International Journal of Cultural Studies recent issues

A `cover narrative': from Nightmare to Reality

Hartley, J. — 2008-05-29

Imitating Incas and becoming llama: Tintin in Latin America -- or the Latin American in Tintin?

Scorer, J. — 2008-05-29

This article revisits Tintin's adventures in Latin America, not only tracing the themes of colonialism and the ethnographic present in the works but also reconsidering the traditional reading of The Adventures of Tintin as simply a patronizing vision of the Latin American other. The article draws on fluid notions of latinidad to highlight how Tintin and friends are sometimes (unwittingly) able to `act Latin' — at least until Tintin becomes weary of his adventures and, in so doing, loses his own sacred nature.

The repressed memory of Brazilian slavery

Sepulveda Dos Santos, M. — 2008-05-29

This article investigates the over-exposure in Brazilian narratives and images of the suffering and humiliation of the black population during the slavery era. It argues that the emphasis placed on the painful memories of slavery still has the power to undermine the self-esteem of the Brazilian population. Seventy-five per cent of the slaves who were brought to Brazil died within the first three years. Undoubtedly the slavery trade and the humiliation and torture suffered by the black population were traumatic events that left their marks on the victimised individuals. We find images of slaves being tortured and beaten in all the nation's major educational and cultural institutions. However, when history is a product of traumatic situations, it unfolds as though without witnesses. Because slaves were unable to transmit the full horror of their experiences to subsequent generations, our partial representations of the past fail to promote social justice for present-day Afro-descendants.

Goldfinger's gold standard: Negotiating the economic nation in mid-twentieth century Britain

Karl, A. G. — 2008-05-29

`Goldfinger's gold standard' reads the James Bond/007 spy film Goldfinger (1964) to interrogate how economic institutions and ideas shape a British national imaginary during the decolonising mid-century. I argue that Goldfinger answers anxieties about the loss of British `standards' of global authority by economically delimiting the nation and privileging cultural Britishness, at the same time that the film acknowledges the flexibility and the ironies of the Bretton Woods gold standard that is its premise. As such, Goldfinger is prescient about the transactive nature of Britishness and economics alike that are characteristic of life under contemporary global capitalism. I contend that ideas about Britain are conditioned by economic policy, and suggest that the interfaces of economic, national and cultural histories may serve as the basis for further interdisciplinary inquiry. •

`Riveting and real -- a family in the raw': (Re)visiting The Family (1974) after reality TV

Holmes, S. — 2008-05-29

Paul Watson's 12-part documentary serial, The Family (BBC, 1974), focused on the lives of the working-class Wilkins family from Reading. Along with An American Family (PBS, 1973), The Family has been positioned as a landmark precursor to reality TV. Yet it has largely been referred to rather than analysed, and the potential relationship at work between `then' and `now' is often obscured. In seeking to (re)construct the popular reception of The Family, this article argues that it is particularly productive to `revisit' the Wilkinses right now, precisely because the growth of reality TV has led to an `opening up' of the traditional terrain of documentary studies. Drawing on new archival research, this article examines how discussion of the programme generated an expansive extratextual framework. This framework turned The Family into a cultural event, and it represents a crucial site for accessing its historical circulation — particularly with regard to discourses on `ordinary' people as television performers, and `ordinary' people turned television `stars'.

The personal is professional: Personal trainers as a case study of cultural intermediaries

Smith Maguire, J. — 2008-05-29

The article examines the discursive construction of personal training as a case study of the characteristics of cultural intermediary work. Based on an analysis of US personal training occupational texts from 1990 to 2000, the article employs a cultural economy perspective (du Gay and Pryke, 2002) to examine the importance of normative codes of professionalism, the investment of personal resources and aesthetic labour, and the tension between cultural and economic categories in representations of the work. Personal training is a particularly revealing case because of its explicit tensions between cultural factors (e.g. a professional, service-oriented ethic) and economic parameters (e.g. the entrepreneurial aspects of selling services). In response, trainers are encouraged to adopt a vocational attitude, suggesting how cultural intermediary work more generally invokes particular dispositions, which are the outcomes of negotiating between economy and culture, and the personal and the professional, in specific occupational contexts.

Mediating hope: New media, politics and resistance

Fenton, N. — 2008-05-29

In an attempt to reimagine the concept of resistance in media studies this article argues for a reconsideration of the concept of political hope in non-mainstream mediated political mobilization that will take us beyond a focus on resistance to one of political project(s). The critical first step in such an endeavour is to reach beyond the confines of media and communication studies. This article draws on political science, sociology, social movement studies and cultural geography, among other subjects, to consider the ways in which new media may allow a reimagining of hope so that a collective consciousness can be developed and maintained. In doing so the article suggests that if, as scholars, we wish to enhance our political purchase then the notion of resistance in media and communication studies should be made to engage with the struggle of changing the terms of the polity.

Editorial: 'Who are you going to believe -- me or your own eyes?' New decade; new directions

Hartley, J. — 2008-03-18

This issue of the International Journal of Cultural Studies marks the beginning of its second decade of publication. Since the first issue was published in 1998, we have published about two million freshly minted words — nearly 250 articles on culture, media and everyday life in every continent including Antarctica. John Frow has described the journal as follows: `The International Journal of Cultural Studies is one of the most interesting and innovative showcases of recent work in cultural studies. From Balinese punk to Brazilian television, it's eclectic, adventurous and genuinely international in its range; and it publishes work of a consistently high quality.'

Mapping the vast suburban tundra: Australian comedy from Dame Edna to Kath and Kim

Turnbull, S. — 2008-03-18

By the time of Australian Federation in 1901, almost 70 per cent of Sydney's population were living in the suburbs: a statistic that suggests that despite prevalent and enduring images of the bushman and the ocker, the 'real' Australia was, and still is, more likely to be located in what Barry Humphries has described as Australia's 'vast and unexplored suburban tundra'.¹ As a satirist, Humphries has been in the forefront of an expedition to map the tragi-comic dimensions of this territory with characters such as Dame Edna Everage, who first appeared on Australian television in 1956, offering the box room of `her lovely home' as a potential billet for an athlete during the Melbourne Olympic Games.² Some 50 years later, Dame Edna not only presided over the closing ceremony of the 2006 Commonwealth Games, but was joined on the steps of the Melbourne Town Hall, during a ceremony to award her the key to the city, by two more recent suburban icons, Kath and Kim. With the international success of Dame Edna and Kath and Kim, it seems that the Antipodean suburb is still being mapped and mined for comic effect on television both at home and abroad. This article will explore the conditions of such success within a long tradition of anti-suburbanism dating back to the nineteenth century while exploring the role of comedy in constructing a national imaginary which is now widely circulated via increasingly transnational flows in television.

Television pre-views and the meaning of hype

Gray, J. — 2008-03-18

Although commonsense notions of interpretation and the meaning-making process dictate that such practices begin following consumption of the text, this article argues that, through hype and previews, texts are pre-decoded before a text even exists. By focusing on marketing and previews surrounding two television programs, prior to release, the article examines how such paratexts create meaning, genre, style, tone and audience, and hence it argues for the significant primary power that these supposedly secondary intertexts hold over consumption. Not 'judging a book by its cover' and not `believing the hype' are clichéd virtues, but this article argues that covers and hype are not so easily ignored, nor, given their considerable powers to conjure the text, should they be so easily ignored by media and cultural studies analysts.

Making it after all: a reparative reading of The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Crozier, S. — 2008-03-18

This article develops a reparative reading of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970—77) in order to demonstrate the ways in which Mary's emotional and imaginary significance is broader than her original context of second wave feminism in the US. The notion of reparative criticism as an alternative or supplementary approach to conventional cultural studies analyses is explained. The article develops this approach through a number of readings of Mary Richards as she appears and is invoked both within and beyond the sitcom narrative. It is argued that the ambivalence associated with Mary allows viewers to negotiate social and psychic conflicts in a process of making a possible world for themselves.

Instant-messaging Shiva, flying taxis, Bil Klinton and more: children's narratives from rural India

Arora, P. — 2008-03-18

In this article, story (re)productions by children in rural India are seen as a potential tool for addressing current `participatory' issues facing development practitioners. A project was implemented to involve children from a rural village in South India in e-literary storybook productions. The intention was to foster online representations of the rural voice through the lens of the child. Drawing on the material of children's stories, multiple subjectivities are revealed that compel us to reconsider relations of the 'rural' with technology and current social contexts. An analysis of these narratives highlights children's appropriation capabilities as they weave the 'urbanness' and 'global' with the 'rural' fabric, moving beyond the traditional discourse of the urban—rural dichotomy. This effort capitalizes on current theorizations of territory as scapes, making the case to harness children's stories to enlighten the adult, well-intentioned development practitioner who seeks genuine understanding of territory and practice.

Race-conscious transnational activists with cameras: Mediators of compassion

Mahrouse, G. — 2008-03-18

This article examines a Canadian transnational solidarity activist's efforts to publicize human suffering through visual documentation. The objectives are to examine some of the ways activists negotiate ethical dilemmas about spectatorship and a white/Western gaze, and to consider the potential of the uses of visual documentation as a tool/tactic for subverting global white hegemony. The analysis focuses an one activists' attempts to capture and narrate experiences of suffering in the light of racialized relations of domination and subordination. The article argues that the strategies used to document and display photographs constituted the photographer and the viewers' understandings of themselves in ways that reinforce rather than subvert power. The article concludes by considering the implications of white/Westerners as mediators of the Other's suffering.

Ordering sex in cyberspace: a content analysis of escort websites

Castle, T., Lee, J. — 2008-03-18

Research studies on prostitution, more specifically escort services, have neglected the use of the internet as a method of solicitation and advertisement. The current study is an exploratory analysis of the content of 76 escort websites, located using online search engines. The purpose of this study was to uncover information about the escort agencies and escorts that utilize the internet for advertisement purposes. One of the goals of this research study was to describe the `typical' escort website from the potential customer perspective and includes information on individual escorts, prices, payment options and reviews.

Review: Mark Gibson Culture and Power: A History of Cultural Studies Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007. 228 pp. (paper) ISBN 9780868408866

Lee, R. E. — 2008-03-18

Celebrity culture and public connection: Bridge or chasm?

Couldry, N., Markham, T. — 2007-11-27

Media and cultural research has an important contribution to make to recent debates about declines in democratic engagement: for example, is celebrity culture a route into democratic engagement for those otherwise disengaged? This article contributes to this debate by reviewing qualitative and quantitative findings from a UK project on `public connection'. Using self-produced diaries (with in-depth multiple interviews) and a nationwide survey, the authors argue that while celebrity culture is an important point of social connection sustained by media use, it is not linked in citizens' own accounts to issues of public concern. Survey data suggest that those who particularly follow celebrity culture are the least engaged in politics and least likely to use their social networks to involve themselves in action or discussion about public-type issues. This does not mean that `celebrity culture' is `bad', but it challenges suggestions of how popular culture might contribute to effective democracy. •

Everywhere and nowhere: Vancouver, fan pilgrimage and the urban imaginary

Brooker, W. — 2007-11-27

This article discusses fan pilgrimage, using as a case study the city of Vancouver, Canada — a location that has been used as the basis for several cult television series. It draws on theories of urban geography, particularly of postmodern suburbia (Edward Relph, Jean Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, Fredric Jameson, Edward Soja) to argue that while Vancouver may be valued by film and television producers as a generic, anonymous, `flat' environment, to fan pilgrims who bring their own imaginary maps (based on the fictional geographies of Smallville, The X-Files and Battlestar Galactica ), the city is a rich intersection of possible worlds. The article uses science fiction and superhero metaphors of parallel universes and `infinite earths' to explore this fan experience, arguing finally that pilgrimage can be an act of creation, performance, disguise and carnival that symbolically transforms the location in question, temporarily inverting social structures and making the city into a liberating, playful space. •

Alternate reality gaming and convergence culture: The case of Alias

Ornebring, H. — 2007-11-27

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are a form of internet-based mystery game in which participants are immersed in a fictional world and engage in collective problem-solving. This article studies three ARGs connected to the TV series Alias (ABC, 2001—6), two of them launched by the network ABC as part of the marketing of the TV series, the third produced by fans. Previous research on ARGs has not sufficiently problematized the fact that many ARGs are marketing tools. While ARGs can be analysed as part of a wider context of convergence culture and fan culture, such an analysis must take into account the underlying commercial logic of popular culture production. Despite the differences found between industry-produced and fan-produced ARGs, they still share a framework of consumption that conforms to corporate goals of marketing and brand-building as well as fan audiences' goals of pleasurable interaction with fictional worlds. •

Music and cultural politics in Taiwan

Ho, W.-C. — 2007-11-27

This article aims to examine the current debate concerning the complicated interplay of nationalism and globalization that, along with associated social changes, determines the cultural diversity of contemporary Taiwanese music today. Despite the deep cultural entanglements of Taiwan's political history, the ethnic identities of Taiwanese indigenous and popular music are crystallized by the ways in which identity is constructed and represented in culture and social relations. Over the past two decades, Taiwanese musical culture has been developed largely in relation to policies to integrate traditional Chinese, local Taiwanese and Western music. The historical and political processes in Taiwan's music are factors are pertinent to what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture. Ethnic indigenization and market globalization are part of the conception and practice of the state/party regime's efforts to co-opt the interest of diverse musical elements in a new collective Taiwanese music identity. •

Memory machines or musical instruments?: Soundscapes, recording technologies and reference

Benschop, R. — 2007-11-27

• According to R. Murray Shafer, recording technology is both a crucial tool to preserve endangered sounds, and a threat to such sounds. This ambiguity raises the question of how the role of recording technology should be understood. In this article, I examine this role in a recent soundscape production called Alle Namen. First I discuss historical work presenting a shift in the use of recording technology from a memory machine aiming to reconstruct live performances as faithfully as possible, to a musical instrument used to create new musical experiences. Particularly in the context of artistic soundscapes, recording technology is understood to have a distinctly creative role. My analysis of Alle Namen, however, shows that recording technology is not unequivocally used as memory machine. Rather, without drawing attention to the technologically mediated nature of the performance itself, Alle Namen records a lost present rather than a lost past. •

Review: Zygmunt Bauman Liquid Fear Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. 188 pp. (paper) ISBN 9780745636801 Zygmunt Bauman Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. 115 pp. (paper) ISBN 0745639879 Zygmunt Bauman Consuming Life Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. 160 pp.(paper) ISBN 9780745640020

Deuze, M. — 2007-11-27

Review: Debbora Battaglia, ed. E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 272 pp. (paper) ISBN: 0822336219

Parks, L. — 2007-11-27

Review: Alexander R. Galloway Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 143 pp. (paper) 9780816648504

Juul, J. — 2007-11-27

Ships in the night: Journeys in cultural imperialism and postcolonialism

Christophers, B. — 2007-08-29

This article reflects on the fact that postcolonial studies and the critique of American cultural imperialism, despite addressing similar core themes, have developed largely in isolation from one another. It identifies four primary reasons for these separate evolutionary trajectories, relating in turn to when and where the respective critiques have taken shape, and to the different cultural geographies and cultural products that they have each examined. These explanations are important, I argue, to the degree that they help to suggest ways in which the two debates might begin to feed into and constructively inform one another. The second part of the essay maps out the potential contours of such a dialogue.

Articulating the Third World in/and cultural studies

Lai, M.-y. — 2007-08-29

This article seeks to articulate the Third World in/and cultural studies through a critical interrogation and refiguration of the term with reference to the current condition of global capitalism and its structuring effects on collective struggles. Tracing critiques of the term to the historical connection between the Third World and the nation-form, the article suggests a deterritorialization of the Third World to reclaim its relevance under global capitalism as a discursive site of utopian longings for unity among the oppressed and the creation of alternative futures. The deterritorialized Third World is refigured through a theoretical deployment of `queering' and discussed with reference to the experiences of Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong.

Imperialism and `medieval' natives: The Malay image in Anglo-American travelogues and colonialism in Malaya and the Philippines

Goh, D. P. S. — 2007-08-29

The location of Orientalist racial difference and Ornamental class familiarity in imperial discourse can be combined to understand the nuances of colonial representations. Revisiting the Malay image, I argue that the medievalist convention of portraying the native as situated in intermediate evolution between savagery and Western civilization was crucial for imperialism. The Malay image shifted from the representation of orientals exhibiting incommensurable difference in early European travelogues to civilizable medievals in early nineteenth-century British writings. British authors also vacillated between representing Malays as model and degenerate medievals with different racial and class symbolic valences. The vacillating representation influenced colonial state building in the late nineteenth century. I show this by looking at the travel writings of British and American colonial statesmen who supported contrastive colonial policies.

From `The Me Decade' to `The Me Millennium': The cultural history of narcissism

Tyler, I. — 2007-08-29

Claims that consumer-orientated and media-saturated cultures have given rise to `a new narcissism' have been repeatedly asserted within social and cultural criticism for the past 40 years. Within cultural studies there has been a recent proliferation of accounts of the rise of narcissism in analyses of consumer culture, celebrity culture and new media. Returning to key influential accounts of `cultural narcissism' that emerged in social criticism and popular media in the 1970s, this article interrogates the claim that narcissism is the pathology of our time. Focusing on the sexual and racial politics of narcissism, it demonstrates how narcissism acquired its meaning and force as a critical term through its stigmatizing attribution to specific sexual and social groups. The central argument is that the contentious cultural and political history of narcissism needs to be acknowledged within contemporary theoretical accounts of `cultural narcissism' and `media narcissism'.

Nation, identity and the fascination with forensic science in Sherlock Holmes and CSI

Harrington, E. B. — 2007-08-29

Although the popular television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation presents cutting-edge images and laboratory techniques, it reiterates the reassuring ideological message and the glorification of the man of science that typify Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. While the Holmes stories use reassuring, formulaic narratives to consolidate a normative national identity and counter increasing disenchantment with empire, CSI replays a similar sort of procedural detective story to reassure viewers with the fantasy that the United States can be secured amidst threats of violence and terrorism, that individual identity, as well as national identity, can be fixed and scientifically assured.

The `other media' alternative communications in Israel

Katz, Y. — 2007-08-29

This article discusses the alternative media system that has developed in Israel as a means to offset the limited variety of communications means that serve special-interest groups. It explores the role of alternative means within society and explains the debate on the new policy of awarding franchises to special-interest channels. Taking into account the means that have developed outside of the mainstream media, it is fair to say that alternative media are well established as an integral part of the communications system. While the government has long objected to media services that serve special-interest groups and advocated for a common culture, the current policy — of approving special-interest programing and services through the mainstream media — can be seen as an understanding that cultural identity is in need and can be well served through new media services.