To sir with love

Abstract

A Short History of Cultural StudiesJohn HartleyLondon: Sage, 2003, 189 pp. (pbk), ISBN 0-7619-5028-1 Can there be a more persistent dilemma for the cultural studies academic than the appropriate staging of communicative address? In a profession centrally invested in the self-reflexive production and exchange of knowledge as discourse, the enunciative questions of what, how, why, where and to whom we speak circulate as regulatory principles for most of our endeavours and even form a primary yardstick of professional evaluation. What's more, we labour in a field of critical inquiry that specifically makes its business the analysis of cultural discourse in all its varied forms, with the emancipatory lure of furnishing ways of not just understanding but actively changing that discourse and the world it governs.