New ethnicities and British cultural studies. The concept of new ethnicities has emerged out of a relatively new configuration of disciplines known as cultural studies. It originated in Birmingham in the 1960s when the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was founded. Jamaican-born Xxxxxx Xxxx was an influential former director of the centre, and texts referring to the black experience of a ‘hybrid’ status within British society emerged from the Centre, while Xxxx himself has been referred to as a diasporic intellectual (Xxxx, 1996). Xxxx (1980) admitted that it is difficult to locate the exact beginnings of cultural studies and to give an exact definition but he states that: Cultural Studies was an ‘engaged’ set of disciplines, addressing awkward but relevant issues about contemporary society and culture, often without benefit of that scholarly detachment or distance which the passage of time alone sometimes confers on other fields of study (Hall, 1980 p. 4). In other words, cultural studies aimed to understand the changes and developments taking place in British society at the moment of such changes. There was a tension between political and intellectual concerns in cultural studies which according to Xxxx (1980, p. 80) ‘prevented its easy absorption and naturalization into the social division of knowledge’.
