A polemic for cultural studies -- both in the sense of defending cultural studies from its more misguided critics (of which there are many) and in the sense of trying to make cultural studies better (rather than simply making it go away) -- Why Cultural Studies? has three interrelated agendas:
- To clarify the nature of cultural studies for outsiders: Given the widespread confusion about cultural studies -- and the problems engendered by such confusion -- one of the primary goals of the project is to help dispel some of the more prominent (and damaging) public misconceptions about what cultural studies is.
- To orient newcomers to major debates about cultural studies: Given the tendency of introductory texts to describe and explain cultural studies in a relatively dry and lifeless fashion, one of the primary goals of the project is to situate cultural studies more fully as both a subject and object of active and far-reaching debates about intellectual and political work.
- To challenge practitioners to make cultural studies better: Given the various ways (some more willful than others) that many people who do cultural studies have nonetheless managed to contribute to its problems, one of the primary goals of the project is to offer a set of guidelines for how cultural studies practitioners might refine their -- our -- work in order to make cultural studies a stronger, more effective intellectual and political force.
More generally, this project arises out of my belief that professional scholars and cultural critics need to be more effective at (re)presenting the work we do to a broader public -- and, more specifically, that those of us who do cultural studies need to be especially diligent about communicating the knowledge we produce to audiences who typically dont read scholarly journals or attend academic conferences. In a cultural climate where intellectual work is increasingly depicted as dangerous precisely because it engages with real politics, the need to address the question of how intellectual work is represented (by ourselves and others) is a pressing one.
Growing out of my earlier work on media, race, and identity, Mixed Messages presents a critical analysis of the politics of multiracial and multiethnic identity in contemporary US culture. Focusing on a diverse range of prominent media figures (e.g., Eminem, Spike Lee, Tiger Woods), controversial public policy issues (e.g., affirmative action, racial/ethnic profiling, the census use of racial categories), and my own experiences as a person of multiracial heritage, this project examines three basic phenomena:
- cultural texts, sites, and practices where the existing racial categories rub up against each other in ways that unsettle the naturalness of race,
- the multiple ways that popular media discourses about race actively work to deny the possibility of identities that blur the existing racial categories, and
- governmental and institutional policies that function to create, maintain, reinforce, and police mutually exclusive forms of racial categorization.
While avoiding the too easy (and too naive) notion that we should simply ignore race completely, Mixed Messages ultimately argues that any viable attempt to eradicate racism in the US will require us to abandon the check one box only philosophy that has dominated our collective understanding of racial identity, and to radically reconstruct the categories we use to identify ourselves and each other.