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Lawrence Black, Cultural Studies 50 Years On: History, Practice and Politics. Edited by Kieran Connell and Matthew Hilton, Twentieth Century British History, Volume 28, Issue 4, December 2017, Pages 625–628, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwx011
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Extract
There is something of Mao’s (apocryphal) verdict on the 1789 French Revolution to Connell and Hilton’s collection of essays, interviews and memoirs to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), that it is ‘too early to say’ what its impact has been or will be. Founded in 1964, it was directed successively by Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson, before becoming the Department for Cultural Studies in 1984. It was finally closed by the University in 2002. Its seminal works—Policing the Crisis (1978), The Empire Strikes Back (1982), Resistance through Rituals (1976)—are familiar fixtures on any modern British history course worth its salt. With the death of Hoggart and Hall in 2014, the conference from which this book emerged was unfortunately timely.
Often on a skeletal staff (Hall was only interim director until 1973), the CCCS’s achievements were substantial. It set out to disturb the academic (and political) consensus and was part of the 1970s mix of ideas that achieved this. As a cultural laboratory or studio, analogies with the Frankfurt School might be tempting, but CCCS was more an academic equivalent of Warhol’s Factory. To name some of those associated with CCCS who do not contribute to the volume makes this point—Paul Gilroy, Angela McRobbie, Dick Hebdige, Catherine Hall, Bill Schwarz and, from this journal’s advisory board, Frank Mort. Stuart Hall’s own intellectual vibrancy and agility is omnipresent both in this book (he is not indexed; Hoggart is) and in the Centre’s most influential, productive period in the later 1970s—and endures long after he left. CCCS’s works remain touchstones of collaborative endeavour and have been responsible for bringing race, the state, ethnicity, imperial legacies, youth subcultures, media, sexuality and much (much) more into the purview of historians, literary and linguistic scholars, psychoanalysts, ethnographers, anthropologists and others. To this mix of disciplinary porosity with novel topics and methods were added doses of theory and political commitment. To some extent, and whether it deserves blame or credit, we are all practicing in the wake of CCCS in using identity and culture or if we think of CCCS as grappling with intersectionality before the term. What was once exceptional to CCCS has often become a norm—the fusion of politics and pop culture, the founding of Channel 4 (discussed here in relation to CCCS by Dorothy Hobson) or even how interdisciplinarity now informs research funding directives.
