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Contemporary Cultural Theory

can instead be given critical access to the best... within the
popular arts of the new mass media: jazz and good films make
up for the absence of Beethoven and Shakespeare’ (Storey, 1997,
p. 69). This kind of theoretical culturalism continued to remain
in play at the Birmingham Centre. It is particularly evident, for
example, in the Centre’s work on youth subcultures, where an
ethnographic focus inspired by The Uses of Literacy was combined
with an emphasis on generation and class deriving in part from
Williams in order to produce accounts of subcultural resistance
to the dominant culture (Hall & Jefferson, 1976).
Hall was director of the Birmingham Centre until 1979, when
he took up the chair of sociology at the Open University, which
he held until his retirement. At Birmingham, he left behind a rich
tradition of critical cultural inquiry, which has subsequently been
exported to North America, Australia, Korea, Taiwan and else-
where. One of its most important legacies is, as Turner observes,
the ‘strategy of “reading” cultural products, social practices, even
institutions, as “texts”’ (Turner, 1996, p. 81). During Hall’s direc-
torship, the Centre became increasingly involved with the ‘new’
issues of gender, race and ethnicity. Paul Gilroy and feminists
such as Angela McRobbie firmly placed the issues of racism and
sexism on the Centre’s agenda, a move initially resisted by Hall
himself. These questions will be explored in much greater detail
in chapter 5. For the moment, let us note only that the develop-
ment of British cultural studies under Hall’s guidance was, as he
himself has observed, in part a reflection of his coming to terms
with a personal trajectory as outsider—a black Jamaican emigré
working and living in the heart of white, high British academic
culture.
The Centre’s shift in substantive focus was accompanied by
a theoretical shift towards the kinds of semiology that will
provide our major concern in chapter 4. Substantively, Hall’s
own work tended to focus on the mass media, especially on
how these construct public opinion and, in effect, police those
popular subcultural practices and subversions that might
threaten the state’s legitimacy; theoretically, it became fascinated
by structuralist and later post-structuralist thematics. This turn
towards semiotic and structuralist methodologies is definitively

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