Dick Hebdige

by

Subham Dutta

• LAST MODIFIED: 20 August 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0140

Introduction

Dick Hebdige is regarded as one of the prominent thinkers in cultural studies. He was born in England in 1951. Integrating many cultural strands from youth subculture, contemporary music, art, and design to consumer and media culture, Hebdige emerged as one of the significant thinkers of cultural studies in post-1970 Britain. His works both directly and indirectly engage with the changing cultural landscape of British society and the evolving trajectory of its cultural politics. Hebdige graduated from Birmingham University in 1974. His MA thesis, “Aspects of Style in the Deviant Subcultures of the 1960s,” was his first foray into the domain of subculture studies. Hebdige studied under Stuart Hall, and his works incorporate and respond to the literary criticism of Richard Hoggart. Ideologically, Hebdige integrates the Marxist analytic paradigm with narrative, stylistic, and cultural analysis in his works. Being a cultural Marxist, he emerged as one of the major exponents of the Birmingham school of Marxist political theory. After teaching at various UK art schools and Goldsmiths College, University of London, Hebdige moved to the United States in 1992 and became the dean of critical studies and founding director of the Writing Program at California Institute of the Arts. Hebdige’s thesis links him with the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, run by thinkers like Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. Methodologically, the Birmingham School espoused the necessity of looking at the cultural circuit as the site of meaning production. It explored the intersection between history, culture, and the different modes of self-fashioning. Hebdige’s works advocate disciplinary and conceptual convergences instrumentalizing dialogues between multiple paradigms. From mapping the origins and growth of subculture studies to studying the politics of postmodernity, his works demonstrate a strong ideological commitment to the Birmingham school of Marxist thought. His recent project on desert studies reads desert as the site of disciplinary intersections and overlaps. His major works include his books Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), Cut ’n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (1987), and Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (1988). Furthermore, he wrote many articles encompassing topics like image, fashion, style, and so on to read as discrete markers of social and cultural analysis. His works read different forms of aesthetic and cultural designs and explore how they remain implicated in a series of cultural and epistemic entanglements. He is currently a professor of studio art and film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. From 2001 to 2008 he served as the director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and he currently directs the University of California system-wide Institute for Research in the Arts ( UCIRA). In partnership with the Future Art Research Institute, in Phoenix, Arizona, he launched UCIRA’s Desert Studies Project in 2019. Currently, he is interested in autobiography and mixed media in critical writing and pedagogy.

General Overviews

There is a substantial lack of general overviews on Dick Hebdige. Except for some general articles in edited volumes, encyclopedia entries, and online resources, the number of critical engagements with Hebdige’s work is meager. However, almost every work on youth subculture uses and refers to Hebdige’s theories. Gildart, et al. 2020 revisits Hebdige’s idea of subculture from the vantage point of the twenty-first century. Bringing Hebdige’s work in correspondence with contemporary cultural theorists, this book seeks to understand how the trajectory of subculture has evolved since the publication of Hebdige’s book (Subculture: The Meaning of Style [1979]). Parui 2019, an online video on cultural studies, demonstrates how subculture remains an essential constituent of cultural studies. Gelder 2010 offers an elaborate introduction to Hebdige’s idea of subculture. Barker 2003, a critical volume devoted to cultural studies, provides an overview of Hebdige’s work. Barker 2004, in a dictionary of cultural studies, also offers an introduction to Hebdige. Among the earlier overviews, the most important one seems to be Anne Breezer’s entry in Barker and Breezer 2003, which gives a critical introduction to Hebdige’s idea of subculture. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism also contains an entry on Dick Hebdige.

• Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. 2d ed. London: SAGE, 2003.

  Barker discusses the various theoretical and conceptual aspects of cultural studies. The book maps the general theoretical trajectory of cultural studies, including Marxism, feminism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, and psychoanalysis. While discussing the conceptual aspects of cultural studies, Barker unravels how Dick Hebdige’s theories of subculture remain a key component in the field of cultural studies.

• Barker, Chris. “Cultural Capital.” In The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies. By Chris Barker, 37. London: SAGE, 2004.

  DOI: 10.4135/9781446221280

  This book contains a short entry on Dick Hebdige. It explores how Hebdige’s use of semiotic theory forms an essential part of the first wave of cultural studies as it developed within the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It offers a brief overview of Hebdige’s ideas of style and subculture, and how they constitute Hebdige’s culture of resistance.

• Barker, Martin, and Anne Beezer, eds. Reading into Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 2003.

  DOI: 10.4324/9780203393123

  Anne Breezer’s chapter, “Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style,” offers a general introduction to Hebdige’s work on subculture. Breezer comments that the book locates subculture within an intersectional parameter of class and generation, suggesting how youth subcultures offered a response through the rituals and styles of working-class youth, both against the hegemonic social and cultural formations and the prototypical working-class cultures. Methodologically, Breezer shows how Hebdige coalesces the structuralist and the Marxist lenses as the two key theoretical components of his work.

• Gelder, Ken. “Hebdige, Dick.” In The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory. Vol, III Edited by Michael Ryan, Gregory Castle, Robert Eaglestone, and M. Keith Booker, 1110. Malden, MA: John Wiley, 2010.

  This entry by Ken Gelder gives an overview of Dick Hebdige’s idea of subculture. Gelder traces the changing pattern of Hebdige’s thoughts and argues how the subversive possibility of subcultural musical style underpins Hebdige’s works. Gelder identifies how Hebdige, drawing on the works of Barthes, Foucault, Norman Mailer, Umberto Eco, and others, illustrates his viewpoint. In addition, Gelder identifies how the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss’s work on bricoleur remains intrinsic to Hebdige’s work.

• Gildart, Keith, Anna Gough-Yates, Sian Lincoln, et al. Hebdige and Subculture in the Twenty-First Century: Through the Subcultural Lens. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2020.

  DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-28475-6

  Keeping the theoretical focus of Hebdige’s work intact, this book addresses and revisits subcultural ideas from contemporary perspectives. This book raises questions about the importance of Hebdige’s work in the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and mediated communication. The significance of this work is that it brings the work of Hebdige in close dialogue with the works of scholars like David Muggleton, Andy Benett, Steve Redhead, Sarah Thornton, and others.

• Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 3d ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2018.

  This anthology includes a brief introduction to Hebdige’s biography, the methodological design of his works, and his evolution as a thinker. It shows how Hebdige blends Marxist tradition with post-structuralist thoughts in his works. See pp. 2305–2308.

• Parui, Avishek. “Lecture 47—Dick Hebdige—Subculture: The Meaning of Style 1.” YouTube video. NPTEL-NOC IITM, 6 May 2019.

  This YouTube video offers a detailed introduction to Dick Hebdige’s idea of subculture. It locates Hebdige within the conceptual trajectory of cultural studies and intends to argue how Hebdige remains a critical thinker in the field of cultural studies.