[De-westernization reading notes]

第一篇：Raka Shome

Postcolonial reflections on the ‘Internationalization’ of cultural studies

我先把主要观点拎出来，然后摘一些重要的概括性的句子和例子供大家写作时的参考。这篇文章，作者用postcolonial studies的角度批判了当今欧洲文化研究的eurocentrism的视角（westernization），认为学者们提出‘internationalization’of cultural studies 这个观点本身就是一种从westernization／eurocentrism的视角出发提出的。（就好像，我们说，要关注弱势群体，那么这个出发点可能就是我们把自己看成是强势的一方，要去关注弱者）。具体来说，作者从‘internationalization of cultural studies’的出发点、现在整个学术圈生产出版的一系列西方主导的网络、英语作为优势主导语言的限制、亚洲研究的流行、区分de-eurocentrism和decolonization这5个部分分别阐述，这也是文章的主要观点的5个分论点。这篇文章的发表时间是2009年，作者主要就2005年学界出版的‘Internationalizing Cultural Studies’这本书中的一些观点的eorucentrism的出发点进行批判，外加他自己是印度学者，亲身经历了各种不能用母语做研究，好不容易辛辛苦苦作出研究成果还要想方设法翻译成英文，把印度的历史背景介绍给西方学者这种痛苦经历来argue，critique这种eurocentrism／westernization。

Part1 Examining our points of departure into the ‘international’

其他学者对当今文化研究的批判：

Abbas and Erni (2005) write that: ‘A certain parochialism continues to operate in Cultural

Studies as a whole, whose objects of and languages for analysis have had the effect of closing off real contact with scholarship conducted outside its (western) radar screen’ (p. 2). Similarly, in their essay ‘De-eurocentricizing cultural studies’ in the same volume, Shohat and Stam (2005) write that ‘[t]oo much cultural studies work remains insular and ethnocentric, showing little participatory (or even vicarious) knowledge of cultural productions or intellectual critique generated from other sites’ (p. 481).

作者对他们的‘批判’的‘批判’：－出发点就是eurocentrism的

While Erni and Abbas, and Shohat and Stam, are right about the parochialism and ethnocentrism of Anglo centric formations of cultural studies (and that certainly needs to be marked and challenged), the issue however is that when they refer to cultural studies, the assumed position of cultural studies in relation to which their ‘international’ move is being advanced and advocated is the Anglo/Euro axis and imaginary of cultural studies.

总结：

David Birch (2000) notes on a similar point that ‘to define what is happening in Southeast Asia, or Japan, for example, as if it is somehow at the margins [of cultural studies], is to define it as if the centre is, in much the same way . . . located in Western cultural studies’ (p. 142).

Part2 Networks of the ‘international’ in the professionalization of cultural studies

——inequality of knowledge flows：

从写作到发表文章到出版，每一个环节都是西方主流学术传统控制（西方大学、西方的定量研究定性研究方法、出版物也是西方创办把关的，评价标准都是西方那套），非西方的学者需要付出很多很多extra labor来进行研究和发表文章。一句话总结：

Given the inequality of capital flows that inform knowledge production, mega academic publishing houses (usually English language presses in the West, and more specifically today in the US _ given their status in tenure decisions and their much greater promotional and distributional power) tend to be centrally driven by what will be of interest to the American market, will this book ‘work’ in an undergraduate class in an American context? is a question (implicit and often explicit) that almost every aspiring and especially first time author has to grapple with today. This clearly sets limitations on the extent to which we can, or are able to fully, break away from the North Atlantic _ and especially the hegemony of the US _ academy and its networks.

这种知识的生产和传播的不平等背后是经济的不平等：

The larger issue here is with how economic inequities that inform knowledge flows (and its US dominance) produce a situation where we are too often unable to escape the haunting specter of the ‘American’ audience in the demands and politics of publishing. And this remains one of the most significant structural problems that continue to regulate, and constrain, a serious ‘internationalization’, and global diversity in cultural studies.

但也不要太悲观啦，还是有不断在努力着的亲－举例‘Inter-Asia Cultural Studies’

The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal offers one forum through which such sites of struggles are located and articulated and this is in stark contrast to many western academic journals and publishing spaces where injecting too much politics, passion, alternative frameworks, and unknown contexts, can sometimes hurt (journals such as Cultural Studies or Public Culture also constitute important exceptions as they have regularly presented and published challenging cultural studies work from diverse global contexts and frameworks).

Part3 English English everywhere!

这一部分跟前面一部分的network有重复，就是把其中的英语语言又单独拎出来强调了一遍。

Part of this publishing dilemma, including being able to secure publication contracts with presses that would garner institutional recognition, is the problem of language itself _ the continued hegemony of English.

1）非英语母语的学者也必须用英文写作和发表，因为：

a．国际权威学术期刊都是英文为主，尽管有少数international语言的，也是个例（Traces）

b．用英文写才能被更多的引用，‘citation capital’，现在很多非西方学者都去西方的教学机构任职，被更多的引用才能又学术成绩，才能保住饭碗啊！这就要求英语母语的学者付出很多很多extra labor（by Morris）：

用香港学者的例子：Morris (2005) cogently discusses this issue when she notes how Chinese academics in Hong Kong are expected to write in internationally refereed English language journals based in North America, Britain, or Australia if their jobs are to be secure. Inviting us to recognize the arduous labor that such a process involves for speakers and writers whose ‘native’ language is not English, Morris flips the scenario and asks American scholars (who often may not recognize such issues) to imagine what such labor might really entail

2）权威学术会议主要语言是英文；

发言也要英文，一种语言背后会有一种体系规范和逻辑，英文强调但我是一个印度学者，我们的语言传统就是passion！feeling！emotion！你让我用英语发言，就要求serious，面无表情，否则就会显得不professional！这是对我的天性的压抑，我已经不是‘full self’了！

Even after 16 years of being in the American academy, and now in the British academy, I still know that at most conferences, given that I will have to ‘speak’ in English, in a required style of ‘professionalism’ that tends to be written by Anglo-centric assumptions and etiquettes of speaking (that rarely finds much room for passion and emotions), my ‘full’ self (and its underlying history) will never be present.

Part4 Geo-politics and cultural studies: the ‘rise of Asia’ and cultural studies in/of Asia

The interventions provided by cultural studies in Asia have been extremely important and this work needs to be recognized for its excellence, intellectual rigor, and the ways in which it has opened up spaces for so many who could not find space before. But at the same time, I think it is also important to mark that the growing visibility and recognition of cultural studies in/of Asia in international spheres (including the North American academy, that continues to have so much power to confer legitimacy) is occurring at the same time that the ‘West’ is having to confront and recognize, what in journalistic parlance these days is being framed as, the ‘rise of Asia’

居然举了章子怡的例子！！出席国际活动，被国际杂志评论为‘looking good’：China and India, looking good and writing an unprecedented chapter in World History.

但是这种关注亚洲的global desire，又导致对other regions of the world的忽视。

Thus, at issue here is the recognition not only of the geo-politics informing and underlying the flow of knowledge, but the fact that as cultural studies gets seen as an ‘international’ phenomenon in global circuits of knowledge, there are some sites/regions that end up securing more visibility (for instance, in publication networks), while others often fall out of it.

One of the challenges of ‘internationalizing’ cultural studies, where there can be a serious transnational connection of scholars across diverse regions (not just within a region), is the challenge of having to deal with this issue: how do we access sites/contexts/spaces that are so regulated by geo-political barriers that we cannot even go there, or worse, we may not even know they exist.

Part5 De-eurocentrism is not always equal to decolonization

［个人觉得这部分可以和408的‘边缘－中心’Chan的那篇相结合，主要在论述不仅全球范围内有westernization／dewesternization，在地区\国家内部也有不平等，比如亚洲，现在中国，印度，日本的研究比较火热，其他国家就很少提及，而同一个国家中可能城市、农村又有不同。作者认为这也是一种colonization］

Often the decolonization of cultural studies (or any other Western knowledge formation) is framed simply as a matter of de-eurocentrism, as though de-eurocentrism necessarily guarantees a serious democratization of knowledge and the ability to access real disempowerment. The issue of decoloniztion is to be understood not just in relation to Western power structures but also in relation to inequalities within a nation/region.

并且这种地区研究的不平等背后是有西方权力结构的支持的。作者把这种现象称为‘neo-colonialism’：

This is especially the case when there are nations, for instance, in Asia that are significantly allied with, and receive the backing of, western power structures and whose emerging modernities are centrally the product of neo-liberalism that produces all kinds of neo-colonial inequalities within the region.

接着列举了几个这样的弱势国家： Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh (a Muslim majority nation as opposed to India’s shameful Hindu dominance)

As recent postcolonial theory has begun pointing out, the whole issue of ‘colonialism’ needs to be now complicated- new colonial relations are emerging outside of western geographies in non-western regions.

接着引用Spivak 的一段话进一步阐释：

I myself find that it is not necessary to see anything innately critical or radical to remain postcolonial... it should be done with complete academic responsibility. There is no foregone conclusion. It is not necessary to always insist on this colonizer/colonized model and so on; It is not necessary to find proof of this in interminable documents retrieved from the other side of the earth, corresponding institutions related to other countries and so on.

说到国家内部（urban/rural; rich/poverty），作者把rural／poor的这些地方称为： ‘subalternity’

e.g. 列举了一个subalternal地区的现象：How do we ‘access’ the 11-year-old child bride in some forsaken village in India- that is so outside of the map that you may not even know it exists –married to a 60 year old man and she does not even ‘know’ that she is ‘married’ despite the circulation of all kinds of ‘modernizing’ laws that prohibit child marriage and the ever proliferation of non-governmental organizations.

这些地方根本没有access to television，media and ‘modern’ consumption relations

总结：downward movement

It is not enough just to connect to non-western modernities/contexts and claim a decolinizing move; it is not enough just to cross borders laterally. The important issue is this: how do we cross borders and barriers in a downward movement even within the same nation/region?

Useful framework of Spivak’s ‘subalternity’ and ’rurality’ for rethinking decolonization in globalization-

Noting, for instance, how post-coloniality today is being articulated as a metropolitan phenomenon, Spivak has emphasized the importance of engaging with rurality and of learning to ‘learn from below’ and recognized that the urban mindset and landscapes of the Global South often remain out of touch with this bottom level of rural poor.

	Created by huachaos over 9 years ago

Note on 411-Dewesternization-Shome, created by huachaos on 06/06/2015.