Syncretic Youth: The Phantom Legacy of Hebdige’s Subculture—The Meaning of Style

Abstract

The publication of Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style in 1979 marks the end of a decade of writings on the creative potential and symbolically resistive youth subcultures. Although it underpinned many of the central ideas originally developed at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, it also marked a break with the tradition in its shifting the emphasis away from an exclusive focus on class. The foregrounding of notions of race and ethnicity in shaping post World War Two youth culture in the UK opened up the analysis of subculture to reflect the increasingly central impact of cultural exchange and syncretism in the contemporary urban context. Despite criticisms aimed at the supposedly ‘narrow’ nature of Hebdige’s discussion of race in terms of black ‘influence’ on white cultural forms, the focus on inter ethnic exchange in the spectacular displays and performances of youthful subcultures that he identified helped to shape subsequent debates around ideas of racial hybridity and the syncretic.