Abstract
In Discourse and Culture, Shi Xu puts together some of his most important contributions from the last 25 years to the interrelated fields of Discourse Studies, (Socio)Linguistics, and Cultural Studies. The result is a compelling collection of journal articles, book reviews, editorials, and book chapters that points to the crucial contribution of a cultural approach to the study of discursive practices, as well as to the different hopes, challenges, and tensions embedded in it.
This book is organized into three different parts, which are thematically rather than chronologically organized. Part I, titled ‘Cultural Critiques of Discourse Scholarship’ and comprising the author’s most recent work, is the broadest and most theoretical in scope. With a markedly programmatic tone, it introduces a Cultural Approach to Discourse as a way to overcome the ‘universalism’ and ‘aculturalism’ that Shi Xu finds pervasive in most current scholarship in Discourse Studies. The nine chapters in this section explicitly question these dominant assumptions in discourse theory and methods and seek alternative starting points that can lead researchers toward a much needed ‘multiculturalist scholarship’ (p. 76). As part of this project, Shi Xu draws attention to the inherently constructive character of discourses, not only in terms of the subjects and objects of study but also with regard to ‘scientific’ language itself and the way it is strategically used to legitimize certain approaches under the cover of a presumed objectivity.
The second part of this book, titled ‘Studies of Cultural Forms and Functions’, draws mostly on Shi Xu’s work in the Netherlands between 1992 and 1999 and features interview data from Chinese students and professionals living in Amsterdam, as well as textual representations of China from a Dutch perspective in the form of travelogues. This section has a definite socio-cognitive flavor and presents more specific analyses of different discursive practices, such as accounting, meta-communication, or explanation, and their relation to more general argumentation strategies that reinforce dichotomies between ‘us’ and ‘them’. At a broader level, the different articles grouped in this section point to the crucial links between discourse, culture, and ideology and the potential value of a deconstructive strategy that can help scholars uncover the assumptions embedded in discourses by and about the other.
Part III, ‘Enquiries into Unfamiliar or New Discourses’, explicitly extends Shi Xu’s objects of enquiry and thus exemplifies his goal of contributing to the reconstruction of ‘culturally pluralist, dialogical and egalitarian paradigms’ in scholarly work (p. 104). Thus, this section brings historically marginalized or ‘othered’ discourses and practices to the fore and explains them in their own culturally influenced terms. Specifically, the chapters in this section try to offer deeper, more dialectical, accounts of non-Western discourses and practices, both within and beyond academia, as a reaction against over-simplistic, static, and essentializing interpretations coming from a West-centric perspective.
As a whole, the different critiques, analyses, and theoretical and practical concepts introduced throughout this book contribute to a coherent and ever-evolving project and body of work that insistently shows the fundamental role of culture in shaping and reproducing discourses, as well as the possibilities of theorizing ‘from in between cultures’ (p. 21) as a way to enable discourses that are ‘inclusive, non-hegemonic, and collaborative with regard to cultural “others”’ (p. 30). Importantly, the chapters also point to crucial challenges and tensions embedded in the task of developing a culturally sensitive kind of discourse studies that does not automatically privilege one perspective, but instead aims at an open exchange of ideas and practices that are ‘harmonious, revitalizing and enriching’ (p. 80). In the spirit of this book, these tensions are not treated here as problems or ends, but rather as necessary and productive starting points for engagement and growth.
First, as Shi Xu points out, there is an urgent need in current scholarship to question the different theories that inform our research as we move into particular contexts. This is an argument that Shi Xu develops with specific references to CDA and its sweeping, unproblematized ‘application’ to all kinds of discursive practices throughout the world, but it could easily be transposed to the social sciences and the humanities at a broader level. At the same time, and for the sake of the ‘in-between-cultural position’ that Shi Xu proposes – especially between East and West – there is also a need to avoid engaging in the equally sweeping practice of automatically reducing a particular approach to its immediate historical and geographical location. In this sense, it might be more useful to think about specific concepts, as well as the phenomena that they allow us to explain and those they do not, as a way to keep working on a two-way exchange of categories of practice and analysis that can take us closer to the ‘cultural co-existence and common cultural prosperity’ (p. 30) that Shi Xu advocates.
A second, related tension has to do with the implications of developing multiculturalist scholarship that, as Shi Xu proposes, rescues and (re)valorizes excluded discourses, while at the same time critiquing and deconstructing discriminatory and exclusive ones. Obviously, and for very good reasons, much of this new and pluralistic paradigm is being built in explicit contrast and often as an alternative to the White and Western perspective that has dominated the production of knowledge for centuries. This strikes me as a necessary move that may begin to undo some of the pervasive colonization of our ways of thinking and doing research, as well as the dramatic consequences for those labeled as ‘others’.
If, however, as Shi Xu seems to propose, the goal is not to replace one ‘centrism’ with another, but rather to have different parties learn from each other and collaborate, this kind of sustained critique may need to eventually incorporate a more dialectical view, not only of Eastern discourses but also of Western ones. This implies, for example, acknowledging the resistance to binaries that has also informed many Western thinkers, especially within cultural studies, as well as an overall academic move from an emphasis on differences and toward an embracing of common goals in theory and practice.
Overall, Shi Xu provides a fine contribution to the interdisciplinary study of the indissoluble relationship between culture and discourse, and a sound defense of the need to never study them in isolation since culture saturates the ‘entire social life, all acts, facts, and artifacts’ (p. 15), including discourse. This book will thus be a useful resource for those working in the fields of discourse studies, cultural studies, sociolinguistics, and intercultural communication.