David Macfarlane TRANSGRESSING BOUNDARIES: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF CULTURE IN AFRICA edited by Brenda Cooper and Andrew Steyn (University of Cape Town Press, R74,94)
THIS scintillating collection of essays derives from a conference organised in 1993 by the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town. The “boundaries” of the title are those of traditional academic disciplines, and a running question concerns the extent to which these enable and disable both the investigation and the production of local knowledges and cultures. Given South Africa’s current educational climate of difficult but necessary self-interrogation, this publication could hardly be more timely.
In a lucid introductory overview, the editors briskly define culture – that most contested of terms – as “popular and intellectual, fine art, literature, music and film, as well as, more broadly, the values and ways of life of different groups in different places at different times”. This suggests a debt to Raymond Williams specifically, and British cultural studies generally. How well do these British-based theories and practices travel to these shores?
Very well indeed, I think. One advantage the academic left possesses over more conservative formations in the humanities is a thoroughgoing explicitness about its own procedures and assumptions. Quite the reverse characterises academic traditionalists, who have always held to some notion of neutral intellectual enquiry.
Under the merest pressure, this stance of magisterial impartiality quickly resolves itself into vivid ideological commitments. As Terry Lovell puts it, in the essay based on her keynote address to the conference, “The knowing subjects of the humanities and social sciences were men masquerading as the abstract individual inquiring subjects of Enlightenment philosophy, objective, disinterested and rational observers. The `humanity’ studied had distinctly masculine traits” – and, as she also argues, traits of racism, sexism and several other “isms” as well.
By contrast, underlying all the contributions to Transgressing Boundaries is, in the editors’ words, “the essential point that what is at stake is cultural politics; that African studies is what Lovell calls a standpoint knowledge, the wish to understand, in order to challenge, oppression”.
Theoretical papers consider cultural work both globally and in this country over the past few decades, and ask what prospects such work provides for the study of African culture. Marxism, feminism, post-modernism and post-structuralism are among the theoretical models considered for their helpfulness or otherwise in African contexts. Then there are case studies concerning poison, the Lydenburg Heads, and slavery.
Reflecting the conference’s commitment to debate, the book includes responses to some key papers. Colin Bundy, for example, responds to Lovell by distinguishing between “African culture – the production and consumption of culture in Africa” and “how African culture is received, mediated and studied in the metropolis”. He asks which of these the conference is actually discussing.
That question strikes me as a fair one to ask now of the book itself. For instance, none of the contributors would (I imagine) maintain that the study of culture in Africa can be conducted solely in and through English. Yet the implication that this might be so emerges simply by omission: the issue is not addressed.
Isabel Hofmeyr poses similarly difficult questions in her response to superb papers by David Bunn and Jane Taylor. Their essays trace the complex and worried treatment of poison in 18th-century settler and Victorian metropolitan texts respectively. Poison as an element of local knowledge that settler and imperial texts attempted to subdue and annex is a richly fascinating focus here.
While paying tribute to this, Hofmeyr asks how much concerning local knowledge “can and cannot be read off from texts – especially imperial texts”. She recommends that African studies in this country engage more systematically with Africanist scholarship, not least because of the latter’s concern with how to understand local knowledge.
Hofmeyr also raises the issue of the “reception of texts”, and it might be appropriate to this book’s project to consider its own reception. What is this likely to be? Laura Chrisman argues that “more than any other academic field, cultural studies provides the potential for producing new forms of teaching, learning and knowledge which are local-based and people-led”. Those who are already persuaded of this will welcome the book.
And those who are not persuaded of it – a still powerful though increasingly silent bloc in humanities departments – will, I suppose, ignore it, in what has been the local (and British) academic establishment’s favoured response to work that queries its very foundations. But it would be nice to be proven wrong.