I have just come back from Vitoria-Gasteiz, where the colleagues of the English Department at the University of the Basque Country have organized the 48th AEDEAN conference, a yearly meeting which gathers together many Spanish specialists in English Studies. David Walton, a recently retired teacher at the Universidad de Murcia, and a dear colleague, proposed that some of us celebrated the 30th anniversary of the start of Cultural Studies in Spain with a round table. And so we did.
The participants in this highly enjoyable table were David himself, Felicity Hand (UAB), Mª José Coperías (U València), Antonio Ballesteros (UNED), Manuel Estévez (U A Coruña) and myself. We represented the scholars involved throughout the years in the seminars we called ‘Culture & Power’. These were started by Felicity Hand in 1995, hence the anniversary. Rosa González (formerly of UB) and Chantal Cornut-Gentille (formerly of U Zaragoza) were also fundamental in the development of the seminars until 2015, when Manuel Estévez organised the last meeting at the University of Santiago de Compostela. The other essential branch of Cultural Studies is, of course, the AEDEAN panel, first coordinated by Antonio Ballesteros and currently in the hands of Andrea Ruthven.
The label Cultural Studies was first used by the founders of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, England, founded in 1964 by Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart and closed in 2002. The centre was forced to merge with the Sociology Departament in 1988, and eventually caved in to pressures against its interdisciplinary nature, which were deemed to encroach into other academic territories. I’m mentioning this because in a way the CCCS failure to survive mirrors the much more modest failure of the Culture & Power group to live on. Here’s the paradox: there is no doubt that Cultural Studies is as fully consolidated as a discipline (or research methodology) as Literary Studies, yet the CCCS did die and here in Spain it appears that only my university has a subject fully devoted to Cultural Studies (the BA elective I often teach), together with the University of Murcia, where David Walton introduced Cultural Studies subjects in the first three years of the degree and an elective in the MA.
I’m here dealing only with English Studies, as our Departments where the ones to introduce Anglo-American style Cultural Studies, though I can’t say that they are present in other Departments. At UAB the Theory of Literature Unit within the Spanish Department has used the label in its MA degrees, but, as happens, this was because I was the first to teach their elective ‘Estudios Culturales’. On the other hand, the association La Torre del Virrey, which is not attached to a specific university, maintains its activity since 2013, with a journal, seminars and so on. We (the Culture & Power main members) did have a meeting with them in València (I mean with its director Antonio Lastra and other persons) which, mysteriously, led to nothing further for obscure reasons.
As Culture & Power, then, we have both succeeded and failed. The seed we planted in our diverse seminars all over Spain and in the Cultural Studies panel in AEDEAN, has certainly bloomed. Our main task, allow me to explain, was to normalize the presence in English Studies research of texts beyond canonical literature, and beyond the printed word. A measure of our success is that, indeed, many BA and MA students choose today for their dissertations popular fictions, films, TV series, graphic novels and even videogames. A key concept in Cultural Studies is that all cultural manifestations can be read as texts, hence analysed and explored. Within English Studies we limit this to cultural manifestations linked to the English language and the Anglophone cultures, but, obviously, the practice of Cultural Studies is open to any text, anywhere.
This openness is at the same time a problem. We have noted that scholars obviously doing Cultural Studies often reject the label, perhaps because they find it too unspecific or, as I worry, uncool. It’s of course quite counterproductive for the cause of Cultural Studies to force any scholar to accept that this is what they do. Yet, while someone interested in, say, Irish plays, would have no problem to grant that they’re doing Literary Studies, persons in, say, Medical Humanities, might categorically deny they are doing Cultural Studies. In the process of growing, Cultural Studies has somehow melted into more specific labels and has been lost in this process of transfer.
A key issue is why the Culture & Power group failed to consolidate as a research group with research projects in the way that, for instance, others in Irish or Indian Studies have done in Spain. There are diverse answers to this question. One is that we started, as noted, in 1995, when the notion of the research group was not yet fully established in the Humanities in Spain. The first group I joined started operating in 1998 (it was focused on war literature). When the issue was raised by Chantal Cornut-Gentille, my position and that of other members, was that we were too diverse in our interests to present a coherent research project (it would have been as wide-ranging as a project about Literary Studies).
We were also very unlucky. The connection with a specialist at the University of Lisboa, Alvaro Pina, led to the founding of IBACS (the Iberian Association of Cultural Studies) but strange personal tensions eventually killed the association before we had time to set up an archive (we did have a web for a while) or managed to establish a journal. Today, IBACS is the acronym for the International Bachelor Arts and Culture Studies of the Erasmus University at Rotterdam. I have already mentioned the failure to set up a collaboration with La Torre del Virrey. I’ll add now that we also failed to connect with SELICUP (Sociedad Española de Estudios Literarios de Cultura Popular), which runs the journal Oceánide, now in the capable hands of José Igor Prieto Arranz (UIB).
At this point you might think that Culture & Power has been quite a disaster but I’m 100% confident that despite our failure to consolidate the project we did our best for the cause of Cultural Studies. David Walton hinted during the round table that being a group born to oppose the academic system in Spain we were always a bit roguish. He may have a point, though individually we have fully committed ourselves to fulfilling the demands of academia.
In the afternoon, after the round table, I attended one of the sessions of the AEDEAN Cultural Studies panel. It was crowded, with a young audience and young panel participants, all of them doctoral students or recent doctors. The papers presented were diverse in the object of study, solid in their theoretical framework but, as it often happens with the work of young scholars today, lacking a historically perspective of the discipline (or the world). I was together in the session with a colleague of my same age who was present at the round table, and we both wondered why none of the young persons in the room had attended it. Our conclusion was very similar: it is great that so many young scholars are doing Cultural Studies, but a pity that our pioneering work is unknown and unacknowledged. I’m personally very happy that my BA, MA and doctoral students needn’t struggle to have their topics of choice accepted but I wish they knew that back in the early 1990s some of us had to fight very hard to have our choices accepted and respected.
During the round table I mentioned that when I retire (hopefully in seven to ten years’ time) my legacy might be lost as nobody will continue my teaching in the Department. I’m already seeing this with the work that Felicity Hand has done teaching Postcolonial Studies, though she’s happy enough that her disciple Esther Pujolràs is continuing that legacy at the Universitat de Lleida. My own disciples are in other universities, too, but I miss having someone at UAB. My colleague and good friend Nick Spengler tried to assuage my concerns, telling me in private that Cultural Studies methodologies are indeed being applied in all the Literature subjects in the Department. Yes, I know, but this is not the same as having someone else teach popular fictions, film, music, TV series and so on, as I have done and plan to continue doing.
I end, then, with a bittersweet feeling. English Studies in Spain have now little to do with the rigid Filología Inglesa of my time as a young student, and I’m very proud to have contributed to normalizing the presence of Cultural Studies within them. I’m sorry, though, that the Culture & Power group could not consolidate its work, and that the younger scholars do not know us. Funnily, I’m known among them, as I could see, because I’m always sending emails about activities connected to my research fields to the AEDEAN listserv. That’s part, of course, of my still ongoing Cultural Studies activism, a task I’ll keep up not until the day I retire but for as long as I can.
Thank you, David Walton, for organizing the round table. Hopefully one of the young scholars in the panel session I attended will organize one day the 60th anniversary of Cultural Studies in Spain’s English Studies.