The Victims' Revolution

by Bruce Bawer

  “Health, education, arts, history—we need to identify different areas to prioritize. We have limited resources, so we can’t take on everything. This center goes back forty years. It’s evolved a lot over time. The consistent through-line is research that makes a difference. We try to define what that means. The gathering and production of knowledge should help where there are inequities, disparities, and ignorance. We work with the advocacy group the Mexican American Bar Association, for example, and try to find areas where our research matches up with what they’re doing.” So there is an advocacy element, after all? “We try to have a tangible impact—in the arts, in archival preservation, in media policy, in health-care services, in education. There’s a history more tied to activism and access, and to the pressure to open up educational access. The situation is even more dire now forty years later. Forty years ago, Latinos were a minority population in Southern California. Now we’re the majority population, but the level of access hasn’t got much better.” In Los Angeles, he tells me, Latinos make up 72 percent of the students in public high schools, but only 15 percent of the students at UCLA. (His use of the word Latino rather than Chicano is striking—an act that many of his Chicano Studies colleagues would consider treasonous.)

  What’s striking about Noriega is not anything in particular that he has to say, but how different he is from David Diaz—that old radical at Cal State Los Angeles. Diaz looked and sounded as if he’d just come from a protest march in 1969. By contrast, the charming, dapper Noriega—the impeccably sophisticated face of UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center—looks and sounds like a consummately skillful academic administrator. He makes the center sound as if it’s accomplished exceedingly important—and respectable—things. Marxism? Leninist-Stalinist analysis? The dream of Aztlán? He makes these things sound as remote as the moon. Surely UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center could not have a finer salesman.

  Chapter 6

  Studies, Studies Everywhere

  1. “Every Damn Thing”: Cultural Studies

  Abortion, terrorism, sex toys, Hawaiian music, The Wizard of Oz, the French war in Algeria, the Rolling Stones, Brazilian male prostitution, Chinese opera during the Cultural Revolution, wartime British newsreels, the 2001 World Series, 1980s teen cinema, South African soap operas, the movie The Day after Tomorrow: all these subjects, and many others, were addressed in papers at the 2010 Cultural Studies Association conference. It’s hard to imagine a social or cultural phenomenon that wouldn’t be regarded as an appropriate subject for reflection under the purview of Cultural Studies, and it’s equally hard to imagine a critical approach that wouldn’t be considered valid. At one session alone, I heard papers on a French film about “organ transplantation in a transnational not-so-post-colonial context,” obesity among black girls, and the ambivalence of the medical establishment toward women.

  And, last but not least, the Hooters restaurant chain. Sarah L. Rasmusson, a middle-aged woman from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, begins her paper by saying that she was once filled with “classic feminist rage that this cheesy, tacky-ass place even existed.” But when she discovered that some of her students at Princeton were Hooters girls, she “had a kind of epiphany and realized the problem was me.” Why, she wanted to figure out, “do I have such a compunction [sic] against this place?” Was it sheer condescension? So she got drunk, wrote a research proposal, was awarded a grant, and spent a year interviewing sixty girls at a Hooters in Champaign, Illinois, and traveling to several Hooters locations around the world.

  After a brief detour into postmodern jargon (“neo-imperialist, neocolonialist . . . situating yourself at the nexus of global/body/sexualization”), Rasmusson veers back into autobiography, discussing the “schizoid split within myself” between the snobby academic and her own working-class past as a barmaid and cocktail waitress. She realized that in order to “own and honor” her past, she had to “exhume” it and “claim” it. Among the things she discovered in the course of her research, Rasmusson says, is that in the Midwest, Hooters has become a “safe space for gay men” as well as a “new postfeminist space” where, for example, sorority girls can campaign for breast-cancer awareness. Abroad, meanwhile, Hooters girls serve as “agents of globalization.” In reply to questions from an audience of nervous women (I’m one of only two men present) who don’t know how to react to this thumbs-up for an institution they’ve been taught to despise, Rasmusson says that Hooters helps young women work their way up, and that Hooters restaurants, far from being reactionary all-white enclaves, help forge cross-racial communities. Also, she admits she’s turned on by Hooters girls.

  In a way, I’m impressed by Rasmusson. Despite the occasional patch of academic gobbledygook, she at least has something fresh to say and is really out to understand something, instead of using it as an excuse to echo some orthodoxy. She’s not concerned that her attitude toward Hooters is politically incorrect; unlike the middle- and upper-middle-class young women sharing the stage with her, this sometime barmaid has one foot in reality and is willing and able to look, think, form ideas, and actually speak her mind, at once challenging herself and others—which, in the humanities today, is far more than you can usually hope to expect, even if it’s considerably less than you should ask for from something calling itself higher education.

  My one question is: what makes Rasmusson’s presentation Cultural Studies? Exactly how does it differ from old-fashioned sociology?

  What is Cultural Studies? It’s the soul of today’s humanities—or is, rather, the empty space where that soul should be. In a time when the line between the humanities and social sciences is blurring, Cultural Studies is the prime location where that blurring is taking place. And in a time of intersectionality, it’s the place where all the identity studies flow together on (as it were) neutral ground. In fact, a great deal of the “work” done in identity studies is, essentially, Cultural Studies.

  Simply put, the idea of Cultural Studies is to explore the ideological and political ramifications of social and cultural phenomena, high and low, with the intention of better understanding the workings of hegemonic cultural power in everyday life. The term was first coined in 1964 by Richard Hoggart, founder of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England, and at least in the beginning Cultural Studies was restricted largely to departments of literature. Now, however, though Cultural Studies continues to be headquartered, for the most part, in English departments, it has spread its tendrils throughout the humanities and social sciences. Though its original theoretical impulse, moreover, drew heavily on Gramsci, the nature of the “work” done by Cultural Studies practitioners has always been difficult to define. In a 2000 essay, Stephen Adam Schwartz admits that “the question of exactly what [Cultural Studies] specialists do is as yet poorly defined. . . . Its practitioners have long been loath to offer much in the way of a definition for reasons that, they tell us, have everything to do with the intellectual originality of the burgeoning field.”

  Since Cultural Studies is the postmodern phenomenon par excellence, it’s probably fair to say that its indefinability is part of the point. Schwartz quotes the editors of the collection Cultural Studies as saying that the discipline “is not merely interdisciplinary” but “anti-disciplinary” and opposed to method. “To ask what cultural studies is, they imply, is to misunderstand this fundamental anti- or postdisciplinarity.” It’s opposed, moreover, not only to method but also to the idea of reaching a conclusion: it “sees itself not as an attempt to discover or uncover anything in particular about its objects of study, but as an intervention or performative discourse, an attempt to impose a view and a set of interests.” In his encounters with the field, Schwartz claims to have detected “a certain anxiety that cultural studies might turn out to be ‘every damn thing’” (the words “every damn thing” are borrowed from Stuart Hall, Hoggart’s successor as director of the Birmingham cen
ter). And he observes that the “most tangible effect” of its rise “is the opening of the curricula and research agendas of literature departments to vast areas beyond the study of literature itself: not only popular art but everything from gas stations to drag racing to drag queens.”

  For Harold Bloom, the distinguished literary critic who is an English professor at Yale, Cultural Studies is nothing more or less than a grim interloper that has turned literary study into “one more dismal social science.” When, over lunch in Philadelphia, I ask the distinguished University of Pennsylvania historian Alan Charles Kors about Cultural Studies, he shakes his head in dismay. “Cultural Studies,” he laments, “is now dominant in all departments of literature and is increasingly big in history, sociology, and cultural anthropology, though less so in political science.” His own capsule definition of Cultural Studies? “It sees culture as a means of assigning roles, power, obedience, and resources—and examines the way in which culture accomplishes that.”

  Kors first became aware of Cultural Studies in the 1980s. “I immediately saw that it was a wonderful Trojan Horse,” he says, with its “notion of culture derived from Gramsci.” By way of explaining the philosophy that was, at least originally, at the root of Cultural Studies, Kors notes that Marx saw “culture as a superstructure”—that is, as a phenomenon that existed outside of, or apart from, the socioeconomic structures that, in his view, made the world go around, and that was thus essentially irrelevant to those structures. Gramsci, by contrast, regarded culture “as a hegemonic force”—that is, a fundamental element of the power equation—and believed that “control of culture” was therefore “at least as important as the working class.” For Kors, Cultural Studies is intellectually a considerable step below Marx: while “the Hegelians, the Freudians and even the Marxists,” he points out, “felt obliged to try to demonstrate the truth of their ideologies,” Cultural Studies rejects the very notion of objective reality and of an independent human will and mind—and when you eliminate those things, the only criterion left by which to judge any idea is its political or therapeutic effect. “Marx at least had an empirical claim he could make, namely class consciousness. If you wrote from the perspective of the proletariat, you were writing objectively”; but Cultural Studies practitioners “reject objectivity and take the perspective that their works have authority, meaning, and significance, whereas language does not.”

  Apropos of this observation, Kors recalls belonging in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), a group in which historians and students of literature, music, and art history could get together in multidisciplinary fashion. With the Cultural Studies turn in literature, all that changed. “I went to a session on ‘Patriarchy in Montesquieu,’” he recalls. “Three feminist literary scholars gave papers” that were perfect examples of the Cultural Studies approach. “In the Q&A, I said to one of the women, ‘I found it very difficult to distinguish among your claims about what Montesquieu asserted about the relationship of men and women in the eighteenth century, and what was the relationship between men and women in the eighteenth century, and what ought to have been the relationship between men and women in the eighteenth century.’ To which the woman replied, ‘Of course you can’t make those distinctions. You’ve obviously fallen prey to the fallacy of authorial intent.’ To which I said, ‘Would it be an example of that fallacy to say that Marx wrote Kapital as an analysis and critique of capitalism?’ ‘Yes,’ she explained, and said you could also read Kapital in other ways.” At which point he elegantly used her own ridiculous theory against her: “‘Wouldn’t it be an instance of the fallacy of authorial intent to say that you believe in the existence of something called the fallacy of authorial intent and that I have committed it?’ To which she replied: ‘You need to get serious about discourse.’” Many ASECS conferences, he notes, later became Cultural Studies conferences.

  For a quick example of the standard language and politics of Cultural Studies, I would offer up “L’Ouragan de Flammes (The Hurricane of Flames): New Orleans and Transamerican Catastrophe, 1866/2005” by Anna Brickhouse, an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, which appeared in the December 2007 issue of American Quarterly, a leading Cultural Studies journal. Brickhouse describes Hurricane Katrina as an example of a

  transamerican “ecoscape,” a conceptual space registering the interconnectedness of ecological with economic and political forces across the American hemisphere. We might begin to discern this particular ecoscape in a series of humanitarian gestures and official statements of condolence that directly addressed the disaster as a shared tragedy of the hemisphere—one that would supersede, at least rhetorically, some of its most entrenched political antagonisms through a cooperative response to the disaster. Fidel Castro, for example, offered to send 1,100 Cuban doctors and several tons of medical and relief materials directly to the disaster areas. Hugo Chávez . . . offered to send Venezuelan fuel, humanitarian aid, and relief workers to the city. . . . [But] the U.S. government declined all of these . . . offers of aid.

  Briefly put: Castro and Chávez good; America evil. Brickhouse goes on to quote Castro at length, taking his propaganda at face value. She speaks of “Castro’s humanitarian gesture,” though she feels that his underlying goal was “his larger political project of unmasking the cruelty and indifference of the U.S. government and its version of democracy.” She favorably contrasts Cuba’s handling of a hurricane the previous year with the U.S. government’s handling of Katrina. “Cuba—despite its longstanding poverty in the wake of U.S. embargoes—was ready to send its own ‘young, well-trained professionals’ where the U.S. president himself [Bush, not Obama, of course] had not bothered to show up.”

  At the Cultural Studies conference, I hear Mitra Rastegar of the City University of New York give a talk about how Muslims have been “demonized” in America since 9/11. Her case in point is the story of the Khalil Gibran Academy in Brooklyn, founded in 2007 by one Debbie Almontaser, a “respected” Muslim woman who became the target of what Rastegar describes as a “right-wing smear campaign” depicting her as an Islamist. Rastegar argues that while the New York Times defended Almontaser from these criticisms, Almontaser ended up having to resign because the image of her promulgated by “right-wingers” was “embedded in the paradigms” that had already been established by media portrayals of Muslims. Rastegar compares Daniel Pipes, who criticized Almontaser in a New York Sun article, to the Ku Klux Klan, Joseph McCarthy, and the government officials who sent Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II.

  The case against Almontaser pivoted largely on T-shirts reading “Intifada NYC” that were distributed to girls in New York by an Arab group that shared an office with a Yemeni organization for which Almontaser worked. The shirts caused a controversy, and Almontaser refused to condemn them, telling the New York Post that “intifada” simply means “shaking off” and that the shirts provided Muslim girls with “an opportunity . . . to express that they are part of New York City society . . . and shaking off oppression.” Rastegar quotes this comment sympathetically, dismissing the Post as a “right-wing tabloid” and arguing that since “intifada was equated with terrorism” in the public mind, it was impossible for “a nuanced discussion of the word’s fuller meaning” to take place. Rastegar concludes that “it was Almontaser’s inability to dissociate herself from members of her community” that led to her downfall, and that “this is an outrage because of the tolerable/intolerable dichotomy that forces Muslims to fit a certain image fails the test of true openness to a variety of points of view within a community.” In short, it was apparently wrong for anyone to expect Almontaser to renounce Muslim terrorists and their supporters; even to draw a line between the “tolerable” and “intolerable” members of the Muslim community was to force Muslims unfairly to choose between membership in “New York City society” and loyalty to even their most violent coreligionists,
who would like to see New York City in cinders.

  Why, I wonder, is Rastegar’s apologia for radical Islam considered Cultural Studies? Is it simply proof that Cultural Studies does indeed include “every damn thing”? In any event, Rastegar is far from the first person to make such a case under the auspices of Cultural Studies. Look, for instance, at the September 2007 issue of American Quarterly. In “Selling American Diversity and Muslim American Identity through Nonprofit Advertising Post-9/11,” Evelyn Alsultany, an assistant professor of American culture at the University of Michigan, cites as evidence of America’s anti-Muslim bias a 2004 Cornell poll finding that “74 percent characterized Islamic countries as oppressive to women,” and that “47 percent indicated that the ‘Islamic region is more likely than others to encourage violence among its believers.’” To Alsultany, these numbers do not reflect awareness of objective facts but “racism.” She analyzes advertising campaigns, such as one by the Ad Council that was designed “in direct response to the hundreds of hate crimes against Arabs, Muslims, and Sikhs” and that she criticizes for “excluding unambiguous markers of Muslim or Sikh identity.” She also complains about conservative criticism of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which she finds incomprehensible given its “work in condemning terrorism and educating the public about Islam.” (Never mind that it’s a Hamas front group.) Still—sounding very much like Rastegar—she does fault CAIR for buying into “the good Muslim/bad Muslim paradigm.”