Keyan Tomaselli
Watch this keynote on youtube. Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5.
Affiliation
Director of The Centre for Communication, Media and Society (CCMS) at University of KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa)Keynote lecture: Cultural Studies as Hoax and Parody. What is Literacy in the Age of the Post?
(Co-authored with Dr Nyasha Mboti, Post-Doctoral fellow, The centre for Communication, Media and Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban)In an article entitled "The Weirdest People in the World" (Henrich et. al, 2010) the authors argue that 96% of psychology research is focused on only 4% of the world's population. Can Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) societies be assumed as the exemplar for all societies?
The implications of place, space and race in building one's academic career are the focus of this address. Location, class, gender, ethnic and other determinations embed one in particular - often contested - theoretical relations.
How does theory travel? What happens when it arrives at different destinations? How do I as an African-based scholar make a claim to be discussing theory while being over-determined by my peers as being fixed 'in Africa', as doing African studies rather than cultural studies? How does one engage the discursive hegemony of the Western gurus in recontextualising theory into contexts for which it was never intended? And, how does one deal with theory that was forged amongst the rest and that is now determining in the West? Where does postmodernism fit into a world beset by structural violence, terrorism, genocide, where millions are refugees, and where the bulk of research done is on a relatively stable minority of the global population - the WEIRDs? What relevance does postmodern critique have in the post-9/11 world?
These and other questions will be examined in relation to a thesis done by a South African who locates herself in an imagined world of an idealized West in which postmodernism reigns, where theory is a game, analysis is fun and the world is a self-made narcissistic web. Should cultural studies be fun? Should the banal be celebrated as a sub-cultural democracy? I have written a book in 2005 called Where Global Contradictions are Sharpest in which I elaborated my theory of reverse cultural studies. Basically, my argument is that in non-WEIRD societies, reverse signification and nominal conditions predominate, largely making nonsense of Cartesian logic. The book's greatest fans are not academics, but NGO workers deep in the bush, working with often destitute and remote communities. Finally, they tell me, they've found in me an academic who understands the conditions under which they work daily: mess, confusion, and for the industrial subject's mind, the often incomprehensible illogic of those with whom they are working. I will examine the prisms offered by various forms of cultural studies in the light of some personal and auto-ethnographic experiences.
In addition to his keynote lecture, Keyan Tomaselli will also organize a seminar entitled: How to Survive Higher Degree Studies
