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Inhabiting Cultures as a Way to Other Worlds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2018

GEORGE LIPSITZ
GEORGE LIPSITZ*
Affiliation:
Department of Black Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Email: [email protected].
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Extract

In a powerful but frequently overlooked passage in The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon describes expressive culture as a register of incipient social relations. He maintains that long before liberation struggles assume organized political form, perceptive observers will detect the emergence of unusual kinds of expression popping up to summon the people to view the status quo as both unreal and unacceptable.1 The essays in this special issue dedicated to the theme of Inhabiting Cultures display precisely this evidence of incipient critique and transformation. They demonstrate that tomorrow is today; that the reigning cultural forms authored and authorized by domination, exclusion and oppression have become exhausted and obsolete; and that the stirrings of a new world in the making are already here.

Type
Special Forum: Inhabiting Cultures
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , November 2018 , pp. 982 - 990
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2018 

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References

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10 Ibid., 79.

11 Taylor, Diana, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's Dirty War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 265Google Scholar.