By way of a beginning . . .
In a recent publication, the December 1999 issue of the APEAA Newsletter (APEAA is the Portuguese quasi-acronym for the Portuguese Association for Anglo-American Studies, and its Newsletter is edited by the APEAA Board), I found a notice of the Third English Culture Conference held in Lisbon, at the Faculty of Letters, on Dec. 2 and 3, 1999, in which the conference is described as having adopted "mainly, though not only, the multiple viewpoints and broad prospects opened up by the so-called 'Cultural Studies.'" As a member of the Conference organising committee, I might -- in all likelihood ought to -- want to take exception to the notice as a whole. It is, however, the description of cultural studies that I chose to highlight by way of a beginning in a brief sketch of the contexts and conditions of teaching and doing cultural studies in Portugal.

One notices the double disclaimer -- cultural studies is not only "Cultural Studies" (with the double quotes nicely negating any unlikely claims), it is also "the so-called 'Cultural Studies'" -- and the double open-up feature --"multiple viewpoints" and "broad prospects" -- and wonders why anyone should go out of her/his way to make such an emphatic point about cultural studies in the brief notice of an English Culture Conference whose theme was Culture and Citizenship. But if one bears in mind that the Newsletter is edited by the APEAA Board -- and as such must of course claim recognition as an official discourse in (and on) English and American studies in Portugal -- one can then perceive that as part of an official discourse the Newsletter must appear to be in the know, credible and authoritative: the multiple viewpoints and broad prospects of the so-called "Cultural Studies" ploy makes it plausible that the Board not only do know about cultural studies but also expect APEAA members instantly to assent to cultural studies being named "so-called 'Cultural Studies'" and view-pointedly marked for its "broad prospects."

Why bother?
Why bother to make that kind of statement if you are in control of an official knowledge frame within which it is only too plausible to organise a panel -- as was the case at a recent seminar -- to pass judgement on cultural studies and keep cultural studies scholars out of the panel and cultural studies voices out of discourse? Or, what the dickens, why not just leave cultural studies be?

Why bother indeed! Why go out of one's way to disclaim cultural studies in so pointed a form? Why give cultural studies people no voice in assessing cultural studies? Why this push to dictate the absence of cultural studies? Could it be that it has become necessary, strategically necessary, to maintain an official representation of what cultural studies is (not) and does (not), and to keep it unruffled by people who teach and do cultural studies?

Quoting de Certeau
I shall not attempt to offer an answer, although I tend to think that cultural studies is beginning to shape the agenda and politics of knowledge in Portugal and to produce an educational counter-project -- not only in higher but also in secondary education. I want to stress this: I tend to think that it is so -- but it may still prove wishful thinking for some time. What I know, and can bear witness to, is that a place -- keeping de Certeau in mind I will not say a proper place, and won't call it a space -- has been created in and from which trajectories of cultural analysis and theory can be produced which directly run counter and challenge the proper place of official knowledge in English and American studies, building on the resourceful utilisations of time of former days. I shall come back to that official knowledge in a moment, but before I do I will just add that only five or six years ago cultural studies had -- again in de Certeau's words -- to "accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer[ed] themselves at any given moment"; indeed, it had to "make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open[ed] in the surveillance of the proprietary powers."

The official knowledge
The official knowledge in English and American studies in my country is that maintained and reproduced by the surveillance of the proprietary powers. For many years, up to the great change in April '74, it was stiffly philological. Divorced from the present, blind to the quotidian and hostile to the contemporary, the official knowledge in English studies was the knowledge of the past -- it goes without saying, a past carefully constructed by selecting the versions of it offered by a vigilantly policed number of authoritative (authorised) authors. The Anglo-Saxon world as the authentic source of the England to be, the Middle Ages hierarchically construed as a homogeneous whole maintained by the surveillance of the pope, the emperor, and the king, and the Renaissance interpreted as staunchly medieval (with the Reformation safely framed by the canonisation of Thomas Morus) and made accessible by the Elizabethan world picture -- that was the core of the official knowledge in English studies, always in the sole possession of the institution and the teacher, for ever beyond the reach of students.

American studies was a trifle more complicated within the official frame of knowledge. There was no remote past to construct and control -- obviously the native cultures of America were beneath scholarly consideration -- and, to render it more problematic, the many translations of 20th-century American novelists and the predominant position of American movies in the film market made USA contemporary society and cultures part of the everyday cultures of students. (I remember being frowned down upon in the early 60s for my copious reading of Hemingway, Steinbeck and Caldwell, among others.) The solution was to make American studies a natural continuation of English studies: the claim was that you could not begin to understand American literature and culture if you did not command a serious knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. There were also the 18th and early 19th centuries to fall back upon, but with a whole academic year to fill the teacher could not but move closer to the un-history of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

The triumph of time
The philological frame of knowledge did not withstand the flood of history. In the aftermath of April '74, time invaded the place which had been able to triumph over time for so many decades -- and shattered it to a rubble of forgeries and mystifications. For a couple of years there was no official knowledge. Then came from the government the move to reconstitute the logic of official knowledge -- that is, knowledge firmly instituted as that which students have to keep within the boundaries of and reproduce for their grades and degrees. (As I put it in '97, "it basically means that you can only learn from your teachers and not from your own personal and social experience, but also that no matter how much and how hard you learn you'll never come close to your teachers' knowledge.") Since it could no longer be the philological knowledge in English and American studies, it was this time the literary-studies paradigm of knowledge which was made official -- as a field of distinction, the literary field was the best suited to elbow aside linguistical and erase cultural studies.

For the last two decades English and American studies have remained the space strategically defined as official by the knowledge of literature as that which is read -- in Williams's wording, as consumption. Being official, this space of strategy again ensures a triumph over time -- much of the English-speaking cultures of our time are just elided, because the logic of an official knowledge is the logic of exclusion. There is no place for Scotland, Wales, or Ireland, no place for Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, Australia, or New Zealand -- you name it, it is not there. Likewise, cultural studies is not there, officially not, strategically not. Earlier this month, in my Faculty, an inter-departmental proposal (already agreed upon and adopted) to restructure the Modern Languages and Literatures degree courses and introduce Media, Communication and Cultural Studies, among other novelties, was overwhelmingly defeated. According to the logic of that majority vote, Modern Languages and Literatures will continue to be a mausoleum where staff and students shall light candles on the tombs of dead poets.

The place
What can then the place of cultural studies be in this space of official knowledge, this academic context defined by the surveillance of the proprietary powers? More to the point: if the place is there, does it have a strategy at all?

For a number of years, resourceful utilisations of time were all cultural studies people could achieve -- or hope to achieve. What became or was made possible one year in one course could not be continued the following year. American studies colleagues did much that proved ground-breaking -- are in fact doing much that is of high significance. In English studies it took a year-long heated discussion, and pretty difficult negotiations, before an agreement was reached that made it possible to teach English culture courses either as -- you will be surprised at the terms of the alternative -- cultural history or as cultural studies (no doubt the "so-called 'Cultural Studies,'" in the eyes of some parties to the agreement, which the Newsletter notice of the Culture and Citizenship Conference made a point of officially disclaiming). Let's face it, it was no occasion to quibble over designations or definitions -- the important new fact was that it became, was indeed made possible to teach cultural studies as part of English culture courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.

That was -- is -- a place conquered in the space of the other. It is not that the official knowledge context of English and American studies as established in the institution has been suspended and its strategy and logic replaced. No, both the context and the strategy remain in place. That the official knowledge no longer controls all that is being taught and learnt and studied and researched -- that it no longer is certain of unquestioned, unchallenged reproduction -- constitutes, however, a major break with the last two decades. Such break did -- does -- enable cultural studies scholars to develop new trajectories in cultural analysis and theory: the cultural studies undergraduate courses, the annual English Culture Conference, the Culture and Society postgraduate programme and more recently the cultural studies seminar in the inter-departmental Cultural Theory and Analysis postgraduate programme (launched last October in result of long years of persistent efforts by several culture studies scholars to free culture from its ancillary position to literature), and -- last but not least -- the English Culture studies group (which the English Culture staff have formed: six colleagues who work together for teaching and research purposes while keeping a high degree of individual autonomy in their teaching and research).

Not a proper place
That cultural studies does not yet have a proper place -- its own space and strategy -- should not be overlooked. On the one hand, it means that the place must be defended even as it is being developed: there are no guarantees from year to year, and to some extent we have to begin from the very beginning every year. On the other hand -- and this is something cultural studies scholars from English-speaking countries, particularly the UK and the USA, sometimes fail to understand -- cultural studies has no place at all as Portuguese cultural studies. If I get a paper accepted for presentation at a cultural studies seminar or conference is it not expected of me -- almost as a matter of course -- that my paper will have to do with a theme or a problematic which has become relevant in English-speaking countries? Would I get a paper accepted at an international conference if my paper was a Portuguese cultural studies paper engaging in the analysis of the lived experience of a Portuguese group or formation, of a Portuguese context of lived relations of power, of a trajectory in time and space of a Portuguese signifying system or set of practices?

To bring this sketch to a close: I can now certainly teach cultural studies in my department (and from my department, at inter-departmental level), but doing cultural studies outside of my teaching in the English department remains a placeless tactic -- I have to "accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment"; indeed, I have to "make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers."