Toward a Genealogy of the State of Cultural Studies

This is a significant moment, not only for the Left in the U.S., but for cultural studies as well, though the problems facing cultural studies dwindle in comparison with the dystopian trajectories leading us into the next millennium. Still, insofar as cultural studies aims to engage such trajectories (and a neoconservative articulation of cultural studies may be part of the mechanism constructing them), the state of cultural studies demands attention. In fact, cultural studies has never been in a more precarious and ambivalent position than it is now in the U.S. academy. In one sense it is flourishing and proliferating across space, institutions, and disciplines. In another sense, that success has produced at least two conditions that threaten (which is not to say negate) its viability as a political and intellectual project. ¹