Can an article containing the following sentences be worth reading?
“In 1990, my first year as an assistant professor there, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign held a conference on "Cultural Studies Now and in the Future.” The program included historians, media theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, and AIDS activists; and the theoretical terrain—over which cultural studies had held earlier skirmishes with deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, and, of course, in an epochal struggle, with Althusserians and neo-Gramscians—had lately been enriched by the arrival of Foucauldian historicism and queer theory. It really did seem plausible that cultural studies could be the start of something big.“
The answer, surprisingly enough, is "yes.” U Pa. English Prof Michael Bérubé asks “What’s the Matter With Cultural Studies?” and comes up with some fairly intelligent answers, though he never quite reaches the disquieting conclusion that Marxism might be, um, wrong. But I gotta ask: who won, the Althusserians or the neo-Gramscians? I can never remember.
