Halcyon Daze: cultural studies’ crisis narratives and the imagined ends of a discipline

Halcyon Daze: cultural studies’ crisis narratives and the imagined ends of a discipline

Using Frank Kermode’s (1967. The sense of an ending: studies in the theory of fiction with a new epilogue. Oxford: OUP) formulation of ‘the End’ as its conceptual marker, this paper takes aim at pronouncements of cultural studies’ demise. In recent years, it has become fashionable to declare cultural studies as in decline, if not irretrievably lost. In drawing on this conceptualization of ‘the End’ to define the current status of cultural studies, attention will be given to how narratives of demise and decline claim a position of speaking-for the discipline whilst reifying selective moments of cultural studies’ past as markers of a ‘high point’, a halcyon moment from which the current malaise is contrasted. Arguing that this is a troubling dynamic, this paper works through the formulations that selected crisis narrative present to outline how these narratives gain dimension. The argument then moves to problematize the positioning of selective originary points within cultural studies’ past to propose that a far more speculative appraisal of these halcyon moments might be drawn upon. Such ‘speculative recognition’ of the past does not seek to dismiss cultural studies’ histories, nor position these within simplistic generational divisions, but does seek to question the significance selective originary moments hold in defining prescriptions for the discipline’s future.

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