Sous-Culture : Le Sens du Style

Authors: Dick Hebdige, Marc Saint-Upéry

Publishing House: Zones

Publication Date: May 7, 2008

Description :This founding text of “cultural studies” combines poetic writing, fieldwork and theoretical developments in the service of an atypical project: an authentic sociology of punk, written on the spot, at the height of the movement, in 1979.Applying concepts from linguistics to subcultures, Hebdige innovatively describes social conflicts as struggles for the appropriation and reinterpretation of signs, in what he calls, following Umberto Eco, a “semiotic guerrilla war”. Musics, clothes, slang, rituals and haircuts form significant panoplies. The British youth of the 1970s was the crucible of punk and “glam-rock” – with the figure of Bowie – but also of a powerful Rasta subculture imported into England by Caribbean migrants. To understand the emergence of punk, we must understand the importance of these dialogues, by interposed styles, between British and immigrant youth: the subcultures respond to each other in a complex game of exchanges, displacements and citations. With a remarkable advance on the state of intellectual debate in France, this essential work provides conceptual tools to better understand the great circulation of signs and identities that crosses youth subcultures in a postcolonial situation.