“Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies” is a rich and personal reflection delivered at a 1990 conference by Stuart Hall. In it he reconsiders the development, tensions, and future of Cultural Studies by tracing its theoretical legacies. He approaches the subject not as a definitive history, but through an autobiographical lens that emphasizes Cultural Studies’ shifting trajectories, methodological pluralism, and political stakes.
Cultural Studies as a Discursive Formation
Hall begins by rejecting any origin myth of Cultural Studies. Instead, he characterizes it as a “discursive formation” in the Foucauldian sense—multiple histories, practices, and theoretical tensions converging in an unstable but generative project. Cultural Studies never had a single center; it was marked by moments of rupture, argument, and “theoretical noise” rather than linear progression or consensusEssential essays Volume….
The Marxist Legacy: Influence, Trouble, and Distance
Hall situates the project within his own political formation in the British New Left, noting that Cultural Studies inherited Marxist questions (capital, class, ideology, power) but never fit neatly within orthodox Marxism. Instead, it worked “with, on, against” Marxism, taking inspiration while resisting determinism and EurocentrismEssential essays Volume…. He emphasizes that theory was never pure abstraction—it was a response to lived historical crises and practical engagement.
Feminist and Postcolonial Interventions
A central theme is the way feminism and race theory interrupted Cultural Studies. Feminism, in Hall’s view, made a “ruptural” intervention: redefining power, making the personal political, reintroducing the subject and the unconscious into theoretical work, and challenging the patriarchal tendencies within the field itselfEssential essays Volume…. Likewise, race forced Cultural Studies to confront its own Anglo-centrism. Texts like Policing the Crisis and The Empire Strikes Back emerged only after difficult internal struggle and critical reassessment.
The “Worldliness” and Danger of Cultural Studies
Hall draws on Edward Said’s idea of “worldliness” to argue that Cultural Studies must remain entangled with the messy, political, material world—not retreat into pure textuality or abstraction. He warns of the danger of academic institutionalization, particularly in the U.S., where Cultural Studies was rapidly professionalized and potentially depoliticized. For Hall, theory is a tool of intervention, not of retreat.
Positionality, Provisionality, and “The Arbitrary Closure”
Cultural Studies, Hall insists, cannot be anything anyone claims it to be. While it resists being a master discourse, it still stakes political and theoretical positions. Hall endorses what he calls “the arbitrary closure”—the idea, drawn from Homi Bhabha, that political agency requires taking positions, however contingent, partial, or revisable.
Conclusion: Intellectual Work as Agonistic Practice
Hall closes by reaffirming Cultural Studies as a dialogic and agonistic field—never unified, never finished, always contested. Its power lies not in providing settled truths, but in its restless commitment to opening up space for political and intellectual debate. He urges practitioners to hold the tension between theory and politics, plurality and commitment, openness and specificity.
See also: Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms
