The very attempt to define cultural studies would be seen by many of its practitioners as reductive and antithetical to the free-roaming spirit of a subject which, despite an extended and distinguished history still prides itself on its ability to resist rigid disciplinary frameworks. During its evolution, cultural studies has incorporated a variety of approaches, yet has held them intact within itself rather than absorbing and conflating them. As such it should be seen less as a melting-pot than a cage of bees, where feminism, anthropology, film criticism, Marxism, postcolonialism, literary criticism, postmodernism and queer theory swarm in debate. As a consequence, it currently has no single established methodology.

Nevertheless, certain trends and patterns can be drawn from this seeming chaos, including a history which most would agree stretches back at least to Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958).

Cultural studies in Britain established a solid base through Hoggart’s creation, with Stuart Hall, of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964. It would be inaccurate to draw any kind of “house style” from the debates within the Birmingham School, but we can identify an interest in “subcultural” fashions and behavior and in audience interpretation of popular texts, made more urgent through an engagement with feminism, with questions of “race” and identity and with the Gramscian notion of “hegemony,” as it applied to 1970s Britain.

These approaches to cultural studies were not exported directly across the Atlantic, but reached the United States through the filter of French theory—Bourdieu, Foucault and de Certeau—whose stress on a decentered micropolitics of society had increasing relevance to the complex and fragmented cultures of 1980s North America. In practice, cultural studies in the USA has developed as a mutated anthropology: an investigation into the urban tribes of sunbathers, mall shoppers and romance readers which interrogates popular cultures and “subcultural” fan groups. As such, it brings the unseen—the trivial, the homemade, the “minority” reading—to light, and makes the familiar seem alien.

Despite the shifts in content and focus, these studies invariably have in common with both their French and British counterparts a grounding in issues of cultural power and its relation to media representation. John Fiske’s work on the quintessential landscapes and landmarks of the 1980s were highly influential here, although others have since questioned his optimism in the supposedly transformative power of audience readings.

If the North American academy gave cultural studies a boost in popularity and respectability it also prompted a crisis: the expansion of the subject across universities and conferences meant that this “counter-discipline” had itself become an established and increasingly profitable media industry Even as cultural studies becomes a truly international force, with important contributions from Australia, Italy Hong Kong and even the virtual nation-states of the Internet, this paradox continues to hover over the subject and its practice.