Doingcultural studies: What is literacy in the age of the post?

Abstract

Literacy in the context of cultural studies (CS) in Africa concerns less the ability to read and write than the quotidian practice of doing. This intervention argues that CS as taught and as its texts are imagined, in general terms, is the source of a continuing institutionalized limitation. CS for Africans is first and foremost a lived practice, before it is a discipline or ready-for-study academic subject. We discuss the notion of lived CS to confront a pedagogical issue: how much of CS should be text, and how much 'doing'?At the beginning of this academic year, I was walking one day from the English Department to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning such as encouraged friendliness to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously freshmen in their first flush of enthusiasm. An older man going the same way as I turned and remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a student too. I said no, I was a teacher. What did I teach? African literature. Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who also taught the same thing, or perhaps it was African history, in a certain community college not far from here. It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know. (Achebe, 1978: 1)

Examining country development indicators and e-waste under the moderating effect of country development levels and e-waste policy

“…However, we are considering the definition of literacy as per the data source of the current study and other previous studies, i.e. the ability of the population of a region to read and write (Edwards and Potts, 2008;Tomaselli and Mboti, 2013;UNESCO Institute of Statistics, 2021). The level of literacy in a country defines its prosperity and the use of science and technology (Campbell, 1990).…”

Staging/caging 'otherness' in the postcolony: spectres of the human zoo

“…The aforementioned critical issues were, of course, also addressed and successfully developed elsewhere, that is, outside anthropology, most notably in cultural studies, and outside Western academia, most notably by scholars from the global south (see, e.g., Wright 2004;Tomaselli and Mboti 2013; indeed, the journal, Critical Arts, derives from a performance studies trajectory). In that respect, it is difficult to overestimate what cultural studies in general, and the work of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and Kobena Mercer in particular, have done to deconstruct and reorient the way in which generations of social and human scientists dealt with identity and diversity (Harris 2009).…”

Cultural Literacies in Transition

“…Graff 1991Graff , 1995Eldred and Mortensen 1992;Luke 1997;Williams and Zenger 2007;Hall 2008;Bryson 2012), this idea still rings true in more conservative approaches to the importance of cultural literacy, sometimes combined with a nostalgic longing for an idealized past. However, the past few decades there has been an increasing exploration of what cultural literacies can or should imply in the current globalized, pluralized and media-saturated condition (Graff 2003;Street 2005;Duffy 2003Duffy , 2004Lanham 2006;Hartley 2009;Rutten et al 2013;Tomaselli and Mboti 2013).…”