Cultural studies in the future tense/

Includes index.

Lawrence Grossberg is one of the leading international figures in the study of the relations between political and popular cultures. In Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, he offers a powerful critique of the forms of progressive intellectual-political analyses. He asks why we so often tell the same stories over and over (as if the world were not changing or were changing in precisely the same ways) or tell stories that claim to be absolutely new (as if the world were magically new). He argues for an understanding of cultural studies as conjunctural analysis, based on commitments to contextualism, anti-reductionism and articulation. Cultural studies sees the world in terms of contingency and determination, the old and the new, economies and cultures, etc. Refusing to reduce modernity to its Euro-American forms, and challenging its taken-for-granted understandings, he argues that euro-modernity is a specific geo-historical actualization of a more complex and diverse diagram.