Reviews for The cultures of celebrations

The average rating for The cultures of celebrations based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-09-24 00:00:00 Venson Herron In my re-reading of Steve Redhead's work, this monograph was the most surprising. I taught several - 5 at least - courses with extracts from this book and ran an honours course around it. I was concerned that the passing of time would impact on this book the most. Actually the inverse has occurred. The only sonic parallel I can summon to experience of re-reading this book was when I heard Kraftwerk through my Skullcandy headphones for the first time. Tracks - beats - introductions that I knew well suddenly seemed strange. Odd. Distinctive. Challenging. Different. Defiant. This book is the same. Steve's writing at this point had the quality of baked and cracked concrete. Hard. Bruised. Toughened. Weathered. Attractive and complex in its own way. The 1990s had been tough for him - professionally and personally. This book, published in 1997, was in the middle of this pretty dire time. The claustropolitanism that would dominate the latter stages of his career is starting to appear. You can feel it closing in. But the re-reading of this book has shocked me. This book - in short - is nothing less than a presentation of what Popular Cultural Studies could be, with any form of institutional support. The dismissal of the Birmingham Centre and old school cultural studies is clear. This is a different project. This has moved on to new and exciting spaces, beats, theories and critiques. The weakest chapter in the edited collection is from Lawrence Grossberg, where he is trying to 'reconcile' and move between the BCCCS (Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) and the MIPC (Manchester Institute for Popular Culture). That reconciliation is not actually possible. It is a break - politically and theoretically. Grossberg through his career has continued to be wedded to the nostalgia of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre, giving them the quality of a fairy tale. But we all know - the Birmingham Centre was never the Birmingham Centre summoned by its cheerleaders. It now has the quality of the gospels. And any errors, flaws, problems or ignorances within those Birmingham centre gospels can never be spoken. Through remaining wedded to a very narrow parameter of theory and politics, the legacy of the Birmingham Centre has actually killed Cultural Studies. There was another option. Is it too late? Maybe. This book presents the shape of popular cultural studies. It demonstrates the productive hybridity of theory and the empirical, rather than the empiricism that dominates the contemporary academy. This was the moment when a new mode of humanities could have emerged. And we missed it. Universities didn't support it. Scholars remained wedded to long-dated theories from the 1960s and 1970s. And now - because this incisive critique was not initiated in the late 1990s - we are left with pathetic and boring textual analysis, reified representational politics, Foucaultian theory from people who have never read Foucault and don't grasp his neoliberal tendencies, and 'suck it and see' engagements with capitalism. This book gave us the intellectual pathway we didn't take. To our shame.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-02-03 00:00:00 Christopher Cruz Of course quite out of date by this point. However, there are still some interesting & poignant essays. Unfortunately, the good ones are well weighed down by the dregs. "Imagine if I had changed Morrissey's mind about dance music!" Uh, no thanks. There was, at times, a weird, egotistical vein running through certain chapters. Odd.