Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-sxzjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T08:24:50.165Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Inhabiting Cultures as a Way to Other Worlds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2018

GEORGE LIPSITZ*
Affiliation:
Department of Black Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Email: glipsitz@blackstudies.ucsb.edu.

Extract

In a powerful but frequently overlooked passage in The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon describes expressive culture as a register of incipient social relations. He maintains that long before liberation struggles assume organized political form, perceptive observers will detect the emergence of unusual kinds of expression popping up to summon the people to view the status quo as both unreal and unacceptable.1 The essays in this special issue dedicated to the theme of Inhabiting Cultures display precisely this evidence of incipient critique and transformation. They demonstrate that tomorrow is today; that the reigning cultural forms authored and authorized by domination, exclusion and oppression have become exhausted and obsolete; and that the stirrings of a new world in the making are already here.

Type
Special Forum: Inhabiting Cultures
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 243Google Scholar.

2 Thompson, Robert Farris, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art & Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 1984), 158Google Scholar.

3 Foucault, Michel, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” in Dreyfus, Herbert L. and Rabinow, Paul, eds., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 208–26Google Scholar, 212. For an analysis that blends the work of Foucault with the theories of Claus Offe see Plotke, David, “What's So New about New Social Movements?”, in Lyman, Stanford, ed., Social Movements: Critiques, Concepts, Case-Studies (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 113–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 King, Martin Luther Jr. Strength to Love (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), 75Google Scholar.

5 Byrd, Jodi, The Transit of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xvixviiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Sommer, Doris, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 89Google Scholar.

7 Hannerz, Ulf, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 42Google Scholar.

8 Harding, Vincent, “The Vocation of the Black Scholar and the Struggles of the Black Community,” in Institute for the Black World, ed., Education and the Black Struggle: Notes from the Colonized World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 329Google Scholar, 20.

9 Segato, Rita Laura, “Territory, Sovereignty, and Crimes of the Second State: The Writing on the Body of Murdered Women,” in Fregoso, Rosa Linda and Bejarano, Cynthia, eds., Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 7092Google Scholar, 76–77.

10 Ibid., 79.

11 Taylor, Diana, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's Dirty War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 265Google Scholar.