INTRODUCING HISTORY (IN)TO CULTURAL STUDIES: SOME REMARKS ON THE GERMANSPEAKING CONTEXT

Abstract

While ‘cultural studies is caught in a traffic jam’, at the same time the seemingly global crisis of cultural studies coincides with the late reception and high popularity of cultural studies in the German-speaking countries after the ‘cultural’ and the ‘linguistic turns’. Yet, the political and academic history and the contexts of the emergence of cultural studies and ‘Kulturwissenschaften’, as well as their by now established academic traditions and the manifold relations to current developments, are rarely defined and scrutinized. In this paper,we will relate some theoretical and historical perspectives concerning the relationship between cultural studies and the historical disciplines in the German-speaking context. We shall try to trace the potential of mutual benefits between cultural studies and history by foregrounding the political commitment of academic work that still seems to be one of the most important traits of CS as much as the necessity of a stronger notion of the contextualization that history and historiographical methodology provides.