Trouble

As intellectuals, such pronoucements have been our stock-in-trade, at least since a ghost was heard wandering around Europe rabbiting on about the end of holy fixity and the airing of profanity. What might be newer is a sense that in the face of contemporary troubles, many habitual scholarly responses seem inadequate. Today, the willingness to say that we now live in ‘troubled times’ has everything to do with locally distinctive articulation of global predicaments such as climate change, provincial fault lines such as Trump and complexly specific flows and articulations such as the violence done to displaced peoples. This edition of Cultural Studies Review trials some less-than-conventional scholarly responses to a diverse array of troubling cultural moments. Tara Brabazon, Steve Redhead and Runyararo Chivaura raise the possibility of ‘Trump Studies’ in a polemic that seems both mimetic and supplementary. Their persistent attention to race, and whiteness in particular, as a point of connection between Brexit and Trump usefully reminds us of the enduring historical dimensions of these times while not ignoring the unpredictable effects of Trump’s transformation of conventional alliances.