Page 17 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

INTRODUCTION 5

of cultural studies in the American context does, on the whole, seem to
validate Hardt’s early observations. Nonetheless, we would maintain that,
in its ‘post-marxist’ and postmodern phase, cultural studies has offered
more space to voice the concerns of a wider range of radical discourses
(gay and lesbian, minority discourses, third world issues, etc.). Jennifer
Daryl Slack’s essay on The theory and method of articulation in cultural
studies’ sketches out the ways in which the concept of ‘articulation’ has
been, and can be, used to develop a non-essentialist cultural politics which
is sensitive to discursive issues, but which avoids lapsing, as she puts it, into
‘intertextual literary analysis’.
Part II (‘Postmodernism and cultural studies: first encounters’)
documents the 1986 debate on postmodernism, partly reprinting items
from the original Special Issue, including the interview with Hall and the
commentary by Grossberg on the issues of postmodernism and
articulation, and Dick Hebdige’s exposition of postmodern theory, which
ends with an important attempt to ‘rethink’ postmodernism from a
Gramscian perspective. Iain Chambers’ ‘Waiting on the end of the world?’
has been updated for this publication and John Fiske and Jon Watts’ original
contribution ‘Articulating culture’ has been replaced by a new piece by
Fiske, ‘Opening the Hallway’, which further develops some of the ideas in
their original, jointly written piece.
In Part III (‘New Times, transformations and transgressions’), we chart
what came after the ‘postmodern’ debate. In ‘The meaning of New Times’,
Hall reads the discourses on ‘the post-industrial’, ‘post-Fordism’,
‘revolution of the subject’, and ‘the postmodern’, in relation to each other,
as different dimensions (or ‘levels’) of the structural changes, which
constitute the ‘New Times’ in which we live. McRobbie’s ‘Looking back at
New Times and its critics’ engages with the ‘New Times’ project from the
perspective of cultural studies, developing further many of the arguments
of her original contribution to the Special Issue, ‘Postmodernism and
popular culture’. This is followed by the published version of Hall’s key
paper to the conference ‘Cultural Studies Now and in the Future’, held at
the University of Illinois, Urbana—Champaign, in 1990 (see Grossberg, L.,
Nelson, C. and Treichler, P., 1992). In his paper, Hall attempted to deal
critically with the geneaology of cultural studies (and self-reflexively with his
own positioning within that genealogy) and also to indicate some of the
possible ways forward for politically engaged intellectual work in this field,
in the context of the rapid institutionalization of cultural studies, especially
in the North American academy.
Among the stories which Hall tells here, concerning the genealogy of
cultural studies, is a crucial one about the disruption of cultural studies’
initial focus on questions of class by the emergence, within Birmingham
University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) itself, of the
Women’s Liberation Movement, in the early 1970s. Charlotte Brunsdon’s