Cultural Studies and Political Theory

This ambitious collection of work at the intersection of cultural studies and contemporary political theory brings together leading thinkers from both traditions. Challenging the terms that have shaped the last 20 years of culture wars, the essays in...

Jodi Dean is Associate Professor of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is the author of Aliens in America, also from Cornell, and The Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism after Identity Politics.

This is not a collection for the intellectually timid. It will be of interest to those who are seeking to promote collaborative relations between the fields of cultural studies and political theory.

Jill Locke, Gustavus Adolphus College:

This book challenges political theorists to be more capacious in their treatment of the political, more attuned to cultural work that untidies their precious categories. It calls on cultural studies scholars to be more deliberate about the political potential of their insights into the subtle cultural feedback that they so convincingly deconstruct.... As individual essays and as a collection, however, this book will reach far into the bookshelves and classrooms of critical legal theory, democratic theory, American studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, and other untapped resources for political/cultural imagination.

Christian Moraru, University of North Carolina, Greensboro:

Cultural Studies and Political Theory is profoundly interdisciplinary, pursuing as it does the dialectic of theoretical, cultural, and political inquiry in a whole array of areas and discourse.

Robert Owens Gardner, University of Colorado–Boulder:

These 16 diverse and wide-ranging pieces provide a thought-provoking foray into the central debates and problematics of contemporary political and cultural theory by probing the question 'what does it mean for something to be political?'... Each and every essay sheds... light on... social, moral, and legal issues we share and must address as global citizens.

Wendy Brown, University of California at Berkeley:

Inquiry into what is political and why is remarkably overdue in cultural studies. In this volume, cultural analyses of political life and political studies of culture are wound around each other to consider this question from dozens of provocative angles. This is a rich collection that could change the contours of the several disciplines it so capably traverses.