At their best, class-sensitive versions of American cultural studies are animated by the attempt to grasp the complex dialectic of work and leisure—the structuring of U.S. society by the unequal and uneven social relations of labor and the ways in which those relations give rise to a vast array of cultural forms. The social location of the artist, the assembly-line production of films and cheap fiction: whatever the case, class analysis has immeasurably benefited our understanding of the cultural scene. The United States may be an exceptional place—what country isn’t?—but it has seen its fair share of class conflict in the sphere of culture, conflict that is intense, productive, and ongoing.

This is an excerpt from Eric Lott’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 52).