1. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 2006
   An argument against what Collini calls the 'declinist thesis', the belief that contemporary intellectual life is getting increasingly dumbed down and stagnant. Declinists, Collini suggests, are in denial of reality and ignorant of history. Collini also skewers those who, like Edward Said, represent themselves as 'outsiders' while basking in the glamour of in-group recognition.
2. Adventures in Marxism 
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1999
   Marshall Berman explores and rejoices in the emancipatory potential of Marxism.
   
3. Against Post-Modernism
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1982
   Callinocos argues that the relativism preached by post-modernist leaves us with no objective criteria by which to reject those who would falsify the past.
4. All cultures are not equal
   Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
   First Published: 2002
   A common thread binds contemporary Western radicalism and fundamentalist Islam. On the surface the two seem poles apart: fundamentalists loathe Western decadence, Western radicals fear Islamic presumptions of certainty. But what unites the two is that both are rooted in contemporary nihilistic multiculturalism; both express, at best, ambivalence about, at worst outright rejection of, the ideas of modernity, universality, and progress; and both see no real alternative to Western power.
5. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air 
   The Experience of Modernity
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1982   Published: 1988
   Berman examines the clash of classes, histories, and clutures in the modern world, and ponders our prospects for coming to terms with the relationship between a liberating social and philosophical idealism and a complex, bureaucratic materialism.
   
6. Bad Marxism
   Capitalism and Cultural Studies
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 2004
   Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks that's a bad assessment. After an introduction critiquing the 'Marxism' of the academy, Hutnyk provides detailed critical analyses of the approaches and theorists of cultural studies.
7. Beyond a Boundary
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1963   Published: 1983
   Part memoir of a boyhood in a black colony (by one of the founders of African nationalism), part passionate celebration of the game of cricket, this book raises serious questions about race, class, politics, and the factgs of colonial oppression.
8. Break Their Haughty Power 
   Resource Type: Internet WWW site
   Articles on capitalism, socialism, and revolution, from a left-Marxist perspective.
   
9. The Cultural Turn
   Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 2009
   Fredric Jameson, a leading voice on the subject of postmodernism, assembles his most powerful writings on the culture of capitalism.
10. Culture of Complaint
    The Fraying of America
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1993
    Propaganda-talk, euphemism, and evasion are so much apart of American usage today that they cross all party lines and ideological divides. The art of not answering the question, of cloaking unpleasant realities in abstraction or sugar, is so perfectly endemic to Washington that we expect nothing else.
11. Docs Populi
    Documents for the public
    Resource Type: Internet WWW site
    Dedicated to documenting and publishing oppositional artwork of the late 20th century.
    
12. Edward Said, Orientalism
    Reviewed by Malcolm Kerr
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1980
    The book contains many excellent sections and scores many telling points, but it is spoiled by overzealous prosecutorial argument in which Professor Said, in his eagerness to spin too large a web, leaps at conclusions and tries to throw everything but the kitchen sink into a preconceived frame of analysis. In charging the entire tradition of European and American Oriental studies with the sins of reductionism and caricature, he commits precisely the same error.
13. For Lust of Knowing
    The Orientalists and their enemies
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2006
    A rebuttal of Edward Said which examines who the Orientalists were, how historically they advanced their disciplines, and what their achievements have been. Irwin calls Said’s book “a work of malignant charlatanry.”
14. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1994
    Describes attacks on science, and on concepts of truth and rationality, in areas of the humanities.
15. The Illusions of Postmodernism
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1996
    Eagleton explores the origins and emergence of postmodernism, revealing its ambivalences and contradictions. His primary concern is less with the more intricate formulations of postmodern philosophy than with the culture or milieu of postmodernism as a whole. Above all, he speaks to a particular kind of student, or consumer, of popular "brands" of postmodern thought.
16. Logics of Disintegration
    Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1987
    
17. Macdonald, Dwight
    Connexipedia: Article in Wikipedia
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    (1906-1982). American writer, editor, social critic, philosopher, and political radical.
18. Manufacturing Consent 
    The Political Economy of the Mass Media
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1988
    Contrary to the usual image of the press and cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitious in its search for truth, Herman and Chomsky depict how an underlying elite consensus largely structures all facets of the news. They analyze how issues are framed and topics chosen, and the way in which the marketplace and the economics of publishing significantly shape the news.
19. Multiculturalism or World Culture? 
    On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1991   Published: 2000
    Post-modernists are profoundly bored by any questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural differences. The implicit agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so "non-white" peoples such as Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervour than most "whites" are ignored.
20. The Nazis and Deconstruction: Jean-Pierre Faye’s Demolition of Derrida 
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1993
    A review of Jean-Pierre Faye's book 'La raison narrative', which traces the Nazi origins of deconstructionist and post-modernist concepts and terminology. Faye shows, for example, that the concept of 'deconstruction' was introduced in a Nazi psychiatry journal edited by M.H. Goering, and he shows how theorists who based themselves on Heidegger's writings, such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Lacoue-Labarthe, whitewashed Heidegger's Nazism, treating it as a mere 'detail'.
21. Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1992
    An explanation of the foundation of recent post-modern theory which also criticises the misogynist and patriarchal work of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard.
22. Only Connect
    On Culture and Communication
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1972
    
23. Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social 
    Deconstruction and Deindustrialization
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2001
    We have today legions of people with a smattering of knowledge turning out reams of books filled with buzz words that could be (and have been) produced by a computer program, and could be (and are) picked up in peer-group shop talk in a few months at the nearest humanities program or academic conference. Everyone these people don't like is trapped in a "gaze"; everyone "constitutes" their "identity" by "discourse"; to the fuddy-duddy "master narratives" that talk about such indelicate subjects as world accumulation these people counterpose "pastiche" and "bricolage", the very idea of being in any way systematic smacking of "totalitarianism"; it is blithely assumed that everyone except heterosexual white males now and for all time have been "subversives" (one wonders why we are still living under capitalism); a crippling relativism makes it somehow "imperial" to criticize public beheadings in Saudi Arabia or cliterodectomy practiced on five-year old girls in the Sudan.
    
24. Postmodernism and the Left
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1997
    Barabara Epstein provides an overview of the approach and subculture of postmodernism and how they relate to, or conflict with, leftwing ideas.
25. Postmodernism Generator 
    Resource Type: Internet WWW site
    First Published: 2000
    A computer program written by Andrew. C. Bulhak using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text. Each time you click on the page, it generates a brand-new postmodernist essay, completely meaningless, but superficially plausible, just like 'real' postmodernist essays.
26. Postmodernism: Paralysed by postmodernism
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2008
    A great deal of theory in the humanities and social sciences -- and not just postmodern theory -- involves the creating of a kind of conceptual "landscape" filled with these curious kinds of abstract objects -- "language", "power", "justice", "state", "culture", "government", "the polity", "the economy" and a host of others, which are viewed "theoretically" from somewhere way "outside" or "above" them. But it is just this way of looking at things -- from "on high" -- that makes it so difficult to see how people in the landscape are able to create and re-create the world in which they live, and are not simply trapped or formed by it.
    In fashionable postmodernist treatments of identity or subjectivity, language, as the ultimately hollow and imprisoning object, is put together with the notion that anybody who uses words must be committed to the standard definition of those words, to produce the conclusion that "language" determines the meaning of "identity" words such as man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, natural, normal -- and thus "constructs" (as it is said) human identity or subjectivity itself.
27. Radical Perspectives in the Arts
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1972
    
28. Raids and Reconstructions
    Essays on Politics, Crime, and Culture
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1976
    A collection of essays on culture and poltics.
29. Raymond Williams and the Moral Project of the New Left
    A review of 'Views Beyond the Border Country: Raymond Williams and Cultural Politics'
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1997
    Views Beyond the Border Country is an ample demonstration that activist-scholarship, a concrete political standpoint and the insights of feminism and anti-racism ought to inform the politics of any future left in North America, both inside and outside the classroom.
30. Reading Orientalism
    Said and the unsaid
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2008
    An extensive discussion of Edward Said's influential 1978 polemic 'Orientalism'. Varisco mounts a sustained critique on Said's flawed methodology, his skewed and selective handling of literary evidence, his inadequate historical knowledge, and his distorted and tendentious conclusions.
31. Edward Said's shadowy legacy 
    Tricky with argument, weak in languages, careless of facts: but, thirty years on, Said still dominates debate
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2008
    So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to be true. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies.
32. Sign Crimes/Road Kill
    From Mediascape to Landscape
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1992
    A collection of thirty short essays by Joyce Nelson, a writer specializing in the politics of the mass media.
33. Society of the Spectacle 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1967   Published: 2005
    An analysis of modern society and how it can be changed written in the form of 221 theses. The first thesis reads: "In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation." Translator Ken Knabb describes the book as "an effort to clarify the nature of the society in which we find ourselves and the advantages and drawbacks of various methods for changing it. Every single thesis has a direct or indirect bearing on issues that are matters of life and death."
34. Telling the Truth
    Socialist Register 2006
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2005
    A collection of essays that examines the difficulties of illuminating the degenerative and secretive nature of public life.
35. The Trouble with Theory
    The Educational Costs of Postmodernism
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2008
    Postmodern theory has engaged the hearts and heads of the brightest students because of its apparent political and social radicalism. Yet Kitching writes: "At the heart of postmodernism is very poor, deeply confused, and misbegotten philosophy. As a result even the very best students who fall under its sway produce radically incoherent ideas about language, meaning, truth, and reality."
36. The Unfashionable Human Body
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1973
    A discussion of apparel, in the broadest sense of the word, and how it has reflected and shaped attitudes to the human body.
    
37. The Uses of Literacy
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1957
    
38. Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1951   Published: 1962
    
39. Walter Benjamin
    Or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2009
    Eagleton's goal here is to to contemplate Benjamin’s approach to language, history, and art and to chart a dynamic new course for contemporary socialist criticism.
40. Where Do Postmodernists Come From?
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1995
    Eagleton argues that left intellectuals have adopted postmodernism out of a sense of having been badly defeated, a belief that the left as a political tendency has little future. Culturalism, he argues, involves an extreme subjectivism combined with a deep pessimism, a sense that it isn't worth the effort to learn about the world, to analyze social systems, for instance, because they can't be changed anyway.

Experts on Cultural Studies in the Sources Directory

1. The British Museum
2. Connexions Library/Archive
3. Deutsches Historisches Museum
4. The Hermitage
5. ibiblio.org
6. Linden-Museum Stuttgart
7. Marxists Internet Archive