A handbook essay that explains cultural studies apprroaches to the study of popular music.

“What does it mean to be a black film in twenty-first century America?”
 
Riffing off of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s work in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, who in turn drew heavily from Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” this chapter wrestles with some of the controversies surrounding the 2012 film Dj…[Read more]

A critical analysis of the racial politics of the “Blurred Lines” copyright infringement case.

This chapter examines the public discourse — both utopian and panic-driven — about the growth in popularity of the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s

Forty years ago, in his seminal essay, ‘The Whites of Their Eyes’, Stuart Hall admonished the left for its – our – collective failure in figuring out how to fight back against racism effectively. Sadly, his criticism is no less valid today than it was then, and we still have a lot to learn about how to defeat racism once and for all. We’ve k…[Read more]

“When I said that part of what the Centre was about was trying to produce organic intellectual work, I of course had the question of pedagogy essentially in mind.”
— Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies”

Those of us in the academy who call cultural studies “home” often claim that one of the main things we do is to teach…[Read more]

In “Culture Is Ordinary,” Raymond Williams challenged the then prevalent notion that “culture” is a phenomenon possessed only by social elites and educated highbrows, and attempted to replace it with a more expansive vision of culture as something commonly found at all levels of a social hierarchy. A truly democratic society, he insisted, could n…[Read more]

A handbook chapter discussing the relationship between “cultural studies” and “historical theory,” with a specific focus on four facets of cultural studies that help to shape its approach to scholarly research, evidence, and analysis: (1) its overtly political nature, (2) its interdisciplinarity, (3) its constructivism, and (4) its radical contextualism.

A chapter on “Histories” in an edited collection on key terms in popular music studies. I make an argument for the need to always historicize the study of popular music, with 4 major points of emphasis:
1. Doing history is about interpreting facts, not just reporting them.
2. Historical contexts are things that we have to construct in our…[Read more]

The relationship between culture and policy has long been a major topic for media and cultural studies. With
this issue, we hope to broaden the meaning of cultural policy, from policies that are explicitly regulating
something we call the “cultural” (including media or traditional rituals or symbols) to include the practice of
policy-making and…[Read more]