Abstract
This paper aims to contribute to a collective exploration by the Cultural Studies community into the nature and status of its project. It takes as its point of departure two recent titles of the Australasian Cultural Studies Association conferences: ‘Ute Culture’ and ‘What’s Left of Theory’, which together touch usefully on two related anxieties which currently run deep in practitioners of Australian Cultural Studies today. The two titles together can be treated as a single symptomatic text, produced by a meta-entity, ‘Cultural Studies’, which in 2001 was worried that Cultural Studies has too much theory, or that the theory it does have has lost its vigour and force. But through the pun on ‘left’, it also or instead worried whether or not theory is excessive or exhausted, and that it may have lost the politics (of the left) which was its true reason for existing. By 2002 it worried that ‘Cultural Studies’ has become too ‘useful’, thus abandoning its theory and politics, or it is not useful enough, not wanted by anyone, a self-consuming theory which again has lost energy and purpose. But a pun saves ‘Cultural Studies’ from all these dilemmas. ‘Ute culture’ (like ‘panel van culture’ its adolescent cousin) triggers off nostalgic, pleasurable memories of childhood, with remembered wind in remembered hair, recalling a time which existed before the dilemmas of theory, politics or use weighed so heavily on serious, insecure practitioners of ‘Cultural Studies’.
Original language | English |
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Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Continuum |
Publication status | Published - 2005 |
Keywords
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