Abstract
The European Journal of Cultural Studies is pleased to launch its new special section, entitled Cultural Commons. This new section will provide a space for imaginative engagement with salient issues for cultural studies, publishing short pieces that are in keeping with our broad-ranging conception of cultural studies as rooted in the power dynamics of lived experience. It seeks to act as a community of scholarship, discussion and debate that is in keeping with the principle of commoning – that is, a community that is against intellectual enclosure and extraction, which encourages forms of intellectual experimentation, and which understands the political, creative and intellectual dimensions of cultural studies as indivisible. We invite submissions of a variety of forms between 1000-2500 words, including
Intellectual provocations,
Rapid responses to events in contemporary politics and culture,
Personal reflections,
Summations of work-in-progress,
Review articles that encompass multiple books or other cultural artefacts,
Conference reports,
Interviews and collaborative conversations.
In this sense, the section’s central purpose draws inspiration from the work of George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici (2014), who argue that ‘commoning initiatives are more than dikes against the neoliberal assault on our livelihood. They are the seeds, the embryonic form of an alternative mode of production in the make’ (p. 95).
In this spirit, within this inaugural edition are three original pieces that speak to some of the diverse forms and topics that we hope to publish in Cultural Commons, and the kind of ideas that might be seeded within it. The first piece is a conversation between Yiu Fai Chow and Anamik Saha, the two new editors of the European Journal of Cultural Studies. 1 In the course of their dialogic exchange, they reflect on what they each hope to bring to the journal – both in terms of the ‘wilful optimism’ that can act as an animating and sustaining force for cultural studies scholarship, and also of the particular political and intellectual focuses they wish to bring to the fore as journal editors. Chow discusses how he had long assumed that the ‘European’ in the journal title signalled that it was a venue for researchers working with Europe, or otherwise concerned with ‘European’ issues. As one of the two new incoming editors, he sees his role as helping to undo this assumption and, in particular, reflects on how his experience and expertise in ‘this geopolitical thing called Asia’ might help to trouble and complicate our senses of what constitutes the implicit ‘here’ and ‘there’ within cultural studies scholarship.
Meanwhile, Saha identifies the importance of centralising questions of race and intersectional experience in the work of the journal, and more broadly of ‘mining the margins and bringing them into the centre’. He points out that this is ‘not just for the sake of shining a light on neglected topics, but for the way that such a focus can transform the discipline in its entirety’. Their discussion points to the constitutive tensions of cultural studies, and the new ways that we must grapple with these as they manifest in the current conjuncture. It raises questions of how we might operate simultaneously across the ‘centre’ and the ‘margins’ of cultural studies; of the ways we might necessarily oscillate between understanding intellectual endeavour as wholly unimportant in the wider scheme of things, and also as more essential than ever; and of recognising the grounds for deep despair while actively cultivating ‘wilful optimism’.
Paula Serafini also theorises how tensions and contradictions can have generative value and mobilising force; she explores this in her analysis of the feminist public performance piece ‘Un violador en tu camino’ (‘A rapist in your path’), which began in Chile but has now spread to multiple contexts, in part via its spectacular media visibility. Serafini argues that while the artistic and political objectives of activism are often understood as being in opposition to one another, it is when these ‘are understood as being complementary rather than contradictory or competing’ that activist performances will have ‘a better chance of being transformative’. She argues that ‘the spectacular quality’ of ‘Un violador en tu camino’ – the visually arresting aesthetics of synchronised mass performance in public spaces, and its powerful, catchy song that ‘stays in our heads and our hearts’ – does not suggest a mediated spectacle that is empty of meaning, but is rather a productive instance of artists and activists appropriating ‘the communication tools of an intensely mediated society’ which allows ‘the action itself to be participatory, contextualised and emancipatory’.
Finally, Yvonne Ehrstein’s review essay on Shani Orgad’s Heading Home: Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality and Catherine Rottenberg’s The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism explores the ways that pernicious myths of ‘balance’ are mobilised within the contemporary cultural landscape, most especially in relation to motherhood. Ehrstein considers how the dominant manifestation of feminism that is critiqued in these two books is inherently exclusionary – it universalises, privileges and idealises the experiences of White middle-class women and invisibilises or invalidates other kinds of mothering subjectivities. However, this classed and racialised ideal of ‘balance’ does not even benefit those who are its ostensible beneficiaries; it ‘cannot even be realised by those privileged subjects that are conceived as its ideal incarnations’. As such, this review essay points to the deep limitations of a neoliberal feminism that has become divorced from radically redistributive notions of gender politics.
These three pieces provide a glimpse of the kinds of texts Cultural Commons seeks to publish – but we look forward to including an increasingly expansive range of forms, encompassing multiple topics, written from many different geopolitical contexts. Please consider submitting your work to us, and in doing so, to help shape the future travel of Cultural Commons.
