Cultural studies and social movements: A crucial nexus in the American case

Abstract

Cultural studies took hold in the USA in the context of politics fronted by youth, multi-racial, and gender movements that emerged in the wake of the much larger Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. With a full-blown academic legitimation crisis well under way, cultural studies resonated strongly with social struggles that shaped both its reception as well as its capacity to augment new intellectual academic formations. Retrieving the historical nexus questions views that treat and limit British cultural studies to being mainly an intellectual import-export phenomenon. The overlooked historical nexus fosters trivialization anad caricature of cultural studies’ incorporation in the American academia, resulting in both conservative antipathy and left disappointments feeding into the common binary narratives of the ‘failure’ of cultural studies for being too Marxist and not Marxist enough. Restoring the historical nexus underscores the value of cultural formations and projects Williams proposed, while cautioning theoreticist and methodological enclosures.