REVISITING IMPERIAL CULTURAL STUDIES AND ETHNIC WRITING: A Subaltern Speaks from the Boondocks

Abstract

Applying a historical-materialist framework, this exploratory venture to critique Eurocentric cultural studies deploys certain oppositional events/discourses to point out the limitations of the hegemonic discipline. Deconstructing elite bourgeois culture via institutionalizing popular tastes and demystifying idealist rhetoric simply reinforce alienation with a postmodernist hubris. The resurgence of “third-world” resistance with its focus on racial/gender negativity (as in certain democratizing initiatives in the Philippines and among people of color in the metropole) may signal a return to the radical vision of cultural studies. Key to this renewal is the rediscovery of the dialectics of local/ethnic practice and the concrete universal of an anti-capitalist liberation project of subalterns everywhere defying imperialism and the terrorist neoliberal global order.

Keywords:  Cultural studies, ethnic writing, neocolonialism, imperialism, racism, hegemony