Aisha Durham

Identifying Key Intercultural Urgencies, Issues, and Challenges in Today's World: Connecting Our Scholarship to Dynamic Contexts and Historical Moments

In the next section of the discussion, the participating scholars elaborate on their views of the most pressing intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges that we face in todays world. The discussants identify both historically persistent and newly emerging challenges and crises that greatly impact our worlds communities, their health and well-being, the environment, war and violence, oppression, domination, resistance, and political consequences far into the future. It is clear that the perceived “intercultural urgencies” reach deep within and far beyond specific relational episodes and communicative moments. These scholars delineate the many trajectories for much-needed examination, analysis, critique, and intervention.

Defining and Communicating What “Intercultural” and “Intercultural Communication” Means to Us

In order to engage in our larger discussion, we needed to share our definitions, framings, and theorizings of what “intercultural” and “intercultural communication” mean to us and how we inflect these based on our own experiences, identities, and perspectives. Discussants break down how they understand the notion of “intercultural” behind commonly used and circulated terms in our scholarship.

_____ While Black Millennial Race Play and the Post-Hip-Hop Generation

Millennials are defined by their savvy integration of digital communication technologies and by their seamless incorporation of difference that has been communicated through formal policies and multicultural representations. Although diverse media platforms and people appear commonplace within the millennial milieu, this generation still faces what Amiri Baraka describes as the changing same. The changing cultural landscape has not drastically shifted power relations nor has it dramatically transformed how we mediate blackness under postrace. This article will examine the real and imagined body of the slain Florida teen Trayvon Martin, particularly how his body has animated White racial humor and rage, and has activated a new civil rights movement informed by hip hop. The Florida-based author will situate Martin within the post-hip-hop generation and address state policies policing Martin and other Black youth. Vaudevillian blackface minstrelsy as a form of race play will provide a historical backdrop for a discussion about new media blackness, such as mobile gaming, and social media postcards of theme parties and race-planking called trayvoning. The author not only will address Martin as a specific site to project of collective racial longing but will also point to ways minoritized Y’ers are a part of the collective new dream defenders to challenge racial terror today.

Kindred Narratives Reflections of Southern Black Orality in Sweetwater

Durham reinterprets home and reimagines the storied lives of Black women by fusing her experience with those described by author Robin Boylorn in Sweetwater. Boylorn privileges African diasporic storytelling traditions, such as orality. Durham employs them and provides a complementary performance narrative to recount southern Black girlhood in Sweetwater (North Carolina) and Tidewater (Virginia).

Introducing the Discussion and One Another

Over a month-long period, the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication hosted an online discussion among 11 intercultural scholars across and outside of the discipline in response to four key questions. Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Rona Halualani, facilitated the discussion and introduced the question prompts. The goal was to create a vibrant, interactive dialogue about definitional framings of intercultural scholarship and their views of key urgencies, issues, and challenges in todays intercultural world. This section features the introduction of the discussion and of the scholar discussants themselves.

Contesting Identities, Contesting Nation

The globalization process disturbs a rather deep-seated intuition that culture has a special relationship to geographical place. (Tomlinson, 2007, p. 151) Contributors to this Special Issue identify the problematic status of post-colonial identities within cultural studies scholarship as a point of departure. We maintain, in part, that a center–periphery thesis and a nation-bound ethnographic framework deeply inform the orientation of cultural studies scholars to the contemporary social order in the metropole and overseas in empire. Within this framework, ‘Britishness’ has been the silent organizing principle defining metropolitan working-class traditions and forms of cultural resistance as the sine qua non of cultural Marxism’s readings of contemporary life and proposals to transcend it. In ‘Contesting Identities, Contesting Nation’, then, we address these concerns, ultimately pointing to the specter of globalization and the way it challenges the relevance and insightfulness of the post-war cultural Marxism of British cultural studies. Contributors grapple theoretically and methodologically with the serviceable tradition that cultural studies draws on to authenticate and center the metropolitan working class as the subject-object of history and the point of embarkation for research. We point to the incommensurability of this approach with the contextual reality of present-day post-industrial society and the profoundly limiting framework of nationalism which undergirds the British cultural studies subcultural approach to date. We argue further that this ethnocentric approach to class in British cultural studies scholarship cuts at right angles to the postcolonial subjectivities and the presence of the Third World in the metropolitan working class. The fact is that there is a new context of post-colonialism and globalization that defines twenty-firstcentury social formations. This new context has precipitated a crisis of language in the neo-Marxist scholarly efforts to grasp the central dynamics of contemporary societies. The latter has led to a depreciation of the value and insightfulness of neo-Marxist analysis in our time – old metaphors associated with class, economy, state (‘production’, ‘reproduction’, ‘resistance’, ‘the labor/capital contradiction’) are all worn down by the transformations of the past decades in which the saturation of economic and political practices in aesthetic mediations has proceeded full scale (Klein, 2001; McCarthy et al, 2009; Tomlinson, 2007). ‘Contesting Identities, Contesting Nation’ is therefore aimed at a twofold intervention in the field of Cultural Studies. First, while mindful of the extraordinary venue that Cultural Studies has provided over the past few decades for theoretically, empirically and pragmatically grounded investigations into the conditions of production and the forms of existence of, particularly, white working-class youth of the metropole, contributors to this issue urgently announce new departures. Collectively, they maintain that the sub-cultural studies project undertaken by cultural