Why Cultural Studies? E-Book

Gilbert B. Rodman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 309

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Why Cultural Studies? is a rallying call for a reinvigoration of the project of cultural studies that provides a critical analysis of its meteoric rise to the academic fore and makes a convincing argument for the pressing need for a renewed investment in, and re-evaluation of, its core ideals.

• Rodman argues that there are valuable lessons we can learn from cultural studies’ past that have the potential to lead cultural studies to an invigorated and viable future
• Makes the claim that cultural studies isn’t – and shouldn’t be – solely an academic subject, but open to both academics and non-academics alike
• Asserts that now more than ever cultural studies has a productive role to play in promoting social justice and building a better world
• Written by one of the leading figures in the area of cultural studies, and the current Chair of the Association for Cultural Studies

Leseprobe

This edition first published 2015

© 2015 Gilbert B. Rodman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rodman, Gilbert B., 1965–

    Why cultural studies? / Gilbert B. Rodman.

            pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-1-4051-2798-1 (cloth) – ISBN 978-1-4051-2797-4 (pbk.)    1.  Culture–Study and teaching.    I.  Title.

    HM623.R637 2014

    306.07–dc23

                                                                                                            2014017307

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Monochrome Guilloché © imacon / Getty Images

Preface

Once upon a time, there was this thing called “cultural studies.” The question of just what type of thing it actually was will be important later on the story. For now, though, all we need to know is that cultural studies began as a very small, isolated, and obscure thing—one that not a lot of people knew about—and then, with very little warning, it exploded into a highly visible global phenomenon. Lots of people who had never heard of cultural studies before were suddenly very excited about it, especially since it seemed to hold forth the promise of changing the world as they knew it in bold and important ways. Lots of other people (who had also never heard of it before) were just as horrified by its surprising prominence, and because they, too, saw in it the prospect of a radically transformed world—only that possibility struck them as something to be feared.

To be sure, even at the peak of the international boom in cultural studies in the 1990s, it wasn't anywhere near as popular as, say, Elvis Presley was in 1956. It was never that sort of thing, after all. Still, much like rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s (albeit on a somewhat smaller scale), cultural studies was a Very Big Deal. If you were in the Anglophone world in, say, 1992, and working anywhere near the humanities side of the university or academic publishing, you didn't necessarily have to do cultural studies—or even like it—but you would have been hard-pressed to ignore it. Cultural studies promised—or, if you were on the other side of the fence, threatened—to radically transform the ways in which people approached scholarship, cultural criticism, and political action.