Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice

This book presents a cultural history of subcultures, covering a remarkable range of subcultural forms and practices. It begins with London's 'Elizabethan underworld', taking the rogue and vagabond as subcultural prototypes: the basis for Marx's later view of subcultures as the lumpenproletariat, and Henry Mayhew's view of subcultures as 'those that will not work'. Subcultures are always in some way non-conforming or dissenting. They are social - with their own shared conventions, values, rituals, and so on - but they can also seem 'immersed' or self-absorbed. This book identifies six key ways in which subcultures have generally been understood: through their often negative relation to work (as 'idle', 'parasitical', hedonistic, criminal, etc.), their negative or ambivalent relation to class, their association with territory (the 'street', the 'hood, the club, etc.) rather than property, their movement away from home into non-domestic forms of belonging, their ties to excess and exaggeration (as opposed to restraint and moderation), their refusal of the banalities of ordinary life and in particular, of massification.

Ken Gelder is Professor of Literary Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia