British cultural studies
pp. 271-286
in: Martin Middeke, Timo Müller, Christina Wald, Hubert Zapf (eds), English and American studies, Stuttgart, Metzler, 2012Abstract
Cultural Studies is dead! Its spiritual home, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham, had to close its doors in 2002, not quite forty years after its inauguration in 1964. In the USA, where British Cultural Studies found a new home (cf. entry III.3), loud demands for "Stopping Cultural Studies' can be heard (Warner and Siskin), and plans for a life at "The University After Cultural Studies' are already being made. (Such was the title of a plenary panel at the seventh annual meeting of the Cultural Studies Association in Kansas City in 2009.) What would it mean, however, to stop doing cultural studies? Would it mean that we stop analysing the texts, films, plays, images, and songs that contribute to our cultures? Does it mean that we no longer examine the artefacts and symbols that form (British) ways of living? It does not.