Chris Prentice

Postcolonial popular cultures

In 2008, the Postcolonial Studies Research Network at the University of Otago held a conference entitled ‘Postcolonial Popular Cultures’. The conference theme emerged partly in response to Simon Featherstone’s claim in Postcolonial cultures (2005) that the field of postcolonial studies has shown insufficient attention to popular cultural forms as productive sites for exploring the kinds of questions that animate it. While Paul Gilroy (1993), Arjun Appadurai (1998), and Kobena Mercer (2000), amongst others, have produced scholarly engagements with popular cultural practices of diasporic and migrant communities, a survey of the anthologies and major collections that inform the field of postcolonial studies suggests that Featherstone’s point is in many ways a legitimate one: popular culture is one of those neglected domains of enquiry for postcolonial studies, in comparison to elite cultural formations or practices. This is all the more surprising, Featherstone contends, ‘given postcolonialism’s stated interest in reconfiguring dominant cultures, and exploring the conditions and resistance of subalterns’ (2005, 8). The ‘mediation and negotiations around culture and everyday life’ (Schaffer and Kerr 1999, 301) – while often the focus of postcolonial politics, or the ‘content’ of postcolonial literatures, for example – seem to have contributed less to the academic discipline’s constitution of its objects of study. Pleasingly, though, the conference call for papers drew significant interest from scholars in a variety of disciplines and from a variety of countries, each contributing to the increasing redress of an imbalance between elite and popular cultural forms in postcolonial critical scholarship. In the words of Stuart Hall, in his renowned essay ‘Notes on deconstructing the “popular”’ (1981), ‘popular culture matters’ (Hall 1998, 453). Thus the degree and significance of neglect might be debatable, but we regarded this very debate as both worthwhile and timely. However, the call for papers added a rejoinder to the proposition that popular culture matters to postcolonial studies: postcolonial studies also matters to the study of popular culture. The papers presented here are selected from those offered at the conference, while two further papers (Anjali Roy and Radhika Mohanram) have been contributed especially for this issue of Continuum. Collectively, they engage with – and contest – postcolonial studies with reference to popular culture, and they engage with popular culture (studies) from a postcolonial (studies) perspective. They reveal both the importance of each to the other, and the ambivalence that characterizes their relation.

“Fractured Light”: From Globalization’s Hyper-Illumination to Culture as Symbolic Exchange

This essay argues epistemic reduction and reification of indigenous cultures in imperial and colonial discourse underlies the fundamentally economic terms of representation of those cultures. The pursuit of cultural knowledge and forms of cultural exhibition for instrumental, including commercial, ends entails such reduction of culture to representation. Cultural self-representation changes the relations of producer and consumer in economic exchange, but does not change its essentially reductive notion of culture. With contemporary neoliberal globalization, agency, within market relations – like self-representation in a representational economy – ultimately risks assimilation to the global market in cultural difference. Two novels by Māori writers, Paula Morriss Rangatira (2011) and James George’s Ocean Roads (2006), point to contemporary commodification and consumption of indigenous cultural difference as the apotheosis of processes of cultural objectification, reification and commodification that began with imperial colonialism. While Rangatira is set largely between the 1860s and 1890s, and Ocean Roads between 1945 and 1989, both are published within the era of contemporary neoliberal globalization, and ultimately concern the critical stakes in relation to cultural decolonization. They contextualize the epistemic and genocidal violence that has been given an alibi in the valorization of (self-)representational images and performances. In refusing to objectify Māori culture – or by disarticulating such objectifications – the novels point to the potential for those un/signified spaces to evoke precisely the importance of culture as dynamic, unframeable “symbolic exchange”. I argue aspects of Baudrillard’s critical notion of “symbolic exchange” reveal both the stakes and the possibilities of (re)conceiving culture outside of market relations.

Reorienting culture for decolonization

I argue that decolonizing the practice of cultural studies calls for caution around the proposal to incorporate ‘other knowledges’. I posit Aotearoa New Zealand as a critically productive space for interrogating such moves precisely because it is often described as having ‘successfully’ incorporated indigenous knowledges in cultural studies, and in other cultural and institutional spheres. The implication of inclusion and perhaps even embodiment of such knowledges is haunted on the one hand by connotations of appropriation of indigenous resources for the legitimation of the colonialist hegemony and, on the other hand, by the emergence of commodified indigenous knowledge in the era of neo-liberal capitalism and the global cultural market. I invoke Frow and Morriss characterization of cultural studies as ‘suspicious of those totalising notions of culture which assume … the achievement of a whole and coherent “society” or “community”’ (1993, ix), along with Latouches (1984) account of critical epistemology, to argue that even in-group cultural research in order to ‘know’ and record a culture risks fixing that culture as an object of knowledge, and is at least in tension with the project of revitalizing it. Cultural studies, to the extent that it is committed to the imperative of ongoing critique, and its challenge to discourses of reified and institutionalized culture, propose potentially more enabling pathways to the decolonization of culture than those committed to preserving culture in the name of tradition, or to entrepreneurial agency, subsuming culture to the instrumental terms of the neo-liberal market.