Welcome

Intro

Contemporary Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary area continually debated and often described as having no agreed core curriculum. Yet, the recurrence of discussion and theorising around themes as diverse as museum collections, gift exchange, money, time, care, technology and innovation, knowledge and education, social reproduction, precarity and free labour, racism and colonialism, social struggles and history—all share a heritage that in some sense emphasise a core relation to socio-economic context. This two-week course proposes to introduce the themes of contemporary cultural studies in relation to theoretical, social and political styles of critical scholarship made available across almost 100 years. It reaches from French theory, through Frankfurt School, Birmingham, post-structuralist and subalternist studies, to new media, autonomist and accelerationist approaches. This will be a kind of crash course or refresher reading of the core work that has had a lasting impact upon cultural studies and its heritage: theorists range from Georges Bataille, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida and Stuart Hall, to Gayatri Spivak, Avital Ronell, Trever Paglin and Sylvia Federici.

Through the prism of a critical social and cultural studies approach, contemporary scholarship will be considered as necessarily interdisciplinary and this will be evaluated as resource for comprehending social life through cultural knowledge (cinema studies, anthropology, history, musicology, international relations and philosophy). Topics covered include alienation, commodification, production, technology, education, subsumption, slavery, colonialism, anti-imperialism, rebellions, civil war, anti-war movements, globalism, anti-globalisation, development, precarity, three worlds theory, non-alignment and Global South. Using key texts and a series of illustrative films and video, we will examine late 20th and early 21st century manifestations of cultural studies and we will look at how cultural studies copes with (or does not cope with) new subjectivities, cultural politics, class, activism, media, virtual and corporate worlds, environment, global war, terror and austerity.

 But:

I think you have to accept that this is a gamble. You have come with rather vague information but I hope less vague expectations of a course on cultural studies from a person largely unknown. Everything else is a gamble. It always is. You entrust yourself to enter a conversation with someone who will have their own particular and perhaps peculiar perspective, against which you compare your own, critically of course. How peculiar and what is the form for your gamble? I have of course taught cultural studies now for 30 years (almost, a year short) and my selection and interests are shoes both by those 30 years and - here is the real risk - a peculiarity in that I think the course should be structured as an attempt to generate understanding of what is going on now in that sphere -  between economy and culture - that is the preserve of a certain spirit of cultural studies. You should know, you should assume, that any perspective I can offer on the present is shaped by how I see the past and how I have seen the past through teaching a series of courses - or the same course, changing, in different avatars - over 30 years. Whether it was called Art and politics, performing arts of Asia, general principles, contemporary media, capital and cultural studies, interdisciplinary momentum, screens or just capital, there has been a pattern. From the outset you should know that pattern is stolen, lifted wholesale from a book I think you should know, which I hope some have read and if not will read - Das Kapital by old beardo.


We will start with collecting trinkets, and here is one that is gobsmackingly pertinent - Donald Trumps review of the film Citizen Kane:

https://youtu.be/aeQOJZ-QzBk