International Journal of Cultural Studies recent issues

Understanding local reception of globalized cultural products in the context of the international cultural economy: A case study on the reception of Hero and Daggers in China

Ting Wang, — 2009-06-15

The populist-oriented Hollywood blockbuster movies that tend to target the lowest common denominator are often accused by Chinese intellectuals of being culturally debilitating. Yet China's nationwide debate revolving around two recent technocratic, spectacle-driven domestic blockbusters by its renowned film director Zhang Yimou, Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004), and their flamboyant marketing have demonstrated Hollywood's broader and more systemic impact on China's film style, marketing practice and media culture, which are increasingly in line with the unified global standard set by Hollywood and marked by relentless commercialism. By studying the two movies' reception in China, this article discusses how a national culture receives globalized versions of its own traditions, the role of Hollywood, and the implications for international cultural exchange and national identity in the context of the international cultural economy.

Westernization and cultural resistance in tattooing practices in contemporary Japan

Yamada, M. — 2009-06-15

This article examines the popular culture of tattooing in Japan and sheds light on attempts by traditional tattooists to retain a vital presence in the modern-to-postmodern transitional periods. Explaining the values, beliefs and practices associated with tattooing during the pre-modern period, it discusses how these are shaped and modified by modern cultural practices, and how they are being impacted by globalization. While drawing on historical and cross-cultural research on tattooing in Japan, this article incorporates three tattooists' experiences as examples of contemporary practices. By resisting the impact of globalization, traditional tattooists preserve their own practices and pass them on to the next generation.

Eating the past: Multiple spaces, multiple times -- performing `Ottomanness' in Istanbul

Karaosmanoglu, D. — 2009-06-15

Culinary issues introduce a particular way of dealing with the construction of history and the processes of differentiation, commodification and exoticism. Food is related to sensory experiences, and taste and smell play a crucial role in the creation and representation of the past. This article studies the past as/through text and performance by looking at how history is brought back, represented and performed by food practices in the present. It analyses a number of Ottoman restaurants in terms of their expression of the Ottoman past and their ways of performing `Ottomanness' in the city of Istanbul.

Setting the stage for a `Festival of Lies': Notes on expertise and African Cultural Studies

Hoffman, D. — 2009-06-15

This article is a two-part essay resulting from the author's experience as a public commentator on a performance in Seattle, USA by the Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula. The first part of the article explores the difficulties and opportunities that arise when Africanist scholars are asked to serve as cultural experts for a general audience. I outline some of the considerations in agreeing to provide commentary on a performance for which I could claim only a `close enough' kind of expertise, but which nevertheless seemed ideally suited for engaged public humanities scholarship. The second half of the article is the text of the resulting podcast. It first traces the historical background to Linyekula's `Festival of Lies', then presents general observations on African political performance. The script concludes with a reflection on the specificities and implications of viewing Linyekula's performance in Seattle.

Changing lives, challenging concepts: Some findings and lessons from the Lord of the Rings project

Barker, M. — 2009-06-15

This article presents a series of key findings from the international Lord of the Rings project, around the meanings and implications for audiences of choosing to describe the films as a `Spiritual Journey'. Drawing on a combination of quantitative results and qualitative responses, and presenting one woman's responses in detail, it proffers a set of implications for the fields of film, and cultural studies.

The cultural sublime and the temporal dimension of media: The case of child murderer Marc Dutroux

Leurs, R. — 2009-06-15

The responses to the escape of child murderer Marc Dutroux are on the one hand characterized by bewilderment concerning his horrific actions and on the other hand by relief on his renewed imprisonment. The initial response of bewilderment can be considered an `interruption' of the process of making meaning: it is a temporary state of inability to give meaning to news reports. With this line of approach, this article emphasizes the temporal dimension of identity constructions. This is of importance to cultural studies, which has paid a lot of attention to spatiality (`spaces of belonging', etc.) but would be better served with more instruments for analysing temporal structures. To understand bewilderment and the temporal dimension of identity construction this article makes use of Kant's and Lyotard's theory on `the sublime': central to the sublime is the experience of the limits of our ability to comprehend. It will become evident that the responses of bewilderment to Dutroux's escape can best be understood with Kant's modernistic theory of the sublime rather than with Lyotard's postmodernist version. This makes it possible to use theories on the sublime to examine both the modernist versus postmodernist nature of our society, and an important part of the temporal dimension of identity constructions (namely responses to events causing bewilderment). It is appropriate to rename the (Kantian) aesthetic sublime, which has a singular cause, as the cultural sublime: the cultural sublime is the consequence of coherent texts and images, in other words: of media discourses.

A Russian intelligent as a cultural relic: The case of Felix Raskolnikov

Shlapentokh, V. — 2009-04-15

• In the first decades after the emergence of the term `intelligentsia' at the end of the 19th century, almost everybody assumed that those who deserved to be members of this group should be highly educated and have a deep interest in culture, literature and the arts. By the end of the 20th century this type of person had almost disappeared from Russia. The article is a memoir of Felix Raskolnikov, a relic Russian intelligent, whom the author found in an American university in Michigan. •

New Palestinian centers: An ethnography of the `checkpoint economy'

Tawil-Souri, H. — 2009-04-15

• Based on an ethnography of Palestinian checkpoint workers, the author suggests that new and emerging `checkpoint economies' are transforming politically contested boundaries into important economic centers. Focusing on taxi drivers, porters, merchants and peddlers at the West Bank's Qalandia checkpoint, halfway between Jerusalem and Ramallah, the article tracks the growth of checkpoints and their ad hoc economy, and of Qalandia specifically, and argues that although checkpoints are technologies of Israeli military control, they are also renegotiated spaces of resistance. •

Moby Dick, cultural policy and the geographies and geopolitics of cultural labor

McMurria, J. — 2009-04-15

• This article examines the official Australia/UK television co-production of Moby Dick (1998) to engage with cultural policy issues within an increasingly transnational audiovisual sector. It begins with the political and cultural contexts of Melville's mid-19th-century novel to demonstrate that international law and commercial power have long shaped `national' cultural production. The late 20th-century co-production contexts include international cable/satellite networks seeking prestigious literary adaptations for global branding; production trends oscillating between different least-cost production locations; national policy-makers supporting co-productions to negotiate transnational trends; and intranational policy-makers competing to attract international production. Policy forums largely treated co-productions as necessary compromises between maintaining national cultural expression and supporting transnational production, creating a preservationist cultural nationalism that devalued below-the-line workers and privileged drama over other genres. To problematize this dynamic the article considers the geopolitical contexts of the Moby Dick novel and TV movie so as to destabilize these bounded conceptions of national culture and insert priorities of international political justice in cultural policy-making. •

New directions for civil renewal in Britain: Social capital and culture for all?

Message, K. — 2009-04-15

• As with most migration-related issues, it is cities that are on the front lines of the social cohesion debate. Museums — important as sites that represent nations and cities and their populations — have been positioned by national governments as strategic players in the debate, with the result that they are increasingly held accountable to claims that they are, or have the potential to become, central to the wellbeing of community life. This article explores the reasons that the public policy initiatives of cultural diversity, cultural cohesion, cultural capital and cultural industries have come to rely on museums as institutions that collect and create culture, in all its diverse forms, experiences and understandings. •

`deepthroatfucker' and `Discerning Adonis': Men and cybersex

Attwood, F. — 2009-04-15

• This article uses interviews with male cybersex participants to examine their experiences of cybersex and considers constructions of `self' and `sex' in their discussions. It asks how the adoption of a cybersex persona is understood by participants and how they characterize their cybersexual practices in order to develop a clearer picture of the ways in which new forms of communication technology are implicated in producing new forms of sexual practice and how these relate to contemporary perceptions of what sex is. •

Introduction: Thinking about Caribbean Media Worlds

Pertierra, A. C., Horst, H. A. — 2009-02-25

This special issue brings together cultural studies of media with current themes in Caribbean studies and anthropology. The papers were part of an interdisciplinary conference panel focused upon Caribbean Media Worlds. At the outset, we wanted to demonstrate that there are several specific reasons why the Caribbean makes a particularly interesting case study for examining the cultural practices, relationships, micro-political encounters and identities that surround the distribution and use of media technologies. The collection here examines media in interaction with the world of which it is part — in this case, that world is imagined as `the Caribbean'. The main goal of this introduction is to contextualize the studies by presenting key ideas within Caribbean research as a backdrop against which the conceptual and analytic frameworks which emerge in the contributors' articles can be better understood.

Private pleasures: Watching videos in post-Soviet Cuba

Pertierra, A. C. — 2009-02-25

This article traces circuits of distribution and consumption of videocassette recorders (VCRs) and videocassettes in Cuba, which until April 2008 were not available for retail sale, and were usually sourced through black market or informal means. Based upon ethnographic research conducted in 2003/4 with VCR owners and an operator of an informal videocassette rental business, the article argues that understanding the role of video in contemporary Cuba requires a consideration of both the political and economic implications of being a video consumer and the material properties of VCRs as consumer goods. In the context of post-Soviet Cuba, VCRs and videocassettes exemplify the importance of informal practices and economies, and call attention to increased tensions surrounding consumption that have developed since the economic crisis of the 1990s.

Poverty as danger: Fear of crime in Santo Domingo

Taylor, E. B. — 2009-02-25

Poor urban communities throughout Latin America and the Caribbean have been historically represented as sites of physical and moral danger. In recent years they have been blamed in particular for causing a surge in urban crime. This article explores how such representations are constructed through a process of engagement between many sectors of society. I examine how the general public, the national media and a poor barrio in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) contribute to a discourse that spatializes poverty and crime. I argue that the poor are the victims of a class politics that is played out on designated urban spaces in which they symbolize the economic and political crises of the state and middle-class fears of loss of social status. By marginalizing the poor to bounded, powerless spaces, the middle class retain their moral right to respectability and the possibility of social ascendance.

Congregating by cassette: Recording and participation in transnational Haitian religious rituals

Richman, K., Rey, T. — 2009-02-25

A single communications device has transformed interactions between members of widely dispersed transnational Haitian religious communities: the audiocassette recorder. Messages, hymns and prayers taped on them crisscross the sea between Haiti and its diaspora, engaging distantly separated co-religionists in sporadically sequenced, yet effectively intimate conversations and rituals. For both Vodouist and Catholic religious congregations, tape recordings in Haitian Creole effectively circumvent scriptural French and help cement transnational ties by creating vast transnational performative spaces. This article draws on ethnographic research in Haiti and Florida to describe and theorize the important role that audiocassettes have played, in the transnational Haitian case, in cementing `assembled groups' and recreating `certain mental states of those groups' in ways that Durkheim might not have imagined when developing his epic argument about the socially cohesive function and essence of religion, an argument from which we take our theoretical orientation.

Voices from home and abroad New York City's Indo-Caribbean media

Tanikella, L. — 2009-02-25

This article examines how New York City's Indo-Caribbean media represents and constructs diasporic and transnational identities. Analyzing weekly newspapers, radio programs and websites, it argues that as media producers negotiate content and programing with their audiences they produce a varied and multiple `Indo-Caribbean voice'. Indo-Caribbean communities are linking up with home and with India in specific geographic locations in New York City and in locally produced mediated forums. In this article, these connections are mapped locally and transnationally to understand the role of other racialized communities in the development of an Indo-Caribbean presence in the public sphere. The media examined here represent Indo-Caribbean communities as they negotiate belonging in the US that is mediated through relationships with their home countries as well as the Indian migrant community from South Asia.

Afterword

Thomas, D. A. — 2009-02-25

Reviews: Emma Baulch Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk, and Death Metal in 1990s Bali Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007, 226 pp. ISBN 9780822341154

Luckman, S. — 2009-02-25

Reviews: Nico Carpentier and Benjamin De Cleen (eds) Participation and Media Production: Critical Reflections on Content Creation Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, ISBN 9781847184535

Bruns, A. — 2009-02-25

Reviews: John Hartley Television Truths, Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 290 pp. ISBN 9781405169790

Lunt, P. — 2009-02-25

The anachronistic fantastic: Science, progress and the child in `post-nostalgic' culture

Bell, A. R. — 2009-01-07

This article argues that the `genre-slipperiness' of recent media products have been accompanied by a form of `time-slip'. Such happily anachronistic texts self-consciously fuse the nostalgic with the futuristic and suggest comfort and unease with both. In this respect, they might be seen to do damage to notions of linear development, but arguably display love as well as criticism of different forms of progress. This article suggests three different ways of mixing pasts and futures: futuristic texts looking forward to a time when society returns to historical roots; more `combinational' approaches, which juxtapose pasts and futures with a degree of equality; and `technostalgia', nostalgia but to a post-industrial era. Throughout, examples involve young people, as it is argued children have an especially ambivalent role with respect to time, providing a cogent focalizer for the study of aesthetics of anachronism. •

The re-articulation of cultural studies in Japan and its consequences for Japanese studies

Schafer, F. — 2009-01-07

This article analyzes the global circulation of Cultural Studies in the light of its `re-articulation' within the certain local context in Japan. Furthermore, it will not simply raise the question of how to put Cultural Studies into Japanese Studies, but, by taking the detour via the re-articulation of Cultural Studies in Japan, wants to ask what Japanese Studies might `learn' from this already contextualized formation of Cultural Studies. This approach is important because it will illuminate the opportunities for Japanese Studies (and Area Studies in general) to contribute to the project of `provincialization' of Anglo-American Cultural Studies by sustaining a constant reflux of theories and approaches from marginalized formations of Cultural Studies into its geographical centers. •

YouTube as archive: Who will curate this digital Wunderkammer?

Gehl, R. — 2009-01-07

At first glance, the ease with which individuals can access and contribute to YouTube sets it in direct opposition to large corporate media outlets with their top-down mode of dissemination. However, I argue that, despite these seemingly democratic features, YouTube is better understood not as opposed to traditional corporate media but in the same genealogy as previous archival technologies and techniques. In archives, all content is flattened and has equal weight, so it is up to a curatorial authority to present content to audiences. While YouTube promises to democratize media, its lack of a centralized `curator of display' actually sets the stage for large media companies and entrepreneurs to step into the curatorial role and decide how each object in YouTube's archives will be presented to users. The role of the curator of display is, as of this writing, unresolved. This article thus draws on political economic and historical critiques of collections and archives in order to connect the emergent technologies in YouTube with earlier attempts to organize and present information, objects and images. •

Learning a new language: Culture, ideology and economics in Afrikaans media after apartheid

Wasserman, H. — 2009-01-07

Under apartheid, the mainstream Afrikaans media served as vehicles for the ideology of apartheid. Since democratization, they have attempted to rid themselves of this ideological baggage, and instead embraced a free-market ideology in which race has ostensibly disappeared. This repositioning has seemingly benefited the Afrikaans media sector, with an increase of the number and type of media, operating under the proclaimed banner of non-racialism. The discourse within which this repositioning has taken place, is that of a celebratory consumerism coupled with acknowledgement of majority rule. Yet this apparent move away from ideology towards a market logic where consumers are addressed as individuals rather than racial or ethnic groups, obscured its role within post-apartheid identity politics. Afrikaans media constructed the Afrikaans language as a commodity that can be used to its speakers' economic advantage if they recognize the pragmatic necessity of acknowledging the political transformation in the country. At the same time, the economic status of Afrikaans speakers could provide a bargaining chip in the negotiation of minority language rights. Crucially, Afrikaans media are therefore playing an important role in creating a link between consumption and cultural identity — to their own strategic commercial advantage. •

Playing House: Participants' experiences of Big Brother Finland

Aslama, M. — 2009-01-07

Reality television has inspired a vast amount of theorizing and research. Nevertheless, although speculations and popular accounts of participants' experiences of processes of reality television making, including the publicity, have fuelled many (often moralistic) public discussions, systematic research on the topic is scarce. This article analyses the housemates' experiences of the first Big Brother Finland (2005). Their interviews reveal three key themes: (1) the allure of the experience; (2) the ambiguous celebrity status; and (3) the need for defining the `ultimate truth'. They also reveal the participants' views on the complex power relations emerging in the process of reality TV production. •