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Contemporary Cultural Theory

‘proto-discipline’ in American higher education. As currently
constructed, cultural studies still remains deeply indebted to the
pioneering work of the Birmingham Centre. Founded in 1964, as
a graduate research unit under the directorship of Richard
Hoggart, then Professor of English Literature at Birmingham, the
Centre became the intellectually pre-eminent institutional location
for cultural studies, both in Britain and internationally, for most
of the 1970s and 1980s. Anthony Easthope, late Professor of
English and Cultural Studies at Manchester Metropolitan Univer-
sity, judged the Birmingham Centre’s work the most important
‘intervention in cultural studies in Britain’ (Easthope, 1988, p. 74).
Lawrence Grossberg, now Professor of Communication and
Cultural Studies at North Carolina, agreed that: ‘there remains
something like a center—to be precise, the tradition of British
cultural studies, especially the work of the Centre for Contem-
porary Cultural Studies’ (Grossberg et al., 1988, p. 8). Graeme
Turner, founding editor of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies
and now Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
in Queensland, echoed this view: ‘the Birmingham Centre ...can
justifiably claim to be the key institution in the history of the field’
(Turner, 1996, p. 70). It is tempting, then, to look to Birmingham
for a model of what is meant by ‘cultural studies’. Once again,
however, the sign appears radically polysemic, for there was
never a single Birmingham model, but rather an inescapable
plurality of competing and often contradictory models.
The unusually polysemic quality of ‘cultural studies’ attaches
as much to the term ‘studies’ as to ‘culture’ or ‘cultural’: not only
is there no clear consensus over what to study, but also none over
how to organise this study. The various senses of ‘cultural studies’
seem to cluster around four main sets of meaning: as inter- or
post-disciplinary; as a political intervention into the existing
academic disciplines; as an entirely new discipline, defined in
terms of an entirely new subject matter; and as a new discipline,
defined in terms of a new theoretical paradigm. Cultural studies
was clearly intended by Hoggart, in the initial proposal to
establish the Centre, as essentially interdisciplinary in character,
but with literary studies as its single ‘most important’ element
(Hoggart, 1970, p. 255). Aquarter of a century later, this continued

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