‘What's going on?’ Larry Grossberg on the status quo of cultural studies: An interview

Abstract

Introduction. Cultural Studies is a relatively new and decidedly selfreflexive field. Variously conceptualized in the academy in the past as inter/anti/post disciplinary, it appears to have settled into becoming what Tony Bennett (1998) has described as a 'reluctant discipline' in its own right. However, cultural studies still remains a discourse influx. It has become a common focus area in the academy in the United Kingdom and Australia, mushroomed in the United States, strengthened in South Africa and spread to Taiwan and Morocco. It has become articulated with multiculturalism and various discourses based on the politics of social difference and employs avant garde theory. Yet it is also subject to hoaxes (for example 'the Sokal affair') and an ongoing backlash from both the left and the right. At various sites it appears to have become a largely academic exercise, abandoning its praxis roots, its characteristic of being at once an academic (anti)discipline and a political project, a theory-informed discourse and a community-based practice. Given that cultural studies was always intended to be constantly remade, depending on changing locations and conditions, given its current state of flux, and given its exciting but sometimes bewildering state of flux, it is important to take the pulse of the field from time to time, to go beyond our individual discipline-influenced courses, projects, and even various 'national schools,' to get a sense of the current state of affairs of the field in its entirety. In the following interview with prominent cultural studies figure, Larry Grossberg, conducted while he ivas in Knoxville to give an invited talk at the University of Tennessee, I elicited his views on the status quo of cultural studies. In particular I asked his view on such issues as the current state and politics of theory and theorizing, empiricism and empirical research, identity politics and the essentialism versus anti-essentialism debate, the institutionalization of cultural studies in the academy, and national schools and their consequence for internationalization of cultural studies.