Herald or hydra? English cultural studies in the post-1945 World-System

"Cultural Studies" as an academic phenomenon has shown extraordinary growth expanding to universities throughout the English-speaking, settler colonies of Great Britain since first finding an institutional home in England at the University of Birmingham in 1963. Either departments bearing the new name were brought into being or specialties within existing departments declared themselves.;The development of work at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies--its characteristic national mode and concern for theory, and the substantive areas of media studies, subcultures, ethnography, the working class, and race and gender--is traced in Part II. The major efforts are allowed to "speak for themselves", then the shape that cultural studies took in its migrations is examined.;Part III is concerned with the trajectory of Cultural Studies through conjunctural space as the long-term structures of knowledge/power begin to break-up with the general onset of systemic fluctuations announcing the eminent demise and transformation of the Modern World-System. The post-1945 world (and the world of knowledge) ordered by the East-West competition of blocs/ideologies gives way to a world structured by the North-South clash of identities/subjectivities in which even science, guarantor of truth and summit of the disciplinary hierarchy, begins to question its own position from within.;This study situates the early success of cultural studies in the short-term conjuncture of the First (British) New Left which advanced "culture" as an explanatory category in the midst of the upheavals of the mid-1950's as both mainstream and Marxist frameworks proved inadequate, and secondly, in the longer-term trend (since the controversy occasioned by the French Revolution) of conservative social criticism on the part of the literary intelligentsia. Part I is concerned with the determinate conditions of the emergence of the collection of political/intellectual issues which came to be known as cultural studies as a function of social time, that is the post-1945 Kondratieff expansion and the cycle of British hegemony and its passage to the United States.