The migration of cultural studies : The Tribune India

Join Whatsapp Channel

Book Review: Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History ed by Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg.

The migration of cultural studies

For Stuart Hall, theoretical interdiscourse became the most viable way to make strides in sociology and literary studies as areas that undergo transformation across borders with respect to a new intellectual and social milieu.

The migration of cultural studies

After-effects: This posthumously published anthology is a collection of lectures delivered by Stuart Hall at the University of Illinois. Hall's overall perspective on the emergence and development of Cultural Studies and his assessment of it took the western world by storm



Shelley Walia

For Stuart Hall, theoretical interdiscourse became the most viable way to make strides in sociology and literary studies as areas that undergo transformation across borders with respect to a new intellectual and social milieu. This proved to be an instructive methodology towards understanding the evolution of a new field of learning, the study of culture, with all its “exceedingly slippery, vague and amorphous” meanings. To grasp these, the interdisciplinary approach proved to be vital with the cultural context being integral to the “intellectual and political space.”

It took almost a decade for Cultural Studies to reach America. It was already a recognised disciple of study pioneered by Richard Hoggart at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham University in the UK, which he headed until his departure for an important assignment at Unesco.  Stuart Hall, who succeeded him in 1969, would remain its director for over a decade. 

The centre’s work on race, popular culture, subcultures, ideology and semiotics, media and working class culture remained mostly unknown to the world outside until 1983 when Stuart Hall delivered his series of eight lectures collected in this anthology, at the University of Illinois, followed by a conference on the relevance of Marxism to Cultural Theory. This took the western world by storm. The teaching institute here received a further impetus towards the disciplines of  Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Communication and Literary Theory with seminars given by eminent Marxist critics like Frederic Jameson, Gayatri Spivak, Perry Anderson, and of course, Stuart Hall.  

The American interest in Cultural Studies, its direction and scholarship, therefore, emerged from these landmark events.  

Interest in the lectures and seminars delivered by Hall was exceedingly high and enthusiasts began to pour in from long distances, some travelling as much as 500 miles to attend them.

What you find in this posthumously published collection of lectures is Hall’s overall perspective on the emergence and development of Cultural Studies and his assessment of it. Putting aside the history of the centre and its administrative workings within a complex political environment, Hall focuses instead on cultural theory, briefly touching on its “sources, confrontations, negotiations and paths taken up and rejected”.  The lectures stress the contribution of Marxist thought to the interpretation of culture, thereby establishing a link between the leanings of British Cultural studies to the New Left and distancing itself from dominant forms of Marxism towards “another sort of critical materialist practice and socialist politics.” Marxism, in the hands of Stuart Hall, has both its limitations and possibilities.

However, the editors find the lectures have a “lacuna” in the absence of any mention of women’s voices when “by 1983 there had been significant theoretical challenges to the influence of patriarchy on subcultural theory and significant contributions by feminists to theorising articulation.”  This inadequacy in his lectures, particularly the challenges of post-structuralism, subjectivity and feminism, was indeed taken care of later in his paper, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies” published  in 1992. 

Hall saw the dynamism inherent in Cultural Studies, “a process of continuous theorising, always responding to the political challenges of what he called a ‘conjuncture’”.  His theoretical moves therefore, “have to be delicately dis-interred from being embedded in specific concrete and historical context and transplanted to new soil with considerable care and patience.” 

These lectures have been transcribed as closely as possible to the original taped lectures, a monumental testimony of Hall’s contribution to the history of cultural theory with a sound perspective on the meaning of Cultural Studies and its future without ever giving such a protean subject a definitive finality or end. The lectures succeed in giving an insight into the understanding of the subject as well as meaningfully engaging with questions of cultural domination, resistance and class distinction.  

They are an account of “the history of theoretical underpinnings of Cultural Studies, but at the same time try to recognise and acknowledge the perspective they take  on that history, a perspective  defined in part by my own theoretical position as it evolved; this is of necessity something of an idealised — theoretical as it were — history.” In emphasising the symbiotic relation between history and theory, Hall argued that “ideas always arise in particular concrete historical locations which inflect the ideas in certain ways.” 

Such was his confrontation with the difficult political situation prevailing in his times in Britain, to understand which experience needed to be theorised “so as to open up to investigation the problematic nature that such political situations present to us in order to better understand what is going on and how to respond.”  For this experience new theories come into being and outdated theories revisited and reinvented in the new context of time and space so as to arrive at the final coalescing of theory and practice to provide the means for a meaningful political change.

Top News

Delhi High Court dismisses PIL to remove Arvind Kejriwal from CM post after arrest

Delhi High Court dismisses PIL to remove Arvind Kejriwal from CM post after arrest

The bench refuses to comment on merits of the issue, saying ...

US makes another remark on Kejriwal's arrest, reacts to freezing of Congress bank accounts

US makes another remark on Arvind Kejriwal's arrest, reacts to freezing of Congress bank accounts

We encourage fair, transparent and timely legal processes, s...

Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann, wife Gurpreet Kaur welcome baby girl

Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann blessed with baby girl

Bhagwant Mann tied the knot with Dr Gurpreet Kaur from Pehow...


Cities

View All