Page 80 - Cultural Theory

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Stuart Hall and the

CHAPTER FOUR Birmingham School
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Chris Rojek

British Cultural Studies commenced in its contemporary form in the late 1950s. Its
roots were in secondary Schools, Adult Education and Extra Mural departments of
Universities. The first wave of significant figures to write about working class culture
seriously in the postwar period were Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson and
1
Richard Hoggart. They wrote against the grain of the core curriculum enshrined in
the established Universities with its pronounced emphasis on the classical canon and
‘Great Traditions’ of thought. To some extent, their project consisted in validating
working class culture as a subject for study in the Academy. Williams in Culture &
Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) and Thompson (1963) in The Making of
the English Working Class operated in a Left wing milieu that deplored the intellectual
narrowness of British academic life and sought to demonstrate the richness of working
class culture. Hoggart’s (1958) work was less obviously indebted to the party political
traditions of the organized Left. Nonetheless, he also shared a discontent with the
confined character of British academic life and a commitment to raise the profile of
working class culture in the Academy. All three writers represented an approach that
Hall (1980) later categorized as culturalism, by which he meant the attempt to under-
stand the whole way of life of the people in terms of the experience of heritage, lan-
guage and class consciousness. He contrasted this with the continental tradition of
structuralism. The latter seeks to contextualize personal and popular experience in the
framework of culture, class and historical materialism. A valid interpretation of Hall’s
work in the 70s, is that he sought to marry the best elements of culturalism with
structuralism to produce a new synthesis.
Hoggart’s role in developing Cultural Studies was, in fact, pivotal and has not been
given its due in most secondary accounts (Gibson and Hartley 1998). To begin with
the popular success of his book-cum-memoir of working class life in the West Riding
of Yorkshire, The Uses of Literacy (1958), provided the archetypal case for taking work-
ing class culture seriously. Among the ‘angry young man’ generation of 1950s Britain
it was accepted as an inspirational ‘sociological’ contribution. Of equal, and arguably
greater cultural significance was Hoggart’s achievement in persuading the University
of Birmingham to accept a bequest from the publisher of Penguin books, Sir Allen
Lane, to establish the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies on campus. Against

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