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Grant Farred The Dilemma of Contemporary Cultural Studies As a result of developments in the new "social history," the humanist curriculum is increasingly open to popular histories and popular culture, while expanding its critical attention to cultural forms based on the experience of women, people of color, gays and lesbians. Pragmatic histories of the oppression, survival, and struggle for legitimation of marginal groups have begun to erode the massive cultural power generated by traditional idealist histories, histories which depict the moral struggles waged by heroic individuals in order to save Western civilization from successive "barbarisms." Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture From the very moment of its formation in the mid-1950s as the most dynamic intellectual articulation of the British New Left, cultural studies has always been ambiguously situated within the realm of both electoral politics and the academy. Politically and ideologically suspect to the Old (pre-1956) Left because of its apparent disregard for "real" issues of power (not least of which was its preparedness to complicate traditional modes of class conflict with new patterns of consumption), distrusted by the Oxbridge literary establishment because of its radical expansion of "culture" into the realm of the popular, the field occupied a position akin to that of New Letters' relationship to the Labour Party. In the phrase ofStuart Hall, one of its founding members, the New Left was physically (and psychically) torn: it stood with "one foot in and one foot out" of the traditional party of the British left. Almost without exception, the New Left supported Labour electorally; ideologically it was at odds with the party on several issues, of which the condition of the welfare state and the role of cultural politics were among the more contentious. Within the academy, cultural studies' location has often tended to be less ambiguous than tangential, though invigoratingly so. Besides the much revered Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies moment (from the late 1960s through the end of the 1970s), an incarnation all too often uncritically celebrated, and a few experiments in the U.S., the field has never been formally institutionalized within the Anglo-American university. However, from within its marginal location in the university, cultural studies has crafted a rudimentary but intellectually vibrant home for itself. Through its impact on an assortment of disciplines, cultural studies (/-inflected) courses have been taught in various language, history, film, women's studies, and a few social science departments and programs. From this amorphous and liminal site cultural studies has, over the past four decades, been able to impact and shape cru- 292 the minnesota review cial debates about and within the "humanist curriculum." The commitment to remaking the humanist curriculum, no matter how incidental , tendentious, or fraught it may have been (and indeed continues to be), remains one of cultural studies' most important legacies to contemporary left scholars. It is a tradition of struggle that can be traced back to the earliest days of the New Left when Hall, Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart were thinkers at once residually steeped in Leavisite criticism and attempting to produce a new form of cultural engagement commensurate with their politics . Although cultural studies has always been able to make history under conditions not of its own choosing (to colloquialize Marx), the contemporary conjuncture appears to be an especially challenging one. Cultural studies is at a crossroads, a juncture very different from the one outlined so spiritedly by Ross in the late 1980s. When No Respect was published, there was reason for optimism. However inequitably the resources were distributed both inside and outside the academy, the intensity of the "political correctness" wars reflected the series of gains (through both chance and political design) by women, gays, lesbians, African-Americans, and other traditionally disenfranchised constituencies. However, in an environment of academic (and larger socio-political) austerity, cutbacks, and the everreceding possibility oftenure (the university's equivalent ofretrenchment ), cultural studies is now located at a crucial conjuncture, precariously positioned between institutionalization and marginalization. On the one hand, after forty years of intellectual production, cultural studies is still far from entrenching itselfin the academy; on the other hand, the efforts of these past decades have ensured that it...

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