Discourse as Cultural Struggle

Shi-xu is Qiushi Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute of Discourse and Cultural Studies, Zhejiang University, China. He was previously Reader at the University of Ulster, UK. A leading scholar in discourse studies, Shi-xu is the author of A Cultural Approach to Discourse, Cultural Representations: Analyzing the Discourse about the Other, and the lead editor of Read the Cultural Other: Forms of Otherness in the Discourses of Hong Kong's Decolonisation. He is also the founding editor of the Journal of Multicultural Discourses.

• Part I: Cultural Issues in Theory and Methodology; 1. Discourse Studies and Cultural Politics: An Introduction; 2. Discourse and Cultural Transformation; 3. Agendas for Multicultural Discourse Research; Part II: Cultural Struggles in Discourse; 4. Discursive Transition in Central and Eastern Europe; 5. Cultural Value Change in Mainland China's Commercial Discourse; 6. A Chinese Christmas Story; 7. Western Representations of the Other; 8. Western Politeness Theory and non-Western Context; 9. Discourse, Cultural Imperialism, Black Culture and Language Research in the United States; 10. The Discourse of Chinese Medicine and Westernization; 11. Intercultural Communication and Conflict Resolution: Towards an Iranian Approach; 12. Teaching Intercultural Communication in a Chinese Perspective.

Here is a book that takes diversity seriously and lifts it to the level of an epistemic paradigm. What we know is culturally constituted and discursively articulated; this relativism is converted into an absolutism due to historical power relations, and we find ourselves a curious situation in which anything that suggests diversity at fundamental levels of thought becomes a serious theoretical problem. This book addresses this absurdity, and in the context of globalization, the exercise is to be welcomed. -- Jan Blommaert, University of London