By Eleanor Courtemanche
[su_pullquote align=”right”]Cultural studies seemed like the most useful intellectualcatch-all ever: it was edgy, it was interdisciplinary, and itcould critique absolutely anything, even the conditions of its own production in the university.[/su_pullquote]
The 1990s were a great age of theoretical experiment in American universitiesin political theory, sexual theory, media and filmtheory.If youcombinedqueer theory, postcolonial studies, and pop culture analysiswith the lingering 1970spolitical energy around questions offeminismand African-American studies, you gotthe fizzy punch of cultural studiesa phrase first popularized by a conference at the University of Illinois in 1990, which led tothis book. Cultural studies as a field didnt exist when I entered grad school, but in 1999 I got my first postgraduate jobin the field of humanities and cultural studies. Cultural studies seemed like the most useful intellectualcatch-all ever: it was edgy, it was interdisciplinary, and itcould critique absolutely anything, even the conditions of its own production in the university.
Losing its luster amidst the ‘objectivity’ of the sciences
However, in the early 2000s the luster of cultural studies dimmed. I have my own reading of this with which you will doubtless disagreeI think Ralph Nader killed it. It turned out that real politics still existed, and proliferating endless critique on the left felt a little beside the point in the face ofthe Realpolitik turnof 2000-3 (the dirty-tricks Bush victory, the 9/11 attacks, and the Iraq War). Cultural studies had beenvery suspicious of the supposed objectivity of science, but once official Republican policy was to deny thescientific consensus around human-induced global climate change, it felt more interesting somehow, to back the scientists.
By 2007 I was telling my grad students to avoid the phrase transgression, which sounded dated. Wheres the gloryin simply transgressing boundaries if the welfare state is dramaticallybeing dismantled, hurricanes are wrecking the South, and American foreign policy is going berserk? The movements that replaced cultural studies in the academy hada moresober, practicalmood: book history, archival research, studies of realism in the novel, a tentative embrace of technology and medical history, and (at the crazy edge) interest in the dispersed and barely-perceptible agency of systems, animals, and geological fault lines.Journalists got bored and started looking for their cultural panics elsewhere
A cultural renaissance
[su_pullquote align=”right”]Its being revivedby the youngwhile professorsare gently steering them toward book history,theyre protesting dramaticallyabout transrightsand racist police killings.[/su_pullquote]
I think its safe to say that cultural studies is back, but the new surge is not particularly being driven by the academics who invented it. Its being revivedby the youngwhile professorsare gently steering them toward book history,theyre protesting dramaticallyabout transrightsand racist police killings.Marxism was always a marginal player in cultural studiessincein general(dont @ me) it prioritized economic issues over secondary contradictions like gender, race, or resource conservation. But after 2008 the left rediscovered Marx, and so the revival of identity politics feels, to my generation, like were going back to a battle we already fought, and maybe a diversion of important political energy.
Predictably the revival of cultural studies is being treated by the once-again-so-interested media as a university-basedmoral panic, with the same horror atcoddled youth andtheir demands for a better and cooler society.But cultural studies is now everywhere outside the universityeverywhere, in fact, where young people are writing about culture on the internet. Cultural studies escaped its original institutional frameworkand is nowflourishingin the wild. When I teach Victorian pop culture now, I hardly have to bother doing the whole sexuality-race-gender-class analysis, because it seems so intuitively obvious to my Beyonc-trainedundergrads.
Cultural studies is ubiquitous with the youth expressing their views on the internet. | Photo Courtesy-Pinterest[su_pullquote]The new cultural studies combines the cheapness and accessibility of the New Criticism with the enthusiasm of internet fan cultureand the urgency of the fight against political injustice.[/su_pullquote]
Were seeing a momentlike the spread of the New Criticism in the 50s and 60sin which a movementoriginally developed in the ivory tower has trickled down to the high schoolsand in this case, has been actively embraced by teens outside school hours. Its odd to think that these two movements, which seem to have nothing else in common, should have been the ones to spread the most widely outside the university, but they do shareone basic precondition.TheNew Criticismstarted as a rejection of historical criticism in the name of close reading the ironies and paradoxes of important, complexRomantic and modern poems; it spread because close reading can be done in any classroom without library research, and was suitable for the vast expansion of college education after WWII.
Cultural studies 1.0 started off with nuanced readings of Benjamin and Foucault, but in fact you can also do it withoutexpensiveresearch and trainingall you really need isthe Bechdel test. Its obvious, once you think about it, that girls should be able to kill vampires and bustghosts, that black teensdeserve second chances from the police like white teens, that Asian-American comedians should be on TV more, that lovers should love who they please. The new cultural studies combines the cheapness and accessibility of the New Criticism with the enthusiasm of internet fan cultureand the urgency of the fight against political injustice.
Cultural studieshas turned out to be, in retrospect, a weirdly thorough success that is influencing the creation and reception of culture everywhere in the world, especiallyoutside theacademy. One might even takethe omnipresenceof cultural studies 2.0 asa sign that research in the humanities, though obscure at the time, ended up having transformative culturalimpact. My one grumpy Gen-X request is that, when they hit 30, todays culture warriors get one of their girl superheroes to pass a law ensuringnew mothers something like the paid leave they enjoy everywhere else in the Western world.
Eleanor Courtemanche is an Associate Professor of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Her book about Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and the construction of moral outcomes in complex Victorian novels was published in 2011.
This article was first published on Arcade.
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