Historicizing Theory

10. The Sixties, the New Left, and the Emergence of Cultural Studies in the United States

It is often assumed that Cultural Studies in the United States is the North American branch of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. This judgment is hard to prove, because assumptions are usually left unstated and no one had argued the point in so many words. Others have noticed the same thing, however. For example, Richard Ohmann, writing in 1991, asserted that Cultural Studies “felt almost like a British export” at what we must now recognize as U.S. Cultural Studies’s coming out party, the Urbana, Illinois conference, “Cultural Studies Now and in the Future.”1 The history and genealogy of Cultural Studies has yet to be written, so there is no story about the influence of the Birmingham school in print that I can dispute here. I will have to rely on ambiguous bits of evidence, such as the title of the introduction to Lawrence Grossberg’s collection of essays on Cultural Studies , “‘Birmingham’ in America?”2 Noting the double qualification of scare quotes and question mark, one might assume that this piece would not support my position. But Grossberg doesn’t explain the typography, and he does describe his brief residency at the center in the 1960s as the basis for the work he would do in graduate school, and, by implication, ever since. “‘Birmingham ’” might be read as a figure for Grossberg himself, and that too would support my case, since he has been Cultural Studies’s most prominent spokesperson on this side of the Atlantic. 235 10 The Sixties, the New Left, and the Emergence of Cultural Studies in the United States DAVID R. SHUMWAY It is as a developer seeking to build Cultural Studies in the United States that Grossberg has written about the intellectual history of the Birmingham Centre. His work shows deep ambivalence about the degree to which Birmingham should serve as a norm for the movement as a whole, but the question is always practical rather than properly historical. Writing in 1989, Grossberg can lament that Five years ago [Cultural Studies] functioned largely as a proper name, referring primarily to a specifically British tradition, extending from the work of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, through the contributions of the various members of the Centre, . . . to the increasingly dispersed and institutionalized sites of its contemporary practitioners. . . . However, “Cultural Studies” is becoming one of the most ambiguous terms in contemporary theory. . . .3 In 1995, Grossberg cautioned, “while I might argue that the link between Cultural Studies (as a somewhat dispersed intellectual discourse) and British Cultural Studies should not be ignored, it cannot be essentialized as if it were the only way into the discourse, the only genealogy, of Cultural Studies.”4 Yet in his writing it functions as the only genealogy since, aside from the bare mention of what he calls the “Chicago school of social thought,” he never discusses an alternative. Patrick Brantlinger does offer a broader genealogy, but his book seems rather more to support Birmingham’s paternity than to question it. The book proceeds from discussing the “Humanities in Crisis” in the United States to a chapter on “Cultural Studies in Britain,” which provides a potential solution.5 The task of this essay is to offer an alternative genealogy by arguing that Cultural Studies in Britain and the United States derive from differing New Left movements and their academic offshoots. In the United States, left-wing political movements of the 1960s produced, besides campus protests, changes in the knowledge taught and studied at universities. There are four of these that help account for the rise and particular character of American Cultural Studies: (1) the rise of mass culture as an object of academic study; (2) the widespread rejection of the belief that genuine knowledge is politically disinterested ; (3) the rise of academic feminism and the development of women’s studies; and (4) the growth of African-American studies and the recognition of racism as a pervasive cultural evil that universities should address. This essay will argue that these changes in the American academy fostered the emergence of Cultural Studies here, and that the influence of Birmingham, while certainly significant, came late and provided, in Ohmann’s words, “a way of gathering and naming a so-far inchoate movement.”6 In order to understand where U.S. Cultural Studies came from, we need to know what U.S. Cultural Studies is. There is nothing obvious about this 236 David R. Shumway [18.222.115.120] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...