Modernity, postmodernity and regions

The notion of regional culture has been disparaged in the contemporary period. Modernisation - and its bedfellows, standardisation and homogenisation - were assumed to erode the importance of 'local attachments'. The creation of welfare states and national education and media systems typically meant that, for social scientists at least, the 'local' or 'regional' was a residual category of diminishing significance. Similarly, postmodernity - and its bedfellow, globalisation - is seen, typically, as attenuating further the 'local' dimension of life. In this view, in the contemporary era, cultures are formed by global flows of people, commodities and images and not in 'closed' localities. Quite often, especially in cultural and academic commentary, the very idea of regional culture is viewed as normatively problematic, hinting at backwardness and reaction. At the very least, throughout most of the modern period, the term 'regional' has been used to denote something culturally 'inferior' or 'subordinate'.

This chapter is concerned with whether we can identify particularities in social practice and cultural products that might mark a discernibly regional culture in the UK. There has been a strongly normative dimension to this debate since the publication of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy was published in 1957. This book was both a foundational text for British cultural studies and one that identified the impacts of mass culture on distinctive local forms of working-class life, which were negative in Hoggart’s view.