ABSTRACT
Academics, like all other groups in a culture, build altars of meaning based on nostalgia, curiosity and, at times, irrational defence. Particular universities, scholars, books or historical moments extend a tenuous, but taught, grip on the consciousness. The popular memory of Birmingham has erased or displaced many other remarkable centres of Cultural Studies. The victors of history always do. American, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian or Hong Kong sites for the study of culture lack the gleam of credibility and the dust of authenticity. Cultural Studies does not require another history of the Birmingham Centre. Although those working in the Birmingham Centre had a diversity of academic interests, their most famous analyses were those conduced on youth subcultures. Cultural Studies scholars needed the language of authentic experience, resistance, social justice and political change and they required avatars like youth, women, black or gay communities to promote this function.
