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 19th 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.
Mathew Arnold’s
views on Culture and Anarchy