Cultural studies in South Africa,or not

Abstract

This contribution to the International Journal of Cultural Studies' ongoing series ponders cultural studies’ relative failure to retain a presence in South African academia today, suggesting that local and historical mis/uses of the notion of culture may have some impact on how it has been received in this particular context.

What is cultural studies?

What and where is cultural studies today? What is it becoming? What should or could it become? What is its meaning? What is at stake as we assess the ongoing development and maturation of cultural studies as field? The International Journal of Cultural Studies is soliciting provocative answers to these and related questions, from a range of scholars internationally. We will publish their responses as an ongoing series, across multiple issues (to date, see also responses in 23.3, 23.4, 23.6, and 25.5.

What, if anything, does it mean to do cultural studies in South Africa today? This ‘hidden’ (McEwan, 2002) or ‘reluctant’ (Bennett, 1998) discipline can be difficult to pinpoint even in institutions in the Anglophone west, where it retains some presence and status. In South Africa, however, it has little current traction in academia outside of a relatively small circle.

This series of short articles asks the question ‘What is cultural studies?’, which has been considered in field-defining ways by major scholars like Ang (2020) and Couldry (2020), as well as newer voices from a broader, genuinely international spectrum, in keeping with this journal's aims. Rather than adding to their discussions of what, why, how and, indeed, whether, I want to take this opportunity to briefly think about the relative failure of cultural studies to retain a noticeable presence in South Africa, despite much essential scholarship and institution-building and an ongoing profusion of research that we could consider within this frame.

Cultural studies has had a recognisable presence in South Africa for decades. The University of Natal's influential Contemporary Cultural Studies Unit (CCSU), modelled partly on the Birmingham centre (NeSmith, 1988: 2), was started in the mid-1980s. That institution later became the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and the CCSU became the Centre for Communication, Media and Society. (While this centre continues to teach and research cultural studies, the term is no longer in its name.) UKZN offers degrees in Culture, Communication and Media Studies but this seems to be the field's only formal location currently.

Cultural studies’ flowering here has been fostered by scholars like Nuttall (2006), currently the director of WiSER, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, at my own institution, and UKZN's Tomaselli (1999, 2001). As well as helping to train a generation of scholars, Tomaselli spearheaded South African cultural studies’ approach to indigenous San cultures and has published many important theoretical interventions. This legacy is continued in journals including Critical Arts, on whose board I sit. ¹ Nonetheless, aside from those of us who are already in the know, cultural studies as a field, an idea and a praxis seems to have minimal currency in South African academia at the moment.

Some years ago I suggested a possible renaming of my home department from Media Studies to Media and Cultural Studies, in recognition of the diversity and form of research and teaching, which frequently go beyond the basic scope of media and communications. This idea was met with bemusement and even, in a few instances, hostility. Some managers, students and colleagues were discomforted by the claim that culture is central to what we do, on the assumption that culture means specifically popular culture, and that such a rebranding would then benefit those of us who did ‘soft’ rather than ‘hard’ Media Studies work. ²

It is one thing to argue that this is a reductive misunderstanding of cultural studies. It is another, however, to wonder why this misunderstanding persists.

Cultural studies is proud to define itself as diverse and contextually specific (Fornäs, 2020: 299–300), paying attention to how concepts and experiences are impacted by different places, histories, geographies and economies. In keeping with this contextualisation, it may be useful for the field to consider what culture means in the context of South Africa. I am not the first to make this argument, but I reposition it here for a readership that may not be aware of our specific historical contingencies.

The notion of culture is, of course, never ideologically neutral, as can be seen in the increasing familiarity across the Anglophone world of the old term ‘culture wars’ to explain attacks on trans and queer people, on critical race theory, on universities and on books. But in South Africa the word has a particular valence that has reverberated through the academy and may be related to some of the scholarly resistance to the uptake of cultural studies. Ang (2020: 287) mentions the ‘common sense understandings of “cultures” [that] get in the way’ of cultural studies work. In South Africa, these common-sense understandings ask not just which but also whose culture you are studying. This question cements the location of culture within a fraught history of violent racialisation, as its fundamental purpose is to find out which racial group, meaning which remarkably persistent apartheid classification, is under scrutiny. Contained within this question, too, is the implied problem of how a culture is being looked at, who is doing the looking and for what purpose.

In order to explain what I mean here, it is necessary to give a very brief overview of how the idea of culture has been used in South Africa. Through much of the 20th century the term was employed as part of an arsenal of white upliftment. Culture was central to the development and codification of Afrikaans as a language and Afrikaners as a nation. Afrikaners are usually defined as the descendants of the Dutch who first formally colonised the Cape, although of course this phenotypical legacy is far more complex – and far less homogeneously white – than Afrikaner political mythology will admit. More pastoral and on the whole poorer than the British who wrested South Africa away from Dutch rule, they were in the early 20th century associated with ‘poor white-ism’, a kind of social backsliding that put them on the same footing as urban inhabitants of other racial classifications, thus imperilling the imaginary boundaries of whiteness (Magubane, 2008; Willoughby-Herard, 2015).

Powerful Afrikaner groups like the Broederbond, a shadowy organisation of wealthy and influential white men (Pirie et al., 1980), committed major financial and social resources to the project of white upliftment. Along with cultural entrepreneurs like poets, academics and lyricists, they were influential in formalising the Afrikaans language, writing dictionaries and creating a body of literature (Hofmeyr, 1987), as well as setting up a network of so-called cultural organisations that glorified Afrikaner history, food, music, religion and gender relations. ³

Culture, when applied to white (and particularly Afrikaans) South Africans, implied something civilised, moral, admirable and deserving of support and protection. We can think of this perhaps as a kind of sociological approach, which offered a serious attempt to understand and value a certain society in its moment and on its own terms. But the word underwent a drastic renegotiation when applied to other, particularly black, South Africans. In those instances we can think of culture as inculcating rather an anthropological approach, if we consider that definition in its early 20th-century manifestation: a distanced outsider's gaze that located black culture as tribal, nativised, uncivilised and demanding a completely different kind of support and protection.

We see this manifested most clearly in the Bantustan system, which designated small and often barren areas of South Africa as so-called homelands. Black South Africans were classified according to often arbitrary tribal groupings and given legal status in these reserves rather than in South Africa proper. In effect, the homelands system allowed the state to pretend that South Africa was a ‘white Christian nation’ and that few black people actually lived there, as they actually lived in KwaZulu, Venda, Bophuthatswana and just migrated, conveniently, into South Africa to work on mines or farms.

Much has been written about the ongoing consequences of this venal system (see for example Ally and Lissoni, 2012), but for my purposes what is important is how it was justified. Black South Africans, the ideology insisted, had their own unique, fragile tribal cultures that were being adulterated and even destroyed by exposure to urban life and western norms. In order to protect those delicate cultures from miscegenation and disintegration it was necessary, and actually empathetic and responsible, to forcibly remove black people to their ‘tribal’ homes, in the process depriving the majority of the population of the country of access to decent education, health care, infrastructure and social mobility, all the fruits of black labour that white South Africa enjoyed during its economic boom period.

The state's insistence on the preservation of culture as the justification for the homelands system presented black culture as something primitive, unchanging and exotic, with no place in the modern world. Black people who managed to retain a foothold in the cities, who wore suits, earned degrees, became professionals and uplifted their communities, were viewed with intense suspicion, as performers of a dangerous mimicry who had not only forgotten their authentic selves but whose faux-whiteness endangered society as a whole.

In both instances, then, culture was treated as something fixed, closed and heterogeneous, whose purity must be protected and enhanced by social and state measures, albeit in vastly different ways. Beliefs in the unsullied and admirable nature of whiteness, which needed to be kept separate from racialised pollution, were the corollary to an ideological position that insisted on forcing black people into tribalised groupings that had to remain separate so as not to be adulterated. Both ‘cultures’ were presented as delicate, but this meant different things. One deserved protection from money, power and institutions, while the other was subject to physical distance, intense poverty and abjection from global modernity.

These assumptions about the fixity of culture, about the difficulties of authentic, sustainable cross-cultural (meaning cross-racial) dialogue and hybridity, have persisted into the 21st century for many South Africans. I have written elsewhere about how determined and inflexible ideas of racial and, consequently, class identity continue to shape urban and suburban life in South Africa (Falkof, 2022). In the post-apartheid era, with the advent of the National Arts Council and associated awards and events, the notion of culture has been given (at least on paper) a high gloss sheen, part of a broader discourse of modernity and nation-building. ⁴ Despite such interventions, though, belief in the separateness of cultures persists among different kinds of South Africans.

Given this brief history it should come as no surprise that the idea of culture can feel particularly fraught here, and that many academics may experience ‘a wariness about “culturalist” paradigms so effectively employed by the apartheid state’ (Nuttall, 2006: 263; see also Tomaselli, 2012: 15). It also suggests, however, that a properly located and properly critical cultural studies in fact has much to offer to scholarship in this country, despite the common refusal to engage with, or lack of knowledge about, the field. Cultural studies can provide a set of tools and an adaptable vernacular that may allow South African writers to venture beyond the constraining modes of racialised cultural history, to view culture as a shifting, fluid and central element of an attempted national identity that is wildly contested and wildly diverse. Culture in South Africa needs to be approached as a symptom rather than a cause of interlocking social tensions, while also offering the potential to think our way through and past those tensions by understanding the sedimented structures of power that keep them afloat. In order to achieve this, those of us who consider our work to be within cultural studies need to foreground the national and international intellectual histories that sustain us; to draw cartographies of contemporary culture that are sufficiently broad as well as sufficiently convincing; and to offer vital correctives to the casual dismissal of culture that continues to permeate academic hierarchies in the humanities.