The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Forum: Critical and Ethnographic Practices

Session Four: More Practices of Cultural Studies in Our Worlds (Asian-American, American, Latina/o, Latin American, Subaltern, African American)

Session Four More Practices of Cultural Studies in Our Worlds (Asian-American, American, Latina/o, Latin American, Subaltern, African American) Another bienvenidos is in order. I would like to enthusiastically welcome our next group of forum participants to the last session of The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Forum. In this particular session we “pre-view” Black cultural studies, Asian American cultural studies, Latina/o cultural studies, Mexican cultural studies, Subaltern studies, Latin American and Latina/o cultural studies, and other related forms of social cultural inquiry such as critical race and gender studies and Lat crit race theory. At the outset of this session I would like to clarify my position on two matters. First, the fact that these cultural studies interventions appear as multicultural representations does not mean that they lack complex negotiations with the “past” (as seen in the case of Chicana/o cultural studies) or that they lack multiple, competing expressions. Second, this final session provides us with the opportunity to rethink where cultural studies is located and to further identify and extend the lines of affiliation between practitioners of cultural studies and their respective cultural studies, Ethnic studies platforms. I think we probably agree that it is impossible to know beforehand how these affiliations will take shape in future endeavors. Yet, if we are attentive to the ways in which these forum interventions often “talk to one another,” we can identify important cross-cultural influences and convergences. It is my hope that the publication of successive Chicana/o cultural studies forums will provide a larger public with the opportunity to further engage the connections between underrepresented cultural studies formations, especially because this type of comparative work is the exception rather than the rule. 138 Once again, I would like to thank all of the participants in this session for their attention and patience throughout the previous Chicana/o cultural studies sessions. The question I would like for us to engage today is: Do you consider yourself to be a practitioner of cultural studies? If so, how do you do an applied form of cultural studies? Kent Ono You know, Asian American cultural studies has not yet emerged as a named formation, although people say they do it. If something emerged like this, I would feel very comfortable with it, but I’d still see myself as doing cultural studies. What does this mean? It seems to me that cultural studies has to do with a particular kind of history of scholarship and politics that occurs both inside and outside the academy. Cultural studies relates to a kind of research and teaching and practice that not only challenges disciplinary boundaries but also social boundaries, generally. For me, Asian American cultural studies is always a kind of transversal of many particularities around subjectivity, politics, identity, and community . The cultural studies work I do is embodied in this way, and it’s also set on attempting to articulate some kind of argument and taking a political position that challenges power relations. That’s cultural studies. I don’t see Asian American cultural studies as that different from cultural studies generally, except that it articulates this kind of position in relation to the history of Asian American studies, which has changed dramatically in recent years. Who practices this form of cultural studies? There are a few who are doing this in print and many graduate students as well. Some of the people involved in this work are Lisa Lowe, Thomas Nakayama, Elena Tajima Creef, Laura Kang, David Eng, David Palumbolin , Fatimah Robtug Rony, and Karen Shimakawa. Wendy Ho is also headed in that direction too. In my own case, I got into cultural studies in relation to rhetorical studies and film. I did my graduate work at the University of Iowa, where they had a media emphasis, but before that I was already doing popular culture work. [The debates had already formed about populist versus popular, and cultural studies was in full swing.] However, my experience in Iowa working with a highly politicized group of graduate students of color was crucial for my current direction and thinking about cultural studies. Although the professors were teaching us British cultural studies, we (the More Practices of Cultural Studies in Our Worlds 139 graduate students) were creating our own formation, both in response to and in resistance to the fixed formation in the classroom. I did not conceive of...