Page 37 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

• Associated concepts Commodification, hyperreality, irony, signs, simulacrum,
symbolic.
• Tradition(s) Marxism, postmodernism, semiotics, structuralism.
14 • Reading Baudrillard, J. (1983) Simulacra and Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e).

Bennett, Tony (1947– ) Bennett was a member of the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) where he helped to develop and promote
the influence of Gramsci within the field, particularly in relation to television and
popular culture. Subsequently, Bennett has been critical of the Gramscian stream of
cultural studies as over-emphasizing signification and consciousness at the expense
of the pragmatic considerations of cultural policy. Here he draws upon the work of
Foucault and his concept of governmentality. As Director of the ‘Australian Key
Centre for Cultural and Media Policy’ at Griffith University, Bennett played a
significant part in promoting cultural policy as a goal for cultural studies. He is
currently a Professor of the Open University (UK).
• Associated concepts Cultural policy, culture, governmentality, hegemony,
ideology, practice.
• Tradition(s) Cultural studies, Marxism, poststructuralism.
• Reading Bennett, T. (1998) Culture: A Reformer’s Science. St Leonards: Allen &
Unwin.

Bhabha,Homi K.(1949– ) Homi Bhabha was born in India and educated at Bombay
University and Christchurch College, Oxford (UK). He is currently Professor in the
Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he teaches in the Departments of
English and Art. Strongly influenced by the poststructuralism of Derrida, Lacan and
Foucault, Bhabha argues against the tendency to essentialize ‘Third World’ countries
into a homogeneous identity claiming instead that all sense of nationhood is
narrativized. He also suggests that there is always ambivalence at the site of colonial
dominance so that the colonizer and the colonized help to constitute each other.
For Bhabha, the instability of meaning in language leads us to think of culture,
identities and identifications as always a place of borders and hybridity rather than
of fixed stable entities, a view encapsulated in his use of concepts such as mimicry,
interstice, hybridity and liminality.
• Associated concepts Anti-essentialism, différance, ethnicity, hybridity, national
identity.
• Tradition(s) Cultural studies, postcolonial theory, poststructuralism.
• Reading Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. London and New York:
Routledge.

Black Atlantic Paul Gilroy introduced the concept of the Black Atlantic into cultural
studies in the early 1990s as a concrete example of the ‘changing same’ of a
diaspora. It is also an illustration of ‘identities in motion’ as opposed to conceiving
of them as absolutes of nature or culture. Thus a diaspora such as the Black Atlantic
involves creolized and hybridized cultural forms. For Gilroy, black identities cannot
be understood in terms of being American or British or West Indian. Nor can they