ABSTRACT
Cultural studies have been a sustained effort to transform the object of studies in the humanities. Cultural studies have challenged the predominance of the governing categories of literary studies in the interest of producing readings of all texts of culture and inquiring into the reproduction of subjectivities. This chapter argues that postmodernism's universalizing critique of universais simply takes one historical form of universality as absolute in the interest of resisting the possibilities of producing new modes of universality on the basis of a conscious realization of the collectivization of social relations. The resolution of the contradictions constitutive of cultural studies has enabled the articulation of cultural studies within a post-Marxist, post-modern problematic. Postmodern discourses, by displacing Marxism along with the hegemonic liberal humanism, provide the necessary legitimation for the extradisciplinary spaces and institutional interstices privileged by postmodern cultural studies.
