In this closing article, Cameron McCarthy, Michael Giardina, Susan Harewood, and Jin-Kyung Park draw on the preceding articles of this Special Issue to develop the argument that educators need to pay special attention to developments associated with human immigration, cultural globalization, and the rapid migration of cultural and economic capital and electronically mediated images. In the plurality of social and cultural sites of practice reflected in these articles, McCarthy et al. find implications for pedagogical practice and the educational preparation of school youth. They specifically address questions concerning the reproduction of culture, identity, and community as they relate to contemporary educational debates. Given this range of cultural practices, how should we address the topic of culture and identity in the organization of school knowledge? McCarthy et al. suggest that pedagogical interventions that privilege popular culture as a site of legitimate critique can open up new avenues of exploration and investigation to a radical, progressive democracy premised on the basic values of love, care, and equality for all humanity.

This article examines the constitutive nature of Caribbean popular culture, specifically calypso performance, in postnational and postindependence identity formation. It seeks to contribute to research that highlights the importance of the work of the imagination in the active processes of community formations and intervene into standard calypso research and criticism that posits calypso as the voice of the people but identifies the people as a rigid, narrow, and bounded category. The article argues for full engagement with calypso within the context of carnival. It understands masquerade as a fundamental part of calypso performance and utilizes masquerade as an analytical category that permits us to understand the play of identities constituted within calypso performance. A masquerade analysis of The Mighty Gabby’s 2001 calypso competition finals performance exemplifies a case of a multivalent masquerade performance that specifically plays with discourses of sexual identity and provides clear insight into the aesthetic work of calypso.

I.In our post-9/11 world, there exists a growing collective feeling across university campuses, at office water coolers, and in local neighborhoods-a crescendo of shared belief, if you will-that matters of global inter/connectivity are now quite literally matters of life and death. The horrific events of September 11, 2001, which have yielded a cultural climate virtually unthinkable only a few years earlier in terms of a war-in-the-name-of-peace mentality, assaults on civil liberties, and the policing of popular culture, have forced scholars the world over to reevaluate our current moment (cf. Denzin, 2004;Giroux, 2003). Post-9/11 developments have propelled a brave new world context and global cultural environment into being that now poses new challenges to critical scholars interested in cultural analysis and interpretive studies. This is particularly the case for scholars operating within the emergent field of cultural studies who, within the past few decades, have sought to look at the spreading effects of popular cultural forms on the social environment of modern institutions and social subjects. These powerfully transformative phenomena generated in this new world context have forced contributors to this special issue to think about popular cultural forms within the overlapping and interconnected logics consequent upon a recognition of the dynamic porosity of modern cultural practices and contemporary forms of affiliation and identification and the institutional and new political contexts in which these dynamics are played out.What, then, are these new terms and conditions of modern life to which cultural studies scholars must pay more sustained attention? We are living in new millennial times where issues of hybridity, electronic mediation, the proliferation of images, and mass migration have altered the con/texts of modern industrial societies and heightened the role of meanings, representations, textual production, and performativity in the organization of social life. Culture and identity have been dirempted from place, and the cultural porosity precipitated 135 Cultural Studies ↔

This article examines the political project of Cultural Studies by calling for a reexamination of the cultural studies research practices. The metaphors used by cultural studies researchers are explored, as these demonstrate the ways in which researchers have sought to emphasize openness and fluidity. However, it is argued that the desire for openness is not enough; that without rigorous consideration of methodology Cultural Studies lays itself open to many of the academic research problems it seeks to challenge. The article therefore offers a rethinking of the metaphors of cultural studies research.The question is, what alternative metaphors do we have for imagining a cultural politics?

No abstract