Cultural Studies in Interhemispherical Perspective. China, Africa, Asia and Australasia

Thematic assessment is offered with regard to Critical Arts’s incorporation into various Chinese trajectories and networks of cultural and media studies. The predominance of discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and comparative empirical studies of Western and Chinese media is addressed for the period 2016–2023, as is the recent location of Critical Arts within the global discourse analysis publishing sector, that is mapped in Wang and Sun (2023, “Bibliometric Study on Chinese Discourse (1994-2021).” Critical Arts 1–17). The reasons for this narrow discursive framing are offered in comparison with another trajectory that is evident in the pages of the journal, one that emerges out of Chinese literary studies in conversation with Western theories, Western philosophies and which addresses big epistemological questions rather than questions of comparative “us-them” differences/correspondences or of administrative or linguistic detail. Finally, in addressing the different methodological directions that have been experienced in the journal’s pages, this overview seeks to act as something of a manifesto in returning Critical Arts to a more general cultural and media studies position. Our method of analysis is to symptomatically track and frame the Chinese meta-narratives as published in the journal, to identify and describe the themes that have been of concern to our various Chinese authors and editors, to relate these to cultural studies as inherited from the field’s earlier origins across the world, and to offer a paradigmatic map for future authors through which to conceptually filter their submissions. Our analysis was pre-circulated to the four Critical Arts editorial board China specialists, amongst others, who were invited to contribute to our narrative.