From Culturalism to Transculturalism

Abstract

social theory, sociology, anthropology, history, politics, and various modes of aesthetics. However, the constellation of these somewhat indefinite ele ments is frequently attributed to Raymond Williams and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (see Hall, "Cultural Studies"; Turner; Grossberg; Bennett; Storey ; Lewis). Williams's concept of "cultural studies," along with Rich ard Johnson's broader notion of "culturalism," distinguished a mode of analysis which could integrate an anthropological interest in the popular arts and artifacts with a reformist social and political agenda. Through various refinements, most particularly the more sophisticated application of Stuart Hall's interpretation of Althusserian ideology and Gramscian hegemony ("Rediscovery of Ideology"), Bir mingham cultural studies exerted an astonishing influence over the evolving (mis)fortunes of the humanities and social sciences in the English-speaking world. Even in the United States, with its own quite distinct understandings of the prob lematic of "culture," Birmingham style cultural studies was able to attach itself to local permutations of poststructural and postmodern theory, providing, among other things, a reinvigorated vocabulary of heuristic dispute-one which productively engaged with America's ongoing consternations over race, the politics of pluralism