Crystal Bartolovich

Literary and Cultural Studies
Carnegie Mellon University
crystal+@andrew.cmu.edu

 

 

Peter Jackson and Jan Penrose, eds. Constructions of Race, Place, and Nation. Minneapolis: Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 1994.

 

Traffic (trae-fik), sb. . . . 1. The transportation of merchandise for the purpose of trade; hence, trade between distant or distinct communities.

 

— OED

 

Cultural geographers are now experimenting with a range of new ideas and approaches, their aversion to theory now firmly overcome. These developments have drawn extensively on contemporary cultural studies and on other theoretical developments across the social sciences. But the traffic has not been in one direction: there is now at least the potential for repaying this debt by informing cultural studies with some of the insights of social and cultural geography.

 

— Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning

 

I have chosen the above passage from Peter Jackson’s Maps of Meaning (1989) as the starting place for a discussion of his more recent book, Constructions of Race, Place and Nation, a collection of essays he edited with Jan Penrose, because its “trade” metaphor (“traffic”/”debt”) calls attention in an economical fashion to a troubling aspect of both texts: a tendency to view “cultural studies” as a sort of theory warehouse for traditional disciplines, and to see “theory” as a stockpile of portable commodities (“ideas and approaches”) ready to be transported anywhere interchangeably. As Jackson and Penrose put it in their introduction, geographers have become “increasingly sensitive to debates in cultural studies” (19). In this essay I will pursue the limits of this “sensitivity” insofar as it can be traced in Constructions. The academy — from its perspective — is comprised of disciplines with well-defined, although semi-permeable, borders. Indeed, the “trade” image argues — linking the previous book even more firmly to the concerns of the more recent one — that disciplinary boundaries function rather like those of nation-states (before they were unsettled by transnational capital). Minimally, it assumes that controlled and accountable transactions (import and export) are negotiated among distinct scholarly domains. The very desire to set the balance of payments aright between “geography” and “cultural studies,” however, is already to undermine cultural studies understood as a postdisciplinary, critical practice.

 

Since I will be criticising Constructions largely on the grounds of its investments in “geography” as a discipline — investments that I think render a “sensitvity” to “cultural studies” impossible — I want to make my own institutional position and interests as explicit as I can from the start: I teach in a literary and cultural studies program at Carnegie Mellon University. In spite of the profound difficulties of doing so, we are committed to attempting to resist disciplinary structures, not only to make a “place” for ourselves, but also because the current organization of the university renders it problematic to cultural studies politically, intellectually, and practically. Attempts at transdisciplinarity threaten power bases of departments, which jealously guard their faculty lines, resources, and boundaries for reasons that often have more to do with self-reproduction than intellectual conviction — as most department members will readily acknowledge. Crises induced by university funding cuts have intensified these border fortifications. In a terrain of entrenched disciplines, it is very difficult indeed to pursue the kind of postdisciplinary practice toward which cultural studies has been moving. Given these conditions, the common gesture of traditional disciplines looking to cultural theory to revitalise themselves without in any way questioning their own disciplinary integrity can be seen as destructive to cultural studies. I address this state of affairs in the following pages.

 

A more sympathetic reader might object to my critique of Constructions on the grounds that it is a “specialist” book whose primary agenda is not, after all, positioning itself in relation to cultural studies. In any case (the defender of the book might add), its heart is in the right place; at a time of right-wing backlash against the left in the academy, and traditionalist backlash against “theory” and “cultural studies,” a book such as Constructions, which attempts to bring the highly charged issue of racism to the attention of a generally conservative discipline, is surely not an enemy. ¹ The book — after all — deals with a very important topic. Without disputing these points, I am still left with the conviction that the collective effect of dozens of books like Constructions is to keep in place the disciplinary structure of the university that cultural studies is attempting to break down. If the transdisciplinary tendency of cultural studies were simply an incidental preference for the new and an anarchic preoccupation with smashing up the old, then ,Constructions would be quite right to refuse to join in. However, since cultural studies has been suspicious of inherited disciplines insofar as they have been participants in the very sorts of oppressions that Constructions attempts to bring to the attention of geographers, perhaps it might have taken more notice. Anthropology (Fabian), History (de Certeau), English (Viswanathan), ‘Oriental’ Studies (Said) — even Geography (Blaut) — have all come under question as disciplines in recent years for the ways in which they have helped to “construct” and maintain racism, (neo)colonialism, exploitation, and many other not so very admirable realities. Attention to the role of “geography” in the processes of racism Constructions describes would not only make it a stronger book; it would render it more politically useful since it is, after all, published by two university presses (Minnesota acquired the U.S. rights from University College London Press) and directed largely to an academic audience.

 

The disciplinary investments of Constructions are explicit. Most of the essays were earlier given as talks at the 1992 Annual Meetings of the Association of American Geographers, and assume a geographer as reader. As the editors explain in the preface: “Besides the application of social construction theory to particular empirical materials, the following chapters are also united in their adoption of a geographical perspective” (v). They add: “we hope the volume will help clarify some of the highly charged issues that revolve around notions of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ as well as contributing to the development of a more rigorous social construction approach within geography” (vi). The marketing categories (“Geography/ Sociology”) printed on the back cover of the book confirm that the University of Minnesota Press agreed with this editorial self-assessment of audience.

 

Instead of pursuing the racisms in which this very audience can be implicated, however, Constructions describes racism as if it only existed in a world beyond geography and the university.² Even Alastair Bonnett’s discussion of “anti-racism and reflexivity” manages to evade any hint that “social geography” might be complicit with the world of secondary school teachers he discusses. Social Geography is for him merely the medium in which racism can be studied; it, apparently, can do so without participating in that world. I cannot imagine a position that could be further from that of the two prominent cultural theorists, Gayatri Spivak and Paul Gilroy, Bonnett includes in his bibliography. Whereas both of these theorists have been relentlessly critical of disciplinary neutrality, and scrupulous in interrogating their own positions and interests, Bonnett simply brings their work “home” to geography, domesticating it, as if this were not a fraught andproblematic gesture. He disparages “auto-critique” and “textual reflexivity” which he describes as insufficiently attentive to “wider political and social processes that structure and enable people’s attitudes and activities” (166). Yet he never pauses to wonder what those processes might be in his own case as a researcher, contenting himself with examining others without considering where their struggles touch (or not) his own — not as an “individual” but precisely as a subject situated in “wider political and social processes that structure and enable . . . [his] attitude’s and activities” as a geographer.

 

Cultural Studies, on the other hand, is a critical practice that few of its practitioners would feel comfortable taking for granted in the way Bonnett’s article takes “geography” for granted. Iain Chambers has recently put it this way: Cultural Studies “cannot rest content within an inherited discipline, invariable paradigm, or fixed set of protocols. It exists as an act of interrogation: a moment of doubt, dispersal, and dissemination. It reveals an opening, not a conclusion; it always marks the moment of departure, never a homecoming. Criticism practised in this manner, in this style, cannot pretend disciplinary recognition . . .” (121-2). The contributors to Constructions show little evidence of such interrogation of themselves as geographers — or even the desire for it.

 

The book is divided into four sections of two articles each, with section titles that echo key texts and problematics in cultural theory. And yet the book evades discussion of the tensions that might confront the articulation of such texts and problematics with “geography.” Its first section, “Constructing the Nation,” offers an essay by Jan Penrose on “social constructions of nation, people, and place” in Scotland and the U.K. and a piece on “immigration and nation building” in Canada and the U.K. A second section moves to a consideration of “Constructions of Aboriginality” with two articles, one by Kay Anderson and one by Jane Jacobs, focusing on Australia. A third section takes up “Places of Resistance” with a study of co-op housing in New York city by Helene Clark and a discussion of struggles to acquire state funding for Muslim schools in the U.K. by Claire Dwyer. The final section, “Politics and Position,” contains the essay — briefly discussed above — by Alastair Bonnett on how self-consciously school teachers deal with questions of race in U.K. classrooms, and a piece by Peter Jackson on police/minority relations in Toronto.

 

According to the editors, the “central argument” of all the chapters concerns the “constructed nature of ‘race,’ place and nation” (19). The book is, in fact, maddeningly repetitive in making this point. Yet, while the volume is adamant in its claim that “‘race,’ place and nation” are constructs, none of the contributors seems to worry much that “geography” is as well. As the editors note in their closing remarks: “Ironically, for a collection of geographical essays, we may have achieved greater sophistication in our theorisation of ‘race’ and nation than we have collectively achieved in theorising the significance of place” (207). One effect of this inattention to “place” — especially the institutional situation and investments of its contributors — is that “geography” has much the same status in this book as the uncritical acceptance of “nation” which the book purports to unsettle. As Michel de Certeau has reminded us concerning history writing: “all historiographical research is articulated over a socio-economic, political, and cultural place of production” (58). He advocates the making visible of this “place” as part of any history-writing project so that usually unaccounted for interests might more easily be exposed. This is not, I would suggest, a merely academic matter. As Jane Jacobs, in one of Construction‘s more interesting pieces, notes (without, alas, unsettling the editors’ disciplinary certitude): “Geography has long been seen as a discipline complicit with imperial intent” (100). “New approaches” will not in themselves expose, interrupt or resist this “complicity.”

 

New approaches, however, are what we get in Constructions, described in ways which the writers are careful to announce are specific to the concerns and methodologies of geography, which are opposed to “textuality.” In her “Constructing Geographies,” for example, Kay Anderson notes: “to conceptualise localities as unidimensional byproducts of economic regimes would seem to be as restricting as the approach growing out of some branches of cultural studies that places/landscapes are mere ‘texts’ to be ‘read’ for their cultural meaning” (85). The antidote to the supposed semiotic excesses of “some branches of cultural studies” is a “realist” approach that Anderson associates with the work of geographers such as Diane Massey and P. Bagguley, who investigate “spatial ranges of the many causal elements that impinge on a local area” (84; Anderson is quoting Bagguley here). Such an approach, Anderson admits, has the limitation of a too heavy emphasis on the economic, “as if the process of place-making can be wholly captured by measuring statistical changes over time in labor forces, gender relations, market pressures and so on” (84). In any case, the effect of Anderson’s gesture (aside from further disseminating a misunderstanding of textuality) is that “cultural studies” is coded as excess so that cultural geography, on the other hand, can become the science of the sensible middle.³

 

This “middleness” is perhaps best exemplified in Jackson’s own contribution to the volume, an essay on “police-community relations” in Toronto which ends with the following sentences, musing about the potential for “riots” in that city: “The liberal conclusion would suggest that recognising the need for change will help prevent any further deterioration of police-community relations. The more radical conclusion suggests that Blacks have every right to protest, by what ever means necessary, while they continue to be faced with differential policing and institutionalised racism” (198). The narrow set of options (for example, might not “whites” think that protest of some kind is in order?), and the emphasis in the article on police-“black” relations rather than “community” more broadly understood, takes the pressure off the white reader — and the author as well. In Jackson’s discussion, “Blacks” are engaged in a (perhaps legitimate) battle with “the police” that does not seem to implicate anyone “outside” this nexus.

 

At the beginning of his “conclusion” section, Jackson nods in the direction of subject-positioning (“I would like to reflect on my position as a White English academic evaluating the problems of another society in situations of heightened social tension”), but his reflections actually have the effect of attenuating his stand on the issues he raises. In the end, taking sides is difficult, he muses, because all the folks he interviewed were nice to him personally, and the leader of the major black anti-police-violence organisation is suspect because he beats his wife, and so on (no information on the “private” lives of other interviewees, it should be noted, was provided; one need not excuse violence against women to note this discrepancy). Since the world is so complicated, Jackson equivocally decides “it is possible to be both optimistic and pessimistic about the future of police-community relations in Toronto” (197).

 

Indeed, in his zeal to be “balanced” and to let his interviewees (ostensibly) speak for themselves and (supposedly) not guide the reader’s analysis of the situation unduly, he allows troubling racist assumptions into his article without any qualification. Here, for example, is the Chair of the Police Services Board speaking as recorded and represented by Jackson: “[People] have to understand that there are some things that police officers simply have to do. They do have to stop people at three in the morning and ask them where they’re going if they don’t seem to belong to the neighborhood. Those are validpolicing exercises and the community has got to understand that” (184). One might wonder how it is that “neighborhood” and identity become intertwined (i.e. what structures these relations) so that attributions of “belonging” can be determined to be a “valid” police activity. While he claims to be against “racism,” apparently such questioning does not enter into Jackson’s understanding of how one might be anti-racist. By focusing ultimately on the personalities of individuals he interviews (and himself), rather than the conflicts between groups, he manages to render a situation of explicit systematic racism less clearcut. This tendency to focus on “individuals” — in several of the articles as well as in editorial assumptions — helps the editors and contributors maintain a certain blindness to their institutional position as “geographers” as well.

 

The editors’ concluding comments particularly emphasise “individuality”: “as individuals, we must locate ourselves within the intersecting matrix of human identity and difference in order to become aware of our potentially common position” (202). This humanist appeal to a universal belies the nod to the politics of difference that surface from time to time in the volume. More importantly, however, as de Certeau has suggested, the “place left blank or hidden through an analysis which overvalue[s] the relation of individual subjects to their object might be called an institution of knowledge” (60). Institutional critique is bypassed in the Jackson and Penrose volume because the contributors are depicted as atomised “individuals” without apparent structuration (“place”) as a group. By leaving this “place” uninvestigated, Constructions preserves a certain tidiness for “geography” that contrasts markedly with what Angela McRobbie has described as the [desirable] “messiness” of cultural studies: “precisely because it is so embedded in contemporary social and political processes, because, for example, the recent changes in Europe affect how we think about culture . . . cultural studies must continue to argue against its incorporation into what is conventially recognized as a ‘subject area'” (722). Resisting “incorporation,” however, is difficult if cultural theory is continuously appropriated by scholars who are in no way troubled by the functioning of traditional disciplinary boundaries.

 

The academic situation of “cultural studies” as outré, as the exotic foreign land from which geography can import theoretical necessities and perhaps a few methodological luxury goods, brings up the question of disciplinary difference and relations with which I opened this essay. One way in which the boundary issue often manifests itself in cultural studies is in terms of “tensions.” For example, the historian Catherine Hall once commented in the question period after a talk — specifically when asked about “textual approaches” to history — “it [your question] makes me think about what the tensions are for me between doing history and being a feminist, which is the productive political tension out of which my work comes. And then the tensions between being a historian, being trained as a historian, and then trying to learn new kinds of methods through the development of cultural studies and associated activities” (273). Hall’s work, unlike Constructions, constantly foregrounds the conflicts attendant with operating in a traditional discipline while working toward “cultural studies.”

 

Do folks in cultural studies need to read books like Constructions of Race, Place and Nation? Janet Wolff has made a strong case for a less dismissive approach to the products of mainstream disciplinary research: “I . . . want to argue strongly against exiling critical cultural studies to its own separate enclave.” She suggests that interventions outside of cultural studies on issues of concern to its practitioners are too quickly “written off as traditional, mainstream, or conservative” when they instead might be read for productive “contradictions” which render their easy assimilation into the merely conservative difficult: “I think we are now in an excellent position to pursue the study of culture within disciplines and on the margins of disciplines, as well as in the newly cleared space of interdisciplinary studies” (716). The problem with Wolff’s perspective is that it helps keep intact disciplinary boundaries which are themselves part of the problem of forming cultural studies as a “critical practice” in the academy today.

 

Fortunately, there are other ways of envisioning the “travels” of theory — and the academy. Edward Said, for example, in theorising the movements of theory, saw this process as undermining the disciplinary closure that the Jackson and Penrose volume takes for granted. “To prefer a local, detailed analysis of how one theory travels from one situation to another,” Said writes, “is also to betray some fundamental uncertainty about specifying or delimiting the field to which any one theory or idea might belong” (227). He has in mind literary studies in particular and muses: “the invasion of literary discourse by the outré jargons of semiotics, post-structuralism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis has distended the literary critical universe almost beyond recognition. In short, there seems nothing inherently literary about the study of what have traditionally been considered literary texts” (228). Surveying this terrain with a sigh, Said concludes: “In the absence of an enclosing domain called literature, with clear outer boundaries, there is no longer an authorised or official position for the literary critic” (230).

 

With neither clear boundaries nor an absolute ground to rely on, the theorist (and critic) must be highly flexible and vigilant if he is not to fall prey to mere mechanistic application of theories to situations for which they cannot possibly be fully adequate. “A breakthrough can become a trap,” Said warns, “if it is used uncritically, repetitively, limitlessly” (239). To combat against this dilemma, he argues that all theory must be supplemented with “critical consciousness,” which he describes as the “awareness of the difference between situations, awareness too of the fact that no system or theory exhausts the situation out of which it emerges or to which it is transported . . . above all . . . critical consciousness is awareness of the resistances to theory, reactions to it elicited by those concrete experiences or interpretations with which it is in conflict” (242). When we read Constructions with Said’s warning in mind it quickly becomes obvious that the book lacks such “critical consciousness.” Following a general practice of “application” rather than interrogation, it fails to consider what it might mean to move theory from something it calls “cultural studies” and make it serve the interests of something it calls “cultural geography.”

 

I will end with one of the more egregious examples of this sanctioned ignorance at work. Throughout Constructions, the signifier “race” is enclosed in scare-quotes. According to an editors’ note, “the word ‘race’ appears in quotation marks to distance ourselves from those who regard ‘race’ as an unproblematic category. For a discussion of thisstrategy, see Gates (1986).” However, when we turn to “Gates (1986),” the introduction to the 1985 issue of Critical Inquiry devoted to “‘Race,’ Writing and Difference,” we do not find a “discussion of this strategy.” In fact, in the body of the text of this issue, attention is relatively infrequently drawn to “race” in this way — certainly not as ubiquitously as in the Jackson and Penrose book.⁴ What we find, rather, is a call for the development of critical tools appropriate to specific situations — and an abandonment of the uncritical application of methods and theories drawn from elsewhere: “I once thought it our most important gesture to master the canon of criticism, to imitate and apply it, but I now believe that we must turn to the black tradition itself to develop theories of criticism indigenous to our literatures” (13).

 

When Jackson, Penrose, and their contributors “imitate” and “apply” what they mistakenly presume to be Gates’s gesture, they are forced into bizarre formulations, such as: “she [Vron Ware] prefers to write of the *mutual constitution* of ‘race’ and gender, rather than implying that any one ‘dimension’ has priority over the other. (A similar argument could, of course, be made for the mutual constitution of ‘race’ and nation, or of each of these categories and particular places.)” (18). In sentences like these, the scare quotes single “race” out, again and again, giving it “priority” in the text, undermining Ware’s point in their presentation of it. This gesture is certainly hierarchical and even oddly segregationist in its implications. Are we really to think (following the logic which the editors’ themselves attribute to the scare quotes as discussed above) that race is a more problematic category than gender? Or, more to the point, that Ware would claim that it was? Not only does the thoughtless, knee-jerk universal typographical privileging of the category of race in Constructions fall far wide of developing a site-specific set of strategies for theorising race matters, it also weirdly distances the reader and writer from dealing with race rigorously once the scare quotes are relied on to do the work of “calling attention” to the constructedness of the category.

 

In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy has recently moved beyond simply observing the mutual imbrication of current notions of “race” and “nation” and called for a critical practice which resists the logic of the nation-state by refusing to assume (as all the essays in Jackson and Penrose assume) the “nation-state” as the logical or necessary (albeit “constructed”) unit of analysis, whether alone or in “comparison” with other nation-states. For Gilroy, such a reconstitution of space opens up the possibility of seeing the production of identities (specifically “black” identities in his book) as more mobilely and complexly negotiated than the focus on “national” units of analysis permits. The demand in Black Atlantic to imagine other spaces of analysis than those that we inherit through the academic disciplines and “every day” life have implications for how we might think the university as well. The import/export logic of books like Constructions needs to be persistently critiqued if a more worldly politics is to emerge in an institutional space where, currently, disciplines defend their perceived boundaries more often than they imagine other spaces, other ways of seeing, other worlds.

 

Notes

 

1. On the homogeneity and conservatism of geography (from a specifically feminist perspective), see Gillian Rose’s Feminism and Geography: “the white bourgeois heterosexual masculinities which are attracted to geography [as a discipline], shape it and are in turn constituted through it” (11).

 

2. The false division between “the university” and “the world” becomes increasingly more difficult to maintain as universities are reorganized as corporations serving transnational capital. Maseo Myoshi puts it this way: “We know that the university is actually a corporation in style and substance. It is integrated into transnational corporatism, in which its specific role is being redefined. We the faculty are participants in many facits of this enterprise: the students we teach, the knowledge we impart, the information we disseminate, the books we write, the perspectives we open, the life-style we adopt, the conferences we organize, the scholarly associations we belong to — all are enclosed in seamless corporatism” (77). Along these lines, Gayatri Spivak also has observed of intellectual production “there is interest, often unperceived by us [theorists], in not allowing transnational complicities to be percieved” (256). See also her “Reading the World.”

 

3. Textuality is so often misrepresented as the reduction of the world to a book that Anderson’s contention is not surprising. It is, nonetheless, incorrect. Contrast her view with Michael Ryan’s: “‘Text’ names that interweaving of inside and outside through the process of reference which puts in question the philosophical desire to posit a pure outside to space, history, and materiality — as a transcendental realm of ideality (meaning) — or a pure outside to differentiation and referential realtions as a positivist materiality that would be of a completely different order than the differential or realtional structure of a language which refers to it (idealism turned inside out), or a pure nature prior to all culture, institution, technology, production, or artifice, by virtue of which such things can be termed derivative degradations rather than ‘natural’ necessities” (23).

 

4. A more accurate citation would have been Paul Gilroy’s ‘There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack‘, which does enclose “race” in scare quotes throughout, a gesture which Gilroy repeats in Black Atlantic. Houston Baker notes in his introduction to the 1991 reprint of Ain’t, however, that “Gilroy and the black British cultural studies project of which he is a member can lead us, I believe, to both a more analytical and a more practical sense of race than the quotation-marked provisionality and embarrassed silences that have characterized our academic past.”

 

Works Cited

 

• Blaut, J. M. The Colonizer’s Model of the World. Guilford Press, 1993.
• Baker, Houston. “Forward” in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. Paul Gilroy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.
• Certeau, Michel de. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.
• Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. “Editor’s Introduction” in “Race, Writing and Difference.” (Critical Inquiry 12, Autumn 1985). reprinted Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.
• Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1993.
• —–. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. (first published in 1987).
• Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
• Hall, Catherine. “Missionary Stories: Gender and Ethnicity in England in the 1830s and 1840s.” In Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler.
• Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies.” In Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler.
• Jackson, Peter. Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
• —– and Jan Penrose, eds. Constructions of Race, Place and Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
• McRobbie, Angela. “Post-Marxism and Cultural Studies.” In Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler.
• Miyoshi, Maseo. “Sites of Resistance in the Global Economy.” boundary 2 22.1 (Spring 1995): 61-84.
• Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: the Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
• Ryan, Michael. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.
• Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
• —–. “Traveling Theory.” In The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1983.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Cultural Studies.” In Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York and London: Routledge, 1993.
• —–. “Reading the World.” In In Other Worlds. New York and London: Routledge, 1988.
• Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
• Wolff, Janet. “Excess and Inhibition: Interdisciplinarity in the Study of Art.” In Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler.