Aesthetics and Cultural Studies

About this book

In 1991, in an essay entitled "Always Already Cultural Studies," Cary Nelson, my former colleague at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and one of the three organizers (with Lawrence Grossberg and Paula Treichler) of the 1990 conference "Cultural Studies Now and in the Future," surveyed the prospects for American cultural studies in the wake of the Illinois conference and made the following prediction: of all the intellectual movements that have swept the humanities in America over the last twenty years, none will be taken up so shallowly, so opportunistically, so unreflectively, and so ahistorically as cultural studies. . . .