Page 13 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

Introduction
David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen

This book has already had a life of its own, a history of a decade. Back in
the mid-1980s, as an alternative to formalist and positivist paradigms in
the humanities and social sciences, British cultural studies, and Stuart
Hall’s work in particular, began to make an impact across national
borders, especially in the American academy. In 1985, Stuart Hall was
invited, as Ida Beam Professor, to deliver a series of lectures on the
University of Iowa campus. Intrigued by his ‘passion, intensity and
intellectual generosity’, the Journal of Communication Inquiry, organized
by graduate students of the School of Journalism and Mass
Communication, decided to devote a Special Issue of their journal to Stuart
Hall, in recognition of his long-term contribution in opening up spaces for
critical scholarship. That Special Issue was edited by Kuan-Hsing Chen,
one of the editors of this collection. In preparing the project, it was clear
that the task was not naively to celebrate the work of a committed
intellectual but rather to take the opportunity to productively facilitate
further ‘critical dialogues’.
In that historical conjuncture, postmodernism had already emerged as a
key site of debate, and practitioners of cultural studies had begun to engage
on that terrain. Captured by the intellectual mood of the day, the editorial
board members of the Journal conducted an interview with Hall, inviting
him to enter the debate on postmodernism, with particular reference to the
work of Habermas, Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and
Baudrillard. In collaboration with members of the Unit for Criticism and
Interpretive Theory of the University of Illinois, who discussed with Hall
the then just released, seminal book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (a
key statement of postmodern political theory), by Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe (1985), we merged the two interviews together, into what
became later the often cited interview with Hall, ‘On postmodernism and
articulation’. We then invited Iain Chambers, John Fiske, Lawrence
Grossberg, Hanno Hardt, Dick Hebdige and Angela McRobbie, who were
familiar with Hall’s work and had also themselves begun to engage with
the debate on postmodernism, from within cultural studies, to respond
to the interview. Together with Hall’s ‘Gramsci’s relevance for the study of