1980—Neo-Marxism, Feminism, and Post-Colonialism at the Dawn of a New Decade of Cultural Studies

“Ronald Reagan? The actor?!” 
—Doc Brown, Back to the Future (1985)

Introduction

The year 1980 marked a turning point across the Western world, characterized by the beginning of the Reagan era in the United States of America and the first full year of the Thatcher era in the United Kingdom. The landslide election of the Republican ticket of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the forty-ninth United States presidential election set off an ongoing rise of conservatism and signaled the start of the Reagan era in 1980. As crises across the 1970s—including defeat during the Vietnam War, the rise of Soviet power, the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt, soaring inflation, and the energy crisis¹—eroded American voters’ confidence in liberal policies, socially progressive causes such as the gay rights movement, feminist protests, and the Equal Rights Amendment encouraged the reactionary rise of the religious right. Across the pond, Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979, implementing broad economic and social reforms—including the privatization of many nationalized industries and the weakening of trade unions—in an effort to reduce the government’s stranglehold on the free market. As over two million British manufacturing jobs were lost in the recession of 1979–1981,² Thatcher’s hardline monetarist policies, cuts to public spending, and unwillingness to compromise with unions aggravated the liberal conservatives within her Conservative Party. 

Over the course of this tumultuous decade, significant cultural studies scholarship was concerned with questions of power, and through the construct of hegemony, analysts sought to explicate its machinations. In the United Kingdom, this scholarship was largely conducted within the context of an Althusserian Marxism, at its core motivated by the phenomenon of social class. Building upon the (neo)Weberian notion of class popularized by a generation of British sociologists writing during the 1950s and 1960s, subsequent generations of scholars would turn to Marx in their explorations of popular, social working-class culture, paying mind to the class power on display in trade unions and on factory floors.³ As the “power as hegemony” position continued to gain momentum throughout the 1970s, moving its focus increasingly away from labor and the economy towards ideology and culture, scholars would come to recognize power as not solely economic, but also cultural. Capitalist state power could not be conceptualized solely as coercive and dominating: it was to be understood as working through internalized consent, as a product of ideology. 

Engaging with the works of Gramsci at the turn of the decade, scholars would come to underline the importance of consent and culture over the course of the 1980s. Recognizing alliances of the working class with sections of the middle classes, Gramscian cultural studies scholars conceptualized a counter-hegemonic culture that opposed the dominant culture and held the potential to aggregate the alliance of different classes. As Reagan and Thatcher fortified their positions of power in the 1980s, cultural studies scholars across the United Kingdom, Western Europe, and the United States would turn to the field of semiotics and the works of Lacan to analyze their regimes through the lens of authoritarian populism, which would accelerate the “power as hegemony” position’s turn to the consideration of cultural and social factors alongside economic inequalities. As Krieger noted, “throughout many of the capitalist democracies in Western Europe and in North America, the recession that began with the sharp rise in petroleum prices in 1973–74 signaled an epochal shift in the patchwork of growth-based economic and social policies.”⁴ Exacerbated by the reluctant entrance of female authors into the literary canon and the decolonization of global culture at the end of the 1970s, cultural studies scholarship’s engagement with the ever-present struggle for women’s equality and the machinations of Eurocentric power relations amongst communities called for a profound restructuring and reconceptualization of the power relations between social and cultural groups. During this time of tremendous social, cultural, and economic upheaval, the global cultural studies project was necessitated to change with the times or risk academic obsolescence at the dawn of a new decade.

The State of Cultural Studies in 1980

Whereas the foundations of the peculiar interdisciplinary project that would come to be known as “cultural studies” cannot reasonably be traced to a singular individual or a single group of scholars, it didn’t come into being in a vacuum, and much may be gained from closely considering the academic landscape of the United Kingdom after World War II. By the mid-1950s, universities across the United Kingdom were expanding their admission processes beyond considerations of class, wealth, and ancestry, making meaningful strides towards greater inclusion based on talent and ability. Leftist intellectuals would come to herald “the culture and sensibilities of industrial workers,” and seek to understand the various intersections of class and nation at the levels of lived experience and social structure.⁵ Answering Leavis and Thompson’s call for the development of critical awareness through the study of advertisements, newspapers, and films,⁶ Hoggart championed the literary study of the popular pursuits of the working classes.⁷ Lamenting the loss of an authentic working-class popular culture in the United Kingdom and denouncing the imposition of a mass culture through advertising, media, and “Americanization,” Hoggart incrementally transformed literary studies towards an early social science. This interest in the study of the popular pursuits of the working classes marked a fundamental departure from the common, established canon of the traditional humanities and social science disciplines, and led to the founding of Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964. 

This movement of reformation would continue throughout the 1960s, strengthened by the establishment of universities in academically underserved communities across the country. This period of growth, popularity, and prosperity would become the central impetus behind the adolescence of cultural studies, marking the project as a revolutionary curricular alternative to the traditional humanities and social science disciplines. Thompson approached social history with a humanist perspective, critiquing those historians reducing the working classes to an inhuman, statistical mass.⁸ Instrumental in disassociating Marxism from Stalinism, Thompson sought to steer the United Kingdom’s Left towards democratic socialism rather than totalitarianism. 

Later, in the 1970s, moving against the idealist conceptions of culture as a march towards perfection, Williams argued for critical scholarship focusing on the shared values and ways of life of particular communities at particular times.⁹ Building upon Marx’s argument that people unconsciously constitute their own conditions of existence,¹⁰ Williams’s methodology of cultural materialism urged the engagement of culture by reading its products and considering their circumstances of creation and circulation.¹¹ Predominantly interested in the social nature of culture, and the cultural nature of society, Williams continuously underlined the importance of community life, as well as the conflicts arising in any cultural formation. Contemporaneously, Hall ushered in the Centre’s most revered period of collaborative, engaged Gramscian scholarship.¹² Under Hall’s directorship at the Centre during its formative phase from 1968 to 1979, scholars sought to approach social history with a humanist perspective, critiquing those historians reducing the people of the working class to an inhuman, statistical mass. 

Significantly, the roots of the interdisciplinary project of cultural studies were defined not by particular problems or subject matters, but rather by a conceptualization of fields of academic specialization remaining in constant dialogue with intellectual and practical interests beyond themselves.¹³ As Williams argued—as did Hoggart before him—the actuality of regional, class-based experiences was principally excluded.¹⁴ In this context, the impetus for interdisciplinarity may be traced to the perceived incompleteness of the academy. This perceived incompleteness rose to the scholarly fore over the course of the 1970s, cumulating by the end of the decade in attempts to broker and fortify cultural studies’ relationship to sociology, communication, and media studies by analyzing the signs, representations, and ideologies at the heart of popular cultural stratification.¹⁵ This culmination coincided with one of the most impactful changes of the guard within the Centre, as its director Stuart Hall—possibly its most widely recognizable alum—left the University of Birmingham and was succeeded by Richard Johnson in 1980. 

Continuing his career at the Open University with a shift towards Foucauldianism and the postcolonial, Hall would become a leading influence on cultural studies scholarship in the United States over the course of the 1980s by fortifying cultural studies’ relationship to sociology and media studies. In the wake of World War II, the American mass communication tradition became a social-scientific enterprise shaped by emerging functionalist research objectives to measure media effects, which would result in both a professionalization of mass communication research, as well as a positivist sociological understanding of mass media. Bolstered by members of the Frankfurt School emigrating from Nazi Germany to the United States, the American social science research tradition was introduced to a decidedly Marxist formulation of theory. Underlining the importance of considering the historical character of mass culture and problematizing the potential division between the individualistic values of mass culture consumption vis-à-vis sociopolitical realities,¹⁶ this critical reconfiguration of mass communication and media studies elevated the theoretical discourse in the United States by pressing communication scholars to confront the undemocratic character of mass culture and to acknowledge and overcome the possible collusion of research with the dominant political and economic system.  

Since the 1970s, the integration of the cultural studies project into the fields of communication and media studies has been fundamentally colored by a certain politics of legitimation, which hinged on the ill-defined, controversial term “culture.” Simultaneously operating as a geographic/historical location (“a culture”), a methodological approach (“cultural studies work”), and a theoretical approach (“cultural theory”), the terms “culture” and “cultural studies” over the course of the decade came to function as broad signifiers across the project and the world, warranting further specification before application. Appadurai later recognized these debates raging during the 1970s regarding cultural studies as revealing an “overdetermined landscape of anxieties,” defined—tongue firmly placed in cheek—as an “omnibus characterization about its ‘theory’ (too French), its topics (too popular), its style (too glitzy), its jargon (too hybrid), its politics (too postcolonial), its constituency (too multicultural).”¹⁷ As a solution to what he perceived to be an incompleteness of the academy, Appadurai insisted on the inclusion of the “minoritarian” as part and parcel of an academic education, in the form of “area studies along with anything that might count as ‘minors,’ ‘minorities,’ and ‘minor literatures.’”¹⁸ Ultimately sarcastic in tone, Appadurai nevertheless indicated clearly the roots of the cultural studies project’s continued caricature by its opponents. At the heart of this ongoing caricature, Hall argued, lies the fact that the foundational work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies produced “no single, unproblematic definition of culture.”¹⁹ Rather, the Centre operated with a propensity to avoid offering up any definitive definition or methodologically suggestive view of what constitutes “culture,” in its stead functioning as “a convergence of interests.” As Hall summarized, the specificity of cultural studies scholarship arose over the course of the 1970s in its contingent location, its flexible positions, and its self-reflexivity. 

In this article, I will chronicle some of the key sub-disciplinary debates coming to a head over the course of the late 1970s, which were fundamental to the development and continued importance of the cultural studies project. Particularly, I will consider the debates regarding the criticality of cultural studies scholarship vis-à-vis the debates regarding the incorporation of feminist and postcolonial perspective across the sub-disciplinary borders of the cultural studies project, culminating in key publications by Laclau and Eagleton, Cixous and Kristeva, and Hall and Said, which would prove informative of how the project would develop over the course of the 1980s.²⁰ To come to a closer understanding of the state of cultural studies in the year of 1980, we must first turn our attention to the differing neo-Marxist perspectives on hegemony, class, and power characterizing the cultural studies scholarship of the late 1970s.

Divergent Schools of Neo-Marxist Thought

The cultural studies project has been concerned with questions of power since its inception, and through the construct of “hegemony” analysts have sought to explicate its machinations. Building upon the neo-Weberian notion of class popularized by a generation of British sociologists writing during the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of scholars would turn to Marx in their explorations of popular, social “working class” culture, paying particular mind to the class power on display in trade unions and on factory floors.²¹ Over time, cultural studies as practiced at the CCCS would turn to the consideration of “the repressed,” motivated by “the rediscovery of ideology.”²² As the late 1970s moved into the early 1980s, scholars across Europe and the Americas worked to reconceptualize Marxist theory, challenging both “official Marxism” and the contemporary, “bourgeois” traditions of the social sciences. 

Forwarding the maxim that the media do not reflect, but rather construct, “reality,” scholars at the Centre would come to strongly (re)condemn positivistic traditions in media studies for neglecting any theorization of power, and for erroneously presuming the media to organically facilitate an integral “consensus.” These theoretical contributions would formally introduce to the cultural studies project a neo-Marxist framework built upon a specific, radical ideological critique. Building upon traditions of interpretive sociology,²³ renewed attention was paid to the critical concept of “deviance” within hierarchical societies. Scholars at the CCCS would turn to the works of Barthes and Lukes to construct a model of consensus creation driven by mythologized power²⁴—a model which, significantly, would foreshadow the importance of Foucauldian models of power and consensus production over the course of the 1980s. Resultantly, this period of ideological critique indicated a bold intellectual, political commitment to the reconceptualization of “culture” as a site of class struggle, hegemonic formation, and structural signification.²⁵ This sub-disciplinary debate would influence—and be influenced by—scholars across the project.

By the end of the 1970s, cultural studies scholarship as practiced at the CCCS was largely conducted within the context of an Althusserian Marxism, at its core motivated by the phenomenon of social class.²⁶ Within this context, Laclau argued adamantly against the “taxonomic” class reductions pervasive in such scholarship, problematizing the facile paradigms of (perceived) bourgeois social scientists: “theoretical practice has been greatly hindered by the connotative articulation of concepts at the level of common-sense discourse and their rationalist articulation into essential paradigms.”²⁷ In its stead, Laclau called for “an increasingly theoretical formalization of Marxist categories,” as contemporary Marxist analysis had made redundant “the complexity of fascism and [has] reduced it to a single contradiction: that existing between monopoly capital and the rest of society.”²⁸ The author, here, aligned himself more clearly with the Centre’s earlier efforts at a Gramscian analysis of popular struggle rather than its Althusserian Marxist successor.²⁹

Moving emphatically against the “process of pronouncing the class belonging to elements of concrete ideologies,” Laclau argued that the reflexive class reductionism of Marxist scholarship had overlooked the critical insights of the work of Arendt.³⁰ According to Laclau, “it was not interpellations as a class but interpellations as ‘people’ which dominated fascist political discourse.”³¹ As the Marxist analysis and political practice characteristic of the 1970s failed to recognize the simultaneous struggle of classes on separate ideological planes—as an ideological rhetorical construction, and as a people—the “working class” had come to function as a class barrier in the United Kingdom and across Western Europe, yielding the “arena of popular-democratic struggle” to the “monopoly fraction” of the petit bourgeoisie.³² The author explicated the ways in which popular democratic interpellations do not share a necessary class belonging, even as democratic struggle is fundamentally dominated by class struggle, rejecting the sterile formalism of past Marxist theory and praxis and positing a “theory of the specific autonomy of popular democratic interpellations” as an absolute necessity.³³ 

Contemporaneously, Eagleton moved against the critiques of Marxist theory forwarded by his peers, which accused this “communist” approach of favoring politics over theory, history over aesthetics, and content over form.³⁴ Criticizing those developing a leftist version of humanist criticism rather than adopting the “revolutionary” Marxism promoted by Althusser, Eagleton proposed a structuralist account of texts’ modes of production and consumption. Whereas “idealist” criticism only provides a subjective, intuitive sense of value of canonical art, Eagleton argued, Marxist criticism can provide an objective account as Marxism provides a science of literary value. The author, here, worked to explicate the historical atrocities committed in the name of capitalism, as “modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao’s China or Stalin’s Soviet Union.” That is not to say that capitalism is void of leading to meaningful contributions to society; as Eagleton underlines, its heritage of democracy, civil rights, and feminism must not be overlooked, in spite of its “history of slumps, sweat-shops, fascism, imperial wars and Mel Gibson.” On the other hand, the meaningful contributions of Marxism—“cheap housing, fuel, transport and culture, full employment and impressive social services for half the citizens of Europe”—similarly warrant recognition.³⁵ As Eagleton continuously highlighted, Marx strived for a future of diversity, not uniformity. Socialism would bring about a deepening of democracy, not an abrogation of it. Elaborating Macherey’s distinction between texts’ aesthetic forms vis-à-vis their ideological representations,³⁶ Eagleton cemented the formal methods of the critic as revealing the influences of ideology on a text’s production; an influence which may take multifarious forms, beyond explicating such gaps and distortions. 

While Eagleton pursued a narrowly focused engagement with the traditions of literary criticism, rather than an engagement with the ongoing project of cultural studies, this complex view gave formal methods a critical import that would resonate across the project. In this endeavor, Eagleton turned to the critical philosophies of the Frankfurt School, signaling the significance of a critical neo-Marxist paradigm for the fields of communication and media studies, particularly, across the United Kingdom and the United States over the course of the following decade. Essential works in communication and media studies were prompted to question the emancipatory potential of public communication reconceptualized as commercial culture, as well as a shared arena for public participation and deliberation; a reconceptualization necessitated by the historical experience of totalitarianism.³⁷ 

This reconfiguration of mass communication and media studies by critical theory elevated the theoretical discourse across the cultural studies project by pressing scholars to confront the undemocratic character of mass culture, and, by extension, to acknowledge and overcome the possible collusion of research with the dominant political and economic system; to overcome the prevalent abstracted empiricism of “the assiduous collecting of facts [in] connection with problems.”³⁸ This trajectory of (critical) cultural studies scholarship was further amplified by Smythe, who argued that Western Marxism had not given enough attention to the complex role of communications in capitalism.³⁹ As a “neoliberal” Academy privileged studies of globalization and postmodernism, Marxist academics were marginalized across the social sciences as young scholars were dissuaded from adopting explicitly Marxist approaches to social and cultural analysis. Smythe’s concerns were proven fair by the clear reduction in articles focusing on Marx between the 1980s and the 2000s: a period marked by “the intensification of neoliberalism, the commodification of everything (including public service communication in many countries), and a strong turn towards postmodernism and culturalism in the social sciences.”⁴⁰

Transforming traditionalist mass communication research into a “critical” media studies, thus, demanded the radical critiquing of positivist philosophy, neo-behavioral social theory, and society itself. In short, by the end of the 1970s differing schools of neo-Marxist scholarship vied for legitimacy and influence; scholarship which, in turn, would set the stage for the broader consideration of feminist and postcolonial cultural studies inquiry in the following decade, broadening the international scope and introspective perspectives of the project. The following section will cover the former, focusing on French feminists’ turn to psychoanalytic feminism and materialist feminism at the dawn of the new decade.

Psychoanalytic and Materialist Feminist Theory

Second-wave feminist scholars’ interest in power during the tail-end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s is rooted deeply in their desire of “understanding, criticizing, challenging, subverting, and ultimately overturning the multiple axes of stratification affecting women in contemporary Western societies, including (but not limited to) sexism, racism, heterosexism, and class oppression.”⁴¹ As authors throughout the era argued, it does not suffice simply to understand the multifarious, complex forms power takes; rather, it is essential to mobilize power through collective struggle, and by these means work towards progressive, emancipatory social change. However, despite the prevalence of these definite precursors, the colloquially recognized beginnings of the cultural studies project were decidedly more oriented towards issues of class, coming to engage issues of race and gender comparatively late. As late as 1978, the Centre’s “Women’s Study Group” questioned the “absence from CCCS of a visible concern with feminist issues,”⁴² and only in the 1980s did the British cultural studies project respond to pressures both of internal critiques and of US cultural studies to pay closer attention to race. 

Before the ever-present struggle for women’s equality was recognized in the literary studies of the late 1960s, the literary works of white, male authors describing experiences from a white, male point of view were considered the standard of universality. Any works deviating from this particular point of view—such as the works of female authors, and all authors of color—would not meet this criterion of “excellence,” and were deemed unworthy of canonization. Even when white, female authors gained reluctant entrance into the literary canon in the early 1970s, they warranted neither the prestige nor academic consideration of their male peers. To consciously move against the patriarchal programming internalizing the dominance of men over women, many feminist theorists and literary critics problematized the use of scholarly frameworks such as psychoanalysis and Marxism as inherently patriarchal, arguing that these frameworks embody various elements of patriarchal ideology. Marx, for example, failed to account for the ways in which women have been oppressed by men despite their economic class. Nevertheless, feminist scholars would draw on elements of these critical theories in their examination of issues relevant to women’s experiences, laying the methodological and theoretical groundwork for many of the lines of inquiry adopted by cultural studies scholars across the following decade.

In particular, a cohort of French feminist scholars rising to the academic fore over the course of the 1970s formed an avant-garde in their dedication to the philosophical dimension of women’s issues, inspiring many of their British and American peers’ and successors’ scholarship trying to make sense of gender relations under the Reagan and Thatcher regimes of the 1980s. Broadly, this cohort turned to psychoanalytic feminism and materialist feminism: the former concerned with women’s psychological experiences; the latter interested in the social and economic oppression of women. Whereas these two approaches to analyzing women’s experience in patriarchal culture often contrasted significantly, most authors acknowledged the ways in which women’s social, economic, and psychological experiences are connected. These connections would prove fundamental to the development of the global cultural studies project over the course of the 1980s. 

French materialist feminist theory examined the patriarchal traditions and institutions that control the physical, economic conditions by which societies oppress women. As De Beauvoir argued, men are conceptualized as essential subjects of patriarchal societies, whereas women are posited as contingent beings: whereas men are independent selves with free will and affective power, women have meaning only in relation to men.⁴³ Consequently, women are defined not solely by their difference from men, but by their perceived inadequacy in comparison to men. Women, thus, are not individual subjects; they are men’s Others. Over the course of the 1970s, French feminist psychoanalytic theory sought to explicate the influences of living in a patriarchal society on women’s psychological experience and creativity, focusing on the individual psyche, rather than group experiences. The oppression of women is not limited to the domains of the economic, political, and social; women’s psychological repression at the level of the unconscious must not be disregarded. For many psychoanalytic feminist theorists, women must learn to liberate themselves within their personal psychologies before any materialist liberation could be achieved, as a woman cannot be meaningfully, “externally” liberated if she does not know intrinsically that she needs to be liberated. The opportunities for women’s psychological liberation, thus, must be investigated at the site at which most of their psychological subjugation occurs: language. It is within language that detrimental, essentialist patriarchal notions of sexual difference have been defined and continue to exert their dominating influences. Particularly, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva—approaching these questions from differing perspectives—exemplified the spirit of the French feminist scholarship of the era that would prove to be so influential in the decade to come.⁴⁴

Language reveals patriarchal binary thoughts, which conceptualize the world in terms of absolute dichotomies. Each side of an opposition deemed inferior in patriarchal thought comes to represent the feminine; comes to represent the “lesser” to a male superior. As Cixous notes, “traditionally, the question of sexual difference is treated by coupling it with the opposition activity/passivity,” as patriarchal thinking conceptualizes women as naturally submissive to men.⁴⁵ Women cannot learn to resist patriarchal thinking by obtaining equal status and equal opportunity in current patriarchal society, as this would simply allow them to become a part of—and propagate—the patriarchal power structure. Rather, women themselves are to be understood as a source of power and energy. To this end, Cixous calls for a novel, feminine language to undermine the patriarchal binaries reducing and dominating women. Such an écriture feminine would be fluidly organized and freely associative, resisting patriarchal modes of thinking and writing most prevalent in academia—and in society at large—that require “correct” methods of organization, rationalist rules of logic, and linear reasoning.

Of course, that is not to say that all psychoanalytic feminist theorists believed in the necessity of an écriture feminine. Kristeva considered any theory that (biologically) essentializes women as misrepresenting their infinite diversity, which, in turn, leaves women vulnerable to patriarchal reduction.⁴⁶ The author recognized the social meaning given to sexual difference as oppressing women. Consequently, Kristeva moved away from the difference between sex and gender posited by her (Anglo)American peers, as patriarchy defines and controls the way its subjects relate to sex and gender as if they were the same thing. To this end, the author moved against any absolute definitions of the feminine, conceding only that femininity is marginalized and oppressed, just as the working class is marginalized and oppressed. Thus, rather than developing an écriture feminine, Kristeva maintains that women and men can move beyond patriarchal language and thinking only by seeking access to the semiotic dimension of language. Differentiated from the symbolic dimension of language, in which words operate and meanings are attributed to them, Kristeva posits the semiotic dimension of language as consisting of such elements as intonation, rhythm, and body language, all of which work in congruence to reveal emotions and bodily drives.

Contemporaneously, Wittig conceptualized “the straight mind” as the perspective of anyone positioned inside the totalizing principles of heterosexuality and the gender dichotomy.⁴⁷ As an alternative, Wittig constructs a “lesbian perspective” as characteristic of those outside of the gender dichotomy, advocating strongly for the active, continuous move away from such a dichotomy, as only this would allow extraction from the phallogocentric symbolic order that constantly works to (re)orient subject to its dominant point of view. Building on the works of De Beauvoir to distinguish between “women as a class” and “woman as an essentialist concept,” the author argues that “lesbian” serves as the sole concept beyond the categories of sex, as the designated subject—“the lesbian”—is neither economically, politically, or ideologically a woman. This position beyond the categories of sex derives directly from the “social contract” of patriarchal society; a social contract between men, in which heterosexual women are subjugated, and from which lesbians are excluded. After leaving France in 1976 following a falling out with the Mouvement de libération des femmes she cofounded, Wittig moved to the United States.⁴⁸ The author did not ascribe to the project of écriture feminine, as “femininity” cannot be a meaningful foundation, problematizing and destabilizing the very dichotomy of masculine and feminine as unproductive and untenable. Exploring the intersections of lesbianism, feminism, and literary form to international recognition, Wittig’s scholarship over the course of the 1980s would prove instrumental in introducing continental feminist critical thought to a new generation of American feminist and queer scholars.

Significantly, feminist psychoanalytic theory does not present the entirety of feminist critical thought. Alternatively, in a reaction to psychoanalytic theory over the course of the 1980s, French materialist feminist theory examined the patriarchal traditions and institutions that control the physical, economic conditions by which societies oppress women, and examined the ways in which men are conceptualized as essential subjects of patriarchal societies, whereas women are posited as contingent beings. 

Building upon the work of De Beauvoir, Delphy offered a feminist critique of the patriarchy based on Marxist principles.⁴⁹ Women are the subordinates within the economic unit of the family, much in the same manner as the lower classes are oppressed by the upper classes in society. Women’s prolonged, unrecognized subjugation is resultant of a lack of perceived shared history. Unlike other oppressed groups—such as oppressed economic classes and racial and religious minorities—there are few historical records of women’s shared culture, shared traditions, or shared oppression. Due to these forms of subjugation, women’s allegiance to men from their own social class, race, or religion always supersedes their allegiance to any women. This separation and oppression occurs predominantly through the “labor contract” of marriage, through which women’s unpaid domestic labor is trivialized as “housework,” and disregarded as warranting further analysis or consideration. In patriarchal societies like Reagan’s American or Thatcher’s Britain, Delphy argues, women’s labor is domesticized and undervalued, continuously acerbating the power imbalance between men and women.⁵⁰ Consequently, women constitute a separate, oppressed class, regardless of their socioeconomic standing. Turning to Marxist theory, the author underlines that understanding anything about sexuality or gender must be preceded by an exploration of these economic realities. 

Similarly, Guillaumin posited this characterization and definition as fundamentally reducing women to property, to be “exchanged” or “given away” in marriage, which functions as the primary form of women’s oppression.⁵¹ Women are not solely exploited in the labor market and the home; they are oppressed by “direct physical appropriation,” which the author defines as “the reduction of women to the state of material objects.”⁵² The overall effect of this appropriation is to deprive women of a sense of individuality, independence, and autonomy, as would be increasingly recognized in contemporaneous scholarship across the cultural studies project. 

Feminist critics, thus, drew from theories and methodologies of a wide range of academic subdisciplines, adapting their tools and frameworks in an interdisciplinary manner and drawing connections among seemingly divergent schools of thought. The continental feminist theory culminating during the late 1970s would prove influential, inspiring British and American peers and successors across the sub-disciplinary divides of the cultural studies project well into the 1980s and beyond. Problematizing the categories, oppositions, and dichotomies on which conventional notions of sexuality and identity rely, the critical/cultural scholarship of the late 1970s shared substantial parts of its intellectual lineage with their contemporaneous feminist peers; the postmodern conception of identity as an ensemble of various unstable positions at the heart of the project problematized traditional formulations of sexuality as a personalized issue. 

Problematically, however, the white mainstream feminist thought of the late 1970s encouraged women of color to prioritize gender issues over racial issues, arguing that they are oppressed more by sexism than by racism. Simultaneously, men of color’s patriarchal cabal encouraged women of color to prioritize racial issues over gender issues, arguing that women of color are oppressed more by racism than by sexism. In response to this erasure, subdisciplines across the critical/cultural studies tradition would seek to challenge the assumptions on which empiricist notions of subjectivity depend, conceptualizing a form of expressive pluralism where identity is reified.⁵³ By understanding identity as represented in a self-evident and authentic manner in one’s body, collectivity came to be reduced to group affiliation defined by the standard of authentic embodiment. These questions, significantly, would spur a renewed engagement with questions of race across the broader cultural studies project.

Post-Colonialism and the Operation of Western Hegemony

The intersections between questions of race and cultural studies are myriad, and must be traced back to the origins of the project. In its earlier stages, the British cultural studies project was decidedly attentive to forms of hierarchical oppression. By applying their “sophisticated” methods of analysis to “low,” popular arts and practices, early British cultural studies scholars exemplified many of the democratizing, egalitarian, and anti-hierarchical drivers associated with critical race scholarship today, and consequently laid much of the groundwork on which future studies were built. Nevertheless, it would be reductive to trace what would come to be known as cultural studies solely to the achievements and aims of the Birmingham Centre. Rather, it is imperative to draw a more diffuse, international genealogy for cultural studies, comprised of essential works of authors such as Barthes, Lefebvre, Fiedler, and Fanon. As the end of World War II prompted a global movement of decolonization, the common academic conceptualization of the relationship of empire and society would change in step. Whereas previous generations of theorists approached this conceptualization from a Western perspective, alternative theories of empire and society were proposed by individuals whose perspectives were profoundly shaped by their experience of being a colonial subject. Recognizing the international lineage of the cultural studies project problematizes the popular Anglo-diffusionist narratives tracing the inception of cultural studies to the United Kingdom, underlining the importance of not discounting those precursors to the Centre written in “nonhegemonic” (i.e. non-English) languages. 

Particularly, at the close of the 1970s scholars across the cultural studies project returned to Fanon’s clairvoyant consideration of a number of currents within contemporary cultural studies, as Fanon’s questioning and problematization of colonialist imagery served as a clear precursor to the later anti-orientalist and postcolonial critiques forwarded in cultural studies scholarship.⁵⁴ Anticipating the anti-essentialist critique of race, Fanon clearly conceptualized the conjunctural, constructed nature not only of racial categorizations but also of communitarian self-definition. Consequently, Fanon posited race as situated, constructed, and semiological, and anticipated the constructivist current within the cultural studies project that would come to the fore over the course of the 1970s. 

Whereas previous generations of theorists approached this conceptualization from a Western perspective, over the course of the 1970s alternative theories of empire and society were proposed by scholars whose perspectives were profoundly shaped by their experience of being a colonial subject. These alternative theories developed alongside separate academic perspectives. On the one hand, the Marxist theories of imperialism were elaborated into complex models of inequitable national development, leading to a world-systems perspective. On the other hand, post-colonial intellectuals—building on the works of Fanon and Césaire—would come to emphasize the cultural and psychological aspects of colonial domination and resistance.⁵⁵ Deeply critical of liberal humanism’s shrouding of the history of Western colonial dominion with a pervasive facade of human progress, “truth,” and “freedom,” authors would explicate the evils of dogmatism and stereotypical thinking, and would explicate a deep fissure in the operation of Western hegemony by which the West appeared both to reach its limits and to construct its dominance.⁵⁶ If the West represented itself as autonomous and universal in the domination of “the Orient,” then the encounter with “the native” indicated the point of both the limit and the fabrication of such a representation.⁵⁷ One such scholar profoundly shaped by the experience of being a colonial subject, Palestinian American cultural critic Edward Said would urge the reconsideration of scholarly analyses of non-Western cultures.⁵⁸

Said explored the cultural and psychological aspects of colonial domination and the resistance of empire. Born in equal parts out of the political realities of the Arab-Israeli wars between 1967 and 1973, and the theoretical revolutions associated with continental post-structuralism, Said drew a genealogy of “Oriental studies” by documenting the entanglement of the Western traditions of the Enlightenment in the domination of the non-Western world. Explicating the essentializing narratives of Western scholars regarding the so-called “East”—the geographical territory spanning Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East—throughout its history, Said problematized the self-aggrandizing historization of the European Great Powers and, later, North America by combining the notion of essentialism with Foucault’s assumption that there is no such thing as an objective reality; that there is no way to “detach the scholar [from] the fact of his involvement [in the world].”⁵⁹ Synthesizing Foucault’s efforts to conceptualize knowledge and power as interrelated and as a potent social force, as well as Gramsci’s focus on the cultural conditions sustaining domination in class-structured societies, Said exposed the extent to which Eurocentric cultural meanings were complicit, instrumental in Western imperialist efforts. The author argued that “empire” must be understood as simultaneously constituted by territorial dominion, material gain, and cultural meanings. The implicit and explicit Western conceptualizations of the East as comprised of exoticized, primitive, and irrational nations rationalize—if not necessitate—Western imperial intervention. Within such hegemonic structures, these essentializing forms of discourse—Orientalism—found expression across social, cultural, and academic conversations as a result of—and in perpetuation of—the power of the dominant group. 

Moving beyond the limited claim that ideas legitimate imperialism, Said sought to establish a normative framework for analyzing those imperial practices making empire possible by producing the desire for it. By shaping colonial desires and offering symbolic incitements and justifications for territorial expansion, narration and cultural meanings play as much a role in imperialism as does political economy. Emphasizing the role of scientific knowledge in creating “the Orient” as a cultural fantasy and projection of Western desire and power, Said posits academic knowledges as accruing material force from the concrete practices of imperial policies and administration. The impacts of this critical line of inquiry would ripple throughout the global cultural studies project, urging scholars to grapple with the colonial histories of their nations by critically exploring questions of race with an urgency heretofore unforeseen.

As the affluence of the “post-war boom” waned in the United Kingdom and the United States, later resulting in the austerity of Reaganomics and Thatcherism over the course of the 1980s, its optimistic cultural disposition made way for the “control culture” accompanying the growing repression of all spheres of political and cultural life. This crisis of capitalism saw economic and social disputes phrased as “law and order” issues; saw “crime” arise as a key theme in the maintenance of hegemony, able to symbolize the “unity of the nation” at greatly unequitable cost to different class cultures.⁶⁰ 

As a mugging in Handsworth, England in 1972 elicited a massive response from the judicial system and the public, news media would come to describe the situation as “a frightening new strain of crime.” These debates would soon lament a perceived deterioration of the “British way of life,” as well as the collapse of law and order in the country. Within a few years, the debates crystalized around a singular, imagined culprit: Black inner-city youth. Within the conservative British public imagination, Black youth had become synonymous with mugging. The egregious news coverage of the Handsworth case would lay bare an entire terrain of contending, contentious forces—shaping the incident from outside and fortifying the hegemonic endeavors of the power of the state to increase its control of the thoughts and actions of social groups, at the clear detriment of always, already marginalized groups. Wielding Marxist thought as a lens through which to gaze at the state and the “peculiarities of the English,” “mugging” is not to be perceived as a fact consumed in the circuit of public communication, but as a relation “in terms of the social forces and contradictions accumulating within it . . . or in terms of the wider historical context in which it occurs.”⁶¹ Expanding the localized phenomenon of “mugging” to a broader social history of the United Kingdom after World War II, Hall and colleagues moved the study of ideology away from a transactional model, in favor of a structural and historical alternative.⁶² 

Historical issues, here, are precisely the “critical forces which produce ‘mugging’ in the specific form in which it appears,” highlighting the critical importance of the theories and methodologies of the cultural studies project for understanding news.⁶³ The British were moved to condemn and cast out this “folk devil” because of the limited, unsatisfactory answers offered within the ideological constraints of their country’s capitalist system.⁶⁴ Facing the crisis of a faltering post-imperial economy, the British were confronted with the lacking capacity of established parties to mobilize and guide political activity, leading to the inevitable decline of political legitimacy, hegemony, and general authority. In light of this pessimist crisis, Hall and colleagues argued for the application of a Gramscian perspective to various existing theories and paradigms in the analysis of racism and related social phenomena, as this allows for a novel understanding of the subjection of the victims of racism to the mystifications of the very racist ideologies which imprison and define them; as it explicates how different, contradictory racially structured social phenomena can be woven into and integrated within different ideological discourses. 

As Hall later noted, Gramsci’s novel conceptualization of ideology was radical, refusing any pre-given, unified ideological subject; rather, Gramsci recognized the “plurality of selves” of which the subject of thoughts and ideas is composed.⁶⁵ Gramsci’s notion of hegemony presumes certain ideas of normativity for the masses on the left. As ideas of “civil society” come to refer to a global normative order that does not exist, a cultural studies that deals in the idiom of such normativity begins to lose track of social and cultural facts. This leads to inaccurate description, misrepresenting which social forces are acting in a given time-space.⁶⁶ As “power” comes to be conceptualized as ontological, intensive, factical, and communicational in a post-hegemonic epoch, culture—once perceived as outside of the everyday—is to be understood as existent within the everyday. The cultural studies project, therefore, comes in many ways to be indistinct from culture industry.⁶⁷ This complex, fragmentary conception of consciousness consciously moved away from the Marxist notion of “false consciousness.” The implicit attack Gramsci advances on the traditional conception of the given, unified ideological class subject, at the heart of traditional Marxist theorizing in this area, functions as an essential component of Gramsci’s broader dismantling of the state.⁶⁸ 

Of course, the engagement of cultural studies scholarship with issues of race did not exist within a vacuum. Rather, the decolonization of global culture in the 1980s would lead to sustained attacks against white supremacist institutions and modes of thinking across the academy. Actively antagonizing the audacious appropriation of cultural and material production of non-Europeans that is characteristic of Eurocentrism, the more radical cultural studies scholars sought to decolonize representation—not solely in terms of cultural artifacts, but rather in terms of power relations within forms of communication and amongst communities. Such radical multiculturalism would call for a profound restructuring and reconceptualization of the power relations between cultural communities, laying the groundwork for a broader post-colonial agenda within cultural studies scholarship—a movement characterized by its relational approach to issues of multiculturalism, colonialism, and race, ushering in an essential, ongoing chapter in the history of the cultural studies project. 

In an era of “imperial postmodernity,” in which globalized capitalism has succeeded in producing “a fundamentally new form of rule,” the machinations of industrial modernization have been supplanted by a postmodern form of capitalism so all-encompassing that “capitalism has become a world.”⁶⁹ Consequently, contemporary capitalism needs to be conceptualized as a system geared towards the “production of life” beyond the mere production of goods; indeed, the system’s “primary task is to administer life.”⁷⁰ To this end, it was essential to develop a critical postcolonial standpoint, and extend the focus and terrain of postcolonial theory by merging the concerns of political economy to postcolonial discourse. Arguing for a new universalism—which may keep open the possibilities of other ways of being, transmit histories of resistance, and give voice to the excluded—Venn called for a “postcoloniality” which might “implicate an emancipatory imagination.”⁷¹ Later, Gilroy drew an expressive through-line from the politics of Churchill, to Powell, to the authoritarian populism of the Thatcher governments of the 1980s, recognizing the idea of the white working class as invented within the cultural politics of race as the antithesis to Black youth’s criminality and lawlessness; forms of policing and criminalization practiced in the hinterlands of empire would come to be repatriated and used against those who were cast as “lesser breeds without the law.”⁷² Culture, here, is not to be conceived as a hermetically closed system regulated by ethnic absolutism; rather, the rhythms of life are to be understood as having their own protocols, ethical maxims, and terms of access.⁷³ Culture is not a closed system, as its terms are (re)negotiated in real time; as those without access to its terms (re)define them in potentially radical and transformative ways. These currents—informed by the critical cultural studies scholarship of the late 1970s and necessitated by the austere politics of 1980s Reaganomics and Thatcherism—caused ripples across the cultural studies project that can be felt to this day. 

Meeting the Moment: Cultural Studies in the 1980s

Marked by the Reagan regime in the United States of America and the Thatcher era in the United Kingdom, the year 1980 marked a symbolic turning point across the Western world. Sub-disciplinary debates fundamental to the development and continued importance of the cultural studies project came to a head over the course of the late 1970s, culminating in key publications regarding the criticality of global cultural studies scholarship. As the late 1970s moved into the early 1980s, differing schools of neo-Marxist scholarship vied for legitimacy and influence—scholarship which, in turn, would set the stage for the broader consideration of feminist and post-colonial cultural studies inquiry in the following decade, broadening the international scope and introspective perspectives of the project. Notably, a cohort of French feminist scholars rising to the academic fore over the course of the 1970s formed an avant-garde in their dedication to the philosophical dimension of women’s issues, inspiring many of their British and American peers’ and successors’ scholarship trying to make sense of gender relations under the authoritative, conservative regimes of the 1980s. These connections would prove fundamental to the development of the global cultural studies project over the course of the 1980s. Subdisciplines across the critical/cultural studies tradition would seek to challenge the assumptions on which empiricist notions of subjectivity depend, conceptualizing a form of expressive pluralism where identity is reified. Following a global movement of decolonization, the common academic conceptualization of the relationship of empire and society would change in step. Whereas previous generations of theorists approached this conceptualization from a Western perspective, alternative theories of empire and society were proposed by individuals whose perspectives were profoundly shaped by their experience of being a colonial subject. In light of these developments, Grossberg summarized the cultural studies scholarship of the late 1970s as the “radical contextualism” embodied in the concept of articulation.⁷⁴ Predominantly concerned with highly contingent interventions, scholars across the United Kingdom and the United States called for an “interdisciplinary and antidisciplinary” form of scholarship, characterized by “modesty [rather than] imperializing discourse.”⁷⁵ This served as the main challenge to the project over the course of the 1980s, more so than globalization or neoliberalism. The authors covered in this manuscript—alongside their globally dispersed peers—challenged “the assumption, crucial to euro-modern ways of thinking, that contexts can be treated as a set of fractured and relatively autonomous domains – economics, culture, and politics,” proposing an alternative to euro-modernity by constructing an ontology of modernity as a multiplicity with regard to both space and time.⁷⁶ Grossberg, thus, recognized the transitory period of the 1970s into the 1980s as marked by the long debate regarding cultural studies as an ideal site for the study of power and culture in constant flux. Cultural studies scholars of the era had to tread lightly to offer diligent, rigorous academic work across the academy, whilst remaining relevant and applicable for cultural practitioners outside the academy: “We are not priests! We don’t get to tell people how to live their lives!”⁷⁷ This passionate ejaculation underlines a foundational aspect of the cultural studies scholarship of the late 1970s that Grossberg exalts: the necessity to remain critical without resorting to prescription. The problematization of the categories, oppositions, and dichotomies on which conventional notions of race, sexuality, and identity rely, thus, inspired major contributions across the disciplines of the cultural studies project, whose influences continue to resonate across sub-disciplinary divides.