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Abstract

'all theorists […] produce theoretical propositions as part of their engagement with or against other theorists and bodies of thought in specific historical and political contexts'. The contacts and conflicts inherent in the intradisciplinary, extradisciplinary, and interdisciplinary dynamics that invest the practice of cultural studies reemerge on further grounds that might even take the form of institutional recognition. Udo Göttlich and Gönül Pultar point out that no official chair or professorship exclusively dedicated to cultural studies can be found in Germany or in Turkey, thus leaving the researchers in this field in some kind of awkward professional ambiguity, if not under the tutelage of established academic traditions. This difficulty seems to be further complicated if such traditions are endowed with an authoritative claim to hold definitive power on the notion of culture, as Göttlich emphasises in his account of the challenge of Kulturwissenchaft(en) and Kultursoziologie to the formation of cultural studies in the German speaking world. The picture gets even more complicated, complex or ambiguous when one is reminded that there is no yet decided-upon rendering of 'cultural studies' into Portuguese and Turkish (and possibly into other European and non-European languages as well), and that translation still depends on inconclusive interpretation of the nature of the kind of research in question. The question of translating 'cultural studies' is not just a question of conceptual adequacy, and 'language' appears to be a much broader and deeper problem for researchers in the non-English speaking world. The problem seems to be multilayered. In the specific case of Turkey, as Pultar argues, it may take the form of a 'language divide' or 'divorce' between Anglophone scholars and those who are merely Turcophone. This divide is elevated to a higher order, the argument goes, when the two sides mutually disdain each other either because one finds what is published in the local language theoretically uninformed and therefore uninteresting or because the other finds what is published in English irrelevant to Turkish studies. The most pessimistic aspect of this account is revealed in two further claims: that the latter judge the work of the former as 'more often than not demonizing Turks and Turkey'; and that 'one cannot but sense' in the stance of the former 'a whiff of neo-colonization [...] that translates in action into unconscious neo-colonialism'. This indeed is a difficult position for multilingual scholars who are supposed to be unconscious neo-colonialists (possibly demonising their own culture) even when they are trained and work in intellectual traditions of a radically self-critical nature. The problem would, of course, not be resolved even if English were taken as the main medium of communication and publication. For, as Sampaio quotes from Álvaro Pina (Pina 2000), there often is the dilemma of having to choose between, on the one hand, writing on a local topic and thus reducing the chance to appear on...