1987:254). An anthology published in 1992 suggests the following major categories of
current work in the field:
the history of cultural studies, gender and sexuality, nationhood and national
identity, colonialism and post-colonialism, race and ethnicity, popular culture and
its audiences, science and ecology, identity politics, pedagogy, the politics of
aesthetics, cultural institutions, the politics of disciplinarity, discourse and
textuality, history, and global culture in a postmodern age.
Grossberg et al. 1992:1But the editors of the volume stress the shapeless nature of the field and the variety of
methodologies in use: ‘[cultural studies] remains a diverse and often contentious
enterprise, encompassing different positions and trajectories in specific contexts,
addressing many questions, drawing nourishment from multiple roots, and shaping
itself within different institutions and locations’ (2–3). There are, for example,
distinctions to be made between the British and American traditions of cultural studies.
The British tradition may be traced back to the pioneering work of F.R.Leavis and Denys
Thompson in the 1930s (Leavis and Thompson 1933), but, more particularly, it arises
from the work of Raymond Williams (Williams 1958). The British tradition, it is claimed,
believes that the study of culture involves both ‘symbolic and material domains...not
privileging one domain over the other but interrogating the relation between the two...
Continually engaging with the political, economic, erotic, social, and ideological, cultural
studies entails the study of all the relations between all the elements in a whole way of
life’ (Grossberg et al. 1992:4; 14). From the later work of Raymond Williams, from the
work of Stuart Hall and others at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies, and from major bodies of theory such as Marxism, feminism,
psychoanalysis and postructuralism, the British tradition derived the central theoretical
concepts of articulation, conjuncture, hegemony, ideology, identity, and representation.
(See, for example, Williams 1975; 1976; 1977; 1989; Hall et al. 1980; Hall 1990.) But
even British cultural studies is not a coherent and homogeneous body of work: it is
characterised by disagreements, ‘divergencies in direction and concern, by conflict
among theoretical commitments and political agendas’ (Grossberg et al. 1992:10).
In the USA, a somewhat different inflection has been given to cultural studies by the
‘new ethnography’, rooted primarily in anthropological theory and practice (a
‘postdisciplinary anthropology’) which is, in turn, linked to work by feminists and black
and postcolonial theorists concerned with identity, history and social relations.
(Grossberg et al. 1992:14).
In some of the cultural studies theorists, one can detect the following characteristics:
first, a belief that reality can only be made sense of through language or other cultural
systems which are embedded within history. Second, a focus upon power and struggle.
In cultural terms, the struggle is for meaning: dominant groups attempt to render as
‘natural’ meanings which serve their interests, whereas subordinate groups resist this
process in various ways, trying to make meanings that serve their interests. (Fiske 1987:
255). An obvious example is the cultural struggle between patriarchy and feminism;
but, of course, divisions into groups in society can be along lines of race, class, age and
34 HISTORY, CULTURE AND CHILDREN’S LITERATURE