In This Issue

Cultural Studies has multiple discourses; it has a number of different histories. It is a whole set of formations; it has its own different conjunctures and moments in the past. It included many different kinds of work. I want to insist on that! It always was a set of unstable formations. It was ‘centered’ only in quotation marks.¹

(Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies” 278)

The recent death of Stuart Hall has forced many of us engaged in Cultural Studies over the years to take a moment to reflect on his work and legacy. Hall’s particular way of weaving together ideas from literary studies, anthropology, sociology and media studies provided useful models for how to connect culture, power and politics. I would venture to say that most people engaged in Cultural Studies have probably been drawn to this mixed bag of possibilities in part because it’s very honest about its own instability and porousness. To talk to people about Cultural Studies is to talk self-reflexively about one’s institutional position and the political possibilities of both individual and collective intellectual practice. To engage in Cultural Studies in any capacity is to be involved in a project that is open to what one doesn’t know. At the same time, though, Hall reminded us repeatedly that Cultural Studies does have a clear purpose or at least some stake in contesting power. In his autobiographical writing and interviews Hall makes clear that in order for him to connect his work to the material and the everyday he relied on concepts gleaned from Marxist theory but that in order to do so he had to work through Marxism’s many silences, inadequacies, evasions and most of all its overwhelming Eurocentrism.

Hall’s particular but ever-evolving brand of Cultural Studies “‘centered’ only in quotation marks” runs through this volume of the Arizona Journal, a publication created almost twenty years ago to provide a home for the kinds of scholarship that were falling between the disciplinary cracks. This volume, like previous volumes, is a call to listen to the new voices marking new territory in Hispanic Cultural Studies. Enric Bou has put together the special section “Explorations of Everyday Life,” a collection of seven essays that answer research questions such as “how is the everyday experienced within Catalan and Spanish contexts?”; “are there particular experiences that result in a specific and unique representation or theoretical response in art, film or literature?” and “how and to what extent do issues of identity, space, historical memory and immigration affect everyday life in Spain?” The essays in this section employ two-fold strategies that take the contextual (material) aspects of everyday life into account at the same time as they occupy themselves with the more subjective experiences of each social actor, including issues of representation.

“The Pedagogy of Degrowth” works to shake us out of our everyday neoliberal teaching practices that, according to author Luis Prádanos, need to be reconsidered in this age of radical economic inequality and impending ecological collapse. This groundbreaking essay provides a toolkit for how to guide ourselves as teachers as we in turn guide our students to “unlearn” ingrained commonplaces about economic growth, technology and progress. This initiative is driven in no small part by the recuperation of indigenous pedagogies from the Andes. In a similar vein, Lorena Cuya’s essay takes a look at seventeenth century environmental criticism in Book IX of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios reales (1609) that relates the Inca with the ideology of an insurgent indigenous movement, the Taqui Onqoy. Likewise, Luis Moreno-Caballud’s essay “La otra transición: Culturas rurales, Estado e intelectuales en la encrucijada de la ‘modernización’ franquista (1957-1973)” approaches the often-neglected role of rural culture in the creation of the hegemonic cultural and political paradigm that underpinned Spain’s transition to democracy after the death of Francisco Franco. Two essays in this volume deal with urban culture from the vantage point of visual studies: that of Kathy Korcheck on the recent photography of what she calls the “speculative ruins” whose existence exposes...