The View from Inside

Even after forty years, the ambition and scope of the 1983 events remain impressive—perhaps even more so in our age of diminished funding for the humanities. That ambition was a product as much of its infrastructure as of its intellectual framework. The teaching institute, which ran from June to July 1983, and the conference, held between 8 and 12 July, can be considered two separate events, despite their shared marketing (see fig. 1). They had separate budgets, were funded differently, and had distinct goals, though they shared many participants and were meant to amplify each other’s impact. Recognizing the particular features of the teaching institute, with its pedagogical focus, and the conference, as a forum where scholars shared and discussed new work in the field, sheds light on the role of Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture in the institutionalization of Marxist cultural theory as an intellectual domain and academic identity. It also points to its role in scholastic politics during the 1980s and after. Hall, reflecting on the history of cultural studies, points to the importance of what he calls “the institutional moment” when a “set of discourses and practices are institutionalised”—that is, when they are “concretised in a particular form, in a program of activities and a specific socially composed group of people” (3). The teaching institute, the conference, and the published book were all milestones in the institutionalization of cultural studies. Hall was ambivalent about institutionalizing the field, but the material practices and social formations of this elongated “moment” are as central to the origin and legacy of Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture as the ideas it promulgated.

UIUC’s Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, which hosted the events, was founded in 1981 to bring together the intellectual interests of disparate faculty members who had previously gathered primarily during a faculty-run criticism seminar (Nelson, Interview). William Plater, the associate director of the School of Humanities, which oversaw the unit, noted that it could be experimental because there was strong university support for “something that was pretty innovative” but also because “nobody knew what a ‘unit’ was,” so they could avoid some of the “enormous bureaucracy” of the university and exercise wide latitude in their pursuits. Nelson and Grossberg were the director and the associate director of the unit, respectively, and Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture was their first large project. Grossberg recalled that they wanted to “put the unit on the map” with a signature event—a “big conference”—that attracted attention and was widely interdisciplinary. What he called their “crass desire for publicity” was combined with their ambition to build academic theory at UIUC and offer students access to the scholars they read in their classes. The unit was an “ideal environment” for such an undertaking because it had the “appropriate interdisciplinary focus,” including faculty members from across UIUC’s humanities and social science departments (Draft proposal [15 Sept. 1982] 13).

The invitation extended to Hall (with whom Grossberg had studied at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the late 1960s) was a central part of this effort because at the time, scholars based in the United States felt, as Jameson later recalled, that they “really had no access to the work coming out of Birmingham” (qtd. in Edwards and McCarthy 7). The conference also intended to redress a “big transatlantic difference,” especially between “literary studies in the US and in the UK, where the Marxist tradition has always been an important element,” as Michèle Barrett remembers (Interview).

In this way, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture was part of an ongoing international conversation about the role of cultural theory in the academy and in politics. Months before traveling to Illinois, Hall delivered the keynote address at the Marx Centenary Symposium in Australia, which was published in the Australian Left Review as “For a Marxism without Guarantees,” discussed by Beech in this collection (see also Curthoys and Docker 165–66). In the United States, all three founding editors of Social Text (Jameson, John Brenkman, and Stanley Aronowitz) participated in the teaching institute or the conference, and the meeting of the MLA’s Marxist Literary Group was held concurrently with the teaching institute. In this way, Nelson and Grossberg used the unit and its signature event, the 1983 conference, to propel faculty members and students at UIUC and elsewhere in the United States into a national and international reckoning with Marxist cultural theory.

Such a transformation was not easy or cheap, and both funding and participation came from numerous sources. In March 1983, the estimated budget for the four-day conference was $43,625 (Nelson, Letter), a portion of which was paid by a $10,000 grant from the NEH premised on the publication of the conference proceedings (Award record for Conference). The teaching institute’s budget was even larger, at one point estimated to be $176,349, including the $26,129 NEH grant and $15,000 supplied by UIUC’s George A. Miller Endowment to appoint Hall, Jameson, and Perry Anderson as visiting professors (Draft proposal [23 Dec. 1982]). NEH funds allowed twenty-five academics from across the United States to attend, including the sociologist and women’s studies scholar Patricia Clough, who described the event as one of the most significant experiences of her career because it linked her with others who shared her intellectual interests, especially among the Social Text collective.

Proximity was the catalyst for the sociality that Clough remembers. Participants were housed in university dormitories and ate together in dining halls. The interactions fostered by such arrangements were mostly amicable, but they were also at times intense or farcical. Nelson joked that the teaching institute and conference were “two months of relentlessly taking ourselves seriously” (“Marx” 317), and Grossberg remembers a protest against the “authoritarian control of the conference by the organizers” occurring while Hall was lecturing (a protest driven, Grossberg recounts, by demands for more access to Hall). Another speaker suggested (facetiously?) that the CIA might kill them all “with sniper fire” for their views (Nelson, “Marx” 317). Janitors refused to clean the restrooms for “a bunch of communists” as a “silent protest” (Nelson, “Marx” 317). On a more convivial note, Nelson argued with UIUC about partitioning the dining hall so participants could drink wine without violating university rules, though even this hospitable gesture did not go uncontested—Lefebvre questioned the quality of the dining hall red (Nelson, Interview). Conference attendees shared dining space with a “big cheerleader camp” that led inevitably to “‘go cultural studies’ jokes” (Wissoker). Dick Hebdige played pool with participants; Cornel West listened to Al Green on someone’s “boom box” at an after party (Wissoker).

These were the essential social interactions that advanced the “institutional moment” of US cultural studies and Marxist cultural theory. For younger attendees, such as Ken Wissoker—a future editor at Duke University Press who was then employed at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago—the 1983 events forged lifelong networks. Wissoker remembers that the teaching institute and conference gathered not only many of the authors who were discussed passionately at the Co-op bookstore but also a “really interesting mix” of graduate students from across the United States. Those graduate students, together with young NEH-funded faculty members, would be the next generation of cultural theorists in their disciplines. The 1983 teaching institute and conference thus instantiated modes of institutional support, intellectual engagement, and social interaction that shaped professional literary studies in profound ways for the next four decades.

The View from Outside

And yet, literary study and theoretical praxis were far more variegated in the mid-1980s than the roster of scholars who participated in the 1983 events would seem to suggest, despite its evident breadth. Contrasting what was included with what was left out may help explain some of the vicissitudes of theory in the academy in the decades after Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. June and July 1983 were “sectarian days,” according to Barrett, who spoke at the conference (Personal communication), and the energy devoted to varieties of Marxism overshadowed approaches now deemed essential. Feminism was a concern for the organizers, but the program did not feature queer perspectives or Black or Latinx feminisms. Discussions of race, slavery, and anti-Blackness were limited. Imperialism and colonialism appeared only briefly. Indigenous understandings of Marxism were not included, and the still-unnamed field of postcolonial studies was only alluded to in mentions of colonial discourse. Environmental and ecological matters were not on the agenda.

The teaching institute’s courses were taught by nine men and two women; the women, Julia Lesage and Spivak, were invited because they were seen by the organizers as having “worked on the interaction between Marxism and feminism” (Draft proposal [15 Sept. 1982] 5).Footnote ² But the presence of this perspective in the majority of the seminars was sporadic at best; women participants complained that the Marxist philosophy seminar with Gajo Petrović was entirely oblivious to feminist concerns (Nelson, “Marx” 312–13). The conference included more women; session 6, “Power and Desire,” with Catharine A. MacKinnon and Spivak, was designed to address what the organizers called, citing a 1981 collection, “the unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism” (Draft proposal [15 Sept. 1982] 7).Footnote ³ In this session, Spivak delivered the first iteration of “Can the Subaltern Speak?”Footnote ⁴ Ellen Willis gave a response.

Other sessions included feminist perspectives in papers delivered by Christine Delphy, Constance Penley, and Franco. As Barrett remarked in her response to Delphy’s paper, the “analysis” of gender in Marxist circles had clearly declined to “take off” in the way “that a lot of feminists hoped it would” because of the way the debate had been framed: gender as Durkheimian social fact (Delphy’s position) versus gender as unfixed and perpetually being constructed (Delphy et al. 268). Proponents of these two positions had failed to find any common ground. Jameson refused the “unhappy marriage” metaphor in “Cognitive Mapping,” proposing in an aside that a fruitful juncture, not an antagonistic one, would occur when “the feminist project and the Marxist and socialist project meet and face the same dilemma: how to imagine Utopia” (355). Whether to wait for a revolutionary moment or articulate feminism within Marxism in the existing conjuncture was a live question in 1983. Such divides were further complicated by the fact that the feminisms on offer that summer were no match for the available range of radical and revolutionary feminisms of women of color.

Framed by the prevailing whiteness of the Illinois events, Hall and Spivak could be seen as representatives of what Graham Huggan has called “the postcolonial exotic.” Hall’s lectures on cultural studies drew crowds of over two hundred people. Spivak, whose star was still rising, attracted eighty or more participants to her seminar. Yet it seemed to her that for the white male majority in attendance, there was room only for Hall as “the Black intellectual” (Personal communication). When the 1988 volume was published, however, it opened with West’s essay “Marxist Theory and the Specificity of Afro-American Oppression,” followed by Hall, implicitly foregrounding questions of race that had not been as prominent during the 1983 events. The present collection for the PMLA special feature Theories and Methodologies continues the reevaluation of the intersection of scholarship and activism in the late twentieth century in West’s and Hall’s contributions with essays by Lisa Moore and Laura Lomas on radical and global feminisms of the time, Robbie Richardson’s essay on the development of Indigenous studies, and Ida Danewid’s reconstruction of the work of Cedric Robinson in relation to Hall.

The essays in this special feature are organized around four vantage points or foci: histories, countercurrents, legacies, and futures. The first cluster, on histories, reassesses the moment in which Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture took place. It begins with an essay titled “In the Thickets: Stuart Hall in 1983,” by Beech, who draws on Hall’s public work and unpublished papers to explore his impact on the political and theoretical landscape of the early 1980s. The next essay, “Theory Camp versus Commie Camp,” by Andy Hines, examines the material conditions of academic humanities in the twentieth century, placing the 1983 events at the intersection of contrasting traditions—political education summer camps and summer learning summits such as the School of Criticism and Theory, which he connects to other academic collectives like the New University Conference, the Marxist Literary Group, and the journal Social Text. The third essay on histories, “The Infinite Articulation: Althusser, Balibar, and the Crisis of Marxism,” by Gavin Walker, situates Balibar’s contribution to the conference in relation to European communism (and Balibar’s expulsion from the French Communist Party in 1981) and the institutionalization of American and British cultural studies. The fourth essay, “African Marxism, Jean Franco, and South-South Studies,” by Sarah M. Quesada, addresses Marxist theory’s relations to African decolonization and how Franco’s work, drawing on African Third World philosophies, paved the way for South-South studies.

The second cluster, on countercurrents, examines authors, movements, and methodologies that coexisted with yet were often marginalized by the views presented at the 1983 events. The first of these essays, “Pearl Diving without Guarantees: Heresy and Salvage Work in the Black Atlantic,” by Danewid, considers the relation between Black radicalism and Marxism as it developed on both sides of the Black Atlantic in the twentieth century by staging a conversation between Hall and Robinson. Richardson, in “Marxism, Cultural Studies, and the Rise of Indigenous Studies,” maps the at times rivalrous relations between Marxism and North American Indigenous studies, finding evidence for the ambivalent role of Indigenous studies in the neoliberal university, especially with regard to methodological innovations such as hemispheric studies and to political struggles such as the land rights movement. In “Marxist Feminism in Flight,” Moore focuses on Barrett, Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Cherríe Moraga to explore feminist theories of class and labor that exceeded the rubric of Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture and that led to varieties of Marxist feminism that give priority to remains, fugitivity, refusal, and surplus life.

The third cluster, on legacies, probes the effect of the 1983 conference on the decades that followed. “Negative Totalization,” by Ronjaunee Chatterjee, examines Jameson’s idea of cognitive mapping from the perspective of the twenty-first century, putting it in relation to the work of the visual artist Zarina Hashmi. In “Henri Lefebvre’s (Every)Day Care,” Lilith Todd investigates how Lefebvre’s expanded sense of alienation derives from his engagement with women’s loss of bodily autonomy, diffuse in what Lefebvre calls “the slightest details of ordinary life” and entangled with rather than practiced by an autonomous subject (79). And Lomas, in “‘Del Otro Lado’: Latinx, Latin American, Caribbean, and Feminist Contributions to Cultural Studies,” analyzes the legacy of so-called Third World feminism in Hall, feminist praxis of women of color, and the shift toward a more complex dialectical framework in thinking about diasporic Blackness that Hall experienced in Bahia, Brazil.

From a Marxist perspective, the past, far from being dead, is not even past—it continues to exert pressure on the future. The final cluster, on futures, includes essays that point toward the next step for Marxism and cultural studies while drawing on those legacies that persist. Crystal Bartolovich, in her essay, “Totality, Revisited,” argues that serious consideration of Marxism’s flexible, nuanced, yet systematic approach to totality and collectivity is imperative for a just, postcapitalist future; it is also a key subtext of the 1988 volume that warrants ongoing attention today. Jonathan Flatley, in “The Slogan and the Map,” turns to Jameson and Spivak, putting them in conversation with a Black Leninist tradition to argue for their ongoing value for understanding collective political formation. P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods, in “The ‘Lost Cause’ of Cultural Studies: Laclau after Hall,” problematize most of the post-1983 work on race, culture, and identity that claims to follow Hall. They look to Laclau’s work on antagonism as an alternative that acknowledges the complex ontological status of Blackness without displacing it, while considering the impossibility of Black freedom. By contrast, Madeline Jaye Bass, in “To Speak from a Place Which Is Moving: Black Diasporas, African Migrations, and the Ongoing Importance of Stuart Hall,” claims that Hall’s grounding continues to enable Black critical and cultural studies. She argues that Hall both anticipates and helps us to address the current conditions (and ongoing crises) of Black studies and Black life around the globe.

The promise of the teaching institute and conference held at UIUC in the summer of 1983 was evident from the start. One anonymous NEH reviewer called the list of participants “really quite dazzling” and “almost too much of a good thing” (Outside review form). Over forty years later, the scope, scale, and ambition of Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture remain inspiring, even as we grapple with challenging elements of its history. Marxism and its relationship to the interpretation of culture have changed dramatically between the 1980s and the 2020s, as each decade has brought political earthquakes and profound social change. Still, looking back, the belief that cultural theory can reform intellectual traditions and that such reforms might have a positive impact on everyday life stands as the bittersweet legacy and hopeful future of Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.