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Bringing It All Back Home

Essays on Cultural Studies

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Book

Pages: 448

Published: May 1997

Author: Lawrence Grossberg

As one of the founding figures of cultural studies, Lawrence Grossberg was an early participant in the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ project, one which sought to develop a critical practice adequate to the complexities of contemporary culture. The essays in Bringing It All Back Home bring a sense of history, depth, and contestation to the current success of cultural studies while charting Grossberg’s intellectual and theoretical developments from his time at Birmingham to the present day. Written over a twenty-year period, these essays—which helped introduce British cultural studies to the United States—reflect Grossberg’s ongoing effort to find a way of theorizing politics and politicizing theory.

The essays collected here recognize both the specificity of cultural studies, by locating it in a range of alternative critical perspectives and practices, and its breadth, by mapping the extent of its diversity. By discussing American scholars’ initial reception of cultural studies, its relation to communication studies, and its origins in leftist politics, Grossberg grounds the development of cultural studies in the United States in specific historical and theoretical context. His criticism of "easy" identification of cultural studies with the theories, models, and issues of communications and his challenge to some of cultural studies’ current directions and preoccupations indicates what may lie ahead for this dynamic field of study. Bringing together the Gramscian tradition of British cultural studies with the antimodernist philosophical positions of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, Grossberg articulates an original and important vision of the role of the political intellectual in the contemporary world and offers an essential overview of the emerging field of cultural studies by one of its leading practitioners and theorists.

Praise

“Bringing It All Back Home interrogates the identity of ‘cultural studies’ as a project, concept, and discipline. . . . Grossberg is an elegant and sophisticated thinker. . . . He has the sensitivity and critical acumen to provide compelling, and for the most part persuasive, interpretations of contemporary life.” - Paul Grainge , OverHere

“Lawrence Grossberg is recognized internationally as one of the leading US exponents of the cultural studies project. Bringing It All Back Home represents a major contribution to the clarification and further development of that project, and an outstanding addition to the formative scholarship of the field. It is a work of outstanding and exciting scholarship by one of the most distinguished exponents of the discipline of Communication and the practice of cultural studies.” - Meaghan Morris

“These essays are among the most important and influential discussions of the history of cultural studies yet published.” - Tony Bennett

“These essays represent an original contribution to and sustained reflection on the central debates in critical cultural theory by one of its leading practitioners and most engaged and distinctive voices.” - Stuart Hall

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Lawrence Grossberg is Morris Davis Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including We Gotta Get Out of this Place and Cultural Studies.

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Paper ISBN: 978-0-8223-1916-0 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8223-1911-5 / eISBN: 978-0-8223-9617-8 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822396178

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