Types of Cultural Studies

Types of Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies:

                Culture is the word which is next to impossible to describe in one word. Culture is something which reflects in your identity. To know more about culture, we have to study about it. “Culture” itself is so difficult to pin down and “Cultural Studies” is very much hard to define. “Cultural Studies” is not so much a discrete approach at all, but rather a set of practice.

                If we go deeper in meaning of cultural Studies than we find that Cultural Studies is an academic field of critical theory and literary criticism initially introduced by British Academies in 1964 and subsequently adopted by allied academics throughout the world. Cultural Studies is an academic discipline aiding cultural researchers who theorize about the forces from which the whole of humankind construct their daily lives. It is not a unified theory, but a diverse field of study encompassing many different approaches methods and academic properties.

                “A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.”

                Cultural Studies combines feminist theory, political theory, social theory, history, philosophy, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, communication studies, political economy, translation studies, museum studies and art history/ criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies. Thus, cultural studies seek to understand how meaning is generated, disseminated and produced from the social, political and economic spheres within a given culture. Cultural studies composed of elements of Marxism post structuralism and postmodernism: those fields that concentrate on social and cultural forces that either create community or cause diversion and alienation.

                The term Cultural Studies was used by Richard Hoggart in 1964 when he founded Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Studies or CCCS. Cultural Studies approaches generally share four goals:

                Cultural studies transcend the confines of particular discipline such as literary criticism or history. Cultural studies deny the separation of “high” and “low” or elite and popular culture.

A cultural study is politically engaged. Cultural studies analyzed not only the cultural work, but also the means production.

                Though cultural studies practitioners deny “humanism” or “the humanists” as universal categories they, strive for what they might call “social reason” which often resembles the goals and values of humanistic and democratic ideals.

There are five types of Cultural studies. They are:

1.       British Cultural Materialism

2.       New Historicism

3.       American Multiculturalism

4.       Postmodernism and Popular culture

5.       Post colonial Studies

British Cultural Materialism:

                Cultural materialism in literary theory and cultural studies traces its origin to the work of the left-wing literary critic Raymond Williams. Cultural studies referred to as “cultural Materialism” in Britain and it has a long tradition.

                “Cultural materialism is an anthropological school of thought.”

                Cultural materialism says that the best way to understand human culture is to examine material conditions. Cultural materialism makes analyses based in critical theory in the tradition of Frankfurt School. In later 19^th century Mathew Arnold sought to redefine the “givens” of British Culture. Cultural materialism furnished a leftist orientation critical of the aesthetic, formalism, ant historicism and a politicize common among the dominant post-war methods of academic literary criticism. Cultural materialism is also about culture or civilization.

                Cultural studies 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 culture less and Marxist analysis, Cultural materialists deal with specific historical documents and attempt to analyze and recreate the zeitgeist of a political movement in history. Ironically the threat to their project was mass culture. Raymond Williams applauded the richness of canonical forms of life. 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 by means of an additional focus on marginalized.

                Cultural Materialists analyze the process 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 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.

1.       Historical Context

2.       Close Textual Analysis

3.       Political Commitment

4.       Theoretical Method.

                Cultural materialists also turned to the more humanistic and even spiritual insights of the great students of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, Russian Formalist Bakhtin especially his amplification of the dialogic form of meaning within narrative and class struggle; at once nonfactual and communal, individual and social Feminism was also important for cultural materialists in recognizing how seemingly “disinterested” thought is shaped by power structures such as patriarchy.

New Historicism:

                New historicism is a school of literary theory which consolidates critical theory into easier forms of practice for academic literary theorists of the 1990s. It first developed in the 1980s, primarily though the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the following decade.

                New historicism aim simultaneously to understand the work through its cultural context and to understand intellectual history through literature which follows the 1950s displace of History of ideas and refers to itself as a form of “Cultural Poetics”, new historicism concerns itself with extra literary matters-letters, diaries, films, paintings medical treaties- looking to reveal opposing historical tensions in a text. New historicist seek “surprising coincidence” that may cross generic, historical and cultural lines in borrowings of metaphor, ceremony or popular culture. H. Aram Veeser introducing an anthology of essays, The New Historicism noted some keys assumption that continuously reappears in New Historicist discourse. They were:

1.       That every human action is actually the effect of a network of material practice.

2.       That every act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes.

3.       That literary and non –literary “texts” are equally valuable.

4.       That no discourse, imaginative, scientific or archival gives access to unchanging truths not expresses unalterable human nature

5.       That a critical method and a language to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe.

                New historians see such cross cultural phenomena as text in themselves. From Hayden White, cultural studies practitioners learned how figural relationships between present and past tropes are shaped by historical discourse from Chifford Geetz, they derived the importance of immersion in a culture to understand its “deep” ways, as opposed to distanced observation Carolyn Porter credits the emergence of American studies. Women’s studies and Afro-American studies on new historicism as a volatile new presence in literary criticism. “Sub-literary texts and uninspired non literary texts all came to be read as documents of historical discourse, side by side with “the great works of literature”. A typical focus of New historicist critics led by Stephen Orgel has been on understanding Shakespeare less as an autonomous great author in  the modern sense than as a due to the conjunction of the world of Renaissance theater- a collaborative and largely anonymous free – for- all- and the complex social politics of the time. In this sense, Shakespeare’s plays are seen as inseparable from the context in which he wrote see Contextualise, thick description influential historians behind the eruption of the New Historicism are Fernand Braudel and the Annales School.

                New historicism is often criticized for lacking a group of historiography as practiced by professional historians. As a postmodern form of historiography, new historicism denies the grand narrative of modernity, often taking relativist stances which deny scientific trans historical concepts or social forms.

American Multiculturalism:

                Multiculturalism relates to communities containing multiple cultures. The term is used in two broad ways, either descriptively or informatively. It usually refers to the simple fact of cultural diversity. It is generally applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, sometimes at the level of organization.

                Multiculturalism centers on the thought in political philosophy about the way to respond to cultural and religious differences. It closely associated with “identity politics”, “the politics of difference and “the politics of recognition”. Multiculturalism can refer to a demographic fact, a particular set of philosophical ideas, or a specific orientation by government or institutions toward a diverse population. The term multiculturalism is most often used in reference to Western nation states.

                Multiculturalism in the America has a long silent history. In 1965, the Walts race riots draw worldwide attention. All African American students in the South attended segregated Schools and discrimination was still unquestioned in most industries. Interracial marriage was still illegal in many states. Nearly a half century later, evolving identities of racial and ethnic groups have not claimed a place in the main stream of American life, but have challenged the very notion of race; more and more seen by social scientists as a construct invited by whites to assign social status and privilege,  without scientific relevance. Unlike sex, for which there are X and Y chromosomes, race has no genetic markers.

                Mexican Americans were getting huge influx into the United States over the last fifty years, immigration patterns indicate that by the year 2050 Anglo-Americans will no longer be the majority, nor English necessarily the most widely spoken language. Administrators of the 2000 census faced multiple problems with its assignments of racial categories for many multiracial people did not identify with any.

Postmodernism and Popular Culture:

                Postmodernism, like post structuralism and deconstruction is a critique of the aesthetic of the preceding age, but besides mere critique, postmodernism questions everything rationalists European philosophy held to be true, arguing that it  is all contingent and that post cultural constructions have served the function of empowering members of a dominant social group at the expense of others. In the beginning, the mid 1980s postmodernism emerged in art, architecture, music film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion and other fields.

                Modernist literature rejected the Victorian aesthetic of prescriptive morality and using, new techniques drawn from psychology, experimented with point of view time, space and stream of consciousness writing. Postmodernism borrows from modernism disillusionment with the givens of society; a penchant for irony; the self conscious play within the work of art; fragmentation and ambiguity; and restructured, decentred; dehumanized subject. But while modernism presented a fragmented view of human history, this fragmentation was seen as tragic. Despite, their pessimism, modernist works still hope, following Mathew Arnold a generation before that art may be able to provide the unity, coherence and meaning that has been lost in most of modern life as church and nation have failed to do.

                Frederic Jameson sees artistic monuments like modernism and postmodernism as cultural formations that accompany particular stages of capitalism and are to some extent constructed by it. Postmodernism Lyatard, adds is characterizes by incredulity forward Meta narratives that serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities inherent in any social organization. Postmodernism prefers “mini narratives of local events”.

                Postmodernism thus reflects both the energy and diversity of contemporary life as depth. The lines between reality and artifice can become so blurred that reality TV is new from television entertainment.

Popular Culture:

                Before 1960s there was a time when popular culture was not studies by academics when popular culture was not studies by academics when it was well, just popular culture. But within American Studies programs at first and then later in many disciplines including semiotics, rhetoric literary criticism, film studies and psychoanalytic approaches, critic examine such as cultural media  as pulp fiction, comic books, television film, advertising, popular music and computer cyber culture. They assess how such factors as ethnicity, race, gender, class, age, region and sexuality are shaped by and reshaped in popular culture.

                There are four main types of popular cultural analysis:

1.       Production analysis

2.       Textual Analysis

3.       Audience Analysis

4.       Historical Analysis

        These analyses seek to get beneath the surface meaning and examine more implicit social meanings. Sometimes popular culture can so overtake and repackage a literary work that it is impossible to read the original text without reference to the many layers of popular culture that have developed around it. As we will also point out, the popular culture reconstruction of a work like Frankenstein can also open it to unforeseen new interpretations.

Post colonial Studies:

                Post colonialism refers to a historical phase undergone by third world countries after the decline of colonialism. Many third world countries focus on both colonialism and the changes created in post colonial writers are the attempts both to resurrect their culture and to combat the preconception about their culture. At first glance post colonial studies would seem to be a matter of history and political science rather than literary criticism.

                Post colonial literary theorists study the English language within this politicized context, especially those writings that developed at the colonial front such as works by Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, Jean Rhys or Jamaica Kincaid.  Earlier figures such as Shakespeare’s Caliban are re-read today in their new world contexts. Said concept of orientalism was an important touchstone to post colonial studies, as he described the stereotypical discourse about the East as constructed by the event.

                Homi. K. Bhabha’s post colonial theory involves analysis of nationality, ethnicity and politics with poststructuralist ideas of identity and indeterminacy, defining post colonial identities as shifting, hybrid constructions. We can see some powerful conflicts arising from the colonial past in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, for example which deconstructs the history of modern India.

                Among the most important figures in post colonial feminism is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who examines the effects of political independence upon “subaltern” women in the Third World. Spivak’s subaltern studies reveal how female subjects are silenced by the dialogue between the male dominated west and the male dominated east offering little hope for the subaltern women’s voice to rise up admits the global social institution that opposes her.

                “No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive”

               

                -Mahatma Gandhi.