Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email
Answers.com

Dick Hebdige

 
Wikipedia: Dick Hebdige

Dick Hebdige (born 1951) is an expatriate British media theorist and sociologist most commonly associated with the study of subcultures, and its resistance against the mainstream of society. He received his M.A. from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, United Kingdom. He is best known for his influential book in subcultural studies, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, originally published in 1979. He is currently a professor of film and media studies and art at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Subculture: The Meaning of Style builds on earlier work at Birmingham on youth subcultures. But whereas much of this research was concerned with the relation between subcultures and social class in postwar Britain, Hebdige broke new ground by interpreting youth cultures in terms of a dialogue between Black and white youth. He argues that punk emerged as a mainly white style when Black youth became more separatist in the 1970s in response to discrimination in British society. Whereas previous research described a homology between the different aspects of a subcultural style (dress, hairstyle, music, drugs), Hebdidge argues that punk in London in 1976-77 borrowed from all previous subcultures and its only homology was chaos. In making this argument he was drawing on the early work of Julia Kristeva who also found such subversion of meaning in French poets such as Mallarmé and Lautréamont.

An important book, Subculture has been criticized for offering a semiotic reading of punk[citation needed] and adopting an omniscient position in relation to it. Dave Laing in One Chord Wonders (1985) provides more of a sociology of punk. For example he shows that many punk musicians actually came from middle-class families (43%) and that there was a strong influence of art school students.

Hebdidge also wrote Cut'n'Mix (1987) on Caribbean music and identity, and Hiding in the Light (1988) a book of essays that includes some further thoughts about punk.

He recently contributed a chapter to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky.

Hebdige was the subject of I love Dick, a semi-fictional book by Chris Kraus published in 1997.[1]

References

  1. ^ Artforum article [1]

External links



Search unanswered questions...
Enter a question here...
Search: All sources Community Q&A Reference topics
 
 
Learn More
Block
Blueprint
Punk

How can you get the dick hard? Read answer...
Who was trick dick? Read answer...
Who is Dick Dastardly? Read answer...

Help us answer these
How do you get a dick felling in you but no dick?
Do moby dick like dicks?
Does moby dick like dicks?

Post a question - any question - to the WikiAnswers community:

 

Copyrights:

Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Dick Hebdige" Read more