Review of "The Renewal of Cultural Studies"

Book Review The Renewal of Cultural Studies P. Smith Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2011 (Pb) $28.95 What is cultural studies? What has it been? And maybe, most importantly, what should it look like nowadays and in the near future? In this timely collection of essays edited by Paul Smith, some of the most renowned current practitioners of cultural studies offer their perspective on ‘‘both the procedures and objects that cultural studies will take on and that it will work with consistently and foundationally’’ (p. 2). The result is a vibrant mosaic of assessments that, taken together, constitute a powerful manifesto of what it means to critique and act upon today’s world—both within and outside of academia—from a cultural studies standpoint. The book will thus be a useful resource for cultural studies practitioners and their students, as well as for those developing this kind of work across and within different areas such as communication, history, anthropology, women’s studies, political science, sociology, or American studies. The book includes 27 short chapters addressing several topics that the editor, in his introduction, presents as ‘‘particularly crucial’’ (p. 4) in order to clarify two main issues: First of all, the relationship between cultural studies and other disciplines it may (partially) share a political project with; and second, the extent to which the adoption of a preferred set of methods can help advance a coherent and intelligible identity for cultural studies. Thus, throughout the different essays, contributors engage with these identified needs, while at the same time advancing their own diverse agendas for a ‘‘redefine[d] and renew[ed]’’ kind of cultural studies (p. 3). Following Paul Smith’s ‘‘Introduction,’’ Nick Couldry’s ‘‘The Project of Cultural Studies: Heretical Doubts, New Horizons,’’ and Carol A. Stabile’s ‘‘The Nightmare Voice of Feminism: Feminism and Cultural Studies’’ present different ways of understanding cultural studies’ current exigencies. Couldry urges scholars to recover the notion of a ‘‘project’’ for cultural studies, namely its foundational impetus to interrogate commonsense understandings of democracy. He sees this as a necessary way to restate the discipline’s continuous relevance away from the overused analysis of cultural consumption. Stabile, on the other hand, focuses on the role that feminism has (not) played in the development of cultural studies. She argues for a more serious and consistent engagement with feminist scholarship that can lead to its mainstreaming as part of, and not just an appendix to, cultural studies work. Cohn, Mitcho, and Woolsey’s ‘‘Cultural Studies: Always Already Disciplinary,’’ together with Henry Krip’s ‘‘From Ideology Critique to Intellectuality: Toward a NeoGramscian Political Pedagogy for Cultural Studies,’’ and Julie Rak’s ‘‘Attack of the FiftyFoot Anthology! Adventures in Teaching Cultural Studies’’ show how self-reflexivity continues to be a defining characteristic of cultural studies as an intellectual project. The authors of these essays develop a grounded, self-referential perspective that focuses on Communication, Culture & Critique 6 (2013) 483–485  2013 International Communication Association 483 Book Reviews Book Reviews what cultural studies should do for its practitioners as well as for their students. In their essay, written from the perspective of those pursuing a graduate degree in cultural studies, Cohn, Mitcho, and Woolsey address the importance of consolidating this approach as a discipline in order to clarify its unique characteristics and contributions. Krip’s chapter discusses the need to better integrate academy-centered ideology critique within an overall commitment to organic intellectual work that incorporates political action. Lastly, Rak’s contribution highlights the need to place pedagogy issues at the center of current discussions about the meaning and repercussions of cultural studies work. The chapters that follow develop this self-reflexive theme by problematizing different objects of study for cultural studies. Denise Albanese’s ‘‘The Literary: Cultural Capital and the Specter of Elitism,’’ Birchall and Hall’s ‘‘Cultural Studies and Theory: One More from the Top with Feeling,’’ and Sharon Willis’s ‘‘Lost Objects: The Museum of Cinema’’ focus on objects that are assumed to be naturally outdated—such as literary production, theoretical developments, and cinema. David Columbia’s ‘‘Cultural Studies and the Discourse of New Media’’ and Matthew Tinkom’s ‘‘Three Dialectics for Media Studies,’’ on the other hand, offer different critiques of the assumption that (new) media is a naturally relevant and/or ahistorical area of study. The next several essays go beyond this object-oriented locus of inquiry, discussing cultural studies’ relation to other disciplines and approaches in terms of perceived methodological dis/connections. These are addressed with reference to data collection and analysis—as in the case of ethnography—as well as in relation to broader paradigmatic tensions—such as those that emerge from the friction with historical, political-economic, or Marxist approaches. Sophia McClennen’s ‘‘Cultural Studies and Latin America’’ and Mahmut Mutman’s 484 ‘‘Cultural Studies to Come’’ tackle the slow but inevitable transnationalization of a field that is still very much dominated by Western perspectives, urging us to rethink ‘‘the geographies and ontologies of cultural studies’’ (p. 189) as they manifest themselves in notions such as ‘‘Latin America’’ or ‘‘cultural difference.’’ After these two contributions, the concluding chapters in this collection urge cultural studies practitioners to establish and/or develop meaningful connections beyond academia, thus arguing for the potential of building alliances with relevant actors in contemporary societies such as policy makers, activists, or nonacademic workers. In addition to—or maybe in the process of—raising important issues regarding the past, present, and future shapes of cultural studies thinking, at least two general and important lessons come out of this collection. The first one is that cultural studies cannot afford to keep staying at—and often glorifying—the margins of societies, but it needs to incorporate the core of these societies in its analyses, thus paying increasing attention to central components of social organization such as public policy, or dominant economic models. The other crucial lesson that emerges from these readings is that, for cultural studies, ‘‘moving forward’’ as a project necessarily incorporates looking backward. Thus, most of the proposals introduced in these chapters implicitly or explicitly indicate that staying alive as a discipline necessarily entails a re(dis)covery of thinkers, ideas, traditions, and topics that have been either easily dismissed by cultural studies, or not incorporated in their full richness. These include the works of Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, or Paul Willis, together with a sustained critique of labor, the economy, the literary, or pedagogy. It may be tempting to interpret this understanding of ‘‘renewal’’ as an unconscious limitation, as yet another piece of evidence of cultural studies’ inability to escape its own (restrictive) legacies. However, a Communication, Culture & Critique 6 (2013) 483–485  2013 International Communication Association Book Reviews Book Reviews more sympathetic assessment may be that the impulse to look back as part of looking ahead shows how cultural studies offers its best contributions when it incorporates a dialectical understanding of history into its project and objects of study. In that sense, rather than becoming obsessed with finding the newest research topic or theoretical framework, the ‘‘cultural studies to come’’ (p. 196) may be better served by acknowledging that its future—just like the future of the societies it strives to critique—will always, inevitably, contain its past. Susana Martínez Guillem The University of New Mexico Communication, Culture & Critique 6 (2013) 483–485  2013 International Communication Association 485