Rewording/Rewarding Culture: (Post)Cultural Studies and the Shame of Being 'Different'

In his Keywords, Raymond Williams states that “Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (Williams 1977: 76). This paper engages with the complex ways in which a methodological approach born in the UK as part of the culture of the New Left, and conceived as a hybrid tendency across disciplines rather than a discipline in itself, is reshaped in the Italian academic context. I will see how English Cultural Studies in Italy tends to be perceived as a Janus-faced approach, inheriting Hoggart’s and Williams’s attempt at adapting techniques of literary analysis for the study of a variety of cultural formations and Stuart Hall’s emphasis on language as the practice grounding signification and producing cultural representations (Hall and Open University 1997: 4-6). While recognising Eagleton’s position that “Literature […] inherits the weighty ethical, ideological and even political tasks which were once entrusted to rather more technical and practical discourses” (Eagleton 2000: 40), I will consider how this position should include Hall’s notion that “culture is about shared meanings and meanings can only be shared through our common access to language” (Hall and Open University 1997: 1-2). In a postcolonial and globalised perspective, and with an eye to the current European contingency concerning migration, I will focus on how the Italian approach to Cultural Studies can help us to tackle the ambiguity recently pointed out by Simon Gikandi, who claimed that English literature is simultaneously “one of the most universal phenomena” and “one of the most parochial disciplines” (Gikandi 2001: 650). This requires English Cultural Studies to strongly engage with Postcolonial and Migration Studies, and again raises the question of what we call ‘Cultural Studies’ and how this theory is located in the Italian context.