Abstract
This is the introductory essay to a special edition of Cultural Commons, the short-form section in the European Journal of Cultural Studies. This special edition marks the centenary of Raymond Williams’s birth in August 2021. It maps out some of his key work and considers how Williams’s thinking is both foundational for cultural studies – in its ‘bloodstream’ – and yet is now often overlooked, unattributed or unacknowledged. While Williams’s work was limited in the sense that it did not register or account for gender or race, and thus at times has been amenable to regressive interpretations, the essay also considers how his writing has provided theoretical models, political inspiration, and intellectual resources for feminism and anti-imperialism. It concludes by reflecting on the deep, enduring radicalness of his thinking, and argues that rather than disavow it for the silences, absences and limitations, we might continue to build upon, extend and pluralise what remains a rich, vital and urgent body of work.
Highlights
This is the introductory essay to a special edition of Cultural Commons, the shortform section in the European Journal of Cultural Studies
Williams (1958, 1961, 1973, 1977) produced a number of widely read books such as Culture and Society, The Long Revolution, The Country and the City and Marxism and Literature; he wrote a whole ream of influential essays, as well as a number of novels
This special section of Cultural Commons offers up three short, specially commissioned essays by three different writers, all of which engage with the question of how we mightvalue the work and ideas of Raymond Williams – in the year that he would have turned 100 – and beyond
Summary
It would be very difficult to overstate Williams’s contribution and foundational importance to cultural studies. He rejected the idea that it is possible, or at all desirable, to know, prescribe or plan in advance what culture under socialism would look like; rather, ‘all the channels of expression and communication should be clear and open’, and there must be no directive about what to write, think or learn As well as this radical insight for cultural studies – that culture is ordinary, that ‘lowness is not inherent in ordinary people’, that all societies and minds are always-already imaginative, and that we retain the capacities for creating common meanings even under conditions of oppression – Williams has given us other widely used concepts that have been profoundly important within the overlapping fields of cultural, media, communication and television studies – and far beyond. As Lynsey Hanley notes, the phrase ‘slow cancellation of the future’ is widely attributed to Mark Fisher and/or Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, but Williams wrote this phrase as far back as 1960 (see O’Brien and Hanley, 2020)
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