Page 163 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

Chapter 7
History, politics and postmodernism

Stuart Hall and cultural studies

Lawrence Grossberg

I
STUART HALL ON IDEOLOGY, HEGEMONY, AND
THE SOCIAL FORMATION

Living with difference
It is both surprising and understandable that British marxist cultural
studies, in the works of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies, has recently had a significant and influential impact in the United
States, especially for communication scholars. (Bits and pieces of it have
been appropriated before by other disciplines, such as education and
sociology.) There are many reasons for the resistance in the past: the
publications are dispersed and often difficult to find; the language is often
explicitly defined by its links to and debates with contemporary
continental philosophy and theory; and the ‘position’s’ commitment to the
ongoing and practical nature of theorizing contravenes common notions of
theoretical stability in the social sciences. There are also many reasons for
the sudden interest: the dissatisfaction with available theoretical paradigms
and research programmes; the increasing politicization of the academy; the
slow incorporation of continental philosophies into the graduate
curriculum, and perhaps, most powerfully, the recent visibility of Stuart
Hall in the United States. Those who have been working in this tradition
for some time might, understandably, be a bit suspicious of this current
interest, even as it is welcomed, for like all intellectual traditions, marxist
cultural studies, even in the work of a single author like Hall, is a complex
and contradictory terrain, with its own histories, debates and differences.

Reprinted from Journal of Communication Inquiry (1986), 10(2), 61–77.