Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies

John Storey is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, UK. He has published extensively in cultural studies, including 13 books.

• Preface Cultural Studies and Utopian DesireChapter 1 Radical Utopianism: Defamiliarization and DesireChapter 2 The Happy Place That Exists NowhereChapter 3 Herbert Marcuse and the Great RefusalChapter 4 Gerard Winstanley and the Law of RighteousnessChapter 5 The Paris Commune: Storming HeavenChapter 6 The Chimes of Freedom Flashing: The Haight-Ashbury CountercultureChapter 7 Utopian Capitalism: Retro and PostPostscript Making Hope and History Rhyme

In Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies, John Storey has delivered a breath of fresh revolutionary air into the miasma of respectable co-optation that has engulfed this once radical project. When Stuart Hall and others developed the framework and methodology of cultural studies, they were creating new interdisciplinary ways to study and intervene in the "terrible interconnection between culture and society" (Hall). Unfortunately, the regression imposed on the scholarly sphere by the neoliberal rise to power from the 1980s onward has managed to temper and tame this project. Too often reduced to little more than an academic field, the radical intellectual work of cultural studies has collapsed within a precarious university atmosphere that encourages collaboration and careerism. In this book, Storey brings the critical apparatus of utopian theory and method (especially as developed in the tradition of Marx, Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson, Ruth Levitas, and others) to revive and regenerate the transgressive and transformative of which this project is capable. I urge all cultural studies scholars and teachers to buy this book. I urge all who are interested in not only understanding the world but in changing it to buy this book.Tom Moylan, University of Limerick