Cultural Studies Now Session 1 :- Culture

Cultural Studies, in its British incarnation, was in effect the intellectual front of the political movement of the New Left. This movement became consolidated in the UK after 1956 when the Suez crisis and Soviet invasion of Hungary jointly precipitated the emergence of an anti-imperial and non-doctrinaire group of Marxist activists and intellectuals, centred initially on the journal New Left Review. Following his appointment in 1969 as Acting Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), which had been established by Richard Hoggart at the University of Birmingham, Stuart Hall gradually took the place of Raymond Williams as the leading intellectual voice of this loosely affiliated formation. Over the next decade, Hall worked with his colleagues and graduate students to develop a theoretical basis and critical methodology for the politically engaged analysis of culture (considered as a social totality), leading to landmark texts such as Policing the Crisis (1978) and The Empire Strikes Back (1982).

This seminar series will begin by asking how British cultural studies both understood and analysed ‘Culture’, before focusing on its lessons for ‘Study’ (i.e. methodology) and its capacity (or otherwise) to enable us to analyse the world today (‘Now’). Sessions are open to all PhD students at LAHP institutions. If possible, please commit to attend all three. I will begin each session with an introduction to some important issues raised in the readings, before turning over to a discussion of the readings, and how they relate to your research.

Seminar 1: Culture
3-5pm, 25 November 2024

Please read:

• Hall, S. ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays, ed. Sally Davison, David Featherstone, Michael Rustin and Bill Schwarz (Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 172-186.

Optional reading/listening:

• Akomfrah, J. The Stuart Hall Project, 2013 (this extract covers the emergence of Cultural Studies).
• Gilbert, J. ‘This Conjuncture: For Stuart Hall’, New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, Vol. 96-97, 2019, pp. 5-37.
• Hall, S. ‘Studying the Conjuncture’ from ‘Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life’, the text of which is also published in Hall, S. Essential Essays, Vol. 2: Identity and Diaspora, ed. David Morley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), pp. 303-324.