The Pedagogy and Politics of Twenty-First-Century Luso-Hispanic Urban Cultural Studies

Response to "The City as Organizing Principle in Twenty-First-Century Luso-Hispanic Studies"

Since the 1980s Anglo-American scholars in the field of Luso-Hispanic Studies have had plenty of time to think through the so-called "spatial turn" that built disciplinary bridges between the Humanities and the Social Sciences. It took approximately 20 years for key texts written in French (those of Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, for example) to be translated into English and work their way into the field. One example of such a text is "Of Other Spaces," (a 1967 lecture of Foucault's that was not published in English until 1984) on the everyday experience of space, where he explains that

[t]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.

(22)

Foucault's ideas about space had such an impact on academics in many disciplines because he explained that space was neither a mere empty container nor a backdrop for events and actions (see Tally). Rather, as Benjamin Fraser reminds us in his essay above and in much of his work on Henri Lefebvre, space is at the same time a product and a creative process. It produces each one of us, in fact, through a complex network of economic, political, social and cultural forces.

Fredric Jameson (2001) subsequently took this concept of the spatial and used it to better explain the culture of late modernism, calling on cultural critics to

rethink these specialized geographical and cartographic issues in terms of social space, in terms, for example, of social class and national or international context, in terms of the ways in which we all necessarily also cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, national and international class realities.

(585–86)

If Jameson wasn't exactly celebrating the postmodern in his The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, he acknowledges that its combination of high and low culture forced us to stop thinking of art as autonomous like many of the artists and cultural critics of the Modern period tended to do. Jameson encouraged us to get our hands dirty—to "abolish all sort of critical distance" (580). Jameson called this an "aesthetic of cognitive mapping—a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system" (586, emphasis mine). Much of the recent history and future potential of urban and spatial directions in Luso-Hispanic scholarship that Benjamin Fraser outlines in his essay is the inevitable outcome of this spatial turn. These philosophies of space from decades ago and this call of Jameson's to a "pedagogical political culture" are at the heart of how many of us now think about how language, image, sound and all other possible systems of meaning can and should be understood in our scholarship and should be taught in our classrooms.

Urban studies and the broader spatial turn have given literary critics, film scholars and linguists in Luso-Hispanic Studies the tools to better connect the complex workings of written, visual and spoken systems of meaning to social life. It's given us the inspiration to get our hands dirty. I strongly suspect that this has happened in no small part as a response to some of the pedagogical realities we currently face. We can't ignore that our students themselves are inherently interdisciplinary. In Luso-Hispanic studies the vast majority of our students are double-majors or minors with no intent to pursue their studies in the Humanities. As professors we've had to let go of aesthetic practices and values elaborated on the basis of historical situations and elitist dilemmas which are no longer ours (if they ever were). Cognitive mapping forces us to consider the real world in which we and our students...