Based in part on an extraordinary five-day conference at the University of Illinois, Cultural Studies supplements and comments on the essays themselves by transcribing extended discussions between participants.

1: Cultural Studies; 2: Putting Policy into Cultural Studies; 3: Angels Dancing; 4: Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt; 5: Engaging with the Popular; 6: I Throw Punches for My Race, but I Don't Want to Be a Man; 7: Traveling Cultures; 8: Portraits of People with AIDS; 9: What is Real and What is Not; 10: Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life; 11: The Cultural Study of Popular Music; 12: Cultural Studies and Ethnic Absolutism 1; 13: Resisting Difference; 14: Guns in the House of Culture?; 15: AIDS, Keywords, and Cultural Work; 16: Missionary Stories; 17: Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies; 18: The Promises of Monsters; 19: Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination; 20: Aesthetics and Cultural Studies; 21: (Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust; 22: Cultural Theory, Colonial Texts; 23: Body Narratives, Body Boundaries; 24: “1968”; 25: “On the Beach”; 26: Feminism Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture; 27: Technologizing the Self; 28: Mail-Order Culture and Its Critics; 29: New Age Technoculture; 30: The Pachuco's Flayed Hide; 31: Ethics and Cultural Studies; 32: Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text 1; 33: Culture, Cultural Studies, and the Historians; 34: Bandits, Heroes, the Honest, and the Misled; 35: “It Works for Me”; 36: Negative Images; 37: Spectacular Action; 38: The Postmodern Crisis of the Black Intellectuals; 39: Excess and Inhibition; 40: Post-Marxism and Cultural Studies

"...the publication of Cultural Studies is an event no serious (or curious) reader can afford to ignore. Make no mistake: in American intellectual life, the "undisciplines" of cultural studies will very likely be the single most controversial and contested terrain of the 1990s, and Cultural Studies the most capacious text in the fray." -- VLS"If you plan to continue living in America, read this book." -- VLS"It's here. It's big. It's the Next Thing...You've gotta have it." -- VLS