Key Concepts:
● Cultural resistance
● Cultural hegemony
● Subcultural theory
Context:
● Race Relations
● Thatcher’s Britain
Case Studies:
● Rock Against Racism
● Rock Against Sexism
● 2 Tone

Antonio Gramsci: Italian philosopher writing in the 1930s

Key Terms:
● Hegemonic: dominant, ruling-class, power-holders
● Hegemonic culture: the dominant culture
● Cultural hegemony: power, rule, or domination maintained by ideological and cultural means.
● Ideology: worldview – beliefs, assumptions and values

Subcultural Theory: The Birmingham School (1970s)
● In the 1970s, a group of cultural theorists in Birmingham applied Gramsici’s theories to post-war
British working-class youth culture
● Looked at working class cultures like the teddy-boys, mods, skinheads, and punks – subcultures
unified by shared tastes in fashion, music and ideology.
● They argued argued that the formation of subcultures offered young working class people a solution
to the problems they were collectively experiencing in society.

Race:
● Bringing race into the picture in the 1980s, Paul Gilroy
highlighted how black youth cultures represented
cultural solutions to collectively experienced problems
of racism and poverty.

Racism from the State: The Police
● Frequent clashes between the police and black youth
● Widespread fears over law and order, black street
crime and the figure of ‘the mugger’
● SUS laws
● New Cross Fire (1981)

Margaret Thatcher:
● Prime Minister 1979-1990
● Militant campaigner for middle-class interests
● In an 1978 interview: ‘British national identity
could be swamped by people with different
culture’
● Hardline attitude towards immigrantion
● Conservative Manifesto: ‘firm immigration control
for the future is essential if we are to achieve
good community relations’
● British Nationality Act of 1981: introduced a
series of increasingly tough immigration
procedures and excluded Asian people from
entering Britain.