1. Cultural studies as a discourse emerged in the early 1960s.  What implications does it have for cultural studies that Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney set out destroying social services, and democratic forces, dismantling social democracy?  How should the project of cultural studies change for the 21st century?

2. Foucault suggests as regards postmodernism that history breaks free of the highly meagre idea of referentiality.  Indeed, postmodernism undermines the idea of referentiality or the much maligned referent.  How does referentiality need to be rethought?  Is it time to have a reconstructed referentiality after the undermined referentiality?

3. How are we to recuperate or mobilize counter-hegemonic agency or human praxis in a world so penetrated by capital?   Is it possible to form an alliance of historic bloc against the dehumanizing total system?

4. As many critics have pointed out, postmodernity is distinct from postmodernism as modernity is divergent from modernism.  Can we say modernity and postmodernity are more comprehensive concepts which denote something close to what can be called the zeitgeist, or a pervasive mood, whereas modernism and postmodernism designate styles of representation or specific doctrines?  Yet, according to Jameson, postmodernism does not refer to specific stylistic features, but to the cultural logic of late capitalism or the Althusserian mode of production.  This seems contradictory with regard to the above-rehearsed difference between modernity and modernism, and between postmodernism and postmodernity.  How would you define the relationship between these terms?

5. The issue of modernity again.  Are postmodernism and modernity incompatible or do they coexist in the same time slot?  When Habermas relaunches modernity as an incomplete project, this seems especially pertinent to non-western countries.  As Terry Eagleton recently remarked, debates between modernity and postmodernity are of immense moment in non-Western cultures which are dragged into the orbit of a postmodern West without having fully undergone a European-style modernity themselves.  Jameson makes similar comments as regards the forming and disintegration of civil society in The Seeds of Time.  There are some further world facts: although postmodernism is the dominant cultural logic in the West, and although multinational capital is increasingly penetrating the former third world with postmodern ideology and mode of production, postmodernism has not yet become the dominant mode of production in most peripheral countries.  Can we say those cultures are closer to modernity or more urgently need modernity?  Is the world only allowed one version of modernity?  Can the previous third world countries achieve what is best termed non-Western forms of modernity catalyzed by their contact and confrontation with Western modernity and postmodernity?

6. How come modernity began and still remains to be defined in terms of Western history while every country has its own trajectory of movement from past to present, from old to new, and while every nation has its distinct terms of modernity for what it means by modernity?

7. How would you define countries like China, since they are on the margins of modernity and postmodernity?  In Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Africa in Marlow's eyes, with its uncanny primitiveness, constitutes Europe's temporal as well spatial other.  This implies what we call Eurocentric historicism.  And this Eurocentric gaze informs many Western historiographic writings.  But in terms of what do we label a certain culture primitive or backward?

8. Would you say something about China's engagement with modernity?  If, as has been generally agreed upon, China has not fully undergone Western-style modernity, then how would you define the period of China since 1911, or at least since 1949 with the advent of socialism in China?  Is socialism a phase of modernity?  Is Mao a modernist or not?

9. Why does revolution always ends in tragedies, and why do all revolutions fail in their goals?  Do we still need revolutions?  How should we evaluate revolutions?  Can we say that revolution's failures contribute to historical progress as much as its successes?

10.  Is theory translatable or not?  We mean does theory have a general application or not?  If theory is not translatable, then how can people of different cultures understand and communicate with one another?  If theory can be translated from one historical reality into another as meaning can be translated from one language into another, then what of the dilemma that when certain people apply an imported theory to their own history, they are seen as either forcing violated history to fit theory or forcing violated theory to fit history.

11. Ideology is one of the key terms in present cultural studies.  Since the times of Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams, it has been defined differently in cultural studies than in traditional Marxism.  Ideology is no longer used to designate a set of wrong ideas that one can fall subject to or transcend; it is ubiquitous, pervasive, part of the social processes of material production (Williams); ideology is a major component of culture, and as re-polarized to history as the absent cause (Althusser); ideology becomes a kind of cognitive mapping of that unrepresentable history.  The questions here are: When did ideology become an inescapable prison house?  Are all truths ideological in class society?  Is the proposition that history absolutely rejects representation not an ideology in itself as well?  If it is, then what terms can we apply to the true history that stands prior to that ideology?  To proceed to politics or polemics of and in ideology, by what criteria do we judge one ideology as superior to another, or truer to history than another?

12. Postmodernism is an ‘end of ideology’, just as it has been declared to be the end of history.  But as Terry Eagleton argued, this is of course true only for postmodern theorists.  It is hardly true for American Evangelicals, Egyptian fundamentalists, Ulster Unionists or British fascists.  Some ideologies (those of neo-Stalinism, for instance) may have crumbled, while others (particularly racism, neo-colonialism, free-marketeering) remain as virulent as ever.  How do you ponder the extraordinary irony that, in a world gripped by powerful, sometimes death-dealing, ideologies, the intellectuals have decided that the ideological party is over?  If power, desire and sectional interests are the very stuff of reality, why bother to speak of ideologies as though there was anything beyond them, or as though they could ever be changed?

13. Jameson says in The Seeds of Time that the precondition of the politics of difference or micropolitics is the universal weakening and levelling of real and objective difference on a global scale.  But if the binary boundary between identity and difference has collapsed, how can one determine whether late capitalism is weakening or erasing difference or identity.  Besides, is gender, class or minority oppression a result of the ideology of identity or the ideology of difference?

14. If micropolitics in theory is a result of the universal weakening of real and objective difference on a global scale, then it seems to possess a radical counter-hegemonic thrust against the late capitalist process of commodification.  But Terry Eagleton makes a remark on contemporary theory that is hardly reconcilable to what Jameson says here.  According to Eagleton, theory is one major symptom in our time of the commodification of intellectual life itself, as one conceptual fashion replaces another in the intellectual stock market, to use a phrase from Northrop Frye.  How would you comment on this?  Do we see a real divergence between Jameson and Eagleton on the same phenomenon? 

15. Mouffe and Laclau admonish us that we have often ‘moved from an essentialism of the totality to an essentialism of the elements’. If this is true, then it seems that every discourse risks being guilty of essentialism, overt or covert.  Gayatri Spivak has made this clear again and again that we cannot but be essentialists, advocating ‘strategic use of essentialism’. Do you agree with this?  Under what circumstances is the use of essentialism justifiable, productive, liberatory?

16. Is it true that any act of theorizing involves totalization, explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious?  If theorizing always involves totalization, then can we say that totalization is a kind of ‘original sin’, and that detotalization is not to undo totalization indiscriminately, but to deconstruct the totalization of a targeted discourse and reinvoke totalization in constructing one's own arguments and narratives?  If totalization as such is inescapable, then is it not more pertinent and more politically consequent to ask ‘Who does the act of totalization serve?’ ‘What does it repress and violate?’  Can we say that there is nothing wrong with totalization itself, but the purposes it is made to serve?

17. One is often puzzled by ironic reversals that criss-cross contemporary debate.  The politics of difference is also frequently called the politics of identity.  Group or collective identity is set over or against hegemonic structures based on difference and oppression as well as on identity or solidarity.

18. Can you talk on the relationship between gender, race, and class?

19. Can you talk about the relationship of postcolonialism and postmodernism?  Is postcolonialism a progeny of postmodernism?  If postcolonialism owes its emergence to postmodernism, do other contemporary discourses such as feminism, queer theory, and even neo-Marxism owe a similar debt to postmodernism?

20. Has the Western world moved beyond orientalism or is it still influenced by orientalists' stereotypes and assumptions of the Orient?  Is there a neo-Orientalism taking place in the world today?

21. Due to historical uneven development in the world, there is still a sharp contrast and disparity between East and West, or the First World and the Third World.  It seems that the previously colonized and semi-colonized countries still remain ideologically and culturally subaltern to the West.  In other words, the West is reconquering the East or the Third World, but this time it is not through military coercion, but through multi-national capital, Western technology and through the former Third World countries' own consent or their uncritical acceptance of Western culture.  Given this metamorphosed imperialism, is it justifiable to say that we live in a postcolonial age?  How can one reconcile the postcolonial with facts of neo-imperialism?

22. What is the role of the intellectual in neo-Gramscian cultural politics?  Is there a significant distinction between an intellectual and an academic?  It seems that one would be an adequate academic if one knows well the rules of scholarship in one's own discipline, and proves productive in disciplinary knowledge, analysis, and writing; but one cannot be regarded as an adequate intellectual unless one is possessed of a broader sense of justice and responsibility as to knowledge and culture, and has to be critically responsive to social life.  What would one have to do to become academic and intellectual at the same time?  If there are many academics who fail to possess those intellectual qualities as defined above, what do you think accounts for this failure?  Are there institutional as well as personal reasons?

23. The last three decades have witnessed an overgrowth of post-marked discourses.  The shared prefix ‘post’ seems to confer a kind of continuity on all these parallel or derived counter-hegmonic movements, and their continuity is registered by the targets of critique or objects of investigation such as logocentrism, phallocentrism, ethnocentrism/Eurocentrism.  Can one say that what has emerged is a new grand narrative except that it valorizes fragmented, discontinuous, local strategies of narration and argumentation?  Lyotard says that postmodernism is hallmarked by its incredulity towards grand narratives or grands recits, but can we say that postmodernism is weaving its own grand narratives as well?

24. If ideology in general is always a reduction or violation of reality, then is it not of urgent necessity to critique the postmodern ideology of difference or differentiation?

25. Terry Eagleton has noted that it is not wrong to trust to the possibility of such universal values, but that the material conditions that might allow them to flourish have not yet come into being.  How would you respond to this?  If you agree with Eagleton, could you sketch the kinds of material conditions that would foster universal values?

26. What is the task of cultural theory and cultural studies?  If it is to question and unsettle the traditional ideas and values of culture, then what cultural and social alternatives does it have to offer?

27. What is the role of university in the age of finance capital?  If the university has been an autonomous space of thinking and knowledge, a space of liberal education not directly affected by capital, how can it maintain such autonomy when the university is affiliated with corporation and business, or as Masao Miyaoshi says, when information and knowledge in university is bent to lucrous purses?

28. The transnational corporations that research universities increasingly serve and are paid by (as opposed to traditional service to the state, and funding by it) tend more and more to have an influence on the university in transnational scope.  As a result, academic capitalism and managed professionals become an important phenomenon, transforming the nature of university.  How should the university adapt itself to the situation of globalization?  Will the university change its institutions, as happened in the 19th century?

29. We would like to take some time to discuss nationalism and internationalism.  Dialectically, again, nationalism and internationalism are not fixed in character.  At certain moments of history nationalism has been progressive discourse, and at others, it has been deployed as a part of the state or religious ideology.  The same relativity is true of internationalism as well.  It can refer to the process of international exchange, dialogue and understanding, but it can also be the logic of multinational capital.  In what situations are nationalism and internationalism liberatory and politically progressive and in what circumstances are these discourses repressive and reactionary?

30. As Benedict Anderson suggests, nationalism  is not only an ‘object’ in the world to discover and investigate but is in some ways constituted in theory - both negatively and affirmatively.  One of the shifts marked in the most recent investigation of nationalism is the recognition that it both has theories and must be theorized, instead of being only documented.  How would you respond to this argument?  We hope you would give some theoretical accounts for the question of nationalism.

31. According to the concepts of Althusser's ‘overdetermination’ and Bloch's non-syncronous contraction’, can we say contemporary nationalism develops a residual (modern) subjectivity within a dominant (postmodern) mode of production in the era of multi-national capital?

32. In analyzing the aesthetic production, Jameson finds ‘cognitive mapping’ of the world situation: the nation-state continues its non-synchronous existence; films from different parts of the world are symptomatically slanted from their respective positions.  By combining the perspectives from a range of the world's cultures, Jameson achieves a larger sense of the totality of the world system and points to one reason for the form of relational study: ‘a study of third-world culture necessarily entails a new view of ourselves, from the outside, insofar as we ourselves are (perhaps without fully knowing it) constitutive forces powerfully at work in our general world capitalist system’.  Is Jameson searching for something beyond ‘Eurocentrism’ or revealing strains of anti-first worldism?  With the expansion of global economy, in what sense does ‘cognitive mapping’ remain an important tool for understanding the ‘odd anachronisms’ of nationalism?

33.  The rapid development of new communications technologies have been changing the texture of our daily life.  Will this development lead to new forms of constructive and potentially powerful social organization, new kinds of communities?