Of Sacred Crossroads
Posted on | July 12, 2008 |
Since the Crossroads conference wound up on Monday I’ve been heeding my stars and hibernating for a few days. Kingston was amazing but gruelling with very long, fully scheduled days–which included, on top of a constant coterie of attendees milling around the poolside hotel bar each night: a major reception at the Prime Minister’s residence, with free pouring rum, massive barbecues of fresh fish, a band and dancing well in to the night; films and performances every lunch time; a traditional drumming performance featuring local elders; a fashion show staging the history of Jamaican dress and style; a dancehall spectacular (with bass so loud my camera couldn’t record it); and a tour of the ancient village of Port Royal. This is just part of the official register of events. Many other colleagues found time to discover much more (and thanks to Dave Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee for chaperoning us to dinner one night).
This was a conference like no other–and I was so grateful to be there to learn about this incredible culture. As a Board member I had meetings scheduled throughout the event so didn’t get the chance to join the trips around the island other delegates were enjoying. But this is the price of being committed to institution building for cultural studies, as the outgoing association Chair, Meaghan Morris, has put it. Sometimes this means taking care of business while other people go have fun 
Still, my body is only just starting to recover from what has felt like three weeks of ceaseless socialising and sharing ideas with many wonderful new friends: in Adelaide, Perth, Sydney, Brisbane and Kingston. I hope you will all stay in touch!
Some people will know I have been re-elected to the ACS Board thanks to the Australia/New Zealand contingent who could vote beforehand. I will also be staying on as organisational secretary for the next four years, and this time around I will be helping organise the next Crossroads conference to be held at Lingnan University in Hong Kong in 2010. This promises to be a big opportunity for scholars in my own region to get a sense of what this association is like.
The thing about ACS that I find important is that it tries to enact in practice what cultural studies encapsulates in name. To paraphrase from Meaghan’s address to the association assembly, despite obvious risks, it attempts to intervene in the comfortable forms of academic sociality which currently favour English speaking professionals, to collaborate and produce scholarly conversations at a regional, national and global level. It is ‘to blunder in, where angels fear to tread’ as Meaghan put it: it is ‘a politics of daring’ that insists on going places where not all people feel uniformly safe (and even if this is a psychological rather than actual risk). This seems only fitting for a cultural studies association given that so many people other than white Western scholars feel unsafe when they travel–when they have the choice to do so. And as so many of us who waited for hours in lines, on the tarmac, or at baggage carousels in LA or Miami this past week know, when we do travel somewhere that is not the US, we still face the surveillance systems and the weight of that cultural terrain in order to get where we really want to go.
But what we learned in Jamaica is how important it is to come to offer support and an audience for brilliant scholars who are forging paths of their own, and are struggling with issues in spite of what “our” media have taught us to fear. So to Sonjah and all the other organisers of Crossroads 2008: thank you for giving us so much evidence that there is more to academic life than scepticism. And see you in Hong Kong!
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August 21st, 2008 @ 2:04 pm
As an actress and student of Cultural Studies at the U.W.I. and having participated in the conference (My First) it is truly heart-warming to read your comment about the discourses but especially about Jamaica.It is truly a great place!The conference was certainly packed ; I enjoyed every minute of it.I want to be apart of this association.