Paper short abstract:

This text aims to disrupt a narrative about how a series of representational critiques in the 1980s changed the rules of the game for the future of Anthropology and African Studies by breaking with a modernist past.

Paper long abstract:

In the disruptive wake of Writing Culture (Clifford & Marcus 1986), more than one wave of criticism has attempted to come to terms with this legacy, but in many cases these efforts have only re-asserted the written word as the locus of anthropological knowledge and the notion of representation as the primary concern for generations of anthropologists to come. This text sets out to disrupt a self-perpetuating narrative about how a series of critiques in the 1980s (alternately referred to as the "crisis of representation literature" or the "literary turn" or the "Writing Culture debates") changed the rules of the game for the future of the discipline by breaking with a modernist past. As a number of commentators have observed, the break with the past signaled by the crisis of representation literature was not actually very clean (Tyler 1987, Fabian 1990), in part because it did not seek to undermine representation, but rather to make ethnographic representations more accurate (Said 1989; Nencel et Pels 1991). Furthermore, while Writing Culture did call attention to the political nature of representation, it failed to fundamentally problematize the notion of text, and—more importantly for the argument here—it was unable to explain how knowledge from ethnographic encounters is produced and put to use. Now, as the contributors to these debates have moved on to other themes and theories, and a generation of scholars influenced by this writing has come of age, it is not clear what the legacy of this movement will be.