil society; Virilio on Virilio; states of emergency and republican power; and, at last, a “zombie manifesto”.

Critical Inquiry

A prestige journal in the humanities that seems quite aware of its status. But given the academic celebrity of many of its contributors, and its generally forbidding editorial standard (it very rarely publishes grad students), it tends to reflect, and occasionally set, many of the current agendas of (American) humanities research.

The journal is supported at the University of Chicago, from which it draws much, but not all, of its editorial board. It was founded in 1974, a latecomer in the spate of journals founded after “theory”'s introduction to the American academy. Here's editorial board member James Chandler on the journal's reticent engagement with theory:

There was something latent in [CI's] strange unfashionability that gave the journal its chance. I want to describe this as a distinctive kind of attention to the disciplinary system of the cold war university. Not exactly theory—at least not theory in the sense that we have come to associate it with, say, the famous Johns Hopkins symposium on structuralism in 1968. It was something more, well, Aristotelian than that, a methodological self-consciousness about critical practice that might better be described as a sense of where one is in the disciplinary scheme of things—at least in that part of the scheme that pertains to the arts, the humanities, and the interpretive social sciences. (James Chandler, “Critical Disciplinarity”, CI 30.2 (Winter 2004): 355-60)

Ambivalence towards disciplinarity in the wake of 1960s poststructural critiques of the human sciences has always informed CI's sense of itself. It continues to tack closer to the literary uptake of high theory (or at least high seriousness) than cultural studies. Where cultural studies's interdisciplinarity has always been a critique of academic disciplines, direct or implied, CI's focus on a meta-disciplinary idea of the humanities is far less willing to dismiss past scholarship, for better and for worse.

An anniversary issue in 2004 (from which I pulled the above quote) asked many contributors to comment on the project of “critical inquiry” today. Responses varied, but a major preoccupation was the disconnect between theory and politics. The immediate occasion was the beginning of the Iraq invasion, which caused some soul-searching about the (non-)effects of theory. Since then, the journal has published more explicitly political content, especially on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (translation of an exchange between Blanchot and Levinas; controversy over the Frank Gehry-designed Museum of Tolerance planned for Jerusalem). Incidentally, major theorists's contributions tend to stay within the limits of some narrower idea of politics: Zizek (tolerance, pluralism), Jameson (space flight, Sokurov), Butler (academic freedom) and Nancy Fraser (justice) all apparently shop their more committed Marxist or feminist writings elsewhere.

Other recent directions: science studies and ecology; translations of essays by Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou, and Roberto Esposito; interrogating multitude and governmentality; art histories and media materialities; literature and reading, considered within a broader framework of media studies; individual essays on Agamben, Deleuze, Foucault; memorials for Edward Said and Derrida; and, laudably, more writing from social scientists than most other cultural studies journals. University of Chicago anthropologists like Marshall Sahlins, Michael Taussig, and Jean and John Comaroff publish here, bringing a different tradition of thinking about culture to bear.

TOPIA

TOPIA was established in 1997 and emphasizes, but does not limit itself to, investigations of Canadian culture and society. Published out of offices at York University through the combined efforts of Wilfrid Laurier Press and Cape Breton University Press, TOPIA remains Canada's only journal explicitly dedicated to cultural studies.

Papers published in TOPIA tend to consist of applied critical theory, or cross-disciplinary cultural analysis, with an emphasis on the political role culture plays as a vehicle for social transformation. The online archive emphasizes in TOPIA's mandate a concern for the reading, and re-reading of history in light of the mulitdisciplinary space offered by cultural studies, as well as encouraging reflection on the dynamics and politics of disciplinarity itself. In the editorial of the tenth anniversary issue, editor Jody Berland points out the advantage of cultural studies' relatively open status as a discipline in Canada: being one of the few Canadian journals dedicated to this emergent approach to the human sciences, TOPIA is able to escape the kind of splintering and specialization that might be produced by a more diversified field (Fall 2007).

Alongside its acceptance of diverse critical approaches to the study of culture, TOPIA offers a shifting focal point of analysis in the form of special issues dedicated to particular topics. It is also possible to detect in the journal's recent publication history an increased emphasis on globalism and the international. Recent issues have focused on diaspora (2007), Islam (2008), ecology and the environment (2009), a double issue on "Cultures of Militarization" (Oct 2010) and an issue on Bollywood (forthcoming, Fall 2011). Earlier special issues focus on feminist cultural materialism (2005), and technology and culture (2004).

Areas of research relevant to TOPIA are: the historical, institutional, and aesthetic formation of Canadian culture; analysis of visual art, film, television, music, literature and popular culture in Canada; the sociology of museums, galleries and the art market; the evolution of environmental geopolitics, city planning, architecture, landscape and new approaches to nature; cultural studies of science and technology; social, cultural and spatial configurations of new technologies; Canada's cultural industries; nationalism, multiculturalism, and the contemporary nation-state in the era of global integration. What unites these very diverse areas of investigation is the central role played by culture in contemporary social transformation. (TOPIA website)

TOPIA is published twice a year, and submissions are subject to blind peer review. In addition to essays, the journal publishes reviews, and regularly includes a catch-all section called "Offerings" which presents shorter pieces, round-table discussions, etc. The journal also publishes a regular column on "Cultural Studies and Political Economy". For the past two years, TOPIA has received funding from SSHRC.