During the early 1990s there was a moment of stock-taking in cultural studies which involved both a codification of knowledge for student consumption and a recognition of the diversification of work in the field according to the changing circumstances of theorizing and research that had resulted largely from the ‘globalization’ of cultural studies (Gray and McGuigan, 1993). It would be tedious to recount yet again these dynamics since they have been so minutely charted, though not always accurately, in a flood of recent literature, a literature which I do not intend to survey here. My intentions are much more specific: to affirm the critique of cultural populism, to further substantiate that critique and to move beyond it. To recapitulate my original ...