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On "Cultural Studies": a response to Remo Ceserani.

Article Excerpt
Theory travels, as Edward Said taught us, and where there is travel, there is an economy of loss and gain. Cultural Studies is no exception. Born in Birmingham, UK, it made its way across the Atlantic in what Georges van Den Abbeele has argued is merely the latest move in a longer itinerary in which Cultural Studies itself "chunneled" its way to the United Kingdom from France, where poststructuralism had packed its bags that, in turn, were arguably stitched together from a rereading of German philosophy in post-Nazi Europe. In his note, Remo Ceserani documents its return across the Atlantic, its delayed arrival both in Italy and, to be honest, to Italian Studies. But let us not be drawn into a rhetoric of belatedness; it is less important to note that this train "viaggia in ritardo," than to inspect the baggage it has lost or gained as a result. It is already a commonplace of discussions of Cultural Studies in the US that the term has become so amorphous and all-inclusive that attempts to define it are futile. Some of the names included in the volumes cited by Ceserani testify to the additional miles traveled: the deconstructionist Marxist feminist Spivak and the post-Marxist Lacanian Zizek, are two figures who would not huddle uncritically under the Cultural Studies umbrella in the US, indeed, Zizek has been openly critical of its lack of a coherent theoretical framework. The brand name of their umbrella instead is "Theory," by which I mean that particular form of discourse whose US birthplace was the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference on "The Structuralist Controversy." Those...