“Cultural studies in Illiberal Times.”

Abstract

This talk will provide a synopsis of my forthcoming book, Illiberal China: The PRC as Ideological Challenge (2017), but with an added emphasis on the state of cultural studies in Hong Kong and as best as I can tell, in China and socalled greater China (Macau, Taiwan, and perhaps Singapore). In other words my question is this: If political liberalism of the traditional, social, and ‘democratic’ kind, today is both degraded and unhelpful in understanding the rise of China and the current political conjuncture in Asia and globally (a major theme of the book), then how might cultural studies respond? Is it complicit or powerless in the degradation of liberalism and/or the liberal university? Can it think through and with, or around, and not simply against the PRC? Should it? If nothing else this much is at least clear to the author: the anti-statism so dominant in cultural studies, stemming from a one-sided assimilation of French theory and from the American university system, has reached an analytical and political dead end. State capacity and representative politics are in crisis everywhere. The state has in that sense been defeated, and it is not a good thing for ‘culture’ or for, as they say, the 99%. Rather than retreating into some wish-fulfilment thought process about anarchy, multitudes, “velvet” or “jasmine” or “umbrella” revolutions, global convergence, and so on, cultural studies should rather write towards reclaiming the state as the proper endpoint of political analysis and popular struggles.