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Editorial Statement: AfricanCultural StudiesKeyan G. Tomaselli & Handel Kashope WrightPublished online: 21 Feb 2008.

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Editorial Statement:African Cultural Studies

In many of the impressive cultural analyses emanating from South Africaand reaching us in foreign political skies, there is an implicit assumptionthat the founding moment of cultural studies in South Africa is the sameas that which founded British Cultural Studies . . . . What is even moreastonishing, is the assumption that cultural studies in South Africa ismerely the continuation of English cultural studies on a different historicalplane.

(Ntongela Masilela 1988, p. 2)

The cultural studies borderland . . . is not a power-free site for unrest-rained and heteroglossic dialogue and exchange, but a contested terrainwhere concrete, differentially positioned subjects have to forge particularstrategies to speak and be heard.

(Ien Ang 1998, p. 20)

Introduction

We offer this issue on the theme ‘African Cultural Studies’, bothenthusiastically and with some ambivalence. On the one hand, as twocollaborating Africans, we are enthused about the publication of an issue ofCultural Studies dedicated to African Cultural Studies. This journal issue adds toour individual and collaborative efforts to contribute to the mapping anddevelopment of a plurality of African cultural studies and to making a space forAfrican approaches in the evolving international discourse of cultural studies.On the other hand, we are uneasy about the dangers (e.g. homogenization,impreciseness, exclusivity, incompleteness, blinkered nationalism, reproduc-tion of problematic power relations) that exist or constantly threaten toemerge in nation-based and region-based traditions of cultural studies. Weshare this general unease with others such as Stuart Hall (1992) who hasdescribed British cultural studies as ‘a pretty awkward signifier’ (p. 277) andLarry Grossberg who observed that ‘the claims of national traditions aregenerally wrong headed . . . .’ (quoted in Wright 2001, p. 155). Ourpreference is for a transnational cultural studies (e.g. Ang 1998, Chen1992, O’Connor 1993, Spivak, 1993). The reality, however, is that culturalstudies has evolved and continues to evolve primarily along regional lines andhowever uncomfortable that might make some of us, there is no way to put thegenie of say British cultural studies back in the bottle of cultural studieshistory. Thus, there are national versions of cultural studies in a few African

Cultural Studies Vol. 22, No. 2 March 2008, pp. 173�186

ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online – 2008 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502380701788986

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countries (e.g. one can discern different kinds of South African culturalstudies) as well as a much looser discursive formation that can be labelledAfrican cultural studies. We are engaged in two critical and seeminglycontradictory tasks; first to contribute to the development of African culturalstudies and second, to promote and contribute to the development oftransnational cultural studies. Our position is that as it develops and if it istaken up as an integral aspect of the internationalization of cultural studies,African cultural studies can contribute to the evolution of transnational culturalstudies.

Despite some of the dangers, there is potential collective strength inAfrican cultural studies, especially in the international context of culturalstudies. While internationally dominant region-based versions of culturalstudies (read British and American) are readily recognizable and engagedaround the world, marginal versions have been restricted for the most part totheir own locations, save for interesting flashes that momentarily interrupt aninternational cultural studies gaze fixed on the centre [e.g. special issue ofCultural Studies on Nordic Cultural Studies (Eskola and Vainikkala 1994)];inclusion of essays on the institutionalization of Turkish cultural studies in athemed journal issue of International Journal of Cultural Studies (Maton andWright 2002). The more substantial of these flashes (e.g. a journal specialissue), we believe (or is that hope?), are more likely to be noticed, recognizedand considered (however fleetingly) for their distinctness. It is our hope thatthis journal issue will contribute to the evolution of both African culturalstudies as well as transnational cultural studies.

Ntongela Masilela’s nativization and other conceptions ofAfrican cultural studies

While Ntongela Masilela might not be a household name in internationalcultural studies discourse, he is for the two of us, and we would suggest oughtto be for African cultural studies in general, a touchstone for the developmentof both South African cultural studies in particular and African cultural studiesin general. In this editorial we return time and again to Masilela’s brief butquite significant intervention as a point of reference for our observations onAfrican cultural studies. Masilela (1988) wrote a preface to what is probablyone of the earliest self-identified edited book of essays on South Africancultural studies, namely Keyan Tomaselli’s (1989) Rethinking Culture. As SouthAfrican, and indeed African cultural studies grow and spread, they do soaround Masilela’s trenchant reservations, recommendations, admonishmentsand vision. These constitute an originary argument about one strand of Africancultural studies, namely, nativization, which Masilela articulated in reaction towhat he perceived as merely derivative African cultural studies which simply

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appropriated British cultural studies and at best applied it to the South Africancontext. Our own preference is for a third strand which occupies a middleground where African cultural studies draws on aspects of both nativist andderivative cultural studies and is developed in conversation with internationalcultural studies (Kanneh 1998, Wright 2004).

In his brief preface, entitled ‘Establishing an Intellectual Bridgehead’,Masilela appealed for a ‘nativisation’ of cultural studies in South Africa (cf.Kerr 1989). This task, he suggested, would occur in the context of‘Africanization’ which he describes as the re-orientation of intellectual andhistorical perspectives of cultural studies in terms of African culturaltrajectories and history. Masilela thus forward-thinkingly linked South Africato the continent as a whole at a time when the cultural boycott andinternational pressure on apartheid was at its peak. Significantly, then, incompiling this themed issue of Cultural Studies we found ourselves selectingpapers from a predominance of South African authored-submissions. Theseauthors (not all of whom are included here) tended to be well-located indominant Western cultural studies paradigms familiar to readers of thisjournal. However, we wanted to also incorporate studies which have grownmore directly from African contexts, as Masilela recommended, ones whichdraw on African philosophies and indigenous frames of reference. Culturalstudies, as Wright has argued (1998), has emerged in many different forms ondifferent continents and conditions, each developing unique characteristics, inanswering often the same questions. We wanted something of this specificityto shine through this issue.

We have mentioned one primary framework for conceptualizing Africancultural studies, namely its relationship with African intellectual work on theone hand and outer-continental work on the other hand (the results of whichare derivative/appropriated cultural studies in Africa, nativized Africancultural studies and a version of cultural studies which draws on both and isarticulated in conversation with international cultural studies). Anotherframework involves the location of Africans: the discourse of African culturalstudies is being developed primarily by Africans on the continent as well asAfrican emigres in the diaspora. In writing the preface for Tomaselli’s editedcollection, Masilela, a South African writing from exile in the US, made one ofthe first outer-continental interventions in the development of African culturalstudies. Our own collaboration reflects and continues this dual source ofdevelopment of African cultural studies. One of us, Handel Kashope Wright, isa Sierra Leonean who was introduced to cultural studies while undertakinggraduate studies in Canada, has taught in the US and now teaches culturalstudies and education in Canada. The other, Keyan Tomaselli, is a SouthAfrican who teaches media and cultural studies in South Africa, and has beeninstrumental in the development of South African and African media studiesand an indigenized cultural studies. We have also selected essays to reflect both

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continental African voices (Lize van Robbroeck and Natasha Distiller fromSouth Africa, Fibian Kavulani Lukalo from Kenya, Sunday Enessi Ododo fromNigeria) and voices of Africans living in the diaspora (Boulou de B’beri-Cameroonian in Canada, Awad Ibrahim- Sudanese in the US, Ali Abdi-Somalian in Canada). In addition to these two principal sets of contributors,there are also diasporic Africans (used here in the albeit problematic loosesense that references black people outside the continent) and Africanists whoare contributing to the development of African cultural studies and the formerof this last two categories is represented by Glenn Jordan (an African Americanwho is a long time resident in Wales) and his contribution to this themed issue(Jordan 1973).

Themes and issues in African cultural studies

In issuing the Call for Papers for this themed issue, we identified a number ofpossible sub-themes:

. Post-apartheid and democratization issues. Crucial here are issues ofessentialism, the divine rights of monarchy, the role of the ancestors,patriarchy/feminism and so on.

. Debates on identity and the dis/connections between continental anddiasporic constructions.

. Cultural studies deriving from performative contexts, such as variousforms of popular theatre, their relation to Freirian pedagogic principles,action research, education and resistance.

. Issues and debates around Africanization/indigenization of different kindsof cultural studies in different parts of Africa.

. The relationship between African philosophical approaches and culturalstudies.

. Comparative analysis between ‘Western’ cultural studies and Africanapproaches, and the nature of their engagement with the former.

With the caveat that these are the selections of two individuals rather than adefinitive, authoritative statement about the status quo of African culturalstudies, we identify these as some of the issues and trends in African culturalstudies. The articles included in this themed issue were selected to cross all ofthe earlier themes, with the concept of identity being the cement binding thepapers into an overarching narrative. For example, in ‘Surviving the Future �Towards a South African Cultural Studies’, Natasha Distiller articulates thegeneral outlines of and an argument to make a space for South African culturalstudies, and issues of identity (especially race, class and language) central in herdiscussion. Fibian Kavulani Lukalo in ‘Outliving Generations: Youth Traver-

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sing Borders through Popular Music in Everyday Urban Life in East Africa’sheds light on what is clearly a vibrant, emerging urban youth culture in EastAfrica. The Bongo Flava music described provides an excellent opportunity toexamine a dynamic space where multiple forms of identity (national, regional,generational, gendered, linguistic, etc.) intersect in complex ways.

All the studies published in this volume engage the notion of ‘Africanness’in interrogating issues of identity and the notion of ‘culture’. This is arecurring theme to which the journal Critical Arts has devoted several specialissues (e.g. Wright 2002, 2003a, Williams 2000). Wright, (2003b) has arguedthat black people in ‘predominantly black’ countries in Africa do not selfidentify as black but rather become black or are assigned blackness as anidentity marker in the West [for a parallel argument, see Michelle Wright(2004) on how African Americans became black]. There is a welcomeconceptual continuity reflected in the fact that Awad Ibrahim and Glenn Jordanmake similar points in their contributions to this themed issue. For and in theWest, race is a crucial, definitive marker (e.g. Webster 1992). For the vastmajority of Africans, however, it is questions of ethnicity and relationship tothe ancestors that are the most crucial markers of identity (Kasoma 1996,Ododo in this issue, Jordan, in this issue). The importance of the ancestors andthe assumption of overlapping social/ancestral dimensions is evident in SundayEnessi Ododo’s ‘Facekuerade: The Transformational Duality in Ebira-EkuechiFestival Performance’. Few cultural and media studies scholars admit theperceptively real dimensions of religion in the everyday life of people in mostsocieties and communities around the world. This lack of scholarly discussionof religion is a blind spot in much analysis deriving from cultural and mediastudies scholars living in industrial and post-industrial societies. Ododo’s paperbegins to address this lack in Western-derived (non-anthropological/theolo-gical) scholarship. Too often the blight of apartheid has been seen as operatingpurely as a form of racial oppression for blacks in South Africa. However, in‘Beyond the Traditional/Modernity Dialectic: African Nationalist Subjectivitiesin South Africa Print and Visual Culture of the Early Twentieth Century’, Lizevan Robbroeck illustrates how race and class intersected in the production ofthe virtually untenable position of black middle-class subjects during SouthAfrica’s apartheid era. Beyond adding nuance to accounts of the apartheid era,her essay is something of a reminder to the field of cultural studies that classmatters.

Shepperson and Tomaselli (1992) in ‘Semiotics in an African Context:‘‘Science’’ vs ‘‘Priest-craft’’’, suggest a way of understanding Africanontologies from the perspectives of African philosophers, linguists and amathematician. Some of the papers in this issue appear to be operating in asimilar vein. For example, Ali A. Abdi’s article ‘Europe and African ThoughtSystems and Philosophies of Education: ‘‘Re-culturing’’ the Trans-temporalDiscourses’ draws on similar African philosophical sources. A review of

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Kwame Nkrumah (1964), Leopold Senghor (1964), Amilcar Cabral (1971),Franz Fanon (1965), and similar influential early twentieth century African-based contributors to philosophy, suggests that the background to con-temporary African philosophy is not the colonial experience, but theexperience of anti-colonial resistance and liberation movements. This is thestuff of original praxis-based cultural studies. The context that legitimated thearguments of African philosophers, and validated their premises andconclusions, has not merely passed as the colonial administrators were sentpacking; it dissipated as the object of liberation has been realized. A liberatedsociety does not need a liberation movement. The philosophical point of thishistorical digression is that the leaders of liberation movements must reason inthe mode of advocacy, they must mobilze people to act, not reflect. Crucial tothe unfolding of African cultural studies (plural) will be the philosophicaldifficulty and rhetorical force (re)conceptualizing traditional concepts andunderstanding African societies as being as dynamic as are those in highlyindustrialized societies. As a way of reframing distinctions between oral andwritten cultures, a crucial part of these investigations into Africa require arelated reconceptualization of the role of orality in the written philosophicaland literary traditions of the West.

Masilela’s (1987, 1988) distinct preference was and continues to be for thecultural studies discourse of the 1970s, when the field was engaged withproducing history from below, addressing issues of class struggle and workingwith (and against) neo-Marxism. When offered the opportunity, he declined toreview specific essays for this collection, asserting that, in general terms, heanticipated that, like much of the current work in cultural studies, the papersmight engage post-modernism and he did not favour post-modernist work. Inhis general feedback to us, he reiterated that a viable and utilitarian Africancultural studies ought to engage history (especially history from below) and bebased on empirical studies and evidence, documentation and archival materials.Just as there is no one cultural studies internationally, there can never be asingle African cultural studies. The majority of the papers in this collectionreflect Masilela’s general vision but in instances here and there (e.g. Lize vanRobbroeck’s reference to Foucault’s notion of the regulation of the body, andthe albeit post-colonial employment of the notion of hybridity by NatashaDistiller, Boulou de B’beri and Awad Ibrahim) they perhaps rub against thegrain of a strict interpretation of that vision.

Masilela’s position has implications for transnational cultural studies. Itechoes and dovetails with various calls for a (re)turn to cultural studies aspolitical, praxis work. These include Robert McChesney’s (1996) argumentsthat the turn to post-modernism is rendering cultural studies apolitical andirrelevant; Hall’s (1992) admonishments against theoreticism in culturalstudies; Tony Bennett’s (1992) call for cultural studies to become a form ofpolicy work, Ann Gray’s (2003) articulation of the importance of empirical

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work in general and ethnography in particular for grounding cultural studies,and our own advocacy for cultural studies praxis (Tomaselli 1998, Wright2003c).

African cultural studies and their international reception

There are various ways in which a discourse declares its presence and evidenceof the existence of African cultural studies exists in such forms as centres,programmes and conferences at institutions on the continent. Anotherindicator is of course publications and journals are an especially goodindication of ongoing work in a field. We thought it might be useful,therefore, to point to a few examples of African-published and edited journalsdevoted to cultural studies or inclusive of cultural studies work. Followingthat, we give our impressions of the international reception of Africanintellectual work.

Africa Media Review (African Council for Communication Education,Nairobi, Kenya published communication studies on African topics). Threekinds of cultural studies are represented in this publication. First, were oraland indigenous communication methods. Second, after 1992 a Marxism which,while drawing in British cultural studies, attempted to reframe this approach interms of African perspectives. Articles re-examined Freire, Cabral and Fanonin terms of post-Cold War issues, and new media technologies. Third, wasparticipatory development research, development support communication,and action research, all of which emphasize bottom-up strategies ofdevelopment and meaning-making. Issues of development are never far fromuseful cultural studies in Africa.

Critical Arts: a Journal for Cultural Studies started life in 1980 as an anti-apartheid vehicle through which to problematize the study of culture andmedia in terms of resistance. Its authors and editors were not even initiallyaware of the Birmingham School until some British readers and academictravellers brought this to their attention in the early 1980s. Since bothBirmingham and Critical Arts worked off Marxist approaches, it is not surprisingthat early Critical Arts authors had developed along similar, if initially, paralleltracks. Following 1994, Critical Arts systematically expanded its interests toinclude the Africa, the Indian Ocean Rim, South�South and North�Southrelations (Tomaselli and Shepperson 2000).

Media Development (World Association for Christian Communication,London) provides short articles on Third World issues, and has providedspace for key discussions on media and democracy in Africa. Many of thesearticles are framed within cultural studies notions of democracy, overlaid bythe dimension of a Vatican II Theology, which relocates communication withpeople in communion in communities (Traber 1989).

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Readings in African Popular Culture (Barber 1997) provides a relativelyencyclopaedic compilation of particular forms of popular cultural Africanproductivity: orality to television, music and song, vehicle slogans, theatre,and so on. This approach to cultural studies, as Barber’s Introduction indicates,is increasingly borrowing from British cultural studies and its reconstitutionsby authors who have published extensively in journals like Research in AfricanLiteratures, Africa, Critical Arts, and Passages.

Journal of Cultural Studies published by the African Cultural Institute,Nigeria, is firmly rooted in African contexts, but in a dialectical relationshipwith travelling theories as they impact, and find roots, in African conditions.The overarching concerns of authors who have published in this journal dealwith those issues of a pressing and nature: ethnicity, development, politicalleadership, gender, literacy, the African renaissance and relationships betweenall of these and the evolution of African cultures and cultural studies.

Masilela (1988) acknowledges the importance of British derivations ofcultural studies and the assistance they might give to establishing intellectualbridge-heads on the political terrains of South African and African histories.But intellectual references, he asserts, need to come from within Africa itself.In 1988 (in South Africa at least) these were few and far between. Later,journals like Critical Arts (South Africa) and Journal of Cultural Studies (Nigeria),amongst others, blazed an Africanizing trail amongst First and Second Worldpublications which predominate in setting global theoretical agendas. Since itsinaugural conference in 1996, the Crossroads in Cultural Studies hasdeliberately opened up spaces for marginalized parts of the world, includingAfrica. Indeed, the Crossroads conferences have included several keynote,plenary, and spotlight session presentations and some of these have later beenpublished in journals like European Journal for Cultural Studies, InternationalJournal of Cultural Studies, and Critical Arts (see Teer-Tomaselli and Roome1997, Wright 1998, 2003a,) and edited collections (e.g. Tomaselli andWright, 2007).

Theories and paradigms travel. As they travel they mutate and change,reconstitute initial emphases, and often disregard their origins. The way thatcultural studies has travelled ‘to’ and ‘within’ Africa, is both similar to, anddifferent from its trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific mutations. When suchtheories do ‘arrive’, they are:

a. often unproblematically applied in unreconstituted forms to differentconditions at their destinations, as Masilela (1988) has noted;

b. often appropriated by politicians and cultural commissars for partypolitical ends, as in the case of apartheid (Muller and Tomaselli 1990);

c. sometimes used to disguise new hegemonic trajectories which simplysubstitute the shell of cultural studies terms for neo-fascist content, anarticulation shorn of its original political project, or a political project inwhich personal agendas are disguised (Tomaselli 2001).

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d. only occasionally noted by dominant Western cultural studies (which forargument’s sake includes some approaches of Australasian culturalstudies), which seems largely oblivious of developments on, in and fromthe African continent. Some Western scholars in and from the formercolonies have taken up African work as they ‘talk back’ or ‘write back’ tothe metropoles of intellectual production (see. e.g. CCCS 1986, Gilroy1993). However, these have been the exception to the rule of Westerncultural studies neglecting to take up and work with African culturalstudies.

In short, cultural studies developed by African scholars, activists and culturalworkers is studied in the North mainly in African studies programmes, less soin communication, and almost not at all in cultural studies itself. Despite theopening of spaces for African cultural studies, it appears that very little of theAfrican corpus gets to inform the major international cultural studies debates.Being classified ‘Africa’, it is apparently relegated to the file marked‘interesting: not necessarily relevant’.

To the papers

Boulou E. de B’beri’s, ‘Africanicity in Black Cinema: A Conjunctural Groundfor New Practices of Identity’ examines the interaction between black culturaland political identity in order to determine new conjunctural ‘practices ofidentity’, found in selected black films. He includes two specific paradigms ofcommunication through which black people can articulate their identity andchallenges the notions that they assert. In addition, he interrogates theconcepts of hybridity and authenticity in identity-creation. His search for asense of Africanicity is articulated through films such as Malcolm X and Beloved,as well as through major role players in the contemporary film industry.

‘Beyond the Traditional/Modernity Dialectic: African Nationalist Sub-jectivities in South Africa Print and Visual Culture of the Early TwentiethCentury’ by Lize van Robbroeck, introduces another realm of African identity,that of the double consciousness involved in being ‘black’ and ‘European’. Sheexplores the ambivalent subject positions manifest in the South African blackmiddle class, by providing an analysis of the visual culture of the earlytwentieth century. She displays the differences between the public discourse ofthe black press and that of individual black artists. She gives specific referenceto artist Milwa Pemba’s work, as well as to certain black publications whichsubstantiate her claims.

Awad Ibrahim in ‘The New Flaneur: Subaltern Cultural Studies, AfricanYouth in Canada and the Semiology of In-betweenness’ contributes agrounding of identity theory through an ethnography of a specific group of

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African youth attending a high school in Ontario, Canada. The location ofnotions of hybridity within a cultural context and within relations of power, isan important corrective on essentializing discourses of identity so characteristicof ‘African thought’ As such, Ibraham puts forward a political argumentregarding the renegotiations of African identities in contexts in the North.Language is understood as a performance of an in-between identity that is theresult of their new context as immigrants and refugees in Canada, rather thanmerely examples of the kind of slang and shibboleths also used in, for instance,African societies themselves where cultural expression has also been influencedby the globalization of cultural form from the North such as rap and hip-hop.These quotations underpin the argument that these youth have ‘become Black’,where ‘Blackness becomes a code, a language, fashion, a hair-do, a bodilyexpression, and above all an experiental memory’. If these youth have indeed‘become black’ in their new context in Canada, how does this affect theirposition in society? Do they experience discrimination on the basis of thisblackness, or is it a means to solidarity with the experiences of otherimmigrants and refugees? How are they looked upon by other students in theschool where the ethnographer ‘hung out’? How do they negotiate theirposition within these spaces, and how does their newly acquired ‘blackness’provide them with agency to resist hegemonic discourses of otherness in thecontext of immigration into a country with its particular notions ofmulticulturalism? These are some of the questions with which Ibrahimgrapples.

Fibian Kavulani Lukalo’s ‘Outliving Generations: Youth TraversingBorders through Popular Music in Everyday Urban Life in East Africa’showcases the emerging urban youth culture in East Africa. Through thepopular Bongo Flava music, one is able to observe multiple forms of identity(national, regional, generational, gendered, linguistic, etc.) and how theyintersect in complex ways. The artists such as Mr Nice and Lady JayDee,singing mainly in the Kiswahili language, construct a cultural space within theirmusic, which draws from their African roots but is applicable to their currentsituations and ideologies. The music provides an interesting space of identitycreation, since restrictions such as power and class are defied and the music israther embraced across all ethnic, religious, gender, socio-economic, age andpolitical divides.

Natasha Distiller in ‘‘‘Surviving the Future’’ � Towards a South AfricanCultural Studies’, presents a further interrogation of identity in Africa, butlooks specifically at South Africa and the difficulties encountered in assessing acontemporary South African cultural space. She gazes at the nation post-1994,but particularly at the identity with which the nation has been ‘burdened with’.This includes considering aspects such as race, class and language as well ascertain constructed phrases which restrict the definition of South Africancultural studies. She includes the concepts of creolization and hybridity and

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their attempts and short-comings in describing South African culturalpractices, histories and identities.

Sunday Enessi Ododo’s paper is based on analysing, theorizing andproposing an understanding of the Ekuechi festival of the Ebira Tao of CentralNigeria, offering an analysis of mask and mask-less significance in those kindsof performances, which the author handles well. Facekuerade theory containsthe essentiality of the transformation duality, the fact that the culture to whichOdodo is referring can see ‘godliness’ in a mask-less performance, and still seethe person performing as one of their own. This is linked to the way ancestorsare actually treated even away from the performances. Usually there areaccompanying libations, sacrifices other rites which highlight the linkagebetween the ancestors and the living.

Ali A. Abdi in ‘Europe and African thought Systems and Philosophies ofEducation: ‘‘Re-culturing’’ the Trans-temporal Discourses’ is largely critical ofEuropean modes of thinking and attitudes towards Africa. He asserts thatcontemporary African philosophy may have been motivated by resistance tocolonial and liberation efforts. It is in this line of thought that he challenges theway in which African philosophy has been and is conceived by Westernphilosophies as inferior. He charts the implications that have resulted from thiscategorization and highlights prominent debates in the field.

‘An African Presence in Europe: Portraits of Somali Elders’ by GlennJordan intertwines personal narrative of author and subjects with imageryrelating to a diasporic history and cultural studies. He describes his project(The Somali Elders Project) as ‘a cultural-political intervention combininghumanist portrait photography, collaborative ethnography and oral history’.His aim is to bring the marginalized voices, images and experiences of theSomali Elders in Wales to the fore, by relaying their stories to a wideraudience. He highlights a theme, prevalent to this collection, that of the‘African’ identity, questioning whether these men consider themselvesEuropean or African, considering they have spent most of their lives inEurope. His article is largely self-reflexive, as he considers his presence, aswell as that of his camera in the project, asking questions such as, how does thesubject present himself to the camera and how does he address you, theviewer?

Conclusion

In an article commissioned for the inaugural issue of the International Journal ofCultural Studies, Tomaselli (1998) wrote, ‘It is up to us in Africa and thoseconcerned about the continent to ensure that our voices are heard, our ideasdebated, and our theories engaged’. It is important that we stir the richdiversity and heritage of African scholarship into the international debates and

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directly address the continent’s ‘fringe’ status. This theme issue of CulturalStudies is dedicated to this objective, adding to the growing body of work thatincludes journals, books, conferences, presentations, academic programmesand centres and empirical and conceptual research on African cultural studies.However, in terms of the project of transnational cultural studies, establishingand putting forward African cultural studies is only one part of the equation.The other side has to do with the reception of African cultural studies as it isbeing put forward. African cultural studies needs to be taken up both as acomponent of regional versions of cultural studies internationally and perhapsmore importantly as contributory to the evolution of transnational culturalstudies. Of course, there is always the issue of how this is done, with all theattendant possibilities and problems that readings and misreadings entail. AsAng (1998) once pointed out, at play at the cultural studies borderland ‘is apolitics of (mis)communication where the transfer of meaning cannot be takenfor granted’ (p. 20). Wright’s (1998) caveat to the field is probably stillpertinent: as Africans we can only be at home in international/transnationalcultural studies when we can say ‘African cultural studies’ without non-Africans raising an eyebrow and us feeling like biting our tongue. Better yet,we can only be at home in cultural studies when non-Africans engage Africancultural studies without us raising an eyebrow and wishing they would bitetheir tongue.

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Keyan G. Tomaselli &Handel Kashope Wright

Guest Editors

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