for whom are we Internationalizing?

Following Meaghan Morris and Handel K. Wright's introduction on transnationalism and cultural studies on Culture Studies (Vol. 23, Nos. 5-6, Sept - Nov 2009, 689-93), Raka Shome's "Post-colonial Reflections on the 'Internationalization' of Cultural Studies" (694-719) addresses the politics of "internationalizing" cultural studies. Shome, a post-colonial Indian subject position engaging British cultural studies through the space of an American graduate classroom, draws attentions to larger issues such as frequent unexamined points of departure into the "international," the geo-politics of knowledge production, academic protocols and practices, the gross unevenness in transnational exchange and circulation of knowledge, the continued hegemony of English. Here are some excerpts I found very revealing. I enjoy reading this paper.

"for whom is cultural studies 'going global' or 'international?'...For many like me, raised in post-colonial contexts, our intellectual existence itself has always been a 'post-colonial predicament' from day one; our psyches and imaginations could never escape the violence and relations of the 'international'; our imaginations have always had to move through different routes of the 'international' in order to make sense of ourselves and subjectivities." (p. 701)

"Multiply situated across diverse and colliding relations of the 'international', my post-colonial subject position was one that never had the 'luxury' or the choice to avoid the 'international' in my intellectual production including in cultural studies." (p. 702)

"'internationalizing' - as a term - implicitly assumes a level of agency (for the term connotes an action, or possibility of action); but for many of us, given our own history and our 'international relations with cultural studies or other knowledge formations, we were rarely 'internationalizing' as much as being constantly 'internationalized' upon through relations and academic imaginations which were not of our making." (p. 703, emphasis original)

"many non-western scholars who received training in western institutions, or western style institutions, tend to be fairly privileged in relation to their 'home' population; many do not constitute a typical sample of significantly disempowered post-colonial populations in their own nations and regional contexts." (p. 704)

"as a cultural studies scholar doing cultural studies work in non-western spaces and geographies whose 'knowledge' and 'scholarship' simply do not have that kind of recognition from the Anglo/American academy are issues that have to be continually grappled with." (p. 704)

quoting Larry Crossberg about scholars writing outside of the North Atlantic axis "they have three choices...third, they can downplay the specificity of the example by emphasizing the theoretical argument at the expense of actual analysis." (p. 705-6)

"Given that the ethos and research protocols of western (especially US) institutions are now being transported to through engines of neo-liberalism, and imbibed in, so many non-western institutions, the pressure to publish in English language journals or with English language publishing houses has never perhaps been greater, even if one is not situated in a western geography, if one is to 'succeed' as an academic." (p. 707)

"given the geo-political and historical inequities that inform the global landscape and its intellectual traffic, a non-native speaker/writer of 'English' from a Western geography or structure is indeed positioned far more differently in such a landscape than someone from an Asian geography." (p. 708, emphasis original) Shome takes French and Bangladeshi intellectuals as opposing examples.