Introduction to JJPC bibliography, covering 1999-2002
“Cultural studies is not one thing; it has never been one thing,” Stuart Hall wrote in 1990 (11). Hall was Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (now the Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology) at the University of Birmingham, from 1968 to 1979, and remains among the most widely-regarded figures in the field of cultural studies. Other influential writers have repeated Hall’s understanding, including Lawrence Grossberg, co-editor of the journal Cultural Studies, who in introduction to the 1992 anthology Cultural Studies wrote that “it is probably impossible to agree on any essential definition or unique narrative” of the field (3). By 1999 Janet Wolff, Director of the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, was able to write that it had become “a cliché to say . . . even that [cultural studies] cannot be defined.”
And yet something called cultural studies has for thirty years been of importance to academic and social discourse, first in Europe and then elsewhere, and remains so. An OCLC search for books that include “cultural studies” in their title returns 488 that have been published since 1990, an average of three a month for twelve years. The publishers of a further 1,327 during this period have included “cultural studies” among their key terms. Scholars wishing to publish in cultural studies may consider more than twenty-five peer-reviewed English-language journals that include “cultural studies” in their self description, including, to cite only those that contain the collocation in their title, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies; Cultural Studies; Cultural Studies / Critical Methodologies; Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies; European Journal of Cultural Studies; French Cultural Studies; Inter-Asia Cultural Studies; International Journal of Cultural Studies; Journal of African Cultural Studies; Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies; Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies; and Review of Education / Pedagogy / Cultural Studies. A Google search for “cultural studies” turns up “about 399,000” links, including hundreds to particular courses, departments, and research centers at prominent universities on every continent. As a point of comparison, a search for “cultural anthropology” yields 70% fewer pages, for “ethnology” some 20% fewer than this. These terms fare even worse when compared to cultural studies in OCLC.
Whatever else may be said of cultural studies, then, whatever it is, or whatever they are, the field constitutes an important part of the discursive landscape of social and academic life in the early twenty-first century, and particularly in the past decade has allied itself in one form or another with a daunting number of publications. It is with a sense of the impossible, therefore, that I have decided to draw a frame around “cultural studies” as it has existed in English-language academic journals in the final two years of the twentieth century and the first year and ten months of the twenty first. The aim has been to provide a data set that will aid in the discussion of what kind of not-one-thing cultural studies is, or are, now. To do this I have tried to turn bibliography into a science.
One possible bibliography of my subject would have been a list of articles that appeared in self-described cultural studies journals between the beginning and end dates in question. For several reasons I have rejected this approach, not least because cultural studies itself has been cognizant of the fact that discursive communities close in on themselves and in time become unable to see what is perfectly obvious from the outside. My sense has been that much of the best work in cultural studies, as cultural studies has defined itself, or has been defined in theory and practice in works that describe themselves as “cultural studies,” has not been published in cultural studies journals or, for that matter, in books that ally themselves with cultural studies in their titles, key terms, and advertisements. How to characterize this sense, though, without imposing on the field one more idiosyncratic position about what cultural studies is, or isn’t, or should be?
I began with the three most prominent multidisciplinary full-text databases of scholarly journals, JSTOR, Project Muse, and EBSCO Academic Search Premier. Together these index, abstract, and provide the searchable full text of articles from 3,000 peer-reviewed journals. I limited the first search to articles published in the past decade, November 1992 to October 2002, which either in their title or abstract identify themselves as concerned with the theoretical field of cultural studies. This yielded 220 titles, the most recently-published 80 of which are listed below, in sections 1-1.3. Many of these articles were from journals that describe themselves as being concerned with culture or cultural studies, but 45%, 99 of 220 titles, were not. The journals in which these self-identified investigations of the possibilities of cultural studies appeared include Academic Questions, Australian Journal of Anthropology, Comparative Education, Comparative Literature, Critical Arts Journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Japanese Studies, Journalism Studies, Modern Language Notes, Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Sociological Review, Southwest Asian Journal of Social Science, and Yale Journal of Criticism.
With this data at hand I set about trying to identify the key theoretical understandings and concepts the authors of the articles identify most closely with the theoretical field of cultural studies. The logical starting point was in the abstracts, and in the list of key terms for those articles that included them, but I took advantage as well of the ability to search the texts electronically for particular words and phrases, and to count. The twenty concepts most frequently mentioned, with interpolation of related terms and allowances for grammatical propriety, were, in alphabetical order, deconstruction, discourse, essentialism, feminism/gender, globalization, hegemony, hybridity, identity, multiculturalism, nationalism, orientalism, popular culture, postcolonial theory, postmodernism, poststructuralism, race, representation, textuality, and transnationalism.
To classify this list scientifically is not possible. The best I could do was to divide it once, into four theoretical areas of investigation, deconstruction, feminist and gender theory, postcolonial theory, and poststructuralism, and sixteen concepts, the others. This became the classification scheme for the bibliography that appears here. I classified postmodernism as a concept rather than a theory because it appears more often as a noun than as an adjective in the data set from which I was working.
With these categories at hand I returned to JSTOR, Muse, and ASP, limited the search to work published in the past forty-six months, January 1999 to October 2002, and searched titles and abstracts. Of the hundreds or thousands of results for each term or terms I eliminated hundreds or thousands of particular case studies, and reviewed the remaining articles for possible inclusion in the bibliography. Those that most directly engage the theoretical or conceptual field of the terms the earlier data set had yielded are to be found here. To characterize the nature of the particular case studies I selected and have included in special sections case studies related to Japan, Japanese subjects, and the study of Japan, and in practice a few other case studies have made it into the lists if they directly address the theoretical or conceptual field of three or more of the search terms. In principle I excluded book reviews, and articles under ten pages in length, but in practice a few of each of these have been included on the basis of a subjective judgment about their usefulness.
The range of the databases from which I have worked has directly determined the range of entries in the bibliography, and so particular omissions should be noted. Some journals, at the discretion of their publisher, maintain a “moving wall,” defined at JSTOR as “a fixed period of time ranging, in most cases, from 2 to 5 years, that defines [a] gap between the most recently published issue and the date of the most recent issues available” in the electronic databases. Journals of British and American literary studies, particularly those published in the United States, tend to maintain a three- to five-year moving wall, and so the relation of cultural studies to English literary studies is somewhat underrepresented in the bibliography. Likewise, in regard to the specific case studies of Japanese subjects, two prominent English-language journals, Journal of Japanese Studies and Monumenta Nipponica, maintain a moving wall of five years, and so the representation of the relation of cultural studies to the study of Japan is affected accordingly.
An initial analysis of the data set represented in the bibliography yields a few surprises. First, as much as we talk about and write about multiculturalism and popular culture, the thousands of discussions of these subjects that have appeared since 1999 have tended to be particular case studies and not theoretical analyses of the concepts themselves. The studies of multiculturalism, in particular, those that did not make it into the bibliography on the grounds that they do not engage the theoretical field of the subject, often are self-congratulatory exercises in How Multicultural We Have Become. During the years covered in the bibliography not many scholars have turned attention to multiculturalism in terms of the voices left out of this kind of discourse, or engaged in analysis of the discourse of multiculturalism itself. Second, we seem to have stopped talking about poststructuralism and started doing it. And third, the rubric of interdisciplinarity and transnationality that characterizes many discussions of cultural studies seems not to be misplaced. Of the 505 articles listed in the bibliography fewer than 27% appear in journals self-described as cultural studies, and the remaining journals, more than 200, represent a remarkable cross-section of academic disciplines, from anthropology to urban education via behavioral science, geography, history, law, literature, media studies, philosophy, political science, developmental and social psychology, sociology, and others. Authors for whom an institutional affiliation is noted represent work undertaken in 29 countries, in North, Central, and South America, across Europe, North and South Africa, Southwest, South, Southeast, and East Asia, and the Pacific.
Beyond this, I shall let the bibliography speak for itself, in the hope that it is a fair representation of recent English-language theoretical work in cultural studies, however many things that may be, in the early mid-autumn of 2002.
Works cited
Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treicher, eds. 1992. Cultural studies. London: Routledge.
Hall, Stuart. 1990. Cultural studies and the crisis of the Humanities. October 53: 11-90
Wolff, Janet. 1999. Cultural studies and the sociology of culture. Invisible Culture [online journal, cited Oct. 31, 2002]. http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue1/wolff/wolff.html.
