Editorial

CHRIS HEALY

UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

AND

KATRINA SCHLUNKE

UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, SYDNEY

Cultural Studies Review
volume 22 number 1 March 2016
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/index
pp. 1–3
© Chris Healy and Katrina Schlunke 2016

ISSN 1837-8692

Cultural Studies Review 2016. © 2016 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) 2016, 22, 4906, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/csr.v22i1.4906

We are using the title ‘Fashioning’ for this issue of Cultural Studies Review as a salute to our excellent special section, ‘Dressing the Body, which is concerned with how living in our clothes might be our most immediate and yet intimate way of addressing the world. And we are also using ‘fashioning’ as a way of saluting Stuart Hall and drawing your attention to the important and powerful essays here in the section ‘Stuart Hall: In Memorium’ because, perhaps more than to any other matters, Hall returned again and again in different ways to consider how self-fashioning occurred in the interstices between cultures of representation and the productive constraints of power.

There’s also a link to Ben Highmore’s exemplary essay on feelings and things. Highmore quotes a passage from a conversation between Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart in 1959, in which Williams is recalling the men of the Welsh village of Pandy where he grew up: ‘I remember the men at home—a whole attitude in a way of dress.’ The focus of Highmore’s essay is a timely and telling reappraisal of Williams’s notion of ‘structures of feeling’ that wants to (re)connect that notion to ubiquitous forms of material culture. It is a critical contribution to our imagining of our everyday worlds as a constant synthesis of things and feelings, stuff and sensation. Stefan Laser provides us with a wonderful ‘case study’, both imaginatively written and forensic in its tracking of the great differences that come to be articulated through the ‘informal sector’, in this instance in India amid the worlds of e-waste management. Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel inspires us to appreciate the conjunctures of resistance, economy and production in the cultures of fish ‘processing’. His analysis is both profoundly materialist and movingly ‘animalist’ in its conceptualisation of agential fish. Annee Lawrence brings to our attention the work of three key novelists who ‘represent a line of flight towards a literary imaginary in Australian writing that is contemporary, locally grounded, but also regionally and globally entangled’. Her essay challenges what is so often gathered together under the heading of ‘Australian’ literature and insists that the concerns of this writing also be addressed.

How to speak of the dead can be a question of balancing respect and truth, an act of balancing that seems to be under negotiation as a perhaps differently-distinctive ‘generation’ seems to be passing on at a rate of knots. In this issue, six distinctive and thoughtful salutes to Stuart Hall’s legacy show us all again just how far reaching was his impact upon cultural studies as a way of thinking, an engaged politics and an enduring pedagogical resource and style.

It is hard to read Tony Bennett’s account without marvelling at the dynamic relationships between Hall’s historically specific biography and his work. Yet, as Tania Lewis suggests, it is also Hall’s legacy that is so important ‘for navigating the late liberal, managerialism of present day academia’. That legacy, Lewis writes, ‘is one of a humanistic engagement with and reflexivity toward conjunctural relations of power, identity, cultural location and institutionality’. The reminder of Hall’s concern with ‘conjuncture’ and ‘articulation’ takes us into our own spaces of personal and institutional life. As Bennett says: ‘There was, though, never any question of presenting race and class as competing alternatives—the point for Stuart was to attend both in the context of the changing articulations of their relations to one another.’ The site of those conjunctures also included the media as Gerard Goggin emphasises when he explores how a different kind of crisis was ‘policed’ in northern New South Wales. Hall also worked ‘personally’. Writing about a friend, Ann Curthoys and John Docker elegantly evoke the work of conversation that both enlivened a set of rich relations but which Hall also used ‘theoretically’ as a form of thinking. Elspeth Probyn describes this capacity from a different angle, suggesting: ‘His gift was to address each of us in our individual experiences, our emotional and physical experiences of being hurt and baffled when we find ourselves in the strictures of race, class, sexuality and gender not of our own making’. Many of the contributors write of how Hall’s work is today still invaluable for teaching. And perhaps that continuing value is an echo of what Catherine Driscoll identifies as the way ‘Hall remains attuned to the importance of seeing cultural studies as a history of ideas which remains unfinished’. And so we go on. Vale Stuart Hall.

The lively and evocative essays within our guest-edited section ‘Dressing the Body’ are individually addressed in the insightful introduction by Prudence Black and Rosie Findlay. We would like to thank Prudence and Rosie for their astute editorial work but also for introducing such a timely and telling set of essays that refigure the idea of dress and its relationship to the body in a way that pushes that thinking into the spheres of economy, affect and memory. And finally we draw your attention to our excellent set of reviews. The books examined range in themes from ‘gay life in Manila’ to ‘regional Australia’, each carefully considered for you to consider in turn. Happy reading.