1988 signaled a major year for cultural studies with the publication of several significant texts: The collection of essays Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Spivak, and The Hard Road to Renewal, Stuart Hall’s book on Thatcherism. Despite these texts’ divergent purposes, themes, and theories, they can be productively read together for their unique contributions to Marxist cultural theory. In the decades preceding their publication, a resurgence in scholarship devoted to Marxism had emerged, as scholars grappled with both its internal issues as well as its increasingly apparent insufficiency to explain current social formations. As Grossberg and Nelson explain in the introduction to Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Marxism was “paradoxically at once undergoing a renaissance of activity and a crisis of definition.” In this essay, we elucidate how each text contributed to cultural studies and particularly highlight how each intervened on this redefinition of Marxism.
Articles by Elise Homan
Elise Homan is a doctoral student in communication studies at the University of Utah. She is a communication scholar working within human geography, mobility studies, spatial theory, and theories of globalization and transnationalism. Her research examines issues of borders, sovereignty, citizenship, and movement, with a focus on their spatial dimensions, investigating the production of space, its influence on subjectivity and identity, and how these processes are connected to technology and media. Her work is framed by rhetorical and poststructural theory but maintains an interdisciplinary approach.