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This article addresses the turbulent relationship that British cultural studies scholars have with the concepts of "class" and "tradition" and the problematic status of these key terms within the cultural studies literature. The authors maintain, in part, that these concepts have been deployed within a center-periphery thesis and a field-bound ethnographic framework by cultural studies scholars pursuing a sub-cultural studies approach. Within this framework, "Britishness" has been the silent organizing principle defining metropolitan working-class traditions and forms of cultural resistance. British cultural studies proponents have therefore pursued the study of class and culture as a localized, nation-bound set of interests. This has placed cultural studies in tension with post-colonial subjectivities. The authors write against the grain of the textual production of the working class within cultural studies scholarship, insisting that recent films and literary works offer a more complex story of class identities in the age of globalization and transnationalism.

Draws on articles in this special issue to find implications for educators of developments in popular culture, cultural globalization, and electronic images. Addresses questions concerning the reproduction of culture, identity, and community within contemporary educational debates. (Contains 48 references.) (Author/SK)

Discusses Henry Giroux's, Alan Block's, and John Devine's differing viewpoints on how cultural incorporation and routinization of schooling undermine its capacity to address the needs of contemporary youth. They all maintain that schooling has become a site of symbolic and physical violence which students experience in multiple ways. The paper examines their writings on popular culture, violence, and schooling. (SM)

This paper critically interrogates the prevailing contemporary figurations of so-called "urban" popular culture as suggested within and against filmic narratives of sport and the racial logics of late-capitalism. Attempting to forge a contextual understanding of the conflicting representations of (urban) subjectivity, the authors locate "urban" America within broader conjunctural developments that have given rise to its mainstream appellation. They then focus on how urban popular culture is currently represented within broader pop culture formations, especially Hollywood cinema, before concluding with a close read of the Spike Lee film He Got Game, which, they argue, is both an example and a symptom of popular racial representation that is compatible with the politics of a conservative (Black) middle class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces a series of articles which deal with the status of popular cultural formations in the understanding of social formations.

Focuses on developments made in racial identity formation and popular culture in the United States. Description of racial instability, racial recording and racial incorporation in US; Reference to the theories of C.L.R. James and Friedrich Nietzsche; Discussion on the ideological configurations in popular culture and civic life; Information on the book `Simulations,' by Jean Baudrillard.

This article takes a radically different stance towards popular culture and argues that it is precisely in popular culture that racial identities and interests are constructed, reworked and coordinated and then infused into the expressive and instrumental orders of school life. Contemporary sociology of education theorists writing on the topic of racial antagonism has tended to focus too narrowly on sites within the classroom and the school. Insights that might be gained from the study of popular media, television, film and popular music, and their influence on racial formation and racial antagonism have been forfeited.