The field of cultural studies is experiencing, as Meaghan Morris puts it, an unprecedented
international boom. It remains to be seen how long this boom will last and what impact it will
have on intellectual life. Certainly, within the fragmented institutional configuration of the
academic left, cultural studies holds special intellectual promise because it explicitly
attempts to cut across diverse social and political interests and address many of the
struggles within the current scene. As Lata Mani notes in her essay in this volume, in its …

I want to start this paper from the premise that both academics in cultural and media studies,
and left-wing political theorists and activists have found the everyday culture of the people in
capitalist societies particularly difficult to study either empirically or theoretically. In this paper
I wish, then, to interweave two lines of theoretical inquiry: one into the culture of everyday life
within subordinated social formations and the other into our own academic practices
involved in such an inquiry.