Bruce Burgett’s research while affiliated with University of Washington Bothell and other places

Drawing on nearly a decade of experience at the University of Washington, the authors argue for a reorientation of graduate curricula and pedagogy through publicly engaged forms of scholarship. Recognizing that the claims mobilized around public scholarship are necessarily local and situational, they suggest that public scholarship is best understood as organizing language that can align and articulate convergent interests rather than standardize or normalize them. This approach to public scholarship cuts against the disciplinary-professional mandates of most graduate curriculum since it requires both diversified forms of professionalization and pragmatic commitments to institutional change.

Drawing on the four authors’ experiences as members of a collective made up of faculty and staff housed across several academic and non-academic educational institutions in the Seattle metropolitan region, the article argues that practitioners of cultural studies can best address questions of praxis by developing and institutionalizing more diverse sites for the critical and creative study of culture. A non-affirmative model of cultural studies needs to be grounded, both institutionally and theoretically, in collaborations that cut across, bridge, and reconfigure the relations among educational institutions, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and community groups.

Lateral II is also, like the first, a braiding of research threads. This time we offer a triple helix. The Cultural Industries thread, curated by Jaafar Aksikas, presents a conversation between two nodes of cultural studies that move in and outside the academy Ien Ang’s Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney, and the Cultural Studies Praxis Collective at the University of Washington. This intersectoral work hints at an alter-economy, what it terms a negotiation with partners for critical purchase that complicates the reductive rubrics of neoliberal exchange. The Theory Thread, curated by Patricia Clough features a dossier on digital feminism assembled by Katherine Behar. This too is an effort to find value beyond measure, but also to refuse the algorithms of success, to assert the ungoogleable, the necessary failure, in pursuit of an anti-search engine that might power other reservoirs of thought. The Universities in Question Thread, is curated by student activists Megan Turner and Niall Twohig, and art from the smARTaction collective curated by Tina Orlandini. This dossier of manifestos and art works from various university mobilizations and occupations from Quebec, Cairo, Occupy Wall Street, University of California, and University of Puerto Rico, document the creativity that lies within critical mobilizations and the contagious proliferation of forms that this emergent politics takes.

'Critical Purchase in Neoliberal Times' is an edited conversation with Ien Ang and three members of the Cultural Studies Praxis Collective (CSPC): Miriam Bartha, Bruce Burgett, and Ron Krabill. The transcript of the conversation conducted at the University of Washington was reworked and revised by the interlocutors. The document as a whole surfaces and addresses a series of questions about engaged and community-based forms of cultural studies scholarship; multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and media policy; and the future of the transnational field of cultural studies in the context of the neoliberal turn in global higher education.

Appropriating the genre of the campus map, graduate students at Queen Mary University London and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill have produced a countermap of the university. Elegant in design, yet multi-purposed, their mapping of alternative uses and critiques takes the form of a poster-sized doubled sided print which locates the university within its larger societal force field (the map’s front side), and stages an arena for playing that field by means of a board game (which appears on the reverse side). In sharp contrast to the political geography of curricula intended to assimilate students to an already settled matter and progress-toward-a-degree, an unproblematic temporal beat measured by accumulated credit-hours, the critical cartographical work of this collective reallocates the energies of their seminars and research to produce alternate forms of knowledge and means for its legitimation.

'Lateral Moves – Across Disciplines' is an edited conversation with Randy Martin and three members of the Cultural Studies Praxis Collective (CSPC): Miriam Bartha, Diane Douglas, and Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren. The original conversation took place at the University of Washington's Simpson Center for the Humanities in 2007. The transcript of the conversation was reworked and revised by the interlocutors and Bruce Burgett, the co-director (along with Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren) of the CSPC. The document as a whole surfaces and addresses a series of questions about interdisciplinarity, cultural studies, and the humanities; about creativity, agency, and advocacy; about different forms of professional, disciplinary, and civic education; and about knowledge, labor, and organizing.

This essay addresses the question of how to best teach interdisciplinarity through a detailed discussion of a common upper-division gateway course for multiple majors housed in an interdisciplinary studies unit. It argues for a shift in the problematic within which discussions of interdisciplinary pedagogy generally take place by emphasizing the practice of interdisciplinarity itself.

Sex, panic, nation. Remove the punctuation and it reads as a working hypothesis. Add a verb or two and it becomes a premature conclusion. We all know, after all, that the US has been characterized from the outset as a nation shaped through a history of recurring sex panics. D. H. Lawrence traced these repressive conjunctures of sex and affect from Benjamin Franklin to Walt Whitman in his 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature, instructing his readers to respond to each iteration by “pull[ing] the idealistic and democratic clothes off American utterance, and see[ing] what you can of the dusky body of IT underneath” (14). Gayle Rubin told a similar tale in her 1984 essay “Thinking Sex” when she referred to “moral panics” as the “political moment of sex” and suggested that the “great nineteenth-century moral paroxysms . . . have left a deep imprint on attitudes about sex, medical practice, child-rearing, parental anxieties, police conduct, and sex law” (4, 25). We all know that the reverse is also true. Sex, in public discourses and practices of US nationalism, occasions panic when it takes the form of what Michael Warner calls “matter out of place,” when it compromises the moral and bodily sanctity of the normative citizen-subject by allowing knowledge about the “messiness and variety of sex” either to contaminate official policy publics or to escape legally sanctioned zones of privacy (18, 174). Panic, in the first sense, characterizes a nationalist culture that polices sex. Panic, in the second sense, polices sex in ways that produce nationalist culture. Adopting and modifying the opening gambit of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1976/1978), we might think of these intimate couplings of sex, affect, and nation as two closely related variations of an overarching panic hypothesis. Foucault’s intervention into historical and political discourses of sex and sexuality called attention to the pitfalls of what he referred to as the “repressive hypothesis”: the research framework that figures sexuality as a physical drive that intersects with political and social power solely through dynamics of repression and liberation (17–49). Foucault spelled out his counter-hypothesis in a widely cited passage: “Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for the greatest number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies” (103). The influence of this counter-hypothesis on subsequent research can be felt even among scholars who might otherwise disagree with Foucault. As Carol Vance, David Halperin, and many others have observed, Foucault’s counter-hypothesis is often equated in the scholarly literature with the commonplace idea that sexuality and sexual identity formations are “socially constructed,” the lesson being that researchers ought to commit themselves to denaturalizing received ideas about sexuality as they trace and document the diverse manifestations of a thing called sex across time and space. This is a tempting research project, especially in a world in which one of my local papers recently recycled on its front page a Washington Post story about the “gay brain” (Stein). Yet Foucault was very clear that his stakes were different: “It is the agency of sex we must break away from, if we aim—through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance” (157). One of the benefits of the panic hypothesis is that it extends this more radical project by naming mass-mediated sex panics—“white slavery,” “anti-homosexuality,” and “child pornography” are among Rubin’s examples—as the sites where sex and sexuality are assembled as instrumentalities of power. I describe in my conclusion to this article how the panic hypothesis might point toward some promising interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral bridges between literary, cultural, or social history and media studies, policy, or activism. To get there, though, I follow Foucault’s lead: What happens if we reject the panic hypothesis as our starting point as we seek alternative means of approaching the histories of sex and sexuality? What happens, in...

In 2001, I served on the steering committee for the conference Sexuality in Early America, 1500–1820. Co-sponsored by two major institutional forces in the study of early American history and culture, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, this conference was designed to address the general neglect of the history of sexuality in the field of early American studies. Here is how the original call for papers set the stage: In the last two decades, the history of sexuality has emerged as an important and dynamic field of inquiry. By historicizing matters once understood as universal and eternal, scholars have connected sexual behaviors and desires to specific political, social, and economic contexts. Many have discovered links between this seemingly private realm of human experience and broader structures of power. Still others have questioned the coherence of the category of sexuality itself. With few exceptions, early American scholars have remained on the margins of this new field. Mindful of this omission, the . . . conference aims to examine the relationship between sexuality (defined broadly to include desire, behavior, and attitudes) and the conditions and institutions of early American society (also defined broadly to include New France, the Caribbean, and the Spanish borderlands). Notable here are several now familiar overarching motifs: the naming of the history of sexuality as a new and important academic field; the insistence on a historical approach to the study of matters once considered universal and private; the gesture toward linkages between those intimate matters and macro-level analyses of power; the positioning of the research to be presented at the conference as a corrective to previous omissions; the somewhat uneasy assertion of a temporal range contained by the years 1500–1820 and informed by present-day concerns, as well as a geographical scope that is American in both the national and the transnational senses of the term. These stage directions also reflect some interesting negotiations that had taken place behind the scenes. When the original call for papers was circulated among the members of the conference steering committee, I had responded by suggesting that we might want to include a solicitation for research that called into question the utility of the categories of “sex” and “sexuality” for research conducted on historical materials that did not deploy those terms as we do today. This suggestion struck me as uncontroversial at the time, as I was drawing not only on the insights of Michel Foucault and his many commentators but also on research clustered around the rubric of queer theory which had suggested, throughout the 1990s, that we need to think carefully and politically about the instability of those categories as we investigate bodily and intimate practices that travel across geographic regions and historical periods. Yet my suggestion created a flurry of email. Some steering committee members worried that the inclusion of this emphasis in the call for papers would move the conference in a less historical direction; others were concerned that questioning the heuristic value of the concepts organizing the conference would undercut its coherence and focus, and could even return the emergent field of the history of sexuality to the margins of academic study. The result was an inclusion in the call for papers of the short sentence, “Still others have questioned the coherence of the category of sexuality itself.” At the conference, the tension between these two different, though not necessarily opposed, approaches to the history of sex and sexuality created some interesting effects. The conference papers ranged over a wide array of topics that could be generally categorized as sexual, while the responses to those papers consistently raised the question of what was gained and lost by the deployment of sexuality as an organizing category. In part, I am to blame. In my response to one set of presentations, later published along with selected papers from the conference in a special issue of The William and Mary Quarterly, I noted that Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language defined the terms “sex” and “sexual” as referencing what we think of today as “gender,” while the verb “to sensualize” most closely approximated our...

Toward the conclusion of Lydia Maria Child's 1824 novel Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times, the young Episcopalian Charles Brown reappears as the proper marital partner for the novel's female protagonist, Mary Conant—and just in time. Readers of Hobomok will recall that the narrative begins with a scene in which Hobomok, the novel's noble savage and title character, leaps into a magic circle drawn by Mary in order to conjure her ideal future husband, Charles Brown. Hobomok's disruption of that ritual and his apparent usurpation of Brown's narrative role evoke an "involuntary shriek of terror" from Mary (13–14). Her nerves are calmed only by Hobomok's retreat, and the subsequent appearance in the circle of Brown. Following a series of plot twists, including the disappearance of Brown during his voyage to the East Indies in search of "wealthe" and "treasures," the novel concludes as it fulfills its telegraphed plot (143). Child first weds Mary and Hobomok (a union that produces "Little Hobomok," the "fearless young Indian" [148]), and then relies on the elder Hobomok's voluntary nullification of that marriage in order to enable the fated alliance of Mary and Charles (a union that results in the renaming of "Little Hobomok" as "Charles Hobomok Conant" [150]). His "Indian appellation" gradually forgotten during a distinguished career at Cambridge (150), Mary's son comes to identify solely with his Anglophone matronym and, through that identification, to embody the synthesis of Puritan New England and Episcopalian Old England. Along the way to this maternalist resolution of both the "Indian" problem and the "national" problem, love tutors Mary to overcome her initial disgust at Hobomok's "savagery" and renders Hobomok "civilized" enough to recognize Brown's superior claim to Mary's heart, even as it leaves him sufficiently "savage" to flee west where he "pursued with delirious eagerness every animal that came within his view" (140). At least, that is what I concluded the last time I wrote about Hobomok. In that 2004 essay, I suggested that the explicitness of Child's interweaving of affective, national, and imperial themes ought to push us to think more critically about why research conversations focused on these imperial intimacies could be received as news in the early twenty-first century. I traced that sense of novelty to the acts of archival mis-construction and textual misinterpretation occasioned by nationalist paradigms of American studies and American literary history. I stressed the distortions those acts have embedded in our understanding of what I join Ann Laura Stoler, Amy Kaplan, Lauren Berlant, and many others in thinking about as the archives and heuristics of sentimental imperialism and imperial benevolence. I still believe that to be the case, but I have also become increasingly dissatisfied with the predictability and generality of this now familiar argument. In contrast, consider the unpredictability and specificity of Brown's response to the question of where he was during his three year absence from New England: "I came in an English vessel, which lies two miles below waiting for the wind. My story is no uncommon one for an East India passenger. Our vessel was wrecked, and for nearly three years I have been prisoner on the coast of Africa. How I effected my escape, I have neither the strength nor the spirits to tell you now" (145). If we take Brown at his word and assume that his is a common story, then why does it sound uncommon to our ears? The linkage of British colonial and imperial ambitions in the East Indies and the Americas are relatively well charted, but how do we account for Brown's captivity along the "coast of Africa"? Is it a formalist attempt by Child to balance the captivity experiences of her male and female leads? Is it a condensed displacement of the question of slavery and its inter-relations with politics of Cherokee removal in the 1820s? Is it a desperate plot device to explain Brown's absence? Is it all or none of the above? Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse point us to an answer to some of these questions. In "The Problem of Population and the Form of the...