Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In 1988, I co-founded the first degree-granting program in the US in “World Literature and Cultural Studies,” two concerns that the group considered to be inextricably linked. Other members of the WLCS faculty included Kristin Ross, Sharon Kinoshita, Jose David Saldívar, Christopher Connery, and Susan Gillman. At the time, the program positioned itself as an intervention in the largely Euro- if not frankly Anglocentric focus of the humanities across the US, as well as in the overriding preoccupation of earlier cultural studies initiatives with the present. By contrast, the WLCS program at UCSC considered the study of precapitalist cultural formations as important as the study of cultural developments under the capitalist world system, and did so from a global perspective. Alongside the politics of culture in modern France or Mexico, therefore, the program also focused on economy, politics, and culture in Sassanian Iran, Han China, and the European Middle Ages. That UCSC administration swiftly dismantled the program provides one clear index to its provocation–and with this truncation its peculiar imbrication of cultural and historical interests was lost. Wikipedia currently defines cultural studies as “a field of theoretically, politically, and empirically engaged cultural analysis that concentrates upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture.” Using the aspirations of the WLCS program at UCSC as one index among others, the paper will offer a critical reassessment of the dissemination and development of cultural studies in the US over the past thirty years, with particular attention to the implications of its shift from an oppositional critical practice to what can now come to constitute the norm in the humanities today. In this regard, the increasing marginalization of literature, of history, and of theory in the project of cultural studies, globally conceived, are all matters that themselves require historical, theoretical, and literary elucidation. Examples will be taken from the fields of history, literature, and film.