Introduction

Abstract

This book has grown out of a sense of frustration. There has now developed a wide division between history and cultural studies, and my frustration derives from the experience of social historians and practitioners of cultural studies talking past each other, at times in mutually self-righteous terms, and at others in terms of mutual distrust and scepticism. There is now a sort of stand-off between social history and cultural studies, and I view this situation with unease and disquiet. In one way and another, in each of the chapters of this book, I worry over the lost ground between social history and cultural studies, and broach certain ways in which that ground may be reclaimed. It is because I see this lost ground as common territory that I am concerned to reclaim it in the interests of both forms of enquiry. What is at issue is the question of their relationship across this ground, and of how they can fruitfully inform each other. Anthony Giddens has suggested that ‘there are no distinctions between the methods of investigation open to historians and sociologists, or the forms of concepts which they can and should employ’ (1987: 224), and this seems to me equally true of history and cultural studies. Yet much cultural studies work today is divorced from the investigations of historians, while historians pay little attention to the disciplinary renegade that is known as cultural studies. This has not always been the case.

History was once life-in-earnest, and all intellectual endeavour, whether worked on human experience or on the oddities of the physical and non-human world, is no more and no less than the effort to wrest what is interesting or useful from the facts of life, and turn it to benign account.

(Fred Inglis)