From Birmingham to Angkor Wat: Demarcations of Contemporary Cultural Studies

Abstract

The radical inspiration of Cultural Studies has been betrayed, declares E. San Juan, Jr. In this timely essay, he argues that this betrayal springs from the postmodernist temperament, the “metaphysical turn,” of contemporary Cultural Studies. By exaggerating “the possibility of liberation over the established fact of domination,” Cultural Studies has abandoned fundamental categories such as class and nation in favor of race and gender, among others. The frivolous has overcome the political: commercial icons and rituals are now fantasized to topple the very system that makes their condition possible. “In what sense can this still inchoate and contested terrain called ‘cultural studies,’ distinguished for the most part by formalist analysis of texts and discourses, be an agent for emancipation, let alone revolutionary social transformation, of the plight of oppressed peoples around the world?” In this essay that politicizes as rigorously as it historicizes, San Juan critiques the critics and criticisms of contemporary Cultural Studies whose avocations swing back and forth between the ludic and the ludicrous. With this necessary polemic, San Juan strives to give back to Cultural Studies, as an heir to a radical tradition, its truly radical aspiration.