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In a much-referenced essay from 1980, setting out the major terms of debate in British cultural studies at the time, Stuart Hall drew a distinction between a complex of ideas drawn from European structuralism, Marxism and psychoanalysis (Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Lacan) and what he called the “indigenous or ‘native’ tradition” of the field (Hall 1980, 59). With the distance of twenty years and in a context sensitized to post-colonial criticism, the appellation “native” appears a curious one. Can Hall really have meant to apply it to Britain? The anomaly is heightened if we remember that Hall’s own relation to Britain was first as a colonial subject growing up in his “native” Jamaica (1996, 484–503).

Yet the use of the term was not an isolated one. It appears elsewhere in Hall’s writing of the period to refer more broadly to a general set of resources—at once social, political and semiotic—to be found in British institutions and everyday life. In an earlier essay on the popular war-time magazine Picture Post, he contrasts the “native strengths of English life,” characterized by an uncomplicated directness, with a more self-conscious political and intellectual style to be found in continental Europe (1972, 109). The opposition also had wider currency within the British “New Left.” It was given its most colorful expression in E. P. Thompson’s diatribe against Althusserian Marxism in The Poverty of Theory. The associations between Englishness, simplicity, and naivete, which are present in Hall, are played up by Thompson for theatrical effect:

I commence my argument at a manifest disadvantage. Few spectacles would be more ludicrous than that of an English historian—and, moreover, one manifestly self-incriminated of empirical practices—attempting to offer epistemological [End Page 152] correction to a rigorous Parisian philosopher . . . I can sense, as I stare at the paper before me, the shadowy faces of an expectant audience, scarcely able to conceal their rising mirth.

(Thompson 1978, 197)

Again, the opposition between English simplicity and European sophistication is most vividly captured in a colonial metaphor. In a famous debate with Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, Thompson represented the importation of structuralist Marxism—for which they were centrally responsible—as a moment of high colonial drama:

Our authors bring to [their] analysis the zest of explorers. . . . Amidst the tundra and sphagnum moss of English empiricism they are willing to build true conventicles . . . . Pulling their snowcaps over their ears, they disembark and struggle onwards to bring the intense rational consciousness of their cutting instruments to the “traditional intelligentsia once buried entirely in the tribal rites of Oxford and literary London.” There is a sense of rising suspense as they—the First White Marxists—approach the astonished aborigines.

(Thompson 1978, 38)

Such images draw down on a dense history of relations between England and continental Europe, but they also resonate with important moments in the development of American cultural studies. In an essay on the history of the field in the United States, James Carey suggests close parallels with Britain. The American equivalent, for Carey, of the early work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson is to be found in the inspiration of pragmatism (Dewey, James, Rorty, Geertz) and the sociology of the Chicago School. The theme which connects them is, significantly, nativism. The strength of early British cultural studies, for Carey, was “precisely its ethno-centrism”:

Intellectual work . . . is always and everywhere decisively touched and shaped by the national formation (and the sub-formations of class, race, gender etc.) within which it is produced . . . Cultural studies at its best . . . is an exercise, to use Clifford Geertz’s phrase, in “local knowledge.”

(CulturalStudies in Question 16)

These same strengths were also to be found in the early formation of American cultural studies. As Carey writes in another essay: “While there has not been an ‘American experience’, there has been experience in America, and American culture has been an attempt to formulate and express that experience.” In this picture, American cultural studies was, [End Page 153] in its original forms, an attempt to “delineate...