Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies

by Lawrence Grossberg

As one of the founding figures of cultural studies, Lawrence Grossberg was an early participant in the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ project, one which sought to develop a critical practice adequate to the complexities of contemporary culture. The essays in Bringing It All Back Home bring a sense of history, depth, and contestation to the current success of cultural studies while charting Grossberg’s intellectual and theoretical developments from his time at Birmingham to the present day. Written over a twenty-year period, these essays—which helped introduce British cultural studies to the United States—reflect Grossberg’s ongoing effort to find a way of theorizing politics and politicizing theory. The essays collected here recognize both the specificity of cultural studies, by locating it in a range of alternative critical perspectives and practices, and its breadth, by mapping the extent of its diversity. By discussing American scholars’ initial reception of cultural studies, its relation to communication studies, and its origins in leftist politics, Grossberg grounds the development of cultural studies in the United States in specific historical and theoretical context. His criticism of "easy" identification of cultural studies with the theories, models, and issues of communications and his challenge to some of cultural studies’ current directions and preoccupations indicates what may lie ahead for this dynamic field of study. Bringing together the Gramscian tradition of British cultural studies with the antimodernist philosophical positions of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, Grossberg articulates an original and important vision of the role of the political intellectual in the contemporary world and offers an essential overview of the emerging field of cultural studies by one of its leading practitioners and theorists.

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, adjunct distinguished professor of anthropology, and the director of the University Program in Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He has won numerous awards from the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association, as well as the University of North Carolina Distinguished Teaching Award (for post-baccalaureate teaching). He has been the co-editor of the international journal Cultural Studies for over fifteen years. He has written extensively about the philosophy and theory of culture and
communication, and the interdisciplinary practice of cultural studies. His research focused for many years on American popular music and youth culture, but his recent work has turned to the contemporary
U.S. political culture and the global struggle over the possible ways of being modern. His work has been translated into a dozen languages.

Reviews

[Arda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notes from final:

This reading provides valuable insight and call for the reconsideration of the theoretical study of communication in its conceptualization of culture and identity, gender, race, and the overall manner in which global contexts are established.

The consequences of the institutionalization of knowledge are reiterated by Grossberg, who also demonstrates how culture cannot be reduced in such ways that emphasize differences. Cultural studies, Grossberg observes, have the tendency to consider cultural identities as objects, thus making it a trendy subject. The over-emphasis on the politics of identity may have brought theoretical attention to the study of culture, but it has limited its understanding by underlining distances, and thus maintaining differences to establish margins for the outsiders, to the point of even romanticizing the idea of how different things are. Grossberg brings attention to tracing the conceptualization of space, and recognizes that context, or space, per se, is not an empty notion of “somewhere,” and that a link needs to be established between context and theory, and how the space in which one is placed has an effect on the sense of belonging one has. Moreover, Grossberg, criticizes the singularity of identity and calls, instead, for a multi-dimensional, inter-disciplinary and self-reflective approach that would not be independent of context. The concept of the power of culture, in this regard, is also relevant, as the reduction of what power is and what the power of culture is also reduces its understanding, rather than articulating and fitting the linkages together by the acts of deconstruction and reconstruction, which is an approach that Grossberg is in favor of.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

These essays are a must read for understanding the practice of Cultural Studies.