Search

This article pursues two tasks. The first is to clarify the value and productivity of Williams's Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (first edition 1976, second expanded edition 1983a) for the project of Cultural Studies. This clarification is helped, I argue, by reading it alongside Vološinov's Marxism and the philosophy of language (published in Russian in 1929, translated into English in 1973). The second and related task is a speculative development of 'keywording' (or keyword analysis) based on an assessment of the limitations and potential of Williams's broad philological project for today. My argument is that Keywords initially sought to provide a historical map of changing patterns of feeling associated (primarily) with industrialization in England, and that this was sometimes in an uneasy relationship with what he would later name as the project of providing 'resources of hope'. One consequential limitation of the original work is that its historical perspective was built on semantic examples provided by the OED (or to give it its original title, the Oxford new English dictionary on historical principles) and supplemented with Williams's literary studies. My suggestion is that Cultural Studies can develop (and has, to some degree, already developed) Williams's Keywords project without it being centred on literature or beholden to the OED. This would mean treating the project less as an exemplary milestone or methodology and more as an unfinished and unfinishable project whose methodology is critically dynamic: in other words, to move from Keywords to 'keywording' requires altering Williams's methodology. In conclusion I speculate about the ways in which the historical aims of keywording could be expanded to make it more conducive to providing 'useable histories' and semantic counter-narratives, while also pursuing the radical contextualism of Vološinov and Bakhtin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The planetary scale of climate change challenges forms of conjunctural analyses that are based around the scale of national politics and culture. Global warming insists on planetary dimensions and invites us to treat humankind as a species that has developed a taste for fossil fuels. Critical cultural studies, and the human sciences more generally, seem founded on the principle that culture and society have historically worked to differentiate humans, and that the task of a critical practice is to investigate this process within and across specific geographical locales. How do we reconcile what seems to be an irreconcilable difference between cultural studies and climate change? Below I argue that, alongside the necessary work of conjunctural analysis, we should remember that the critical human sciences have other capacities that are more suited to negotiating the monstrous diversity of scales that global warming and the microcultures of the everyday articulate. Alongside conjunctural analysis I argue for the relevance of an approach that would posit 'disjunctive constellations' as objects for attention. While it might seem counter-intuitive, the disjunctive constellations I have in mind are at once more modest and (potentially) more expansive than a conjuncture. In my understanding, disjunctive constellations are not in opposition to conjunctures; they may well be the critical kernel at the heart of a conjunctural sensitivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What would it mean to treat Cultural Studies as a project that has had amongst its accomplishments the production of new forms and styles of writing, and a generative approach to aesthetics? An initial answer to this question would be that this would recognize how Cultural Studies interceded in an academic environment not only through its concern with supplying ambitious questions and insisting on a broad range of objects of scrutiny, but also by showing how this often entailed reconfiguring the forms through which intellectual inquiry conveyed its cargo. This article doesn’t seek to provide a taxonomy of Cultural Studies’ forms and styles; what it seeks to do is to encourage a self-reflexive attention to aesthetics within Cultural Studies as a form of practice. It suggests that there are two guiding questions that might frame such an attention: how might Cultural Studies generate forms that are adequate to the complexity of the configurations that it seeks to register; and how might Cultural Studies generate forms that could reach the ear of new audiences not attuned to the cadences of scholarly writing? The tension between these two questions should be seen as an invitation to purposeful experimentation within Cultural Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This piece of writing is an experiment in digressive and peripatetic cultural studies that follows a thought path around the city of Birmingham in England. Instead of constructing an argument it tries to perform a mode of enquiry that could be sensitive to the 'simultaneous non-synchronicity' of culture, and could craft a form of writing adequate to history's torn and crumpled state. It doesn't try to claim preferential treatment for such a practice, merely a marginal place for such a practice within cultural studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a contribution to an emergent investigation into the usefulness of “mood” as an analytic category for communication and cultural studies. In it I offer a number of descriptive moodscapes that demonstrate the way that mood can direct us to a material world of orientation, attunement, and atmosphere. I also suggest that cultural studies, as a writerly form, can also engage generatively with mood as a productive and political project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the difficulties facing cultural historians studying the Independent Group (IG) is to gauge its significance in the production of visual culture by those who attended the meetings. As a loose discussion group the IG can be seen as emerging from the same cultural forces that would, a little later, produce the academic counter-discipline of cultural studies. With its interests in consumer culture and in the social life of new technologies (particularly mass media technologies) and with a voracious appetite for the latest trends in science and art, the IG constituted a semi-formal extra-mural group of autodidacts filling-in the significant gaps of an official art education that was still framed by 19th-century values. A pedagogic agenda, though, does not necessarily generate a coherent project of aesthetic exploration and result in a consistent visual poetics. In this article the author argues that there is still value in attending to the IG as a cultural research group that produced a visual culture that was simultaneously pluralist (and perhaps contradictory and conflicting) in style but collective in orientation and sensibility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented which discusses the practice of cultural studies, particularly migrant cuisine, critical regionalism, and gastropoetics. Topics include the implication of aesthetics in cultural studies, Parama Roy's theatres of the flesh and the psyche, and the description of gastropoetics in cooking. It highlights two sentences from Nadeem Alslam's novel "Maps for Lost Lovers" to analyze the study of food culture.