Abstract
This issue marks both a cause for celebration and more somber reflection at the Journal of Communication Inquiry. Forty years ago, in the spring of 1974, the first issue of JCI was published. Any time you start hitting numbers like 40 in an anniversary (or a birthday for that matter), it makes sense to start considering things like “history,” “longevity,” and “legacy.” But between the writing of the first and final drafts of this introduction, the instinct for reflection would achieve a pointed poignancy with the passing of a giant in our field, Dr. Stuart Hall.
In future issues of JCI, others far more qualified than I will likely be sharing personal and professional perspectives on Dr. Hall’s history and legacy. But I would like to take this opportunity, on behalf of the Journal and all of the students and faculty who have worked for four decades to keep this critically focused journal running, to say while we mourn the loss of this intellectual luminary, we more strongly celebrate the life of this singular human being.
We also celebrate the Journal’s particular connection to Dr. Hall’s scholarship. In June of 1986, JCI became the first journal based in the United States to feature Dr. Hall’s work (Chen, 1986). In addition to two works by Dr. Hall, the issue also featured an interview with the critical studies pioneer as well as other works by other notable scholars in the field (Lawrence Grossberg, Dick Hebdige, Angela McRobbie, and Hanno Hardt) that looked at the history and prospects for British style cultural studies in the United States. All of this is to say if we are proud of the place JCI has in the field of critical scholarship, it is because we know the size and height of the shoulders upon which we stand.
It is perhaps also fitting that the essays and articles in this issue touch upon the ways in which the threads of history weave themselves into the pattern of our current lives. In this issue, you will find an examination of the place for critical studies in today’s academy and the echoes of past protests and struggles from oppression in modern debates of media control, representations, and freedom.
The year before Ed McLuskie earned his PhD at the University of Iowa, he served as editor for the first issue of JCI. In his essay, he talks about some of the ways new technology has changed how researchers interface with journals and the importance of a critical cultural journal like JCI (and the students and faculty who keep it alive) in an increasingly neoliberalized and commoditized academic profession.
All (or at least many) eyes were on Russia earlier this year as Sochi played host to the Winter Olympics, which in and of themselves were no small source of controversy. In this issue, Anna Popkova takes us back to an earlier controversy (the December 2011 election protests) and explores how the cultural legacy of political dissent in the privacy of Soviet kitchens might be expressing itself on the Russian Internet.
Sangeet Kumar looks at a different kind of debate surrounding the decision by the Indian government to open up Indian print media to foreign investment. Kumar examines the way each side articulated their arguments to shared culturally specific meanings to make very different arguments. He argues that this discursive dimension of globalization is a key site of struggle to make the meanings that will guide policy choices.
Culturally specific meanings of a different sort guide the work of Shayla Thiel-Stern, who looks beyond recent offerings of stories about courageous females (like Brave) and asks what kinds of adventurous role models existed for girls 50–70 years ago. Through a series of interviews with women who grew up in the mid-20th century, Thiel-Stern finds some powerful intersections of media, identity, and representation that is worthy of a place in the larger body of feminist media scholarship.
Instead of looking at adventure stories that feature a female hero, David Oh looks at a Hollywood blockbuster which he argues is an example par excellence of a text advancing White masculine supremacy. Oh finds the modern incarnation of the classical European construction of the nefarious “Oriental” as well as the ideological work of setting up a hypermasculine, White, standard of superiority in the highly stylized and fictionalized account of the Battle of Thermopylae, 300.
As we at JCI consider where the journal has been and where it is going, I leave you with some thoughts from Dr. Hall on the kind of endlessly evolving future he wanted to see for critical cultural studies: I mean that it is always self-reflectively deconstructing itself; it is always operating on the progressive/regressive movement of the need to go on theorizing. I am not interested in Theory, I am interested in going on theorizing. And that also means that cultural studies has to be open to external influences, for example, to the rise of new social movements, to psychoanalysis, to feminism, to cultural differences. Such influences are likely to have, and must be allowed to have, a strong impact on the content, the modes of thought and the theoretical problematics being used. In that sense, cultural studies cannot possibly thrive by isolating itself in academic terms from those external influences. So in all those ways I think there are good reasons, not just personal predilections, for saying that it must remain open-ended. It is theorizing in the postmodern context, if you like, in the sense that it does not believe in the finality of a finished theoretical paradigm. (Grossberg, 1986)