Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
notion of transnational culture studies
from Outside in the Teaching Machine in
setting the parameters for a scrupulously
United States-centred collection, while
Cary Nelson is more enterprising in naming
Spivak as a key, if disingenuous, player
in cultural studies' "fetishizing of'fandom.'"
While there is good material in the
collection, it is unfocused and ultimately
disappointing. Smithson's introductory
essay, one suspects, would be a suitable
item for deconstruction by the author of
Outside in the Teaching Machine: Smithson
fails to situate "culture" historically within
the British tradition (Tylor's Primitive
Culture is not a central text, and not the
only important one before Williams), and,
in his discussion of essence of culture does
not seem to have considered the possibility
of "strategic essentialism," a concept
beyond which Spivak has now moved.
Potentially productive tensions are elided,
Smithson stressing early in his essay a nowcommon
proposition that culture studies is
concerned to create new knowledge, not to
explain knowledge to a wider public, but
failing to address the contradictions of this
position with his later comment that teachers
in culture studies will "have to write jargon-free
prose for magazines and
newspapers." Similarly, a tame "dialogue"
between Gerald Graff, Janice Radway, Gita
Rajan and Robert Con Davis ends in agreement
to disagree, gentlemanly disputes
glossed as "signs of vitality in an ongoing
and productive debate."
The explicit subject of the collection, the
institutionalization of "culture studies" in
the University, and the problems and possibilities
this opens up for cultural workers,
is an important one. Many of the articles
debate the need to make a declaration of
independence from the Birmingham
School, to adapt British "cultural studies"
to "culture studies" in the United States;
again, this is a fertile topic. Too many
essays, however, after promising beginnings,
end in a melange of celebratory
epiphany and warnings of a forthcoming
apocalypse. Several of the writers in the
"Dissenting Voices" section successfully use
the tactic of either anecdote, or detailed
analysis of a specific cultural situation to
open up institutional contradictions for
analysis. Pamela Caughie narrates her own
reaction to "strategies of manipulation" of
the Chicago Art Institution's "Degenerate
Art" exhibition to lead into a discussion of
how "a cultural studies pedagogy may work
against the very politics it endorses."
Sheng-mei Ma's chilling account of his
interpellation and packaging as native
informant within North American academia
suggests institutional aporias in Asian
and Asian American Studies. Yet both writers
turn away from detailed analysis of
institutional practices to unproductive generalization.
Few culture studies teachers
would disagree with Caughie's call for "a
performative pedagogy . .. continually
reenacted and reinscribed" in which "each
pedagogic situation creates its own dynamics";
many might question the precise
nature of this pedagogy beyond the application
of currently fashionable gender
studies vocabulary. Again, Ma's suggestion
that culture studies "integrate and use
varying perspectives rather than exclude
any one of them" is unarguably desirable;
however, his essay clearly shows that there
are institutional constraints upon such
integration which mere volition cannot
overcome.
English Studies/Culture Studies contains
two excellent essays: the first, and the last in
the collection. Patrick Brantlinger produces
detailed analysis of "Cultural Studies versus
the New Historicism," while Cary Nelson's
refreshingly polemical "Always Already
Cultural Studies," explores the commodification
of cultural studies and produces a
manifesto for future work in the area. They
cannot compensate, however, for the overall
thinness of the collection.
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