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Tense Futures: The Work of Cultural Studies

It feels strange to respond formally to a book with whose origins and development I am intensely familiar: Larry Grossberg and I have been engaged in conversations about the themes and issues he addresses here over many years. The normal conventions of academic commentary therefore feel somewhat out of place: this is hardly going to be a dispassionate, measured, and final judgement. Instead, I have treated this as another opportunity to extend these conversations a little further. I have organized it around Three I’s (I have a sad enthusiasm for alliteration): the book as important, inspiring, and imperfect. Its importance is, in one respect, self-evident. Larry Grossberg has been a distinctive and sustaining thread in the development of cultural studies as it has travelled beyond its parochial beginnings in Birmingham. In his teaching at Champaign-Urbana and North Carolina, in his writing, in his work as a journal editor, conference organizer, and collaborator in the creation of the Association for Cultural Studies, he has been a vital force in shaping the possibilities and prospects of cultural studies. If this book had just been a mature reflection on the decades of diffusion of cultural studies since he was in Birmingham at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1968, it would have been an important and interesting book. Fortunately, its ambitions are rather more than that: Grossberg treats us to a sustained attempt to recover, renew, and revitalize the ‘‘project of cultural studies.’’ The result is, in my view, dramatic, engaging, and challenging as he