Postgraduate Course Pages > Cultural Studies: East Asian and North American Perspectives

Read student responses to the first semester of the seminar.

January 10: We concluded with informal presentations allying the themes of the seminar to the research interests of particular students. Presentations included Miyako Hirata on Japanese modernization and school education, Mao Wei Bing on the reform of China’s state-owned enterprises, Hiroaki Furihata on cultural change and the “independent-living” movement, and Naoki Yamamoto on the relation of cinema and the public sphere.

Many thanks to all for participating in this experiment, which we are pleased to say will be repeated as a regular course in the Graduate School, new and some returning topics, new and some returning participants, in academic year 2004.

December 13: Discussion of the degree to which the modern Japanese university is a Western institution, and of the nature of the tradition of liberal arts that has underpinned that institution in the West. The modern West, we want to contend, seriously studied, learned from, and in effect absorbed the educational traditions of China, India, Japan, and the Islamic world, and in the development of the modern university added three elements, which may be thought of as the cornerstones of the tradition of the liberal arts:

1. students are free to study whatever they find engaging,

2. in the field they choose to study they are free to criticize anyone who has studied the field before,

3. they must acknowledge openly the sources from which their ideas have come.

Discussion from this of the paradox involved in accepting the institution of the university but feeling uncomfortable with the three conditions, and of strategies for developing a Japanese ethic for a university system that aspires to the standard of the best universities of the West.

November 29: The texts discussed, partly in terms of the November 22 “Post-Said” discussion, were Edward Said’s The Academy of Lagado, London Review of Books, April 17, 2003, and Give Us Back Our Democracy, the Observer, April 20, 2003.

In the context of the discussions of Said and the United States, students might also have a look at Said’s The Other America, Al-Ahram, March 20-26, 2003, a work that addresses the dominant American discourse of the second Bush Presidency (the “American consensus” in the idiom of the article) as well as overly simplistic (and essentialist) assumptions about the United States.

Discussion also turned briefly, for reasons that would take longer than worthwhile to explain here, to the taxonomy of the Internet. Professor Ewick mentioned the Open Directory Project, the “largest human-edited directory of the Web” and the “core directory” of Google, Lycos, HotBot, AOL Search, Netscape Search, and many others. A description of ODP may be found here, in Japanese here. The top-level hierarchy is here, in Japanese here.

Students not in Professor Sadria’s Master’s and Doctoral seminars are reminded that participants in those seminars will be at a study retreat next weekend, and so this Cultural Studies seminar will not meet again until December 13.

November 22: The seminar began with Hiroaki Furihata’s admirable follow-up to his presentation of November 15. Hiroaki extended his discussion of the relation of the empowering process with the themes of the course by taking into account discussions of the public sphere by Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser. The discussion that followed focused on differences in the intentions and epistemological contexts of Habermas and Fraser. The public sphere for Habermas is a space to manage conflicts that have already emerged, between and among people whose positions are already recognized, while Fraser provides legitimacy for difference that is not yet recognized, and proposes a public sphere that provokes the emergence of diversity and difference.

This discussion was followed by discussion of what might be called the “post [Edward] Said world,” a topic that we shall take up again November 29.

To provide a frame for the discussion we looked at two articles from the International Herald Tribune of November 22-23, 2003. The first, a summary of a November 20 Detroit News article, noted that in Dearborn, Michigan, a Detroit suburb with a large concentration of Arab residents, legal charges against people with Arab or Muslim names has increased by 9.3% since September 11, 2001, while during the same period charges against those without Arab or Islamic names has fallen 6.7%.

The second article, “U.S. Tech Boom Relied on Imported Experts,” notes that in 2000, according to the US National Science Foundation, 38% of the scientists working in the United States were foreign born but educated at the doctoral level in the United States. Since 9/11, according to Stuart Patt, spokesman for the Consular Affairs Bureau of the US State Department, US visa applications in all categories have fallen dramatically. The article notes specifically that according to a National Science Board analysis of statistics from the Office of Immigration, from 2001 to 2002 “the number of temporary worker visas issued for jobs in science and technology plummeted by 55 percent, to 74,000 from 166,000.” Patt, the State Department spokesman, confirmed that since 9/11 “the State Department had brought foreign scientists and engineers under greater scrutiny.”

***

Of Edward Said’s many contributions to the public sphere we would like to call attention in particular to two: his criticisms of the pre-modern element of thought in the Middle East, and his demonstration, paradoxically, of the greatness of the United States.

Regarding the first, a frequent theme in Said’s work is that part of the process of becoming modern is to accept personal responsibility for community building, and that this requires a capacity for self-criticism, the ability to turn a critical eye toward yourself and those close to you. Said’s criticism of Arab and Islamic societies was that they have not been self critical enough, particularly in terms of power relations. One cannot be a modern intellectual and not be self-critical. The condition of the modern intellectual is self-criticism.

In regard to the United States, Said in important ways is testimony to the greatness of the United States. In response to essentialist criticisms of the United States one may turn to Said, among others, and say, yes, but in the United States Edward Said can criticize the United States. The greatness of the United States is that a Palestinian professor, from a distinguished position at a major research institution, can teach to American students the crimes of the United States.

Responses to Said and his work in recent years have occasionally taken note of the second of these points, but have risked overlooking the first. Many of the speeches honoring Said at the First World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES) in Mainz in 2002, for example, and many of the tributes that have followed Said’s death on September 25, 2003, have been nothing less than pre-modern glorifications of a hero figure, of a sort that Said himself must have found, would have found, dehumanizing and unhelpful.

We are in a position to extend an intellectual tradition, and so we must be post-Saidian instead of Saidian. Part of the point we want to make is that if we repeat Said we have killed Said.

***

From these considerations discussion turned to the question of whether, in relative terms, the United States is becoming, has become, increasingly intellectually impoverished. Our suggestion is that to answer this question we need a longer time frame than is usually brought to such considerations.

In the twentieth century the United States both has absorbed the resources of the world and expanded the world. In both cases we refer to the world economy, politics, security, intelligence, and material and non-material goods. In the 20th century the United States absorbed a high percentage of the world’s resources, raw materials and energy, of course, but also human expertise.

And at the same time the major action of the United States was the expansion of the world. The US military expanded across the planet, the CIA gathered data across the planet, production was expanded across the planet. Earlier civilizations and institutions, the Moguls, the Christian Church, the Ottoman Empire, many others, have similarly absorbed and expanded the world, but none before has reached the degree of absorption and expansion of the United States of the twentieth century.

This simultaneous absorption and expansion has had many negative consequences, but also wide-ranging positive effects. Every person sitting at the table in this seminar, for example, has a perspective that is indebted to the expanded world. Our world has expanded along with the expansion of the world.

In a work that most students in the seminar have read, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (Harvard UP, 2000), Hardt and Negri qualify Empire in terms of its unlocatedness, but thereby ignore a critical question: where in this unlocatedness is the United States?

The question of what will become of the society, ideology, and structure of power that organized the absorption and expansion of the world in the twentieth century is central. What happens in the United States in the short and medium terms will affect our lives everywhere, not because of American power but because through the activity of absorbing and expanding the world the United States has become the central point of reference in the world, in both positive and negative terms.

The Unites States, for example, has shaped and determined the thinking of Al Qaeda. Whether the qualification or the reference is negative or positive is not important. The important point is that the United States has become the main point of reference in the world, and the shaper, in both negative and positive terms, of the discursive constructions of the world.

In this regard post-Saidian thought must look seriously and self-critically at the place and the becoming of the United States in the world. Not to do so, the last and most important part of our post-Saidian point, is an act of intellectual irresponsibility.

November 15: In his presentation “Reorganization of Key Concepts in Cultural Studies in Terms of the Empowering Process,” Hiroaki Furihata admirably connected his PhD work on the empowering process with the theoretical material of this seminar. Reaction to the presentation was mainly favorable, and the questions, comments, and responses that emerged in regard to the degree to which the material of the seminar has changed Hiroaki’s understanding of the process of empowerment are exactly the sorts of exchanges we hope for. We’re grateful to Hiroaki for venturing into this territory, and would be pleased if other students would follow.

The empowerment presentation also opened a space for discussion of the possibility of moving beyond a dichotomy of power and powerlessness, the possibility of reaching a moment of empowerment that no longer defines itself in the field of power.

The dichotomy of power / powerlessness (or any other dichotomy) contains within it a trap. To work only within the dichotomy is to be stuck in a logic of opposition. This logic of opposition is important and necessary, but alone it it is not enough. Alone it leads to a kind of poverty. If in human relations, social relations, international relations our only logic is a logic of opposition then we contribute to practices that, to put the point plainly, prevent people from living together comfortably, in groups, societies, and nations.

What is at stake is our capacity to create meanings that help to reinvent an ability to live together. This is what we all are trying to do in the projects we are at work upon in this seminar and elsewhere, and to do this we need a multitude of logics, not only a logic of opposition. We talk about empowerment because we want to be rid of power as the defining field in which our practices construct meaning.

Questions about whether it is possible to transgress the field of power answered themselves in the asking. We would not want to say that we have reached a moment of empowerment at the macro level, in international relations, for example, in which we may altogether do away with the logic of opposition, but we hope that at a micro level, in this seminar, for example, we have demonstrated, or are beginning to demonstrate, that the field of power and its oppositional logic is not the only field and the only logic within which new realities in perception, representation, and meaning may emerge.

November 8: The second week of addressing practical applications of the theoretical models was not as lively as the first, but we hope continued to help students understand the ways that we can talk about (and think about) subjects across the academic disciplines with reference to the critical and conceptual vocabulary under development in the seminar. Topics touched upon included development theory, the public sphere in education, documentary film, and empowerment.

Hiroaki Furihata has volunteered to present in the November 15 seminar a fifteen-minute presentation on the ways our theoretical models may be put to use in his study of empowerment. Naoki Yamamoto will in a few weeks time offer a presentation on his work in film studies. Other students looked slightly less nervous than before at the prospect of volunteering for a presentation. We shall continue to ask. Anyone is welcome at any time to address the seminar in the form of a presentation, of course.

October 25: We began a two-seminar session on practical application of the theoretical models that have been presented, in which students were asked to discuss areas of their own academic interest in terms of the theoretical understandings we have addressed. The discussion that ensued was lively and occasionally even contentious (and happily so), touching upon 1) the quality of interactions in elementary school classrooms, 2) whether or not our essentialized notions of the roles of teachers help or hinder the free exchange of ideas, 3) how to help construct models that will empower others, and, especially, 4) whether teachers should work to uphold or to subvert the dominant discourses of a society. Of course in regard to this last topic we did not arrive at an unambiguous conclusion - perhaps we would all agree that some discursive constructions are worth upholding and others worth subverting - but we hope that it did not go unnoticed that the quality of the interaction was aided by our ability to draw upon the critical vocabulary that has been developed in the seminar.

October 18: After we had assembled in the seminar room, participants were invited to leave the room and to take all belongings with them. Each student was then asked to re-enter the room alone, and for one minute to write impressions of the space. After each had done this, all participants were invited to re-enter the room together, if possible to sit in the seat occupied while in the room alone, and once again to write impressions. Students then read aloud both sets of impressions.

Those impressions written while alone in the room noted that the space was bright, empty, “solid,” wide, cold, quiet, and noisy. Also that it smelled of a storage room, “felt like a hospital room,” and that the eleventh-floor view of the city lights was beautiful, “like starlight,” in fact. Two students had taken notice of the folded umbrella Professor Sadria had left on the table, the only artifact of our earlier presence.

Impressions written after we had re-assembled noted that the room was warm, relaxed, “humanistic,” and “still wide, deep, and alien but with the possibility of change.” Two students took note of the sound of the pens and pencils against the paper as the impressions were written. A bright red blouse was noted twice, along with colors of other clothing. One student felt “slightly annoyed” by the realization of “the otherness of others,” another that “something [had] come alive,” a third that she felt the possibility of “affairs” and no longer cared about the umbrella.

Drawing examples from this exercise Professor Sadria explored the nature of several important theoretical concepts in an attempt to make them approachable to students. In the room alone each student had interpreted the space and its icons, the chairs, desks, and whiteboard of a seminar room, in ways that made use of signifiers, emotional icons, we might say, that expressed the writer’s private relation with the space. Returning to the room together represented (and was in the written impressions represented as) a clear rupture with the earlier private relations, because of the expectation of interaction about the earlier experience.

In both cases the space itself was public, or “quasi-public”—the campus has gates one must walk through and guards one must pass and an elevator to negotiate to the seminar room. While each of us was alone in this quasi-public space we experienced private feelings and emotions that we signified in our written impressions. Upon re-entering the public space together the private feelings were replaced with the expectation that we would interact about the nature of what had just occurred. In this way, in exactly this rupture, the public space became a public sphere. The space itself was public all along, but in our expectation of interaction the second time the public sphere emerged. The public sphere, as opposed to the public space in which it may emerge, is this expectation of interaction.

In response to this several students noted that the understanding differs from definitions of the public sphere by writers such as Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas. For Habermas, it was noted, the expected interaction must be of the res publica. We must be talking about our society and the commonwealth for the public sphere to emerge. To have entered the public sphere in the seminar we would speak of the policies of Chuo University or the Tokyo metropolitan government or the relation of Japanese money to the war in Iraq.

Professor Sadria agreed that the understanding we are developing differs in this way from the understandings noted, and that the difference arises from a refusal to reify either the public sphere or the concept of a polity. Everyday life is the polity, and the public sphere emerges in the expectation of any interaction, in the attendance of a film in which we have an implicit expectation of shared experience, in a virtual public space within which a virtual public sphere may emerge, in a discussion of gender issues or of the nature of the public sphere itself. What is at stake now in this understanding is not the energy required to create a public sphere but rather the way we react to any public space, for it is upon the content of the interaction in the public space that the quality of the public sphere depends.

Thus we reached 8:00 having become a public sphere and knowing, we hope, that it had happened.

October 11: The object brought into focus by Professor Sadria at the beginning of the seminar was the concept of the politics of the body. The lens through which the object was viewed, so to speak, was the way we dress. We discussed in this regard the relation of body politics with private and public spaces of action and behavior, the difference, for example, in the clothing we wear or do not wear when we move into our most private space, our bed, and the clothing we wear when we enter the public sphere. We noted that we qualify and quantify public space in terms of clothing, in the difference, for example, between what we signify, or try to signify, when we dress for a job interview, a meeting with a friend, or a baseball game.

We discussed the nature of the difference between codes created in public space when we are free to choose our own body politics at the level of clothing and the codes that pertain when our body politics are decided for us, as in the case, to keep with the chosen lens, of the school uniform. Most students present in the seminar were required at one or another time to wear a school uniform, which most admitted to having altered. This alteration, it was noted only implicitly in the seminar, is an interesting and important point of elision. Opinion was divided about whether school uniforms are a positive or negative intervention into the public space of the school, with perhaps a slight bias toward the positive, but was this only so long as subjectivity could be expressed with the subversive alteration, the untucked shirt, the shortened skirt, the more fashionable button?

We briefly explored reasons that people even when they are free to choose their own codes and signifiers tend to dress alike.

From discussion of the how and why we choose or are chosen to appear as we do, we moved to the concept of the where, the codifying element of place, and the relation of the size of the public space and the degree of anonymity it allows. If the public space is small, as in a small town in the Japanese countryside, for example, we are known, people know who our parents are, where our house is, from where we have come. If the public space is large, as in a metropolis, for example, as in Tokyo, we have the possibility of anonymity. We discussed the degree to which we can intentionally choose a politics of the body that signifies our identity, and the ways we transmit messages about our identifications with the choices we make regarding our body politics.

From these considerations students were invited to describe the reasons we would be talking about such a matter in a cultural studies seminar in Tokyo in 2003. In response to the confusion that ensued Professor Sadria suggested that the importance of the issue lies in the degree to which we are more than others before us living in an age of the iconization of social relations, and that the politics of the body has become both a cause and an effect of this.

Social relations were iconized in other times and at other places but mass consciousness of iconization is a new phenomenon. In our time and place the substance of production is the icon. We produce icons and consume icons. We live in a world of icons as communication, as a medium of social relations, and as central signifiers in the public sphere.

Students will be invited in the October 18 seminar to address the relation of the the politics of the body, private and public space, and the iconization of social relations, in a city such as Tokyo, in a year such as 2003.

October 4: As noted in the course description for this two-course sequence, in this second semester we shall turn from theoretical formulations that have been of importance to cultural studies to practical case studies that make use of the theoretical material of the first term. Accordingly we turned in the October 4 seminar to a case study Professor Ewick has proposed for the term, international education in a Japanese and East-Asian context, and “brainstormed” the topic. Student responses were of a quality that surpassed that of the first term.

The initial discovery was that different people in the room had different ideas about what “international education” means. Does the “international” of “international education” refer to

1) the content of what is taught (as in a course in international relations, cross-cultural competency, or the language or culture of a foreign country, for example)?

2) the relation of subject or language to the location in which something is taught (as in, for example, a Korean school in Tokyo or a Japanese school in Frankfurt)?

3) an internationally-mixed student population (as in, for example, the University of Southern California or Columbia University, each of which has 5,000 foreign students from 100 countries, or this seminar, in which the ten participants on October 4 represented five nationalities)?

4) an internationally-mixed faculty (as in, for example, the elite business programs at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, IMD International in Laussanne, or the University of Southern Europe in Monaco, in each of which the faculty is both culturally diverse and 95% foreign)?

5) a combination of these?

6) something else, as in, for example, a successful study abroad program, as in, for example, Queens University at Charlotte North Carolina or DePauw University at Greencastle Indiana, at both of which 90% of students spend at least one undergraduate year abroad?

In addition to this basic question about meanings, several other important issues were raised, including the degree to which outside influences can change (or even destroy) a culture, the conditions under which such changes might be beneficial or harmful, the degree to which countries with historically strong systems of social control are threatened by outside influences, and the degree to which cultural self-confidence and cultural insecurity are related to assessments of the relative benefits or threats from outside influences.

Particular attention was given in these regards to Japan and the United States.

The seminar will return to these questions and issues in both theoretical and practical terms as the case study develops. Students are invited to propose case study topics of their own interest for future discussions and, we hope, presentations.

July 12: Presentation of the historical development of the concept of culture, which as we are using the term here is a category of perception that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, out of the field of anthropology, following upon and countering earlier conceptions of culture that were theological, racialist (i.e., particular races have particular kinds of culture), or evolutionary (i.e., all cultures develop alike and European and North American culture is further along the evolutionary path than the cultures of “primitives” and “savages”). Discussion of the fatal flaws of positivist analyses of culture (though more needs to be said of this), and of the idea, helped along by Raymond Williams and Clifford Geertz, that culture is a public system of meaning:

The concept of culture I espouse . . . is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

Culture is public because meaning is. . . . [When we say that we do not understand people from another culture we are acknowledging our] lack if familiarity with the imaginative universe within which their acts are signs.

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), pp. 5, 12-13.

July 5: Presentation of an understanding of religion in terms that have been developed in this seminar. Distinction drawn between immanent and transcendental meanings, and between systems of thought and systems of belief. Discussion of the ways articulated discourses may use a “somatic” or “somaticized” belief system to affect social behavior.

June 21: Review of the key concepts of the first eight meetings of the course, and discussion of their relation with each other. Students are reminded that the next class meeting will be July 5.

June 14: Presentation of an understanding of the concept of cultural hybridity. Many discussions of cultural identity are essentialist. Early feminisms essentialized woman-ness, early African-American studies essentialized Blackness. These essentializations formed identifiable constituted bodies, the lesbians of UCLA, the Blacks of Harvard, that in the social polity have served important functions, and have addressed important issues. But if we are not to be essentialist we must question the nature of these constituted bodies.

The idea of a mixing of cultures has always existed, and has been provided an important theoretical frame in Clifford Geertz’s concept of cultural syncretism. Cultures have always mixed. Our way of being in culture is syncretic from the start. Japanese culture is an excellent example of this, as is Chinese culture, as is any culture. Why, then, if we know that all culture is mixed culture, that all culture is syncretic, do we need a new emphasis on hybridity? Does the emergent emphasis on hybridity mark something new? From the 1960s to the end of the twentieth century discussions of such matters often focused on the concept of multiculturalism. Are we entering a new era, an era of cultural hybridity, that in some way extends our understanding of a syncretic multicultural society?

While we would not want to contend that multiculturalism is over or that the legitimacy of constituted identities has in some way been reduced, we would like to say that discussions of cultural hybridity in fact do refer to a qualitatively new element in the social polity. Along with obvious sorts of genetic hybridity—the “Negripino,” “Hinjew,” “Chino-Latino,” and “Blaxican” of the Kotkin and Tseng article we looked at, for example—this element of hybridity has to do with the rise of subjectivity in cultural mixing. Hybridity as understood in this way is not a social or a genetic hybridity but an individual choice to cross the borders of a constituted identity, cultural hybridity as a personal strategy. In a multiculturalist understanding the constituted borders of cultural identity are not crossed, but we are living in an age, for the first time in history, in which these constituted elements of identity may be trespassed, and the social implications of this are profound.

Brief discussion, in this context, of Michel Maffesoli’s The Time of the Tribes (1996) and Frantz Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre (1961, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963).

June 7: The “notes toward a reflexive model of textuality” presentation was completed, with an attempt to demonstrate its relation to the center/margin model of creation of meaning/cultural change presented May 17. What holds the center of a cultural or social structure together is a tightly intertwined, powerful, and normative network of text, which, like all text, has an inside and an outside, an included and excluded, a self and an other. Rather than summary comments on the earlier part of the presentation I’ll put the presentation notes in the worksheets section here.

Several of the questions following the presentation were very good, but we reached 8:00 without adequate discussion of two or three of these. We’ll begin the June 14 seminar there.

May 31: Beginning of a discussion of a “reflexive model of textuality,” which is promised to lead back to and to help contextualize discussions of past weeks about the possibilities of cultural change that exist at the margins of a social structure. Discussion of an essentialist view of (any) text that posits unbiased and objective authors as the receptors of stable truths and the transmitters of these into texts, of their texts themselves as carriers of stable truths and objective meanings, and of readers of their texts as receptors of these. Movement toward a deconstruction of this model, in part via discussion of texts that provide evidence that the understanding is not without fatal difficulties. Discussion of the relation of the meaning of a text and the intended meaning of its author, of the importance of the contextual and discursive framework within which its reader exists, and of the degree to which meaning arises from the context in which the text is constructed and read rather than from the text itself.

Announcement, for little discussion of this could be conjured, that all texts exist in contexts, and that all, of necessity, have an included, those who share a context and discursive (and therefore ideological) framework with its author(s), and an excluded, those who do not.

Homework: students who have chosen to participate in an active rather than a passive way are invited to choose one chapter from Culture & Text: Discourse and Methodology in Social Research and Cultural Studies, edited by Alison Lee and Cate Poynton (London: Bowman & Littlefield, 2000), and by August 16 to have rewritten it. These rewritten texts (reconstructed, shall we say, in the context of this seminar), and informal discussion of them, will provide the point of departure and an initial contextualization for the second half of the course.

May 24: Brief student presentations on understanding of the model of cultural change that Professor Sadria outlined on May 17, and further discussion and elaboration of the model. Distinctions drawn between marginals (those who have chosen to work on the margins or edges of a system) and marginalized (those who have been pushed to the edge by a system or structure of power), and between victims and actors; movement, in this way, toward a deconstruction of the binary opposition between oppressor and oppressed; discussion of the possibility of participatory observation and reflexibility from the peripheries of a social or cultural structure.

Professor Ewick, at the risk of beginning once too often at the top of the same page, has asked students further to consider what specifically is meant by the center/periphery metaphors we are using here (what, in other words, are some of the characteristics of someone standing at either position? center of what? at the margins of what?), and to be prepared to discuss their understandings at the beginning of the May 31 class.

A section on Pierre Bourdieu, whom Professor Sadria has called upon in recent discussions, has been added to the links page here.

May 17: Presentation of an understanding of the process of cultural change as a process of the construction of meaning, and of the relation of the “core” structures of a society (the elite, the establishment), its marginal elements, and this process of constructing meaning (i.e., the process of cultural change). Discussion of the illusion that power to construct meaning (to change culture) lies in the established order of a social structure, where sophisticated protection of interests limits rather than facilitates freedom to create new understanding. Discussion of the possibilities of working at the margins of a social structure, where without the limitations of an entrenched structure the possibility of the creation of new meaning is rich. Discussion of the ways this understanding is contrary to Marxist understandings of political action, to fifty years of development theory, and to mainstream theories of globalization. Discussion of the idea that for the first time in human history we are living in an age that contains the possibility of simultaneity, that the generation of meaning in Sri Lanka or Bangladesh may provide models for the regeneration of particular industries or understandings in Japan or the United States. Discussion of the need to continue moving toward the margins, to move off-Broadway when Broadway has been appropriated, and to off-off Broadway when off-Broadway has been emptied of meaning. Discussion finally of the proposition that cultural change is effected by those who have the capacities of the elite but no illusion of power, those with the capabilities of those at the center, but who choose to work at the margins.

May 10: Continuation of discussion of the relation of power, representation, and knowledge; discussion of the theoretical analyses of this relation that have become common understanding in North American scholarship and academic practice; discussion of the sources of knowledge in experience and representation, of the relation between these, and of the non-transparency of representation; discussion of the concept of having (and not having) the power to represent, and the relation of this with the production of knowledge; discussion of the importance of Michel Foucault and Edward W. Said in the emergence of these formulations in North America.

May 3: National holiday. No class.

April 26: Discussion of key concepts in the field of cultural studies: culture (and identity) as process rather than essence; culture and identity as constructions; the relation of power, representation, and knowledge; the relative autonomy, agency, and subjectivity of each of us within culture.

April 19: Introduction to the course; definition and discussion of the concept of cultural change.