Critical Understandings of Culture

In this episode, Dr. Nadine Chan, Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University, joins the podcast to discuss some of the key elements and methods of Cultural Studies. We also discuss her own projects on film as a colonial and counter-colonial object in Malaysia and Singapore, and the various ways of documenting environmental degradation in contemporary Southeast Asia.

Marcus Weakley:
Hello. Welcome to Breaking the Shackles of Time, a podcast about writing and other topics. We are continuing our new trend here with episode five. I have a wonderful guest with me today. I have Dr. Nadine Chan with me today. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here.

Nadine Chan:
Thank you for having me.

Marcus Weakley:
Yeah. I appreciate you coming and visiting and having a conversation. For a little bit of background about Dr. Chan, she’s a assistant professor of cultural studies at Claremont Graduate University. Her areas of research and teaching include media historiography and theory, post-colonial and new empire studies, environmental humanities media, and the Anthropocene, visual studies, global Asia, South East Asian film and media, amongst others. She received her PhD in cinema and media studies from USC, University of Southern California, and is a former Harper Schmidt fellow through the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago, and a Global Asia postdoctoral fellow from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Marcus Weakley:
From what I know, she has two main projects right now. One is a project that’s conceptualizing film as an object that is animated by both colonial and counter colonial energies. And hopefully we’ll have a chance to talk a bit more about that, as well as another project that’s focusing more on the visualizations of the Anthropocene, particularly through questions of archive information and effect. And I think both of those studies will be great examples of the uniqueness of cultural studies as a field.

Marcus Weakley:
Just a bit more. Her research has been supported by a Social Science Research Council, Andrew W. Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Global Asia Postdoctoral Fellowship amongst others. And we are welcoming her here today to discuss the unique qualities of the field of cultural studies, as well as her specific work within that. So once again, thank you so much for joining me. And I would like to start as I typically do at a more general level, and then we’ll narrow in to your specific research. My sense is the audience might not fully understand what cultural studies is uniquely as a field or an academic discipline, so if you had to describe it to someone who doesn’t know anything about it, how would you do that?

Nadine Chan:
Yeah. So first of all, thank you for having me Marcus and for that intro. Well, cultural studies, it’s a lot of things. I mean, you could ask anyone in the field what the discipline is and they might all well give you different answers. But I think one thing we would all agree on is that as a discipline, it’s fundamentally interested in unearthing infrastructures of inequality, oppression, thinking about networks of power and politics an the production and circulation and use of cultural objects or at particular cultural moments. So, yeah, I mean the concerns of cultural studies, as I say, will always be fundamentally about the interrogation of power and the structures of power in whatever forms. So I think in the nutshell, that is what it would really be. Yeah, I guess I’d say it’s a discipline that’s built around an ethos, the ethos of always doing scholarship that in some way intervenes into questions of power, hegemony and ideology.

Marcus Weakley:
Yeah. So that’s really interesting. I mean, it seems to me that then it has kind of that social justice critical paradigm, and then it’s also very pragmatic, it seems like are very practical. Like the way you’re talking about the use of methods, you are able to pull from established methods and sounds like the humanities and the social sciences just very directly, as well as other fields to just, okay, we’ve got a problem here that we want to solve, or we have something that we want to study and highlight, and we can just use whatever method best accomplishes that. So that leads a bit into what my next question was going to be, which was what’s different about cultural studies compared to anthropology and sociology? And it sounds to me that those are two key elements, that anthropology and sociology don’t have explicit critical or social justice lenses, right?

Nadine Chan:
Right. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think coming back to it, that’s really sort of cultural studies in a nutshell. That sort of ethos of political intervention kind of undermining and breaking apart sort of structures of power and seeing sort of the dirt and the networks, and then the tissues of connectivity that make those structures of power happen. And absolutely in the sense that I think cultural studies allows us to have the freedom to teach ourselves or to get the skills that we need in order to answer the questions that are important.

Nadine Chan:
So I mean, obviously I’m not trained in these other fields that you mentioned, so I can’t really speak for that. But what reads to me as quite, I guess, liberating about cultural studies is that we pull methods from disciplines in order to speak to the research question or the research problem that we have. So it’s very much a process whereby our question and our research problems drive the methodology, drive the process and not the other way around. So for instance, if say literary analysis of a novel makes sense for one chapter, we do that. If ethnography makes sense, say in terms of how this novel was being received in its society or how it continues to circulate in the everyday and it’s become a part of our everyday life, and if that works for another chapter, that’s great too. So in cultural studies, we find our methods. We find methods that fit our questions as opposed to sort of the other way around.

Marcus Weakley:
It sounds to me then that, I mean, there’s kind of a tied along with that then I’m sure is kind of the idea that situatedness is really important or the cultural and power dynamics of a specific situation. That’s probably historical, as well as geographically bound, probably in some cases. Power represents itself in dynamic ways and expressed in different social institutions and conglomerations, I guess. So when you narrow it down, I’m assuming and ask these critical questions geared towards social justice about specific, I think you said cultural events earlier, so about a cultural event, my assumption is that tied into this approach is the idea that there’s something unique here happening that isn’t necessarily transferable to other cultural events in other places. Like maybe some of it is, but you have to approach the situatedness of that specific circumstance for the uniqueness that it is. And so knowledge has that character too, or what we can know about the world or about these power dynamics is that they are situated in unique circumstances. Would that be correct?

Nadine Chan:
So historically it has its roots in Marxist critique with two lineages in the Birmingham School, in the Frankfurt School coming out of the 60s and 70s, and the Birmingham School in particular. And this is how I teach these, my cultural studies courses is very much interested in the convergence with media studies and studies of mass culture. Questions of popular and mass culture, such as cinema, television, new media, and even print forms like advertising the press and so forth. So you have all these so-called intellectual trajectories coming out of its beginnings in Marxist roots and add this a tremendous array of very new and exciting methodologies and perspectives, including that of feminism, sexuality studies, critical race studies, post-colonial studies, new empire studies, as well as various sort theoretical and modes, deconstruction and what have you. Which have over the past few decades really pushed and challenged cultural studies to continuously grow and to reinvent itself.

Nadine Chan:
And that’s one of, I guess, the exciting things about this particular field and working in this particular field in that there is always this conversation happening between different and emergent sort of schools of thought. Cultural studies has never been a static field. In that way, it kind of defies a particular aesthetic definition of it. But that said at its heart, as I mentioned are its Marxist roots. And this is an intellectual tradition that I still emphasize in my teaching today and is particularly pertinent in light of our neoliberal moment and sort of the effects of that. To my mind, there will always be a kind of leftist, progressive element to the ethos of cultural studies. A desire to interrogate the structures of power, whether they be in the forms of capital or institutions such as incarceration or ideological methods, ideological modes of mass culture, like cinema and at present digital new media, for instance.

Nadine Chan:
Some would say that cultural studies has lost its way in recent decades. It’s become so diffused. It’s become sort of the pot of critical thinking and critical theory and critical work everywhere. But that’s a good thing. It shows how prevalent our modes of inquiry are in these other disciplines. So as I mentioned, if one were to sort of trace the lineage of the field, it was developed by British Marxist academics in the mid 20th Century and it’s since been taken up by many disciplines worldwide. Interestingly, it’s sort of institutionalization, particularly in the U.S. into programs and departments, would have been something perhaps that the founding, the initial thinkers behind cultural studies might have been uncomfortable with because of the very nature of cultural studies so called counter institutionalizing, and even one would say radically anti-disciplinary bent.

Nadine Chan:
So there have been many sort of scholarly efforts to pin down cultural studies. Its formation, its disciplinary parameters where it’s heading in recent years. But at the same time, this is not one of the questions that we in cultural studies should be holding near and dear to our heart. Because at the heart of it, what we are interested in this field is very much a kind of critical engagement in questions of power, hegemony, ideology, and in all of these things. It’s becoming, I think now more than ever, cultural studies is experiencing a kind of revival looking at say our present day media driven ideology, driven politics, how this converges with the emergence of new mass medias, social and digital media, and how structures of race and social inequality and capital undergirds all of that. So we are really kind of seeing a moment that was very much like the earlier period out of which cultural studies emerged. And we are seeing a revival of that moment now. So I think it’s a very exciting time to be part of this field.

Marcus Weakley:
It sounds to me that what you’re describing as situatedness is a really important element of how cultural studies approaches culture. You’ve talked about different cultural events or different moments as being the main topics or the main focus of study, and then looking at different expressions or elements of culture. But it seems to me, and if I understand correctly, the epistemological approach behind this is that there are things that go on in situated context that are going to be unique to those contexts in ways that might not be easily transferable to other ones. So there isn’t some overarching knowledge about culture that we’re going to be able to investigate and learn from specific instances of culture. It’s going to be much more contextualized, and maybe there are things that are transferable, but for the most part, you have to do the work of really digging into a specific situation.

Nadine Chan:
Good question. Yeah. So in that sense, I think cultural of studies does both and it can do both. It is definitely not a feel which makes claims toward grand universal theory. I mean, to think it’s not say physics or philosophy, which makes these large overarching claims. But-

Marcus Weakley:
Certain philosophers, not all.

Nadine Chan:
Right, yes. Certain philosophies. So in that way it is not interest… Well, it’s hard to say, but it is less interested in having these grand claims than it is about looking at how power and politics works. And it’s hard to do that without some form of specificity. But at the same time, it could be, but nor does it necessarily have to be a field that’s mired in minutia in these tiny little esoteric moments.

Nadine Chan:
Coming back to that idea that we were talking about earlier, which is about how cultural studies as a field is very much invested in asking sort of questions that matter, questions about power that matter. So in our work, yes, we definitely want to make our researchers situated as historically grounded and grounded in the everyday of the social structures around that particular moment as possible. But we also kind of want to go a step further and to think, what does this mean in terms of how power works? What does this mean in terms of how hegemony works? So how does ideology work and how do I see these sort of formations and structures happening through my whatever case study? If that makes sense. So it makes claims awards, both sort of ends of the spectrum. It speaks to larger concerns, but it’s also sort very much grounded in the concrete and the specific.

Marcus Weakley:
Yeah. And I think that makes a lot of sense to me too. Especially, I mean, I’m sure once you bring in the RFU approach or think of the field or work through the field with more of an emphasis on the Marxist tradition as well, I’m sure more of that goes into it. Because given the predominance of capitalism and the capitalist structure, those sorts of economic and then political and all the other sorts of interconnected power dynamics that are going to move out and through the way capital functions, I’m sure there are going to be things that cross boundaries as well, that you could talk about that’s learned through specific situations.

Nadine Chan:
Yeah, that’s what is exciting about cultural studies is that you can have these conversations across disciplines, across fields, across area studies even because they’re all kind of coming back to this notion of how power works and how do we grapple with the meat of it and the meshiness underneath these various structures. So yes, it speaks big, but it’s also very, very kind of done well. It’s also kind of very rooted in the specifics of the moment and place.

Marcus Weakley:
So I would love to jump in a bit more to your specific research. And I would love if you could use some of this as an opportunity to also talk about why some of these areas of study are so important in our contemporary understanding of power dynamics right now. Because I’m sure as you’re talking about, there’s a resurgence of the original spirit of where cultural studies came from in the 60s and some of these ideas, my sense, I don’t know, you should please correct me if I’m wrong, but some of these areas of study were probably present then, and then some of them have developed over the years. Then I would love to hear a bit more about why some of these are important in the field and they’re being looked at instead of others.

Marcus Weakley:
So to start with the first project that you’re working on that I mentioned earlier. So the first is that you want to look at film as both colonial and counter colonial and do this specifically through a study of colonial educational films in British Malaya in Singapore, from the 1910s to the present. And by doing this also offer theoretical and historiographical framework for colonial cinemas and their post-colonial afterlife.

Marcus Weakley:
So this is really interesting to me where you’re using film studies here in a certain theoretical and historiographical framework to approach the workings of colonialism specifically in the context of British Malaya and Singapore. What drew you to this and how do you approach this in a way that you think is, if you could use what we talked about in theory a bit earlier, how does the way you approach this specifically reflect the values of cultural studies? I’m sorry to give you a three part question, but then just some of the details. What are some of the really important things or interesting things to you that you feel like you’re learning through this study?

Nadine Chan:
Yeah, sure. Thanks for that question. And I’m kind of working through it now that you’ve asked. And I guess there are many ways for me to get at that question. But I suppose if I were to draw a through line through all of my research interests, they’re all about questions of media, medium specificity, and power. I’m always interested in how power works through our mediated forms of knowledge. And I want to tease out how webs of power structures happen. And I take these to mean different things at different points in the work. So it could be colonialism, it could be sort of environmental degradation. It could be kind of exploitative capitalism. How these things are continued and how they can be unraveled, but doing so through the specific cultural object of media.

Nadine Chan:
So there’s this book that I really like, Ann Stoler’s, Duress: Imperial Durabilities of Our Times that I teach in my course on media and durable empires, that really speak to this idea of the durabilities of Imperial formations. I’m interested in thinking about how empire in his colonial forms looked different in the 20th Century, in the 21st Century, but how one can pass out these various threads of capital, of race through these so-called different political moments over time. So how are these of sort of formations durable through time, I guess?

Nadine Chan:
And then I became interested in cinema as a mass medium that came about in the late… Let’s see now, getting scrambled on my dates… the late 1800s, and then coincided with colonialism in its late stage and the tide of capitalist modernity that happened in many parts of the world. So there was this great kind of confluence between new forms of empire in the 1900s and late 1800s and the emergence of this mode of mass culture being that of cinema. And this is what led me to my first project, A Cinema Under the Palms: Colonial World Making in an Unruly Medium.

Nadine Chan:
So here, I mean this book begins with the premise that in colonial situations, cinema was never just about entertainment, but was very much entangled with increasing forms of colonial governance in everyday life. And I look at the context of British Southeast Asia, specifically Malaysia and Singapore, as sites where, one of the first sites in the world, where colonial governments were experimenting with using films to produce of semi-literate citizens and spectators, who kind of shared this, a notion, had a shared notion of what it means to be a subject that was part of the empire.

Nadine Chan:
So in many ways that where never before possible, colonial cinema could recreate an artificial world where time and space and human and natural environments could be rearranged on the surface of celluloid according to very colonial logic. Through film, you could have the British Empire pictured together. The world could be reassembled as a visualization of Imperial capital and extension of Imperial cartographies and arranged according to vernacular time. So a lot of this book is very much about thinking about how the very logics of empire can be found through the ontology of cinema.

Nadine Chan:
So it’s not so much a book that’s interested in tracing representation. I’m not terribly interested in like, “Oh, look at how native people in Southeast Asia were being represented on film.” That’s not really the interest here. But it’s really thinking about how the very technology, the aesthetics, form, the ontology of cinema itself speaks to colonial logics that emerge at the time of its being.-

Marcus Weakley:
Wow, so-

Nadine Chan:
… and so that’s part of the book’s first part of the argument. The book’s second part of the argument, and that comes back to your question on the counter colonial part, is that in spite of the mediums kind of emergence as a tool of empire, it was also very much a space for counter colonial resistance and possibility. And this is where I get at what’s at the title of the book, Colonial World Making in an Unruly Medium. There is something very fundamentally unruly about cinema. While it helped to build this empire, it was also a source of its disruption. And this is where maybe the cultural studies part of the equation comes in, in that I look for these so-called counter colonial energies in various places around the cinematic object.

Nadine Chan:
So it’s not just looking at the object itself, but looking at how it was circulated or failed to circulate. Looking at how the tech technology worked or failed to work coherently. It failed to sort of capture the tropics in a particular way. It failed to capture dark skin exposed correctly. So there were all these failures within the medium itself, not to mention in terms of how it was received. So some of the work that I do involved finding out these histories about how the film was received and continues to be received among people in Malaysia. And this gives it a kind of social life and an afterlife that exists beyond the nature of the project. I mean the object of colonial cinema itself. So on the one hand, I have this argument about the cinema as a colonial world maker. But on the other hand, I also have this argument about cinema as an unruly medium. And so that’s kind of the trajectory for the first book.

Marcus Weakley:
Yeah. So that’s so interesting. So on the one hand, you’re looking at it in terms of a colonial instrument of sorts, like the intended original, okay, we’ve got this medium, that’s going to be more powerful than… I mean, I can imagine people think this is going to be more powerful than print in many respects and in books and in other ways. Let’s craft a new world through this medium type thing as an instrument of colonialization. But then on the other hand, and I have to say I mean, it sounds really interesting, all the different ways that you described looking at how it didn’t work. I mean all the way from being distributed or received to all the other different ways that it just, that didn’t pan out or people used it in other subversive ways. I don’t mean to ask this question, but I’m interested in it, so is it close? How are you doing with the project? Is it going to be ready soon?

Nadine Chan:
Is close. Yes.

Marcus Weakley:
Cool. Because I would like to take a look at it.

Nadine Chan:
Fingers crossed it will be done very, very soon. So yeah, I’ve been working on it for a while now and I think it’s time for it to be out in the world. I’ve already started researching and I’m presenting stuff for my second project. So I’m eager to start thinking about that and bridging some of the arguments in my first project to my second one. So I’m in the process of tying up the loose ends. To a certain degree, revisions can never be complete because coming back to this whole notion of cultural studies, speaking to critical questions of our moment, you can write a historical project. Mine is a historical project. It ends in the late 50s, but it always speaks to the questions that drive us today. I mean, it always gets back to this question of media, media and power, sort of media and it’s counter possibility. Which are questions that we’re kind of thinking about today too.

Marcus Weakley:
I think we should jump to your next project.

Nadine Chan:
Okay, cool. Yeah.

Marcus Weakley:
Yeah. So because you were saying there’s some development too, or at least some integration or some tie between the two. So is this the one on the visualizations of the Anthropocene?

Nadine Chan:
That’s right. Yeah.

Marcus Weakley:
Cool.

Nadine Chan:
And it’s a project that I’ve been very excited, in many ways came to me quite naturally and quite, I would say almost in the quite fluidly from the first project. So the first project thinks about pretty much coloniality in the 1900s. And this project thinks about the environmental crises as an extension of capital. So very much in alignment with Jason Moore’s stuff on the capitalist scene where coloniality was its dominant proponent at an earlier moment. So I see this almost really natural convergence of my second project, which is on visual media, data visualization, and the environmental. Thinking back about that earlier point I made about what do imperial formations look like across through different sort of political moments and formations? How can we look to the environmental issues that we are facing as also an extension of “imperial formations” or empire?

Nadine Chan:
So my second project is candidly titled Documenting Friction in the Extractive Zone: Visualizing Ecological Milieus of Uncertainty and Loss. And it thinks about various visual instruments that I use to document the world and to record so-called natural phenomena, particularly in the context of Southeast Asia. And so I look at indexical media forms such as cinema and photography, but also new digital and computational forms of information visualization, such as data mapping, scientific modeling of things such as climate change, air pollution, meteorology. In other words, it’s kind of interested in how the ways in which data of complex systems, predictive models kind of make visible, immediate, and apparent for human understanding things such as the long duration of environmental duress. What Rob Nixon would call the long dyings and slow violences of planetary degradation. And so my project is interested in looking at what are the visual tools in which we use to visualize that and what is limiting and problematic about these tools.

Nadine Chan:
So I’m kind of working through several research questions now. First of all, how do our visual media and methods of information visualization produce our sense of planet and planetary time? How do these modes of seeing ecological crisis within zones of invisibility and representational failure work? What are its limitations and mid conditions of uncertainty, degradation and loss? What does it mean to have an indexical medium that can only document the aftermath? And in spite of this, can modes of counter knowledge or occluded visibility still become productive ways of witnessing and building relationality with our planet. I’m starting to go into this area of complexity science and the idea of complexity and complex systems is another through line for the book. And here I’m really kind of referencing complexity studies in math and computational science and we talk about interdisciplinary.

Nadine Chan:
But I mean, complexity science kind of explains non-linear systems in which large networks work in very unpredictable ways. So weather systems, climate epidemiology, the worldwide web, financial markets are some instances of non-linear systems. And I think where I want to take this book to word is kind of thinking about an ontology of visuality and an ontology of knowledge, which is less about indexical transparent immediate relationality to the real, which is very much what things like photography or cinema or even data modeling is all about. But finding ways in which one can picture complexity in the humanities and in media studies, perhaps as a way of taking us closer, hermeneutically toward inhabiting milieus of uncertainty and loss. So in other words, I want to move away from the hardening of knowledge, but quite the opposite, the opening up of media to productive possibilities of counter knowledge.

Marcus Weakley:
Yeah. And that uncertainty is probably a bit chaotic too, would you say?

Nadine Chan:
Yeah. Yeah.

Marcus Weakley:
So how do you represent chaos in [inaudible 00:33:24].

Nadine Chan:
Exactly. Exactly. How do you represent chaos? And my first book let’s not forget is about cinema as an unruly medium. So there’s this kind of through line of the chaotic and the unruliness and the counter this and that throughout both works.

Marcus Weakley:
Yeah. Is there any final takeaway or anything you would like to leave the audience with about cultural studies before we wrap?

Nadine Chan:
Yeah, for sure. So if we could draw a thread through our various meandering conversation today, one of the things that really sticks out is about how the field is very much invested in questions of, I guess you could say social justice. And social justice can mean a lot of different things, particularly in cultural studies. It could mean kind of literal going out on the streets and activism. It could mean community work. It could mean socially engaged scholarship and the latter. I think socially engaged scholarship is very much what we are interested in doing here at CGU, whether or not the work is historical or whether or not the work is situated in another place, in another time where we’re all interested at sort of getting at these questions that matter, questions of power and through socially engaged work that always comes back to the ethos of cultural studies. Which is how does power work and what are the ways in which we can unseat that or unthink that, or find different modes of epistemological possibility to rethink the ways in which sort of forms hegemony replicate themselves?

Marcus Weakley:
Professor Chan, thank you so much for joining us today. I really enjoyed talking with you and I look forward to reading your work when it comes out soon.

Nadine Chan:
Thank you. Thank you Marcus, for this chance to flex my brain a little bit in this lap down and for your really engaging questions, it’s been fun.

Marcus Weakley:
Great. So from Studio B3 at Claremont Graduate University, this has been Breaking the Shackles of Time. Thank you so much for listening and look forward to seeing you here next time.