Editorial Statement:

African Cultural Studies

In many of the impressive cultural analyses emanating from South Africa
and reaching us in foreign political skies, there is an implicit assumption
that the founding moment of cultural studies in South Africa is the same
as that which founded British Cultural Studies . . . . What is even more
astonishing, is the assumption that cultural studies in South Africa is
merely the continuation of English cultural studies on a different historical
plane.
(Ntongela Masilela 1988, p. 2)
The cultural studies borderland . . . is not a power-free site for unrestrained and heteroglossic dialogue and exchange, but a contested terrain
where concrete, differentially positioned subjects have to forge particular
strategies to speak and be heard.
(Ien Ang 1998, p. 20)

Introduction
We offer this issue on the theme African Cultural Studies, both
enthusiastically and with some ambivalence. On the one hand, as two
collaborating Africans, we are enthused about the publication of an issue of
Cultural Studies dedicated to African Cultural Studies. This journal issue adds to
our individual and collaborative efforts to contribute to the mapping and
development of a plurality of African cultural studies and to making a space for
African approaches in the evolving international discourse of cultural studies.
On the other hand, we are uneasy about the dangers (e.g. homogenization,
impreciseness, exclusivity, incompleteness, blinkered nationalism, reproduction of problematic power relations) that exist or constantly threaten to
emerge in nation-based and region-based traditions of cultural studies. We
share this general unease with others such as Stuart Hall (1992) who has
described British cultural studies as a pretty awkward signifier (p. 277) and
Larry Grossberg who observed that the claims of national traditions are
generally wrong headed . . . . (quoted in Wright 2001, p. 155). Our
preference is for a transnational cultural studies (e.g. Ang 1998, Chen
1992, OConnor 1993, Spivak, 1993). The reality, however, is that cultural
studies has evolved and continues to evolve primarily along regional lines and
however uncomfortable that might make some of us, there is no way to put the
genie of say British cultural studies back in the bottle of cultural studies
history. Thus, there are national versions of cultural studies in a few African
Cultural Studies Vol. 22, No. 2 March 2008, pp. 173!186
ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online 2008 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502380701788986

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countries (e.g. one can discern different kinds of South African cultural
studies) as well as a much looser discursive formation that can be labelled
African cultural studies. We are engaged in two critical and seemingly
contradictory tasks; first to contribute to the development of African cultural
studies and second, to promote and contribute to the development of
transnational cultural studies. Our position is that as it develops and if it is
taken up as an integral aspect of the internationalization of cultural studies,
African cultural studies can contribute to the evolution of transnational cultural
studies.
Despite some of the dangers, there is potential collective strength in
African cultural studies, especially in the international context of cultural
studies. While internationally dominant region-based versions of cultural
studies (read British and American) are readily recognizable and engaged
around the world, marginal versions have been restricted for the most part to
their own locations, save for interesting flashes that momentarily interrupt an
international cultural studies gaze fixed on the centre [e.g. special issue of
Cultural Studies on Nordic Cultural Studies (Eskola and Vainikkala 1994)];
inclusion of essays on the institutionalization of Turkish cultural studies in a
themed journal issue of International Journal of Cultural Studies (Maton and
Wright 2002). The more substantial of these flashes (e.g. a journal special
issue), we believe (or is that hope?), are more likely to be noticed, recognized
and considered (however fleetingly) for their distinctness. It is our hope that
this journal issue will contribute to the evolution of both African cultural
studies as well as transnational cultural studies.

Ntongela Masilelas nativization and other conceptions of

African cultural studies
While Ntongela Masilela might not be a household name in international
cultural studies discourse, he is for the two of us, and we would suggest ought
to be for African cultural studies in general, a touchstone for the development
of both South African cultural studies in particular and African cultural studies
in general. In this editorial we return time and again to Masilelas brief but
quite significant intervention as a point of reference for our observations on
African cultural studies. Masilela (1988) wrote a preface to what is probably
one of the earliest self-identified edited book of essays on South African
cultural studies, namely Keyan Tomasellis (1989) Rethinking Culture. As South
African, and indeed African cultural studies grow and spread, they do so
around Masilelas trenchant reservations, recommendations, admonishments
and vision. These constitute an originary argument about one strand of African
cultural studies, namely, nativization, which Masilela articulated in reaction to
what he perceived as merely derivative African cultural studies which simply

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appropriated British cultural studies and at best applied it to the South African
context. Our own preference is for a third strand which occupies a middle
ground where African cultural studies draws on aspects of both nativist and
derivative cultural studies and is developed in conversation with international
cultural studies (Kanneh 1998, Wright 2004).
In his brief preface, entitled Establishing an Intellectual Bridgehead,
Masilela appealed for a nativisation of cultural studies in South Africa (cf.
Kerr 1989). This task, he suggested, would occur in the context of
Africanization which he describes as the re-orientation of intellectual and
historical perspectives of cultural studies in terms of African cultural
trajectories and history. Masilela thus forward-thinkingly linked South Africa
to the continent as a whole at a time when the cultural boycott and
international pressure on apartheid was at its peak. Significantly, then, in
compiling this themed issue of Cultural Studies we found ourselves selecting
papers from a predominance of South African authored-submissions. These
authors (not all of whom are included here) tended to be well-located in
dominant Western cultural studies paradigms familiar to readers of this
journal. However, we wanted to also incorporate studies which have grown
more directly from African contexts, as Masilela recommended, ones which
draw on African philosophies and indigenous frames of reference. Cultural
studies, as Wright has argued (1998), has emerged in many different forms on
different continents and conditions, each developing unique characteristics, in
answering often the same questions. We wanted something of this specificity
to shine through this issue.
We have mentioned one primary framework for conceptualizing African
cultural studies, namely its relationship with African intellectual work on the
one hand and outer-continental work on the other hand (the results of which
are derivative/appropriated cultural studies in Africa, nativized African
cultural studies and a version of cultural studies which draws on both and is
articulated in conversation with international cultural studies). Another
framework involves the location of Africans: the discourse of African cultural
studies is being developed primarily by Africans on the continent as well as
African emigres in the diaspora. In writing the preface for Tomasellis edited
collection, Masilela, a South African writing from exile in the US, made one of
the first outer-continental interventions in the development of African cultural
studies. Our own collaboration reflects and continues this dual source of
development of African cultural studies. One of us, Handel Kashope Wright, is
a Sierra Leonean who was introduced to cultural studies while undertaking
graduate studies in Canada, has taught in the US and now teaches cultural
studies and education in Canada. The other, Keyan Tomaselli, is a South
African who teaches media and cultural studies in South Africa, and has been
instrumental in the development of South African and African media studies
and an indigenized cultural studies. We have also selected essays to reflect both

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continental African voices (Lize van Robbroeck and Natasha Distiller from
South Africa, Fibian Kavulani Lukalo from Kenya, Sunday Enessi Ododo from
Nigeria) and voices of Africans living in the diaspora (Boulou de BberiCameroonian in Canada, Awad Ibrahim- Sudanese in the US, Ali AbdiSomalian in Canada). In addition to these two principal sets of contributors,
there are also diasporic Africans (used here in the albeit problematic loose
sense that references black people outside the continent) and Africanists who
are contributing to the development of African cultural studies and the former
of this last two categories is represented by Glenn Jordan (an African American
who is a long time resident in Wales) and his contribution to this themed issue
(Jordan 1973).

Themes and issues in African cultural studies

In issuing the Call for Papers for this themed issue, we identified a number of
possible sub-themes:
.

Post-apartheid and democratization issues. Crucial here are issues of

essentialism, the divine rights of monarchy, the role of the ancestors,
patriarchy/feminism and so on.
Debates on identity and the dis/connections between continental and
diasporic constructions.
Cultural studies deriving from performative contexts, such as various
forms of popular theatre, their relation to Freirian pedagogic principles,
action research, education and resistance.
Issues and debates around Africanization/indigenization of different kinds
of cultural studies in different parts of Africa.
The relationship between African philosophical approaches and cultural
studies.
Comparative analysis between Western cultural studies and African
approaches, and the nature of their engagement with the former.

With the caveat that these are the selections of two individuals rather than a
definitive, authoritative statement about the status quo of African cultural
studies, we identify these as some of the issues and trends in African cultural
studies. The articles included in this themed issue were selected to cross all of
the earlier themes, with the concept of identity being the cement binding the
papers into an overarching narrative. For example, in Surviving the Future !
Towards a South African Cultural Studies, Natasha Distiller articulates the
general outlines of and an argument to make a space for South African cultural
studies, and issues of identity (especially race, class and language) central in her
discussion. Fibian Kavulani Lukalo in Outliving Generations: Youth Traver-

EDITORIAL

sing Borders through Popular Music in Everyday Urban Life in East Africa
sheds light on what is clearly a vibrant, emerging urban youth culture in East
Africa. The Bongo Flava music described provides an excellent opportunity to
examine a dynamic space where multiple forms of identity (national, regional,
generational, gendered, linguistic, etc.) intersect in complex ways.
All the studies published in this volume engage the notion of Africanness
in interrogating issues of identity and the notion of culture. This is a
recurring theme to which the journal Critical Arts has devoted several special
issues (e.g. Wright 2002, 2003a, Williams 2000). Wright, (2003b) has argued
that black people in predominantly black countries in Africa do not self
identify as black but rather become black or are assigned blackness as an
identity marker in the West [for a parallel argument, see Michelle Wright
(2004) on how African Americans became black]. There is a welcome
conceptual continuity reflected in the fact that Awad Ibrahim and Glenn Jordan
make similar points in their contributions to this themed issue. For and in the
West, race is a crucial, definitive marker (e.g. Webster 1992). For the vast
majority of Africans, however, it is questions of ethnicity and relationship to
the ancestors that are the most crucial markers of identity (Kasoma 1996,
Ododo in this issue, Jordan, in this issue). The importance of the ancestors and
the assumption of overlapping social/ancestral dimensions is evident in Sunday
Enessi Ododos Facekuerade: The Transformational Duality in Ebira-Ekuechi
Festival Performance. Few cultural and media studies scholars admit the
perceptively real dimensions of religion in the everyday life of people in most
societies and communities around the world. This lack of scholarly discussion
of religion is a blind spot in much analysis deriving from cultural and media
studies scholars living in industrial and post-industrial societies. Ododos paper
begins to address this lack in Western-derived (non-anthropological/theological) scholarship. Too often the blight of apartheid has been seen as operating
purely as a form of racial oppression for blacks in South Africa. However, in
Beyond the Traditional/Modernity Dialectic: African Nationalist Subjectivities
in South Africa Print and Visual Culture of the Early Twentieth Century, Lize
van Robbroeck illustrates how race and class intersected in the production of
the virtually untenable position of black middle-class subjects during South
Africas apartheid era. Beyond adding nuance to accounts of the apartheid era,
her essay is something of a reminder to the field of cultural studies that class
matters.
Shepperson and Tomaselli (1992) in Semiotics in an African Context:
Science vs Priest-craft, suggest a way of understanding African
ontologies from the perspectives of African philosophers, linguists and a
mathematician. Some of the papers in this issue appear to be operating in a
similar vein. For example, Ali A. Abdis article Europe and African Thought
Systems and Philosophies of Education: Re-culturing the Trans-temporal
Discourses draws on similar African philosophical sources. A review of

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Kwame Nkrumah (1964), Leopold Senghor (1964), Amilcar Cabral (1971),

Franz Fanon (1965), and similar influential early twentieth century Africanbased contributors to philosophy, suggests that the background to contemporary African philosophy is not the colonial experience, but the
experience of anti-colonial resistance and liberation movements. This is the
stuff of original praxis-based cultural studies. The context that legitimated the
arguments of African philosophers, and validated their premises and
conclusions, has not merely passed as the colonial administrators were sent
packing; it dissipated as the object of liberation has been realized. A liberated
society does not need a liberation movement. The philosophical point of this
historical digression is that the leaders of liberation movements must reason in
the mode of advocacy, they must mobilze people to act, not reflect. Crucial to
the unfolding of African cultural studies (plural) will be the philosophical
difficulty and rhetorical force (re)conceptualizing traditional concepts and
understanding African societies as being as dynamic as are those in highly
industrialized societies. As a way of reframing distinctions between oral and
written cultures, a crucial part of these investigations into Africa require a
related reconceptualization of the role of orality in the written philosophical
and literary traditions of the West.
Masilelas (1987, 1988) distinct preference was and continues to be for the
cultural studies discourse of the 1970s, when the field was engaged with
producing history from below, addressing issues of class struggle and working
with (and against) neo-Marxism. When offered the opportunity, he declined to
review specific essays for this collection, asserting that, in general terms, he
anticipated that, like much of the current work in cultural studies, the papers
might engage post-modernism and he did not favour post-modernist work. In
his general feedback to us, he reiterated that a viable and utilitarian African
cultural studies ought to engage history (especially history from below) and be
based on empirical studies and evidence, documentation and archival materials.
Just as there is no one cultural studies internationally, there can never be a
single African cultural studies. The majority of the papers in this collection
reflect Masilelas general vision but in instances here and there (e.g. Lize van
Robbroecks reference to Foucaults notion of the regulation of the body, and
the albeit post-colonial employment of the notion of hybridity by Natasha
Distiller, Boulou de Bberi and Awad Ibrahim) they perhaps rub against the
grain of a strict interpretation of that vision.
Masilelas position has implications for transnational cultural studies. It
echoes and dovetails with various calls for a (re)turn to cultural studies as
political, praxis work. These include Robert McChesneys (1996) arguments
that the turn to post-modernism is rendering cultural studies apolitical and
irrelevant; Halls (1992) admonishments against theoreticism in cultural
studies; Tony Bennetts (1992) call for cultural studies to become a form of
policy work, Ann Grays (2003) articulation of the importance of empirical

EDITORIAL

work in general and ethnography in particular for grounding cultural studies,

and our own advocacy for cultural studies praxis (Tomaselli 1998, Wright
2003c).

African cultural studies and their international reception

There are various ways in which a discourse declares its presence and evidence
of the existence of African cultural studies exists in such forms as centres,
programmes and conferences at institutions on the continent. Another
indicator is of course publications and journals are an especially good
indication of ongoing work in a field. We thought it might be useful,
therefore, to point to a few examples of African-published and edited journals
devoted to cultural studies or inclusive of cultural studies work. Following
that, we give our impressions of the international reception of African
intellectual work.
Africa Media Review (African Council for Communication Education,
Nairobi, Kenya published communication studies on African topics). Three
kinds of cultural studies are represented in this publication. First, were oral
and indigenous communication methods. Second, after 1992 a Marxism which,
while drawing in British cultural studies, attempted to reframe this approach in
terms of African perspectives. Articles re-examined Freire, Cabral and Fanon
in terms of post-Cold War issues, and new media technologies. Third, was
participatory development research, development support communication,
and action research, all of which emphasize bottom-up strategies of
development and meaning-making. Issues of development are never far from
useful cultural studies in Africa.
Critical Arts: a Journal for Cultural Studies started life in 1980 as an antiapartheid vehicle through which to problematize the study of culture and
media in terms of resistance. Its authors and editors were not even initially
aware of the Birmingham School until some British readers and academic
travellers brought this to their attention in the early 1980s. Since both
Birmingham and Critical Arts worked off Marxist approaches, it is not surprising
that early Critical Arts authors had developed along similar, if initially, parallel
tracks. Following 1994, Critical Arts systematically expanded its interests to
include the Africa, the Indian Ocean Rim, South!South and North!South
relations (Tomaselli and Shepperson 2000).
Media Development (World Association for Christian Communication,
London) provides short articles on Third World issues, and has provided
space for key discussions on media and democracy in Africa. Many of these
articles are framed within cultural studies notions of democracy, overlaid by
the dimension of a Vatican II Theology, which relocates communication with
people in communion in communities (Traber 1989).

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Readings in African Popular Culture (Barber 1997) provides a relatively

encyclopaedic compilation of particular forms of popular cultural African
productivity: orality to television, music and song, vehicle slogans, theatre,
and so on. This approach to cultural studies, as Barbers Introduction indicates,
is increasingly borrowing from British cultural studies and its reconstitutions
by authors who have published extensively in journals like Research in African
Literatures, Africa, Critical Arts, and Passages.
Journal of Cultural Studies published by the African Cultural Institute,
Nigeria, is firmly rooted in African contexts, but in a dialectical relationship
with travelling theories as they impact, and find roots, in African conditions.
The overarching concerns of authors who have published in this journal deal
with those issues of a pressing and nature: ethnicity, development, political
leadership, gender, literacy, the African renaissance and relationships between
all of these and the evolution of African cultures and cultural studies.
Masilela (1988) acknowledges the importance of British derivations of
cultural studies and the assistance they might give to establishing intellectual
bridge-heads on the political terrains of South African and African histories.
But intellectual references, he asserts, need to come from within Africa itself.
In 1988 (in South Africa at least) these were few and far between. Later,
journals like Critical Arts (South Africa) and Journal of Cultural Studies (Nigeria),
amongst others, blazed an Africanizing trail amongst First and Second World
publications which predominate in setting global theoretical agendas. Since its
inaugural conference in 1996, the Crossroads in Cultural Studies has
deliberately opened up spaces for marginalized parts of the world, including
Africa. Indeed, the Crossroads conferences have included several keynote,
plenary, and spotlight session presentations and some of these have later been
published in journals like European Journal for Cultural Studies, International
Journal of Cultural Studies, and Critical Arts (see Teer-Tomaselli and Roome
1997, Wright 1998, 2003a,) and edited collections (e.g. Tomaselli and
Wright, 2007).
Theories and paradigms travel. As they travel they mutate and change,
reconstitute initial emphases, and often disregard their origins. The way that
cultural studies has travelled to and within Africa, is both similar to, and
different from its trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific mutations. When such
theories do arrive, they are:
a. often unproblematically applied in unreconstituted forms to different
conditions at their destinations, as Masilela (1988) has noted;
b. often appropriated by politicians and cultural commissars for party
political ends, as in the case of apartheid (Muller and Tomaselli 1990);
c. sometimes used to disguise new hegemonic trajectories which simply
substitute the shell of cultural studies terms for neo-fascist content, an
articulation shorn of its original political project, or a political project in
which personal agendas are disguised (Tomaselli 2001).

EDITORIAL

d. only occasionally noted by dominant Western cultural studies (which for

arguments sake includes some approaches of Australasian cultural
studies), which seems largely oblivious of developments on, in and from
the African continent. Some Western scholars in and from the former
colonies have taken up African work as they talk back or write back to
the metropoles of intellectual production (see. e.g. CCCS 1986, Gilroy
1993). However, these have been the exception to the rule of Western
cultural studies neglecting to take up and work with African cultural
studies.
In short, cultural studies developed by African scholars, activists and cultural
workers is studied in the North mainly in African studies programmes, less so
in communication, and almost not at all in cultural studies itself. Despite the
opening of spaces for African cultural studies, it appears that very little of the
African corpus gets to inform the major international cultural studies debates.
Being classified Africa, it is apparently relegated to the file marked
interesting: not necessarily relevant.

To the papers
Boulou E. de Bberis, Africanicity in Black Cinema: A Conjunctural Ground
for New Practices of Identity examines the interaction between black cultural
and political identity in order to determine new conjunctural practices of
identity, found in selected black films. He includes two specific paradigms of
communication through which black people can articulate their identity and
challenges the notions that they assert. In addition, he interrogates the
concepts of hybridity and authenticity in identity-creation. His search for a
sense of Africanicity is articulated through films such as Malcolm X and Beloved,
as well as through major role players in the contemporary film industry.
Beyond the Traditional/Modernity Dialectic: African Nationalist Subjectivities in South Africa Print and Visual Culture of the Early Twentieth
Century by Lize van Robbroeck, introduces another realm of African identity,
that of the double consciousness involved in being black and European. She
explores the ambivalent subject positions manifest in the South African black
middle class, by providing an analysis of the visual culture of the early
twentieth century. She displays the differences between the public discourse of
the black press and that of individual black artists. She gives specific reference
to artist Milwa Pembas work, as well as to certain black publications which
substantiate her claims.
Awad Ibrahim in The New Flaneur: Subaltern Cultural Studies, African
Youth in Canada and the Semiology of In-betweenness contributes a
grounding of identity theory through an ethnography of a specific group of

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African youth attending a high school in Ontario, Canada. The location of

notions of hybridity within a cultural context and within relations of power, is
an important corrective on essentializing discourses of identity so characteristic
of African thought As such, Ibraham puts forward a political argument
regarding the renegotiations of African identities in contexts in the North.
Language is understood as a performance of an in-between identity that is the
result of their new context as immigrants and refugees in Canada, rather than
merely examples of the kind of slang and shibboleths also used in, for instance,
African societies themselves where cultural expression has also been influenced
by the globalization of cultural form from the North such as rap and hip-hop.
These quotations underpin the argument that these youth have become Black,
where Blackness becomes a code, a language, fashion, a hair-do, a bodily
expression, and above all an experiental memory. If these youth have indeed
become black in their new context in Canada, how does this affect their
position in society? Do they experience discrimination on the basis of this
blackness, or is it a means to solidarity with the experiences of other
immigrants and refugees? How are they looked upon by other students in the
school where the ethnographer hung out? How do they negotiate their
position within these spaces, and how does their newly acquired blackness
provide them with agency to resist hegemonic discourses of otherness in the
context of immigration into a country with its particular notions of
multiculturalism? These are some of the questions with which Ibrahim
grapples.
Fibian Kavulani Lukalos Outliving Generations: Youth Traversing
Borders through Popular Music in Everyday Urban Life in East Africa
showcases the emerging urban youth culture in East Africa. Through the
popular Bongo Flava music, one is able to observe multiple forms of identity
(national, regional, generational, gendered, linguistic, etc.) and how they
intersect in complex ways. The artists such as Mr Nice and Lady JayDee,
singing mainly in the Kiswahili language, construct a cultural space within their
music, which draws from their African roots but is applicable to their current
situations and ideologies. The music provides an interesting space of identity
creation, since restrictions such as power and class are defied and the music is
rather embraced across all ethnic, religious, gender, socio-economic, age and
political divides.
Natasha Distiller in Surviving the Future ! Towards a South African
Cultural Studies, presents a further interrogation of identity in Africa, but
looks specifically at South Africa and the difficulties encountered in assessing a
contemporary South African cultural space. She gazes at the nation post-1994,
but particularly at the identity with which the nation has been burdened with.
This includes considering aspects such as race, class and language as well as
certain constructed phrases which restrict the definition of South African
cultural studies. She includes the concepts of creolization and hybridity and

EDITORIAL

their attempts and short-comings in describing South African cultural

practices, histories and identities.
Sunday Enessi Ododos paper is based on analysing, theorizing and
proposing an understanding of the Ekuechi festival of the Ebira Tao of Central
Nigeria, offering an analysis of mask and mask-less significance in those kinds
of performances, which the author handles well. Facekuerade theory contains
the essentiality of the transformation duality, the fact that the culture to which
Ododo is referring can see godliness in a mask-less performance, and still see
the person performing as one of their own. This is linked to the way ancestors
are actually treated even away from the performances. Usually there are
accompanying libations, sacrifices other rites which highlight the linkage
between the ancestors and the living.
Ali A. Abdi in Europe and African thought Systems and Philosophies of
Education: Re-culturing the Trans-temporal Discourses is largely critical of
European modes of thinking and attitudes towards Africa. He asserts that
contemporary African philosophy may have been motivated by resistance to
colonial and liberation efforts. It is in this line of thought that he challenges the
way in which African philosophy has been and is conceived by Western
philosophies as inferior. He charts the implications that have resulted from this
categorization and highlights prominent debates in the field.
An African Presence in Europe: Portraits of Somali Elders by Glenn
Jordan intertwines personal narrative of author and subjects with imagery
relating to a diasporic history and cultural studies. He describes his project
(The Somali Elders Project) as a cultural-political intervention combining
humanist portrait photography, collaborative ethnography and oral history.
His aim is to bring the marginalized voices, images and experiences of the
Somali Elders in Wales to the fore, by relaying their stories to a wider
audience. He highlights a theme, prevalent to this collection, that of the
African identity, questioning whether these men consider themselves
European or African, considering they have spent most of their lives in
Europe. His article is largely self-reflexive, as he considers his presence, as
well as that of his camera in the project, asking questions such as, how does the
subject present himself to the camera and how does he address you, the
viewer?

Conclusion
In an article commissioned for the inaugural issue of the International Journal of
Cultural Studies, Tomaselli (1998) wrote, It is up to us in Africa and those
concerned about the continent to ensure that our voices are heard, our ideas
debated, and our theories engaged. It is important that we stir the rich
diversity and heritage of African scholarship into the international debates and

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directly address the continents fringe status. This theme issue of Cultural
Studies is dedicated to this objective, adding to the growing body of work that
includes journals, books, conferences, presentations, academic programmes
and centres and empirical and conceptual research on African cultural studies.
However, in terms of the project of transnational cultural studies, establishing
and putting forward African cultural studies is only one part of the equation.
The other side has to do with the reception of African cultural studies as it is
being put forward. African cultural studies needs to be taken up both as a
component of regional versions of cultural studies internationally and perhaps
more importantly as contributory to the evolution of transnational cultural
studies. Of course, there is always the issue of how this is done, with all the
attendant possibilities and problems that readings and misreadings entail. As
Ang (1998) once pointed out, at play at the cultural studies borderland is a
politics of (mis)communication where the transfer of meaning cannot be taken
for granted (p. 20). Wrights (1998) caveat to the field is probably still
pertinent: as Africans we can only be at home in international/transnational
cultural studies when we can say African cultural studies without nonAfricans raising an eyebrow and us feeling like biting our tongue. Better yet,
we can only be at home in cultural studies when non-Africans engage African
cultural studies without us raising an eyebrow and wishing they would bite
their tongue.

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L. Grossberg, C. Nelson & P. Treichler, New York, Routledge.

EDITORIAL

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Keyan G. Tomaselli &

Handel Kashope Wright
Guest Editors