Acknowledgements
Thanks to Arnold Shepperson especially for his critical discussions on aspects of this paper, and for his help on data analysis. John Williams' detailed and very extensive critique of an earlier draft of the paper is also acknowledged. Thanks also to Ruth Teer-Tomaselli for detailed discussion on this paper. Others who contributed to discussion on the paper include Terje Skjerdal.

June 2000

ABSTRACT
Methodology, policy and the turn to post-LitCrit, are both strengths and weaknesses in contemporary cultural studies. They are strengths in that they have freed the field from the tyranny of quantitative methods and a deterministic positivism; but they are simultaneously weakneses, in that cultural studies now exhibits an ambiguous relation to the `material' - to contexts. Texts (with a capital `T') are disarticulated from contexts in the post-LitCrit `tradition'. Though `context' is sometimes recuperated via the category of `experience', the commodification and bureaucratisation of the academy ensures that academics have less and less access, time and resources, to visit and participate in the terrain of that experience.

The ensuing consequences of historically inappropriate appropriations of cultural studies is now being felt in regressive studies supposedly couched within the democratising imperative that was once the raison d'etre of the field. This keynote address will examine the consequences of the loss of the `material' from certain inflections of cultural studies in South Africa. The Interim Report of the South African Human Rights Commission into Racism and the Media and other so-called monitoring projects will constitute my case study. Using the concept of dynamic justice, I will propose a return to context based on evaluative criteria rooted in the human condition. Instead of `Texts', or even `class consciousness', I will argue that the principal contextual criteria for cultural studies research could be based on the socio-political value ideas of Freedom and Life Chances.

For more information on the conference click here