Janice Radway

Ethnography Among Elites: Comparing Discourses of Power

The politics and poetics of ethnography have been much debated of late both within anthropology as well as in communication and cultural studies. Although the debate about the precise nature of ethnographic practice is not new, it is probably fair to say that it has been recently reinvigorated and deeply influenced by poststructuralist literary theory and by postmodern philosophy. The insights produced by this interdisciplinary dialogue are many. A central claim in the critique that has been mounted of ethnographic methods centers on the need to differentiate more clearly and self-consciously between ethnographic fieldwork and the practice of ethnographic writing. Where ethnography was traditionally and habitually thought to take place largely &dquo;in the field,&dquo; practitioners are now urged to recognize that ethnography is produced by the collision of two social worlds, the previously erased home-world of the writing ethnographer, and that distant world in the field inhabited and made meaningful by the group the ethnographer wishes to understand. It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of this interactional feature of ethnography. Clearly, ethnographic knowledge could not be produced without entree into another world, but it is equally the product of the social relations, habits, and practices of the usually Western world inhabited by the anthropologist. Indeed George Marcus and Michael Fischer (1986) have recently argued in Anthropology as Cultural Critique that although previous ethnographic theory and method focused on the fieldexperience and on the problems of eliciting an alien world-view, the practice of ethnography has always been at least covertly comparative and therefore implicitly preoccupied with the world of the ethnographer. As a consequence of their critique of the power-relations typically hidden within the ethnographic relationship, Marcus and Fischer call for an explicitly comparative, reflexive ethnography where &dquo;cultural juxtapositioning, fully realized,&dquo; would entail &dquo;equal ethnography among us and them, strongly linked&dquo; (Marcus and Fischer, 1986, p. 138). Such a project, as Marcus and Fischer recognize, is an extremely difficult one. It entails not one field but two and it involves us in the potentially selfindulgent and paralyzing activity of reflecting upon ourselves and our own culture. Not the least problem in accomplishing that is the clarification of what

Research universities, periodical publication, and the circulation of professional expertise: On the significance of middlebrow authority

203 This essay is a shortened and revised version of a much longer chapter on the history of learned and literary culture in the United States from 1880 to 1915 in Carl Kaestle and Janice Radway, Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880– 1945, volume 4 of A History of the Book in America, ed. David Hall and Hugh Armory (Worcester, Mass., forthcoming). I am grateful to David Hall, the American Antiquarian Society, and Cambridge University Press for permission to publish this essay. Research Universities, Periodical Publication, and the Circulation of Professional Expertise: On the Significance of Middlebrow Authority

Girl Zine Networks, Underground Itineraries, and Riot Grrrl History: Making Sense of the Struggle for New Social Forms in the 1990s and Beyond

Drawing on recently established zine archives and oral-history interviews with former girl zine producers, as well as with zine librarians, archivists, and commentators, this essay explores the significance of the fact that dissident girls and young women developed an interest in what are now called “girl zines” through a number of different routes, with a range of different interests, and at different moments over the course of the last twenty-five years. Some were directly inspired by riot grrrl bands in the early 1990s. Others happened upon zines at alternative bookstores and info-shops and as part of their participation in the larger punk underground. Still others learned of them through popular magazines, college courses, and public and private libraries, or through quite varied friendship networks. The fact of this social, material, and temporal variability raises important questions about whether “girl zines” should be thought of as a unitary genre and, correlatively, about whether the girl zine explosion itself should be construed as a secondary effect of the riot grrrl phenomenon of the early 1990s. Building on recent critiques made by punks and zinesters of color of the now-dominant narrative about the history of riot grrrl and the role of zines within it, the essay traces how that narrative developed in the context of a backlash against feminism and how it led, ultimately, to the creation of the genre now known as “girl zines” and the founding of archives designed to ensure their preservation. Though both are seen as significant political achievements for feminism, by considering Mimi Thi Nguyens recent claim that the dominant narrative and the genealogies it constructs tend to ignore the important but often differently motivated contributions of punks and zinesters of color, the essay explores the question of what it might mean to focus on the varied itineraries that girls pursued into the punk underground and on how those itineraries affected the zines they created for often quite distinct purposes. Ultimately, the essay asks how riot grrrl and girl zine-ing ought to be understood. That is, should they be construed as a singular event, as a coherent social movement, as a fractious discourse, as a complex set of social practices, as a political intervention, or as something else? In the end, the author argues that attending to the disagreements and contestations among girl punks and zinesters who constantly called each other out over their differences suggests that as a youthful cohort profoundly affected by the vast social and cultural change associated with what is now call neoliberalism, these young people were arguing among themselves and with the surrounding culture over how to craft new, more flexible forms of subjectivity and sociality adequate to the challenges of the twenty-first century.

In honour of Stuart Hall

It is difficult to know where to begin in seeking to remember Stuart Hall. I did not know Stuart personally, as some of you in this room today undoubtedly did. Although I met him briefly on two occasions, both times at the University of Illinois, where he had been invited to lecture by one of his students – Larry Grossberg – I knew him chiefly through the extraordinary body of scholarship and intellectual work he produced over a very long and consequential career. Thus, it seems fitting to me to begin today with something Stuart Hall said publicly in one of the last interviews he granted, this one with James Hay for Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, published shortly before he died. Speaking about the collaborative project he had embarked upon in 1995 with Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin at Soundings, Hay et al. (2013, p. 12) noted that ‘through that conversation and collaboration, I began to take interest in the more theoretical questions about “what is a conjuncture?” – which I’m still trying to write about’. Now this might not seem either an important or even revealing observation. But think about it. With this comment, a world-renowned scholar nearing the end of his celebrated and influential career, admits that he is still re-thinking one of the concepts most associated with his work, a concept at the very heart of one of his most important contributions, that is, of course, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Hall et al. 1978). This recursivity, this responsiveness to the questions and critiques of others, this radical openness to the value of intellectual debate and disagreement seems to me to be indicative of the ethical and political commitments that animated Stuart Hall’s work for more than 50 years. Fundamentally collaborative from the very beginning – think of his early relationships at New Left Review or his early book with Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (1965) – Stuart Hall was intellectually modest in the most complex and very best sense. What I mean here is that he was never invested in the definitive or supposedly finished status of anything he wrote or said. In fact, I think, he understood his work and life as an intellectual operating within a specific set of institutions to be radically contingent, which is to say, the overdetermined

Interview with Janice Radway

James Hay: As in some of the interviews that I have conducted for this issue of CC/ CS, I want our interview to highlight ways that your recent work intersects with recent and older directions of critical studies, cultural studies, and media studies. Rather than work from your early projects to the present, let’s use your present projects to talk about some of the continuities and shifts in your research interests and investments, not to mention what you see as complicated about describing your work as ‘‘critical studies,’’ ‘‘cultural studies,’’ and especially ‘‘media studies.’’

Cultivating a Desire to Become “Not-Something”: Lauren Berlant, the Idioms of the Ordinary, and the Kinetic Temporality of the “Nearly Utopian”

Based on a close reading of The Female Complaint, this article details the larger theoretical and political stakes of Lauren Berlants inquiry into the appeal of “the normal” as set forth in the genre of the sentimental. The article analyzes Berlants complex account of how the sentimental works for its female audience and, by focusing on two of the key concepts she uses, “the nearly utopian” and “the not-something,” explores why Berlant places process, ceaseless movement, and change at the heart of her argument. The article argues that Berlant seeks to imagine a non-reified, dynamic, open-ended orientation to the world; one that would build on theoretical knowledge to intervene politically in the ordinary of daily living.