In This Issue

On Existing and Possible Formations

As discussions regarding the state of Cultural Studies continue to unfold it becomes important to return to a remark made by Raymond Williams in a talk from 1986 titled "The Future of Cultural Studies." Therein, Williams reflected on the origins of Cultural Studies, specifically, on "the crucial theoretical invention that was made: the refusal to give priority to either the project or the formation—or in older terms, the art or the society" (152). From this simple point there springs a contrarian energy that should not be overlooked—Williams' refusal is voiced here—as is the case also with Henri Lefebvre's emphasis on the Right to the City—as "a cry and a demand" (Lefebvre 158).

One can (one must), then, take Cultural Studies as a "refusal" in a double sense—as an indictment of both self-contained traditional prioritizations of artistic production alone and also bottom-line simplifications that tout the superstructural nature of all culture. The volume State/Culture still, in 2011, points to a much wider arc of criticism emphasizing the mutual influence if not the friable nature of not only State/Culture itself but also other such simplistic oppositions (material/ideal, individual/social, economic/political). Whatever the strain of cultural inquiry employed by authors—whether critical race studies, culinary studies, disability studies, critiques of everyday life, ecological studies, film studies, work on new and interactive media, marxist and neo-marxist approaches to culture, popular culture, queer studies, tourism studies, urban studies, women's studies and so on—the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies remains open to these and other invocations of cultural studies, with the understanding that these areas must necessarily intersect, overlap and collide. Perhaps more importantly, however, it remains open to those articulations of Cultural Studies that have not yet lodged themselves within contemporary debate.

As Williams recounts, Cultural Studies owes much to forerunners who were looking outside of established institutions and outmoded methods toward marginalized populations and revitalized approaches to the definition of "culture." In this respect, two caveats are in order lest we fall into a periodizing thesis, the sort of which bourgeois interpretation can be so fond (Jameson 28). First, in the face of critics who see Cultural Studies as an approach valid only when discussing cultural production of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we affirm the value of critical projects that revisit and reformulate matters of importance to even pre-modern and pre-colonial periods in the Luso-Hispanic worlds. Secondly, to those who would assert that literature has ceased to be of any relevance for contemporary criticism we reaffirm its value as one of many textual variants that may be harnessed by the Cultural Studies critic.

The special section included here on "Literatura latinoamericana, española, portuguesa en la era digital (nuevas tecnologías y lo literario)"—guest edited by Luis Correa-Díaz and Scott Weintraub—is a robust and welcome addition to the ongoing debate over the limits, methods and applications of Cultural Studies. Although the Introduction penned by the editors themselves and the postdata following the essays (Hoeg) best contextualize the section, here it is worth briefly pointing out the ways in which the the latter's contents represent fusions of existing and possible formations of cultural studies. Many of the essays interrogate literary products from new directions (speculative computing and poetry in Weintraub, the effects of cyberculture on traditional literature in Brown), while others look specifically into relatively new cultural forms, frequently drawing connections with previous artistic movements (the blog in Vanoli, the videogame in Chávez, electronic literature in Ledesma, hypertext/hypermedia both in Pitman and in Taylor, the unique qualities of digital texts in Borràs) and others explore how the notion of what constitutes literature is undergoing a sort of "becoming-other" (literature/science in Bjelland, the novelty of Internet Protocol poetry in Fletcher, the changes offered by the CD-ROM format in Olivera-Williams). Finally, Rui Torres pushes into the important questions associated with the dissemination and preservation of electronic literature. In my view these essays are even more notable for their persistent...