Mission Statement Responses

I see this new phase in the history of a well-established scholarly journal as offering a major opportunity. That opportunity needs to be placed in a context. There are three key elements to this context, from the point of view of the American research university and the geographies of the rest of the world. First, globalization has encouraged greater traffic among disciplines, regions, and institutions based primarily on growing access to information, knowledge, and methodology through the Internet and the World Wide Web. Second, and in roughly the same period, the humanities have become increasingly marginalized as a result of the rise of vocational, professional, and skill-based knowledge throughout the world. This has been tied to a deepening crisis of the research university, which has lost any clear sense of its distinctive mission. Third, there is growing tension everywhere between the claims of heritage, identity, and religion and the claims of free expression, opinion, and debate.

Each of these contextual factors, and their joint force, requires renewed attention to what I see as the critical humanities. Under this rubric, I assemble the traditional humanities (from linguistics and literature to history and philosophy), the newer brands of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, media studies, and the softer social sciences, especially anthropology. This is the space that I see as the anchor for CSSAAME.

Challenges

I see four known challenges requiring continued engagement and fresh ideas. First, the tension between Western theories and local or non-Western archives remains unresolved. Discussions about this particular challenge continue to emerge, most recently in John and Jean Comaroff’s book Theory from the South. While there has been much effort to disturb the somewhat static earlier geographic underpinnings of this debate—on the grounds that the North within the South has further blurred the problem of the West within the East, both as regards geopolitics and academic knowledge—the effort to build knowledge of and across areas without privileging some as superior guides to method or theory has not had much success. My own view, outlined in my recent book The Future as Cultural Fact, stresses that an important basis for progress here must be the effort to enable research to be a better distributed capacity across regions, classes, and disciplines. As far as CSSAAME is concerned, I think it would be useful for the journal to monitor, encourage, and publicize efforts anywhere in the world that have the democratization of research as a primary goal.

Second, we need to continue to engage the hoary issue of “text” and “context” that has historically been, inter alia, a proxy for the distinction between the humanities and the social sciences. It is clear that there has been considerable progress on the “text” side of this binary, in linguistic, literary, and philological developments in the era after structuralism held sway. There has been comparatively slight progress in the study of “context.” Apart from a handful of linguists and philosophers, the problem of context remains part of the inert language of the social sciences and the humanities, and it is a ripe subject for a deep investigation based on case materials as well as revisitations of our conceptual languages. What defines a context? How do we handle the problem that all contexts also have their own contexts? Can there be a method for the study of intercontextuality? Are all contexts, such as temporal, spatial, regional, and disciplinary contexts, similar in their structure or form? If not, what does this mean for our scholarly practices?

Third, these considerations, if properly pursued, surely have implications for the study of the relationship between written media and all other media, including visual, electronic, and digital, all of which now play a crucial role in the critical humanities. Regional and areal histories affect the form and force of each of these media and thus of the relationships between them...