Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012. xiii, 297 pp. (Tables, B&W photos.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-932643-02-2.
Meaghan Morris and Mette Hjort, based inside the creative and cultural studies ferment that is Lingnan University in Hong Kong, have coedited a timely, reflective, hopeful and capaciously situated collection, Creativity and Academic Activism: Instituting Cultural Studies. While many have called attention to the anti-disciplinary and bureaucratic-refusing energies of “the desire that is cultural studies,” this study tracks instead the multi-faceted triumph of “instituting cultural studies,” particularly in universities, degree programs, research centres, journals, activist networks, museums and coalitions built up during the past two decades within and across the Asia-Pacific region.
As the co-editors affirm, this is “a volume of stories in which internationally well-known scholars in the humanities and social sciences look back on what they now consider to be key moments of their trajectories as institution-builders, in the process reflecting in often personal terms on the art of the possible in academic life” (1). These stories of “academic activism” are variously based in Australia, mainland China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States. Institutions do not so much constrain as help to produce, shape, inform and tolerate the myriad achievements recounted.
This hopefulness towards moving institutions is also framed by an against-the-grain satire of departmental and bureaucratic corporatization by Morris and Hjort called “Institutional Culture: A Manifesto with Rules,” issuing mock-academic provocations such as “Any head of department who ceases to be able to talk to colleagues without using such terms as ‘quality assurance,’ ‘inputs,’ ‘outputs,’ ‘deliverables,’ performance indicators,’ ‘alignment,’ ‘graduate profile,’ ‘stakeholder,’ and ‘evidence-based’ shall be required to atone for the pain inflicted on others by performing thirty hours of community art work” (23). As this deadly economistic language become norm suggests, the rise and triumph of cultural studies within academic culture has been surrounded by the rise of marketized norms, management modes and corporate values—“the globalization of dubious ideas and dismal policies” (79)—as if to suggest we may have won the battle but lost the war for the humanities and social sciences as institutional forces.
The twelve essays included in the collection are case studies of local institutional creativity, but are framed (and at times overtly interlinked) to larger problematics, social movements and pragmatic tactics that should prove of relevance to other sites and struggles animating “the art of the possible in academic life today” (15). But, as John Nguyet Erni asks, how can we “recharacterize Cultural Studies after the exuberant proliferation of its own spaces” (178)? How can this amorphous anti-discipline stay tied not just to self-ratifying academic activism but to social movements and transformations?
Josephine Ho’s study of “institutionally embedded activism” (61) around gender at the Center for the Study of Sexualities at National Central University in Taiwan complements Tejaswini Niranjana’s consequential testimony of disciplinary change as tied to anti-colonial, issue-oriented and cultural-national struggles in India: thus “thematizing culture as a possible field of inquiry” (34) emergent in Bangalore “as the critical space in the interstices of the humanities and the social sciences” (38). Recalling “the tension between academic and activist work,” Kuan-Hsing Chen’s work is tied to tracking the rise of Cultural Studies in Asia as emanating from “engagements in social and political movements” (41), as reflected in the trans-local journal project that is Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. As Chen observes working across this site, “the regional is the global; the global without the regional and the local is simply a form of empty imagination” (49). Mette Hjort recounts the liberal success story of creativity-within-constraints at Lingnan University, as focalized by the brilliant leadership of Edward Chen. Stephen Chan’s deeply Hong Kong-affiliated projects and works in cultural studies all the more so remain tied to social critique and an evolving pedagogy of “Hong Kong cultural identity.”
Wang Xiaoming, based at a thickly conjunctural program in Shanghai, tracks the forces, forms and activities that have led to the rise of a “cultural studies fever” in China during the past decade, as a way to critically enframe the rise of “glocal” capitalist culture and to create a relevant inter-disciplinary and urban-rural pedagogy. Dai Jinhua, tracking the same spread of cultural studies across consumerist China, is more cautionary, arguing that such studies “started to flourish just when the structural basis of critical or leftist cultural practices disintegrated” (125). But Dai still leaves open the possibility, or hope, for the “repoliticization” of cultural studies in China as one “not only about critique but reconstruction” (138). Koichi Iwabuchi, holding on to the political, historical, as well as the media-critique force of cultural studies, takes on the recent development of “brand nationalism” and institutionalized cultural cool as policy in Japan. Douglas Crimp offers an amusing, oddly performative foray into the institutional politics of an art museum, New York’s Guggenheim, excluding and censoring forms of art-critique and institutional transformation it would later (without any bad conscience) centralize and promote. Audrey Yue elaborates how, within the pragmatism of Singapore, governing and contesting “the business of culture” has opened up “conditions for the self-fashioning of new sexual subjectivities” (193), with various cultural institutions becoming gateways rather than gatekeepers in this social change.
Cultural studies has become by now, as Tony Bennet argues in his concluding essay on linkages of such work to social conduct, “a form of metaculture, one that has been shaped by the longer history of the culture/institution/conduct plexus that, in turn, it has sought to reshape” (213). This collection offers twelve richly conjunctural, theoretically reflective and deftly situated essays on the forces, frames, issues and social energies that affect cultural studies as it has been applied, politicized, interlinked, mobilized and institutionalized in diverse sites across the Asia-Pacific. It looks back as a way to move cultural studies forward and out into the world, and mines resources and tactics of hope much needed in an academic culture becoming managerial and banal.
Rob Wilson
University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
pp. 122-124