Resistance Through Rituals

Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain

Praise for the first edition:

‘No one seriously interested in youth mass culture or style can afford to ignore this work.’ - Stanley Cohen, The Times Higher Education Supplement

‘The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies deserves our gratitude for having begun to locate the real areas of discussion.’ - New Society

‘…affords an authoritative perspective of society’s subcultures amongst the young since the war. What it has to say about that legacy of rebellion deserves to be read by all involved with and seeking to understand young people.’ - ILEA Contact

This revised and expanded edition of Resistance through Rituals includes a new introduction to bring the reader fully up-to-date with the changes that have happened since the work’s first release in the double issue of Working Papers in Cultural Studies in 1975.

The work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham has been noted as historically leading the field in new areas of enquiry within the field of cultural studies, and the papers from the Centre are canonical reading for many cultural studies students. This revised edition includes all the original, exceptional papers, and enhances these with the reflections of the editors thirty years after the original publication.

At a time when youth culture had been widely publicised, but few people understood its significance as one of the most striking and visible manifestations of social and political change, these papers redressed the balance. Looking in detail at the wide range of post-war youth subcultures, from teds, mods and skinheads to black Rastafarians, Resistance through Rituals considers how youth culture reflects and reacts to cultural change.

This text represents the collective understanding of the leading centre for contemporary culture, and serves to situate some of the most important cultural work of the twentieth century in the new millennium.