Abstract not found

ABSTRACT This article welcomes Handel K. Wright’s challenge to standard accounts of the history of cultural studies and begins with suggestions about the significance of this intervention. However, the piece contends that there are limits even to a pluralized origins narrative and that the spirit of Wright’s challenge should be carried further. Hence, three key features of Wright’s approach to cultural studies are reviewed: the stress on its anti-disciplinary nature, the refusal of the confinement to educational sites, and the concern to maintain ’its productive, political edge’. By amplifying the dimensions of these issues and raising critical questions about strategies relating to them, the author tries to encourage further debate about not only where cultural studies has come from, but also about where it may be going.

ii Whereas there is an accumulation of a large body of research in oral literature, it is mostly confined to what is considered as the “fabula ” and “folk wisdom ” (tsingano) genres. Such understanding of genre eschews oral history because it is designated as a “factual ” genre and ceded to historians. Using material collected ethnographically among the Abanyole of Western Kenya, this study combines historical and literary methods to investigate the Nyole expression of ethnic identity through the oral historical narrative. The study shifts attention from the perceived mutual exclusiveness of factual and fictional genres by focusing on the processes of the constitution and narration, and the purpose of narration of akakhale (the past) by the Nyole to cast light on the methods of fashioning the Nyole historical and social imagination. Thus, the study suggests alternative methods of reading the oral historical narrative by highlighting the discursive processes and the predominance of language use in the production the texts of the Nyole past. Taking the notion of the past as the storehouse of a people’s idea of origin and ethnic identity

I nternational communication theory and re- search historically have done well with those subjects that characterize modernity, such as the nation-state and "the fact. " Today, how-ever, it is the postmodern condition within which communication takes place-a con-dition also known as the information society, for many of the critical features of post-modernity are the effects of the use of new information technologies. Under either desig-nation, international communication theory and research must respond to circumstances qualitatively and quantitatively different from those of the past. The current environment may be described as "pandemonic, " following Hookway (1999), because it is ubiquitously