Crossing Disciplines Across Borders: How (British) Cultural Studies Have Been Imported (and Translated) in Italy, France, and German-Speaking Countries

What are studi culturali and études culturelles, and what about the present status of Kulturwissenschaften? What do they all have in common, if any? What are the differences between them? Are they three different research fields, or three national declinations of the same research program, or what else? Common to all of them nowadays is a more or less immediate reference to the British Cultural Studies, whose circulation however has been different across the three national cases, Italy, France, and Germany (together with Austria). Making use of an array of different sources and methods, this chapter tries to identify the commonalities among these reception histories (also in terms of epistemological foundations) without forgetting their peculiarities with respect to their social and political traditions. In all the three national/regional cases we will examine how the disciplinary and epistemological boundaries have been negotiated among different disciplines and (scholarly, political, and ideological) commitments in order to build new objects of research and a different sensitivity to matters of culture.