Editorial

CHRIS HEALY

UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE
AND

KATRINA SCHLUNKE

UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, SYDNEY

ISSN 1837-8692
Cultural Studies Review 2014. © 2014 Chris Healy and Katrina Schlunke. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.

Citation: Cultural Studies Review (CSR) 2014, 20, 4166, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/csr.v20i2.4166

This issue brings together two significant and broadly conceived themes that are connected here in both traditional and innovative ways. Traditional evocations of space often appear as a means of referring to specificity and difference. For example, when we think or speak of cultural studies, we may preface the general category with a specific location—Inter-Asia, Latin-American or British cultural studies—that may hold histories of difference. Here, there is a refreshing take on these questions in what Amy Villarejo calls ‘radical contextualisation’ in her thoughtful review of Anna Pertierra and Graeme Turner's Locating Television: Zones of Consumption. Of course, this gesture is much more than an insistence that a text must be thought of contextually or intertexually. Instead locations or, in this instance, zones of consumptions, described through grounded ethnographic, textual, archival, policy and other methods, are understood as transforming media forms themselves. Thus the ‘radical contextualisation’ of television produces a rich and nuanced argument that television in one location can be a very different cultural practice, perhaps even a different thing, from television in another location.

Such a sense of location has, as it were, travelled a long way from traditional notions of culture as rooted in place. In fact it seems to us that it's more like the challenge of imagining space as an actor, an incitement that comes into cultural studies initially through the work of Lefebvre and Bourdieu. And, as Stephen Muecke pointed out many years ago in Reading the Country, considering practiced place is a way of dislodging naturalised abstractions of Capital such as the individual, democracy, freedom.¹ As an experience and a material event, space can also produce both another order of politics and another order of being. Place, as Martine Hawkes argues in her introduction to our guest edited section on ‘Locating Memory’, is not just one continuous space but may be a set of connected experiences created through media or tradition. We will leave a detailed exploration of the essays in that section to Martine's excellent introduction and simply thank her for bringing such a compelling and diverse set of international articles together.

Of our general articles Christina Lee considers a fictional space that has been reworked again and again. Over time, in the case of Sherlock Holmes, that remediation has taken the form of novels, television and movies that can give rise to sensation in the ‘real’ spaces referenced in those fictional forms. As Lee says: ‘Sherlock tourism is not just a matter of tracing the detective's movements but acts of “place-making”. The individual does not seek merely a location but to locate one's self within it’.

Space as multiply practiced and technologically constituted place takes a number of fascinating forms in Ross Gibson's review essay on digital mapping and locative media. ‘GIS Mapping, Google Street View and the Colonial Prospectus’ is an evocative archaeology of the present that imagines how contemporary ‘zombie media’ might unknowingly be part of an almost utopian project of colonial traversals-as-prospectus-mapping being replaced by forms of participatory narration:

Once you have become a participant and have etched some of your experience into a cartographic system, thereby changing it with your actions, then the system is dynamic, reactive and not separate from you. It is not simply an object to your subject. It is not the flat thing Szymborska scrutinises. Moreover an interactive map stores a narrative that involves you as a character. Indeed with each new recorded visitation from you, the narrative grows around your character.

In a very different way Yuji Sone uses the diversity of otaku practice in Japan to extend and critique both ‘queer’ and ‘performance’. Sone makes a place for ‘otaku’ in a process of intellectual translation that is also an act of discursive invention as readers are given a different order of performance, a different kind of cultural act to connect themselves to. Meanwhile Nicole De Brabandere's contribution in ‘New Writing’ moves back and forth between the theories of habit and the body, and the practice of intervention via performance, to propose new ways of thinking the ordinary.

Ruth Barcan's foray into the practices, consumption and marketing of essential oils raises the possibility of unexpected fault-lines within New Age discourses where ‘ethics, pleasure, spirituality and politics could be made to converge’. But she leaves us with a stark sense of the realities of their production and the banality of their representations. This is a very haunting call to pay attention to the domain of the new age; practices that touch so many of us in some form or another but which are still most often critiqued as simply a ‘problem’ of either ‘truth’ or commodification.

The complexity of looking at ‘ordinary’ practices are also well explored in our reviews section with technology, television, collecting, musical cultures and noise all receiving careful attention from our reviewers. As this collection of essays, new writing and reviews suggests, cultural studies will continue its project of engagement with the technologies and the practices of the everyday to reflect the diversity of whole ways of life while offering paths to interventions in and, hopefully, amelioration of the most exploitative elements of those lives. In foregrounding the location of memory as our guest edited section does in this issue, we are also reminded that each experience of the everyday is also an experience within time and space, an experience marked in some instances by histories of trauma and silencing. We continue to be excited about a style of cultural studies that reflects in its research a world and ways of life that are deeply banal and habitually materialist and traumatic and affective.

NOTES

¹Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe, with Krim Benterrak, Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 1984.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Muecke, S. and Paddy Roe, with Krim Benterrak, Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 1984.