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Cultural Studies
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INTRODUCTION
Gregory J. Lobo, Jeffrey Cedeo & Chloe RutterJensen Available online: 16 Dec 2011

To cite this article: Gregory J. Lobo, Jeffrey Cedeo & Chloe Rutter-Jensen (2011): INTRODUCTION, Cultural Studies, DOI:10.1080/09502386.2012.642542 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2012.642542

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 Gregory J. Lobo, Jeffrey Cedeno and Chloe Rutter-Jensen

INTRODUCTION

Perhaps, in some sense, it was for the better that Cultural Studies at Birmingham, at least qua Cultural Studies, closed its doors or, more accurately, had its doors closed back in 2002. From death life proceeds, and while the disappearance of Cultural Studies from Birmingham may have led to misgivings and questions, doubts and uncertainties for some, even existential ones it in no way and in no sense marked the end of, if we may, the project. Cultural Studies may have died there, but it lives on elsewhere. This special issue of the eponymous journal that focuses on the field is dedicated to documenting the reality and the problematics of ongoing life of Cultural Studies in the elsewhere otherwise known as Latin America (Spanish speaking) where, since 2002, a number of post-graduate degrees (and one pre-graduate) have been institutionalized in leading universities throughout the region. Though not all of them bear the name Cultural Studies for reasons that are aired in some of the following articles they all share its perspective on culture, as an arena of contestation, resistance, conflict, negotiation, education and cooptation, as vital for understanding current configurations, balances, shifts, victories, defeats and stalemates (provisional). In short it is no longer the case that in Latin America Cultural Studies exist more as an individual practice than as an institutional field (Szurmuk & McKee Irwin 2009, p. 24). It is coming in to its institutional own. If we are at all concerned with and for the future of Cultural Studies, this edition of Cultural Studies ought to contribute somewhat to a lifting of our spirits. While Cultural Studies may not have had the impact that it promised in the metropolis (Berube 2009), the fact of the matter is that here in Spanish speaking Latin America the promise and the challenge of complexity and complication are being welcomed, and this is evidenced at the level of institutionalization. That is to say, not only are universities gestating specific degree programmes in Cultural Studies, but students are filling the available slots, and then some. And so once more, perhaps, we see that these troubled, struggling contexts places that have not seen the consolidation of modern disciplinary and biopolitical society as described by Foucault, where capitalism has always been savage and never really acquired the veneer of decency lent to it by the advances however limited of social democracy in the West, situations that have not experienced the profound regimentation and tranquilization of life resulting from the thorough-going penetration of
Cultural Studies 2011, iFirst article, pp. 17 ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online # 2011 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2012.642542

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capitalist, governmental culture into the deepest recesses of both collective and personal experience offer, for that very reason, the possibility of a detour, as it were, of a tangent, a line of flight. In this case, Cultural Studies understood as the intellectual opportunity to see things more clearly, more accurately, as the opportunity to elaborate a better understanding of contexts both local and global may also signal the real possibility of changing things. Though inevitably incomplete, in this issue we hope to have compiled articles that will keep the reader informed as to what has been going on here of late. Of course, one glaring omission is a report from Brazil, and for that we can only offer our apologies. That said, in broad strokes, in recent years, various universities in Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile and Venezuela, have inaugurated programmes, centres, institutes and Masters and Doctoral level programmes in Cultural Studies. The Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia the city from which we write notably established an undergraduate degree in Languages and Socio-Cultural Studies (for all intents and purposes, a degree in Cultural Studies) back in 2000, and recently added a masters degree in Cultural Studies. Also in Bogota there is a masters degree at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. In Chile there is a masters at the Universidad de Arcis, Santiago, while in Argentina there is the masters at the Universidad de Moro Buenos Aires, and the n, Universidad Nacional del Rosario, in Rosario. In Ecuador there is the masters at the Universidad de Cuenca, while in Quito there is a PhD in Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simo Bolvar which also has a masters in studies of n culture, which is related to Cultural Studies. Centres related to Cultural Studies include the Institute for Social and Cultural Studies (Instituto de Estudios Sociales y Culturales, PENSAR), at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogota, Colombia; the Center for Latin American Cultural Studies (Centro de Estudios Culturales Latinoamericanos) at the Universidad de Chile, Santiago; and the Programme in Globalization, Culture and Social Transformation (Programa Globalizacio Cultura y Transformaciones Sociales) at the Universidad Central de n, Venezuela in Caracas. Of course, at the same time, the field of a specifically Latin American Cultural Studies has been undergoing something of a consolidation. But while Latin America obviously presents itself as the object of much but certainly not all Cultural Studies work done here in Latin America, our concern in this issue is not to provide a space for reflection on that field, or to limit reflections to that field that of Latin American Cultural Studies. As the list above should make clear, the institutionalization of Cultural Studies in Latin America is not at all the same thing as the institutionalization of Latin American Cultural Studies which, if we were to be so bold, we would argue is more properly a phenomenon of US/UK origins and contexts. And so, in an attempt to keep ourselves on the terrain of a common and more expansive project we have asked our contributors to reflect on Cultural Studies in Latin America and

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INTRODUCTION

the process of its institutionalization, and not on Latin American Cultural Studies and its distinct institutionalization. What accounts for the surge in Cultural Studies qua, specifically, Cultural Studies in Spanish speaking Latin America? We ask because the case has been made on more than one occasion that whatever the name, people in Latin America have been doing the sort of intellectual work promoted by Cultural Studies for a long, long time and indeed, some of the articles that follow undergird and fill out this assertion. But as the articles also make clear, what is being institutionalized as Cultural Studies is not a field constituted only by Latin American works and thought that precede the Birmingham Centre. Rather, classical thinkers of the Latin American national question, the indigenous question, of the relation of literature to culture and power, to race and ethnicity, in Latin America, are being bundled, as it were, with thinkers like Hall and Grossberg and Bennett, as well as, Irigaray, Haraway and Spivak, and of course many others, because, one would like to argue, such a Cultural Studies allows us and helps us to complicate things. This, of course, notwithstanding the fact the bearers of standard academic disciplinarity reject Cultural Studies out of hand, regarding it as a field of celebratory pop-cultural analyses, seeing it only as in importation into Latin America which speaks volumes both of the power of metropolitan tastes and preoccupations, and of the perceived cowed, self-loathing, Latin American (academic) public. But the other way to understand the rise of Cultural Studies is as a response to the fact that reality really is complicated. Though there still exists a romantic critical discourse that still decries cultural imperialism from without and blames it for the failure to build strong national identities and communities, though a strain of dependency theory is alive and well and blaming regional difficulties on US machinations, and though unreformed Marxists are aplenty and everkeen to reduce all social phenomena to expressions of the class struggle, Cultural Studies has taken off in Latin America because it has been recognized as an admittedly mixed but terribly useful bag of critical tools approaches and methods that can help in the understanding and change of social reality in Latin America, when other more singular perspectives have stalled. But while the why is important, it is nonetheless the actual process of institutionalization that really interests us here. How has Cultural Studies become institutionalized? What does this Cultural Studies look like? What are its forebears and its futures here? What tendencies have facilitated the process and what are the problematics that have, as it were, bedeviled that process? How has the institution impinged on the institutionalization and how has Cultural Studies impinged upon the university/institution? For example, the institutionalization of Cultural Studies has had to deal with the fact that many student applicants to the programmes continue to be somewhat confused at what is being offered. It is still surprising how many students struggle to grasp that we are interested in understanding culture as an ordinary phenomenon that is nonetheless the location of the naturalization of social relations of

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power. Many seem to think, rather, that Cultural Studies is devoted to the formation of cultural policy professionals, that it is about how to bring culture understood in its antiquated sense as something like high culture, a circumscribed object that people relate to, that is somehow distanced from their daily lives to the uncultured masses, so as to enrich and edify, that is, to culture them. In inviting contributions we have sought to give voice not only to those who are working on and in the institutionalization of Cultural Studies; we wanted to give voice to those who will likely not be too familiar to most English-dominant readers. We do not begrudge at all those who have for what ever reason been able to associate themselves with Cultural Studies in the fields collective (English speaking) imaginary, but we hope here to have, rather, highlighted other voices, who despite their as yet low profile vis-a-vis the global Culutral Studies landscape, are nonetheless crucial for the ongoing vitality of the democratic project of Cultural Studies on the ground here in Latin America. That said, if this issue seems somewhat over-loaded with reflections on the Colombian case it is only because, as Robert Irwin and Monica Szurmuk point out in their article, Colombia has been the site of its own specific boom within the larger boom of Cultural Studies Latin American institutionalization. Irwin and Szurmuk give a comparative account of the institutionalizations in Colombia and Argentina, in which they explain why Cultural Studies has been institutionalized under the name Cultural Studies in the former, while needing to give itself another in the latter. Monica Bernabe and Sandra Valdettaro take up the narrative of Cultural Studies institutionalization in Latin America with their article, which focuses on how the authors organized a Cultural Studies programme in a specific place: the city of Rosario in Argentina. They argue for the need to attend to the specific forms of contextualization in which knowledge is produced, while not forgetting about global frameworks and transnational spaces, and their determining effects. Juan Ricardo Aparicio, then, in some sense fleshes out Irwin and Szurmuks discussion of the institutionalization of Cultural Studies in Colombia with a more detailed history of its specific genealogies and a narrative of his own participation in the process as, one would say, one of its effects or products. He also offers a critical reflection, a sort of provisional assessment of the journey so far travelled by Cultural Studies in Colombia. In rounding out the reflections on and from Colombia, Chloe RutterJensen gives an account of the Cultural Studies classroom, in which issues of institutional hierarchy can be felt as contradictions that provide fertile ground for the interrogation of relations of power, allowing students to deconstruct identity categories that are inherent in their attendance in an institution such as the private, elite university; while Gregory Lobo writes of the evolution of the epistemological and theoretical posture of Cultural Studies as it went from idea to implementation at his home institution.

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From Ecuador, Catherine Walsh emphasizes the role played by indigenous thought in the institutionalizaton of Cultural Studies there, and more specifically she focuses on the determining centrality of interculturality in that process, showing how Cultural Studies again has proved fruitful in ways that for some of its critics, would be unexpected. In an interview, Argentinian Daniel Mato from a more adversarial position urges us to forge ahead in the study of culture and power while remaining leery of the thing called Cultural Studies as such, and even more so of that derivative thing called Latin American Cultural Studies. For Mato, both of these projects are irredeemably corrupted by their metropolitan origins, which make their institutionalization in Latin America nothing more than the cliched playing out of old and ongoing relations of domination-subordination. Matos argument is that academic and intellectual work should without regard for nomenclature simply undertake the challenge of studying relations of culture and power, without servile and unnecessary reference to what is called Cultural Studies. From Peru, Victor Vich and Gonzalo Portocarrero combine a narrative of the relatively non-problematic (apparently) institutionalization of Cultural Studies at their university in Peru with some particularly insightful observations. Their narrative would have us understand that the logic of Cultural Studies makes its inclusion into the university exigent, rather than depending on the politics of the academy, on overcoming disciplinary territorialism and jealousies. Their emphasis of the importance of the cultural approach to analysis is not, that is, one shared by everyone who thinks about collective human behaviours, problems, and interactions, about power and domination and subordination. A second interview, this one with US-based, Uruguayan Mabel Morana, ranges over various issues central to the institutionalization of Cultural Studies in Latin America, while making the strong case for a revitalization of the political in intellectual work in a globalized world that while it claims to be post many things, has not left domination and inequality behind, but only reconfigured their modes of instantiation. Finally, from Chile Nelly Richard reviews some of the major contributions to the development of Cultural Studies in Latin America and what one might call Latin American Cultural Studies. She argues that Cultural Studies cannot simply be the institutionalized space of a pacific conciliation between the social sciences and the humanities, but rather must take advantage of its insitutionalized space to encourage the subversion of the hegemony of technocratic knowledges and certainties and their concommitant social implementation through the proliferation of a disobedient language. Its institutionalization, in other words, must if it is to count for anything somehow serve as a point of departure for critique of the institution. In closing this brief introduction, we want to riff, as it were, off of a still quite recent book, by Joel Pfister, in which he asks, critique for what? He gives a tripartite answer: critique for analysis, organizing, and what Stuart Hall

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terms hegemonizing (2006, p. 213), which up until now, Pfister observes, has best been achieved by conservatives (2006, p. 288). We would ask and respond in the same way regarding institutionalization of Cultural Studies here Latin America: institutionalization for what? For analysis, for organizing and for, optimistically, hegemonizing. Cultural Studies, or the sort of work going on which could quite easily be described by such a moniker, as it is institutionalized in Spanish-speaking Latin America, may not always be obviously useful in terms of organizing or hegemonizing; but who can say, really, what sort of analysis will consistently and necessarily serve in such terms? That the field of analysis is opened up, that the terrains of our investigations and the methods brought to bear multiply, this may not in itself be enough. But it is most likely a necessary component in the long revolution, is it not? By bringing the news about the institutionalization of Cultural Studies in Latin American to the readers of Cultural Studies, we hope not only to inform, but to encourage. There really is something going on out there. That said, we close with an expression of thanks to Lawrence Grossberg and the Editorial Committee of Cultural Studies for encouraging this project and allowing us the space to put it before the interested public.
Notes on contributors

Gregory Lobo received his PhD in Literature from the University of California, San Diego, in 2002, after which he took a position at the Universidad de los Andes, in Bogota, Colombia, to help build the department with which he was affiliated, the departamento de lenguajes y estudios socioculturales, and design the departments MA in Estudios Culturales. Winner of the equivalent of a National Science Foundation financial award to investigate nation discourse in Colombia, Lobo has published articles and chapters in academic journals and books, and most notably, in 2009, Colombia: algo diferente de una nacio n (Colombia: Something other than a Nation). He is currently working on a study of hegemony in Colombia, 20022008, and more generally on left-liberal political culture and its adversaries. Jeffrey Cedeno teaches in the Department of Literature in the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogota. He was co-editor of Cuadernos de Literatura (2001, 2002, 2009), Universitas Humanistica (2003), Estudios (2007, 2008), ReVista. Harvard Review of Latin America (2008), Iberoamericana (2008), Revista de Crtica Literaria Latinoamericana (2009), Revista Iberoamericana (2009, 2012). He has published various articles on Latin American literature and culture.

INTRODUCTION

Chloe Rutter-Jensen PhD in Literature from the University of California, San Diego. Publications include La heteronormatividad y sus discordias: narrativas alternativas del afecto en Colombia. Bogota, CESO, 2009, and Pasarela Paralela: Escenarios de la estetica y el poder en los reinados de belleza, Editorial CEJA. Bogota 2005. Associate Professor in the Department of Language and Socio-Cultural Studies at the Universidad de Los Andes, Bogota, Colombia. Areas of interest include gender and sexuality studies and critical disability studies, as well as feminist pedagogy.

References
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Berube M. (2009) Whats the Matter With Cultural Studies?, Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 September, pp. B9 B11. Pster, J. (2006) Critique for What? Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left Studies, Boulder, Paradigm Publishers. Szurmuk, M. & McKee Irwin, R. (2009) Diccionario de Estudios Culturales Latinoamericanos, Mexico, Instituto Mora, Siglo XXI Editores.