ABSTRACT

As we approach the end of the century, cultural studies has become one of the most lively and widely-discussed intellectual fields in the international academic world. University programmes, conferences and publications in cultural studies are proliferating massively, suggesting a clear and indisputable boom. The effect of this steady expansion is that there is less and less consensus over what ‘cultural studies’ means. As a label appropriated in a variety of ways by a diverse and heterogeneous constituency, the identity of cultural studies is becoming increasingly elusive. Contrary to the traditional disciplines, cultural studies refuses to define itself in terms of a distinctive object, nor in terms of fixed theoretical axioms or orthodoxies. As Stuart Hall has put it, ‘[cultural studies] had many trajectories; many people had and have different trajectories through it; it was constructed by a number of different methodologies and theoretical positions, all of them in contention.’1