What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?

Seminar by Gilbert Rodman

From the very beginning (regardless of where one believes that to have been), the range of work done in the name of cultural studies has been too diverse to allow for simple and straightforward definitions of the enterprise. While cultural studies isn't completely unbounded, it also doesn't have a clearly identifiable center: there is no single object of study, no body of theory, and no methodological paradigm that lies at the endeavor's core. Cultural studies' inherent open-endedness places sharp limits on our ability to explain it fully in a single seminar meeting, but we should still be able to stake out the enterprise's broad contours. We won't be able to examine cultural studies' tangled and fractious history in its entirety, but we will trace out enough of that backstory to help make sense of cultural studies' current shape and circumstances. We won't be able to map out cultural studies' current trajectories with absolute precision, but we will engage the question of where cultural studies might -- and should -- head in the future. The best way to think of this seminar, then, is not so much as a source of definitive answers, but as an opportunity to wrestle with productive and important questions.

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