History and Cultural Theory

250 Pages·2006·1.059 MB·English

by  Simon Gunn

History and Cultural Theory
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History and
Cultural Theory
Simon Gunn
First published 2006 by Pearson Education Limited
Published 2014 by Routledge
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Copyright © 2006, Taylor & Francis.
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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-78408-6 (pbk)
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L ibrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book can be obtained from the Library of Congress

Set by 35 in 10/13.5pt Sabon
For Gabriele
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Contents
Preface ix
1 Historicising Theory 1
The legacy of Rankean empiricism 5
Structuralism and its impact 10
The challenge of post-structuralism 16
Conclusion 22
2 Narrative 26
History as literature 29
History as narrative 36
History as practice 43
Evaluation 49
3 Culture 54
Cultural anthropology 56
Culture, language and carnival 65
The sociology of culture 70
Evaluation 78
4 Power 82
Conceptualising power 83
Foucault: history and power 89
The eye of power 94
Historical epistemology 96
Liberal governmentality 100
Evaluation 103
viii CONTENTS
5 Modernity 107
What is modernity? 109
When was modernity? 115
Urban modernity 120
Evaluation 127
6 Identity 131
Defining identity 133
National identities 136
Class and social identity 138
Sex and gender 142
Performativity 146
The emergence of the modern self 149
Evaluation 152
7 Postcolonialism 156
Defining postcolonialism 158
Orientalism, hybridity and difference 160
Subaltern Studies 166
The empire at home 173
Evaluation 178
8 Theorising History 182
Two histories 183
After theory? 189
Reflexivity, ethics and ambivalence 193
References 199
Index 230
Preface
The origins of this book go back a long way in my own history.
I remember the excitement as a teenager of reading Edmund
Wilson’s To the Finland Station (1972), an intellectual history of
European Marxist and radical thought culminating, as the title implies, in
Lenin’s return from exile to Petrograd and the Russian revolution of
1917. Although in many ways a conventional history of ideas, Wilson’s
account was exhilarating because it demonstrated how history could be
combined with political theory in a mutually illuminating manner. At uni-
versity in the late 1970s social and labour history were in the ascendancy,
and historiographical debates were often presented as set-piece confronta-
tions between Marxists and non-Marxists, an intellectual battle waged
over a highly detailed and rapidly growing body of historical scholarship.
Through studying European literature and intellectual history, however, I
was made aware of new ideas filtering in to the human sciences from
diverse theoretical sources, including anthropology, philosophy and psy-
choanalysis. By the mid-1980s, when I was undertaking my doctorate in
modern history it was clear that the intellectual ground was shifting;
economistic forms of Marxism had given way to more culturally-inflected
versions under the influence of Gramsci and, still more controversial, the
ideas of Saussurean linguistics were beginning to be registered in social
historical analysis, soon to become christened the ‘linguistic turn’. As a
historian in a multi-disciplinary school of cultural studies during the
1990s, there was indeed no escaping from cultural theory and what had
been designated more generally as the ‘cultural turn’: literary theory,
queer theory, postcolonialism and Lacanian psychoanalysis became part
of the fabric of intellectual life.
Autobiography is always both individual and social; it combines in
varying proportions the unique and the representative. There is also a tend-
ency, not least among academics, to universalise one’s experience and to
‘speak the structures’ by projecting one’s own educational background as