CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

Mapping the Present: Race and Culture in Contemporary Global (Trans)Formations

Organiser: Denise Ferreira da Silva

Ferreira da Silva, Denise (University of California, San Diego, USA) GLOBAL SUBJECT(IONS): EXPLORATIONS OF RACE, GENDER, AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
This paper examines the political symbolic and political economic processes constituting the terrain of emergence of contemporary global subjects. By mapping the discursive fields constituted by statements on Female Genital Cutting and Terrorism, it attempts to locate the main strategies deployed in constructions of global subaltern subjects. The argument here is that, the mapping of the global and social spaces, these new statregies of power constitute another moment of articulation of meanings of race and culture in the production of modern subjectivities

Somersan, Semra (Bilgi University, Turkey) COLOR BLINDNESS OR POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION: CAN INEQUALITY BE MORE EQUAL THAN EQUALITY?
Two years ago, addressing a plenary session at the 3rd Crossroads conference Stuart Hall, speaking of multiculturalism said, "I have gone forwards and backwards on the question of quotas… We must disaggregate what is being represented." For many, not only quotas but all policies of affirmative action pose problems, of intellectual, political and/or economic nature. So why go back to a seemingly unresolvable old squabble that started in the US and UK back in the late 1960s, and which, may well be more a concern of social policy than of social theory? In addition to providing some conceptualizations to make up for the above, I will argue that a dialogic system of ever changing affirmative action policies (inequality) has to be more equal than a static "consensus" establishment of equality of the status quo. Quotas and positive discrimination have to become the Truth and Reconciliative measures of world societies and of the newly dawning cosmopolitan age, covertly or overtly discriminating on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, sex, and/or class.

MacDowall, Lachlan (University of Melbourne, Australia) THE DAY OF THE JACKAL
This paper examines the history of the figure of the Jackal in the West. In particular, it explores the ways in which questions of race and colonial history figure in the Jackal's identity as a "bisexual terrorist", a sexually versatile and elusive assassin. A lone hunting dog found across Africa, the Middle East and India, the figure of the Jackal was popular in both English and French colonial literature of the nineteenth century. Following a grenade attack on a Paris café in 1975, a French newspapers dubbed the mysterious perpetrator "Carlos the Jackal", after Forsyth's novel. By the time of his capture in 1998, "Carlos the Jackal" or Venezuelan-born Illich Ramirez Sanchez, had come to occupy a pre-eminent place in the popular imaginary as the archetypal international terrorist - daring, deadly and seemingly uncatchable. In 1981, the Australian parliament was referred to the film of The Day of the Jackal in order to illustrate a method of evading passport controls by seeking out the birth dates of dead people and applying for passports in their name. This method, known as "the jackal theory", has since circulated in public discourse, drawing together the figures of the immigrant, the refugee and the terrorist. Reading these moments, this paper argues that the Jackal's racial and colonial heritage is central to the ways in which the Jackal has been used to articulate forms of trans-national subjectivity, constituted through a combination of sexual and geographic mobility.

Hua, Julie (University of California, San Diego, USA) "GUCCI GEISHAS" AND THE POSTFEMINIST MISSION: SITUATING POSTFEMINISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF A POSTFEMINIST SUBJECT
This paper examines the particular historical and political context that enables, through a discursive field informed by Orientalism, imperialism, and modernity, the emergence of postfeminism and a postfeminist subject, arguing that only through a figure of an Other (geisha) is the postfeminist woman able to constitute herself as subject. By historically and discursively situating postfeminism, I link the "local" constitutions of postfeminism in the U.S. to a particular representation of the geisha (as an international figure) that is both informed by, and departs from, other appropriations of her. Through an examination of various U.S. cultural products, I examine the meanings representations of the geisha embody within this postfeminist moment. This paper also examines the geisha's difference (from Other figures of the feminine) in an effort to answer why the geisha, as a commodified and aestheticized sign, is the particular figure of the Other that is appropriated by postfeminism.

Tsagarousianou, Roza (University of Westminster, United Kingdom) MULTICULTURAL IMAGINATION AND DIASPORIC CULTURAL PRACTICES: A LOOK INTO THE CONSUMPTION OF DIASPORIC MEDIA
This paper attempts to examine the diverse ways in which, through cultural consumption, diasporic communities make sense of the multicultural character of the societies they live in. Through an examination of diasporic audience discourses and practices, the article examines the ways in which the current debates within cultural studies on ‘hybridity’ and ‘syncretism’ that are widely used to represent the advancement of new, dynamic, mixed diasporic cultures can be critically adopted and operationalised. In this context, the paper focuses both on the overlaps, the ambiguities, the displacements of difference towards which some postmodern strands of thought direct analysis of diasporic cultures as well as the apparently contradictory move towards the reassertion of ethnic, nationalistic and religious identities, that is, the bringing to the fore of localism. Drawing upon Hall the paper argues that diasporic identities are drawing upon a variety of traditions and cultural materials available to diasporic communities, bringing about complex ways of coexistence of the old and the new, of the local and the transnational. The paper argues that diasporas and diasporic experiences, even their apparently more traditionalist variants, should not be dismissed simplistically as backward-looking, as they are almost invariably constituting new transnational spaces of experience (Morley 2000) that are complexly interfacing with the experiential frameworks that countries of settlement and purported countries of origin represent as well as the complex transnational flows in which they are enmeshed.