Intelligentsia Library 23—Interviews on Cultural Studies

Author: Xie Shaobo, Wang Fengzhen (editors)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-06-01
Features: To improve one's ability to address problems, one must first enhance their theoretical cultivation. This requires adopting an attitude of openness and absorbing advanced achievements, much like in economic construction. When it comes to introducing critical theory, a dialectical understanding is also necessary. Because no culture can exist in isolation; it must engage with other cultures. This is a written interview with foreign theorists by Canadian-Chinese scholar Xie Shaobo and Chinese scholar Wang Fengzhen, consisting of thirty-three questions that touch on modernity, postmodernity, culture, history, ideology, globalization, universities, and intellectuals. The interviewees are a group of renowned intellectuals in North America, who selectively answered these questions. These responses form a loose, tolerant, and inclusive forum. From these answers, it becomes clear that rather than having unified and timely answers to contemporary urgent issues in cultural politics, these topics are more likely to remain a long-standing area of debate. These debates constitute a vast and enduring intellectual space worthy of relentless exploration, and contemporary cultural studies are, in fact, a historical examination of this very space.