ABSTRACT
In a recent article on that fashionable intellectual venture called ‘cultural studies’, Fredric Jameson acknowledges the importance of ‘the fundamentally spatial dimension of Cultural Studies’ (Jameson, 1993:46). This concern with space-or more concretely, the spatial determination of cultural studies theory and practice-has become an urgent one in a time when cultural studies is increasingly perceived and experienced by its practitioners as an international project. With this internationalization, or better, transnationalization of cultural studies comes a whole series of questions: what kind of world is constructed by cultural studies? What sort of a place is the world according to cultural studies? And how does it see its own place in that world? This paper is an attempt to carve out a terrain for a critical transnationalist perspective in cultural studies. Such an effort cannot be made from a spatially neutral position. Indeed, one of our main arguments is that a critical transnationalism must always be enunciated from, and engage with the political peculiarities and necessities of, a particular spatial/ cultural context if it is to avoid reproducing affirmative or dominant forms of transnationalism, as currently most assertively promoted by the forces of global capitalism. As we are writing this paper in Australia, we are interested in developing a critical transnationalist perspective which can productively intervene in critical understandings of this country’s place in the world in this particular historical conjuncture. In doing this, we hope to clarify-by way of exemplification, which in the context of this paper will necessarily remain provisional and schematic-how a practice of critical transnationalism can be brought to bear in cultural studies.2
