Who’s Afraid of Cultural Studies? Linguistics with a Twist

Abstract

This contribution examines the conceptualisation of language as a signifying practice by tracing the ways in which Cultural Studies have been productively mobilised within the domain of English linguistics. Focusing on the development of a distinctive Neapolitan tradition, the article reconstructs how Cultural Studies provided theoretical and methodological resources for challenging formalist and structuralist approaches to language, enabling a reconceptualisation of linguistics as a discipline deeply embedded in social, cultural, and political processes.

Situating its discussion within the broader emergence of Cultural Studies in Italy from the mid-1980s onwards, the article highlights how scholars working at the Istituto Universitario Orientale of Naples drew on Stuart Hall’s theory of representation, Foucauldian discourse theory, and the postcolonial and feminist interventions of scholars such as Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti to reframe language as a site of meaning-making, power negotiation, and identity construction. In this perspective, linguistic analysis is no longer confined to describing abstract systems, but becomes an interpretive practice attentive to discourse, ideology, and historical situatedness.

By foregrounding marginality, transnationalism, and cultural hybridity as epistemological resources rather than limitations, the contribution illustrates how Cultural Studies enabled a form of interdisciplinary linguistics capable of engaging with questions of representation, subjectivity, and social transformation. It argues for a 'linguistics with a twist': an approach that integrates cultural theory into linguistic inquiry and reaffirms the relevance of Cultural Studies for understanding language as a socially embedded and politically consequential practice.