Abstract
A Short History of Cultural Studies (Hartley 2003) made the claim that cultural studies is a ‘philosophy of plenty’; a way of understanding the creation of cultural values among large populations, in times of economic growth, democratisation and consumerism. However these same times – the ‘long twentieth century’ (Arrighi 1994; Brewer 2004) – were marked by unprecedented social and ideological upheaval, with imperialism, total war, totalitarianism, and ‘mutually assured destruction’ (Cold War) as the dark side of progressive secular scientific modernity. Over that long century from the 1880s, world economic and political leadership shifted from European hegemony and British free-trade imperialism to US entrepreneurial-managerial capitalism. The end of the ‘long’ century was marked by further change, often gathered under the term ‘globalisation.’ For their part, the human, political and economic sciences underwent what has been called the ‘cultural turn,’ associated with post-industrial or network society, the ‘new’ or knowledge economy, postmodernism … and cultural studies.
Highlights
CULTURAL STUDIES AT THE END OF THE ‘LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY’ AND THE BEGINNING OF THE ‘CHINESE CENTURY.’
Brainchildren of the West There is no doubt that cultural studies is a Western intellectual enterprise, born out of and seeking to shape Atlantic tensions as economic, political and cultural experience adjusted to American hegemony, carried around the world as much on the wings of popular culture as by military and economic power; i.e. by Hollywood, rock & roll, television; everything except sport
It was not during the 1930s to 1950s, the period when American supremacy was established but later, when it was first seriously challenged – in Vietnam – that cultural studies came to prominence
Summary
ARC FEDERATION FELLOW ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR CREATIVE INDUSTRIES & INNOVATION. ‘The time to work for a commonwealth of civilizations is now.’ (Giovanni Arrighi et al 1996). Commentators became interested in the productivity of signs, and in particular the excess of mediation in contemporary societies, whereby signs – often entirely detached from any plausible referent – suffused the public and private domains They were often criticised for turning the world into a text, the postmodernists were among the first to see clearly, right across the domains of politics, culture and the economy, that representation had been emancipated from reality, and that the process of abstracting textuality, signification, meaning and value from situated context or referential causation was a phenomenon of the system, not of their own fantasies. Productivity is manifested in the assumed source of meaning in any system, and this general shift can be observed across many domains and processes (see Fig. 1)
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