Hetal Dabhi
Sem-2
Paper no. -8(Cultural studies )
Five types of cultural studies
What is cultural studies?
Cultural studies is a field of theoretically, politically, and empirically engaged cultural analysis that concentrates upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture, its historical foundations, defining traits, conflicts, and contingencies. Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of powerassociated with or operating through social phenomena, such as ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes.[1] The field of cultural studies encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. Although distinct from the discipline of cultural anthropology and the interdisciplinary field of ethnic studies, cultural studies draws upon and has contributed to each of these fields.[2]
Cultural studies was initially developed by British academics in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and has been subsequently taken up and transformed by scholars from many different disciplines around the world. Cultural studies is avowedly and even radically interdisciplinary and can sometimes be seen as antidisciplinary. A key concern for cultural studies practitioners is the examination of the forces within and through which socially organized people conduct and participate in the construction of their everyday lives.[3] As a result, Cultural Studies as a field of research is not concerned with the linguistically uncategorized experiences of individuals, or, in a more radical approach, holds that individual experiences do not exist, being always the result of a particular social-political context.
Five types of cultural studies
1)
British culture Materialism
2)
New Historicism
3)
American Multiculturalism
4)
Postmodernism and popular culture
5)
Postcolonial studies
1.British culture Materialism
Cultural materialism emerged as a theoretical movement in the early 1980s along with new historicism, an American approach to early modern literature, with which it shares much common ground. The term was coined by Williams, who used it to describe a theoretical blending of leftist culturalism and Marxistanalysis. Cultural materialists deal with specific historical documents and attempt to analyze and recreate the zeitgeist of a particular moment in history.
Williams viewed culture as a "productive process", part of the means of production, and cultural materialism often identifies what he called "residual", "emergent" and "oppositional" cultural elements. Following in the tradition of Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci and others, cultural materialists extend the class-based analysis of traditional Marxism (Neo-Marxism) by means of an additional focus on the marginalized.
Cultural materialists analyze the processes by which hegemonic forces in society appropriate canonical and historically important texts, such as Shakespeare and Austen, and utilize them in an attempt to validate or inscribe certain values on the cultural imaginary. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, authors of Political Shakespeare, have had considerable influence in the development of this movement and their book is considered to be a seminal text. They have identified four defining characteristics of cultural materialism as a theoretical device:
6)
Historical context
7)
Close textual analysis
8)
Political commitment
9)
Theoretical method
Cultural materialists seek to draw attention to the processes being employed by contemporary power structures, such as the church, the state or the academy, to disseminate ideology. To do this they explore a text’s historical context and its political implications, and then through close textual analysis note the dominant hegemonic position. They identify possibilities for the rejection and/or subversion of that position. British critic Graham Holderness defines cultural materialism as a "politicized form of historiography".
Through its insistence on the importance of an engagement with issues of gender, sexuality, race and class, cultural materialism has had a significant impact on the field of literary studies, especially in Britain. Cultural materialists have found the area of Renaissance studies particularly receptive to this type of analysis. Traditional humanistreadings often eschewed consideration of the oppressed and marginalized in textual readings, whereas cultural materialists routinely consider such groups in their engagement with literary texts, thus opening new avenues of approach to issues of representation in the field of literary criticism.
2.New Historicism
New Historicism is a form of literary theorywhose goal is to understand intellectual history through literature, and literature through its cultural context, which follows the 1950s field of history of ideas and refers to itself as a form of "Cultural Poetics". It was first developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic and University of California, Berkeley English professor Stephen Greenblatt and gained widespread influence in the 1990s.[1] The term New Historicism was coined by Greenblatt when he "collected a bunch of essays and then, out of a kind of desperation to get the introduction done, I wrote that the essays represented something I called a 'new historicism'".
In its historicism and in its political interpretations, New Historicism is indebted to Marxism. But whereas Marxism (at least in its more orthodox forms) tends to see literature as part of a 'superstructure' in which the economic 'base' (i.e. material relations of production) manifests itself, New Historicist thinkers tend to take a more nuanced view of power, seeing it not exclusively as class-related but extending throughout society.[citation needed] This view derives primarily from Michel Foucault.
In its tendency to see society as consisting of texts relating to other texts, with no 'fixed' literary value above and beyond the way specific cultures read them in specific situations, New Historicism is a form of postmodernism applied to interpretive history.
New Historicism shares many of the same theories as with what is often called cultural materialism, but cultural materialist critics are even more likely to put emphasis on the present implications of their study and to position themselves in disagreement to current power structures, working to give power to traditionally disadvantaged groups. Cultural critics also downplay the distinction between "high" and "low" culture and often focus predominantly on the productions of "popular culture" (Newton 1988). [7] New Historicists analyze text with an eye to history. With this in mind, New Historicism is not "new". Many of the critiques that existed between the 1920s and the 1950s also focused on literature's historical content. These critics based their assumptions of literature on the connection between texts and their historical contexts (Murfin & Supriya 1998).
New Historicism also has something in common with the historical criticism of Hippolyte Taine, who argued that a literary work is less the product of its author's imaginations than the social circumstances of its creation, the three main aspects of which Taine called race, milieu, and moment. It is also a response to an earlier historicism, practiced by early 20th century critics such as John Livingston Lowes, which sought to de-mythologize the creative process by reexamining the lives and times of canonicalwriters. But New Historicism differs from both of these trends in its emphasis on ideology: the political disposition, unknown to the author that governs their work.
3.American Multiculturalism
Which brings us to the current political version of American multiculturalism. It is a term that gathered force in the aftermath of the 1960s when cultural narcissism and identity politics became fused into the multicultural movement.
African -American writers
Tony Morrison
About her
Morrison grew up in the American Midwest in a family that possessed an intense love of and appreciation for black culture. Storytelling, songs, and folktales were a deeply formative part of her childhood. She attended Howard University (B.A., 1953) and Cornell University (M.A., 1955). After teaching at Texas Southern University for two years, she taught at Howard from 1957 to 1964. In 1965 Morrison became a fiction editor at Random House, where she worked for a number of years. In 1984 she began teaching writing at the State University of New York at Albany, which she left in 1989 to join the faculty of Princeton University; she retired in 2006.
Morrison’s first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), is a novel of initiation concerning a victimized adolescent black girl who is obsessed by white standards of beauty and longs to have blue eyes. In 1973 a second novel, Sula, was published; it examines (among other issues) the dynamics of friendship and the expectations for conformity within the community. Song of Solomon. (1977) is told by a male narrator in search of his identity; its publication brought Morrison to national attention. Tar Baby (1981), set on a Caribbean island, explores conflicts of race, class, and sex.
The critically acclaimed Beloved(1987), which won a Pulitzer Prizefor fiction, is based on the true story of a runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery. A film adaptation of the novel was released in 1998 and starred Oprah Winfrey. In addition, Morrison wrote the libretto for Margaret Garner (2005), an opera about the same story that inspired Beloved.
Zora Neale Hurston
Although Hurston claimed to be born in 1901 in Eatonville, Florida, she was, in fact, 10 years older and had moved with her family to Eatonville only as a small child. There, in the first incorporated all-black town in the country, she attended school until age 13. After the death of her mother (1904), Hurston’s home life became increasingly difficult, and at 16 she joined a traveling theatrical company, ending up in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance. She attended Howard University from 1921 to 1924 and in 1925 won a scholarship to Barnard College, where she studied anthropology under Franz Boas. She graduated from Barnard in 1928 and for two years pursued graduate studies in anthropology at Columbia University. She also conducted field studies in folkloreamong African Americans in the South. Her trips were funded by folklorist Charlotte Mason, who was a patron to both Hurston and Langston Hughes. For a short time Hurston was an amanuensis to novelist Fannie Hurst.
In 1930 Hurston collaborated with Hughes on a play (never finished) titled Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts(published posthumously 1991). In 1934 she published her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, which was well received by critics for its portrayal of African American life uncluttered by stock figures or sentimentality. Mules and Men, a study of folkways among the African American population of Florida, followed in 1935. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a novel, Tell My Horse (1938), a blend of travel writing and anthropology based on her investigations of voodoo in Haiti, and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), a novel, firmly established her as a major author.
Postmodernism and popular culture
POSTMODERNISM AND POPULAR
CULTURE
Cultural studies started life as a radical political project, establishing the
cultural centrality of everyday life and of popular culture. In a postmodern
world where old certainties are undermined and identities fragmented, the
way forward for those working with popular culture has become less clear.
In contrast to more pessimistic readings of the possibilities of
postmodernity, Postmodernism and Popular Culture engages with
postmodernity as a space for social change and political transformation.
Ranging widely over cultural theory and popular culture, Angela
McRobbie engages with everyday life as an eclectic and invigorating
interplay of different cultures and identities. She discusses new ways of
thinking developed with the advent of postmodernism, from the ‘New
Times’ debate to political strategies after the disintegration of western
Marxism. She assesses the contribution of key figures in cultural and
postimperial theory—Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin and Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak—and surveys the invigorating landscape of today’s
youth and popular culture, from second-hand fashion to the rave scene,
and from moral panics to teenage magazines.
McRobbie argues throughout for a commitment to cultural studies as an
‘undisciplined’ discipline, reforming and reinventing itself as circumstances
demand; for the importance of ethnographic and empirical work; and for
the need for feminists to continually ask questions about the meaning of
feminist theory in a postmodern society.
Angela McRobbie is Principal Lecturer in Sociology at Thames Valley
University, London. She has written extensively on popular culture, gender
and youth culture, and is also a regular contributor to newspapers and
magazines. Her current research is on the fashion industry.
Postcolonial studies
‘Not quite a dictionary but an invaluable reference tool nonetheless, its iden-
tification of key terms remains as useful as its definitions of those terms.’
Professor Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois
This best-selling key guide, now in its second edition, provides an
essential key to understanding the issues which characterize post-
colonialism, explaining what it is, where it is encountered and why it
is crucial in forging new cultural identities. As a subject, post-colonial
studies stands at the intersection of debates about race, colonialism,
gender, politics and language. Key topics covered include:
• borderlands
• transnational literatures
• neo-imperialism
• neo-liberalism
• ecofeminism.
Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts is fully updated and cross-
referenced throughout. With additional further reading this book has
everything necessary for students and anyone keen to learn more
about this fascinating subject.
Bill Ashcroft teaches at the University of Hong Kong and the
University of NSW, Gareth Griffiths at the University of Western
Australia and Helen Tiffin at Queen’s University, Canada. They are
the editors of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader and the authors of
The Empire Writes Back, both published by Routledge.
