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THE PAVIS LECTURE

What's Foreign in Cultural Studies? or, On English as a Chinese language

Professor Meaghan Morris
This event took place on 17th May 2005 at 4:30pm (15:30 GMT)
Berrill Lecture Theatre, The Open University, Walton Hall Campus, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
Drawing attention to the "resistance of Cultural Studies to the foreign (as that which almost by definition it cannot study)", David Simpson suggested recently in New Left Review that the institutionalizing of cultural studies may be a "specifically Anglophone event". At one level, this is incorrect: in my vicinity, cultural studies institutions exist or are taking shape in many languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean among others).Yet there is no doubt that English has a privileged status as the regional lingua franca in which "local" programmes connect with each other as well the "Western"/global academy. It is also used in my university to integrate Hong Kong Cantonese students with the fluent English-speaking exchange students now arriving in force from mainland China. In our classrooms, it is not always easy to say what is and is not "foreign", or for whom.

The cultural politics of language has been an issue for reflection and activism in Asian cultural studies for many years, although it has proved difficult to interest Western scholars preoccupied with European divisions in this rich archive of debate about the legacies of colonialism and the potentials of globalization. Taking this issue as my point of departure, I will ask (as a flagrant foreigner in Hong Kong) whether cultural studies is indeed bound to prefer, as Simpson suggests, a "narrowly national" archive, and, what kinds of internationalism offer hope and practicality to scholars working in a China-centred world?

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