• a form of cultural resistance
• attempts to change law and legislation will no happen over night
• Antonio Gramsci: Italian philosopher writing in the 1930’s
• Cultural hegemony: power, rule, or domination maintained by ideological and cultural means.
• Hegemonic: dominant, ruling-class, power-holders
• the Birmingham school was first to notice the different subcultures of teenagers such as : teddy-boys, mods, skinheads and punks.
• Margaret Thatcher : firm immigration control for the future is essential if we are to achieve good community relations’
• firm immigration control for the future is essential if we are to achieve good community relations’
• ‘ too much fighting on the dancefloor’ reflects how there was a lot of violence at the 2 tone concerts.
• internal tensions in the band is reflected in the eerie sounding music.
• the empty streets represents how everyone was working and how it was no longer a busy city.

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.

people dont follows laws they are infulenced by the culture around them as its a form of cultrual resistance to express

Cultural Hegemony:
● 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
● Cultural hegemony functions by framing the ideologies of the dominant social group as the only legitimate
ideology.
● The ideologies of the dominant group are expressed and maintained through its economic, political, moral,
and social institutions (like the education system and the media).
● These institutions socialise people into accepting the norms, values and beliefs of the dominant social
group.
● As a result, oppressed groups believe that the social and economic conditions of society are natural and
inevitable, rather than created by the dominant group.

Cultural resistance
Cultural hegemony
Subcultural theory

– Organised political movements
– Public protests
– Petitions, marches

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

Cultural hegemony functions by framing the ideologies of the dominant social group as the only legitimate
ideology.

The Birmingham school were the first to recognise teenagers and British working-class youth culture.

Subculture:
– working-class youth culture
– Unified by shared tastes in style, music and ideology
– A solution to collectively experienced problems
– A form of resistance to cultural hegemony

A normal everyday year old girl from Jersey is out on a dog walk, she is doing usual stuff: throwing a ball for her dog, looking at the trees, talking on the phone to her friends… She receives a text message from an anonymous number intending that the sender is near through messages like ‘ i see you’, ‘where are you walking too’… while confused to who this may be, she begins panicking and getting unnerved, however, she carry’s on walking. As the sender states he is getting closer she begins running towards the car park towards here car, the sender reveals himself and she is kidnapped, her phone drops to the floor…