Itinerary of a Thought: Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies, and the Unresolved Problem of the Relation of Culture to "Not Culture"

2001 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 200-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice Peck
1997 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-353
Author(s):  
Fran Markowitz

Ever since the late 1960s, when Fredrik Barth urged us to move away from the idea that ethnicity is constituted by “cultural stufT and to focus instead on the boundary that demarcates groups, anthropologists (and their perhaps more radical half-siblings in cultural studies) have cast into doubt the primordial or essentialist nature of ethnic groups, to say nothing of ethnic identity. Earlier studies focused on the groups themselves—how they display and are constrained by their identity as immigrants, minorities, ethnics, “persistent peoples,” and even “marginal men” (sic)—while more recent investigations have taken up the “borderlands” where groups meet, confront each other (Rosaldo; Rouse), and become zones of hybridized cultural production (Bhabha). In a related vein, ethnicity is also explored as one of many possible intersections of power and culture, and ethnic identity becomes a crazy-quilt of namings and “being-called” (Probyn 25). Indeed, Stuart Hall informs us that “identities are never unified, and in late modem times, increasingly fragmented and fractured, never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions” (4, emphasis added).


2019 ◽  
Vol 96 (96) ◽  
pp. 5-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Gilbert

When Stuart Hall died in 2014, many tributes and memorial activities were planned by organisations, institutions and publications that felt they owed him a debt. New Formations was no exception, and the editorial board spent some time reflecting on an appropriate tribute. Stuart himself, as many of us knew, had little interest in seeing his work codified or memorialised for its own sake. But there was one injunction that many of us were familiar with from that work, his example, and from frequent personal and political conversations with him. The importance of thinking about 'the conjuncture', of 'getting the analysis right', was one that Stuart frequently emphasised to his students and interlocutors. The importance of mapping the specificity of the present, of situating current developments historically, of looking out for political threats and opportunities, was always at the heart of Stuart's conception both of 'cultural studies' as a specific intellectual practice, and of the general vocation of critical and engaged scholarship in the contemporary world. This is double-issue is the first of two volumes of New Formations to be dedicated, in Stuart's honour, to the understanding of this conjuncture. This introductory essay/editorial considers the relationship between 'cultural studies' and 'conjunctural analysis' as specific types of intellectual practice, before proposing a specific analysis of our present 'conjuncture', in dialogue with the other contributors to this volume.


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 556-563
Author(s):  
JAY GARCIA

Recalling his work as cofounder and contributor toUniversities and Left Review, or the ULR group, in the lead-up to the founding of cultural studies during the 1950s, Stuart Hall noted that much of that work had to do with the United States. “In geopolitical terms we were of course neutralists, hostile to the politics emanating from the State Department in Washington,” Hall wrote, “but culturally we were nonetheless attracted by the vitality of American popular life, indeed to the domain of mass culture itself.” If the ULR group and similar collectives shared an “anxiety about the stupendous power of the booming consumer capitalism of post-war America,” they were also united by an appreciation for the ways the “vitality and raucousness of American culture certainly loosened England's tight-lipped, hierarchical class cultures and carried inside it possibilities – or the collective dream? – for a better future, which we felt was a serious political loss to deny.” Not unrelatedly, by the 1960s and 1970s, cultural studies and certain quarters of American intellectual life were proceeding along comparable tracks. Many American scholars and at least some working in cultural studies moved toward social history that emphasized the “hidden experiences of subordinated groups and classes.” Undertaken in concert with the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this version of social history would ramify widely, furnishing the very questions and analytic habits of many fields, not least American studies.


2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-319
Author(s):  
Meenakshi Ponnuswami

Gabriele Griffin's study of black and Asian women playwrights in contemporary Britain fills a gap in British theatre studies. Although a comprehensive study of black British theatre has yet to see print, two developments have, in the past decade or so, begun to stimulate critical attention in the field. One is the publication of plays by black and Asian authors, including collections of plays exclusively by women (such as Khadija George's edition of Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers of 1993), as well as the more systematic inclusion of works by writers such as Winsome Pinnock and Trish Cooke in anthologies of plays by new British dramatists. A second is the work of British cultural-studies scholars and sociologists during the same period, which has offered theatre historians some new approaches and challenges: Kobena Mercer's Welcome to the Jungle (1994); Catherine Ugwu's Let's Get It On (1995); Baker et al.'s Black British Cultural Studies (1996); Heidi Mirza's edited volume Black British Feminism (1997)—not to mention a vast body of work by Stuart Hall, Avtar Brah, Paul Gilroy, and others. Still, as Griffin notes at the outset, while immigrant and second-generation novels and films have received attention and accolades, black British theatre has tended to be ignored except by a handful of feminist theatre scholars.


2011 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Geimer

ZusammenfassungDieser Beitrag diskutiert das in der (vor allem deutschsprachigen) sozialwissenschaftlichen Medien und Rezeptionsforschung populäre Konzept der Aneignung, das insbesondere auf Arbeiten aus dem Bereich der Cultural Studies zurückgeht, welche die Aktivität, Kreativität und den Eigensinn von RezipientInnen akzentuieren. Die Cultural Studies haben damit Pionierarbeit für eine qualitative resp. rekonstruktive Rezeptionsforschung geleistet. Es finden sich jedoch Tendenzen einer Romantisierung und Idealisierung der Aktivität des Zuschauers, die eine inflationäre Verwendung des Aneignungskonzepts nahelegen. In Abgrenzung von diesen - vorrangig poststrukturalistisch und interaktionistisch geprägten - Positionen und im Anschluss an Ansätze innerhalb der Cultural Studies, die Aneignung als spezifische Praxis der Rezeption begreifen, schlägt der Beitrag eine wissenssoziologische Präzisierung des Aneignungskonzeptes vor dem Hintergrund eigener Studien vor. Dies führt zu einer Differenzierung in eine produktive und reproduktive Aneignung, welche die Lesarten-Typologie nach Stuart Hall (dominant, ausgehandelt, oppositionell) weiterführt und differenziert.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 355-374
Author(s):  
Izabela Poręba

The article depicts the connectivity of popular culture studies in the field of cultural studies with issues of postcolonial studies. The aim of the work is to answer the question about a possibility to transplant Western cultural studies research to postcolonial popular culture analysis and interpretation. The study begins with a brief reconstruction of the history of pop culture research in the scope of postcolonial methodology — the most important works, conferences, and thematic issues initiating an interest in a research field new to postcolonialism around the 1990s and at the beginning of the following millennium. In the next part of the article, the author points out two main definitions of popular culture (“the popular”) in the scope of indicated optics — by Stuart Hall and John Fiske; the author also considers terminological issues with “the popular” and its non-existent equivalent in Polish. An ambiguous movement written in popular culture was considered as its most important feature (as Hall and Fiske claimed) — at the same time, a dominant system is contained (incorporation) and meets with resistance of people who revolt by the means of the system itself (exportation). Nonetheless, the author shows why believing in the possibility of resistance can be an illusion. Next, the author comments on the stand of Kwame Anthony Appiah, who problematized the relation of postcolonialism and pop culture. The analysis of connections between these two phenomena is followed by a few examples of intertextuality in Alain Mabanckou’s novels.


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