Popular culture 1978 : history, theory, politics

It is an accident of history" and of very mundane history at that" that the two articles that follow are able to be published in this issue of Cultural Studies. They are both reprints of mimeographed papers that had long sat forgotten on my bookshelves, and would still be there had I not, at the beginning of the year, set about clearing out my study in order to decorate it. And there they were, buried beneath a pile of Open University (OU) course texts, unloved and unread for far too long. For it was clear, on re-reading them, that they offer, in their informality, a distinctive insight into the quite different ways in which two of the key founding figures of cultural studies engaged with questions of the popular and popular culture at a particular historical moment. Both of the articles derive from seminar presentations that Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall gave at the Open University a month apart from one another: Williams in August 1978 and Hall in September. There are significant differences in the conceptualization of popular culture in Williams's and Hall's approaches. But they also share one overriding feature in common: it is relations of class, and of class alone, that both look to in the definitions, theories and histories of popular culture that they offer. Questions of gender are accorded scarcely a mention, and nor are questions of race and ethnicity. While not surprising in the case of Williams, this latter omission on the part of Hall underscores the class-centrism of cultural debates in the 1970s. It's not that questions of race and ethnicity were absent from Hall's work at the time: he contributed to projects on race organized by UNESCO and the Commission for Racial Equality in the late 1970s (Hall 1977, 1978) and, at around the time of his presentation to the OU Popular Culture course team, was working on a major essay on race for another UNESCO project (Hall 1980), but it was an essay in which Hall's theorization of race was worked through via an engagement with the contemporary concerns of a range of class theorists. The major shift of emphasis in his work signalled by his concept of 'new ethnicities' (Hall 1996) was still to come. First published in 1986, this essay marked a decisive shift in the terms that would subsequently inform debates about the categories of 'the popular' and popular culture.