Abstract

This article reconstructs the development of subculture theory; it begins with the approach formulated in the 70s at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, and in particular in the book "Resistance Through Rituals" edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson in 1976, before moving on to the "postmodern turn" of subculture theory in the 90s, in which attention on the analysis of subcultures as products of social classes was overtaken by the analysis of individual forms of appropriation and consumption of cultural products. Finally, the article discusses how in the last few years the "postmodern turn" in the study of subcultures has become the object of critique and reflection on the part of a "third wave" of subcultural studies, which tends to recuperate both from the Chicago School tradition and that of Birmingham the centrality of social inequality and forms of stratification and the subsequent emphasis on subcultures as collectives and politically meaningful experiences.