Review of John Hutnyk’s Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies (2004, London: Pluto)

Bad Marxism is the third major work of John Hutnyk focusing on the problems of representation in the culture industry, and largely inspired by the writings of Marx, Adorno, and Spivak, among others. The book follows The Rumour of Calcutta (1996), in which Hutnyk highlighted the problem of representation in ethnography, and the Critique of Exotica (2000) on the political ambiguity of the notion of ‘hybridity’ in culture. With Bad Marxism, Hutnyk responds to his two previous books by articulating a sense of political urgency for activism during and after fieldwork in both anthropology and cultural studies.