22410: Paper 205A: Cultural Studies
Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English, M.K.Bhavanagar University.
Vachchhalata
Joshi
Vachchhalatajoshi.14@gmail.com
Roll no –
20
Words: 2054
Paragraphs:
15
Topic: Cultural
Studies
Cultural
Studies
Cultural Studies trace the
relationships among aesthetic, anthropological, and political-economic aspects
of cultural production and reproduction. Cultural studies scholars and
practitioners often begin their inquiries by questioning the common
understandings, beliefs, and histories that shape our world. This type of
inquiry assumes that culture is not a fact to be understood and
explained. What demands attention is how culture constitutes diverse worlds
and how it can be mobilized to change those worlds?
Cultural Studies rely on
interdisciplinary research on the formation of knowledge, power, and
difference. Cultural Studies scholars and practitioners explore
constructions of race, class, ability, citizenship, gender, and sexuality in
their effort to understand the structures and practices of domination and
resistance that shape contemporary societies. Many different topics surface as
part of this exploration: everyday practices that structure the creation and
reception of cultural artifacts; relations between producers and consumers in
the circulation of global commodities; claims to membership in particular
communities as they undergo transformation.
“Yesterday's deconstructions are often tomorrow's orthodox clichés.”
Our Master of Arts in
Cultural Studies at the University of Washington Bothell stresses the local and
global locations of the field and seeks to cultivate the capacities needed to
work either within or outside the university. Students in the program
pursue academic research and community-based projects that engage critically
with the arts and humanities, the social and natural sciences, and the cultural
practices that shape power relations across local and global communities.
We understand this approach to Cultural Studies as providing the field with a new
formation, one that is responsive to the work culture does and can do in the
world today.
We would be remiss if we ended this
response to the query “What is Cultural Studies?” without pointing to a problem
in the question itself. Cultural Studies is many different things and the
shape of the field necessarily shifts in response to diverse institutional
locations, pressures, and opportunities. As a result, we think that the
original question ought to be reformulated. Given its pasts, presents,
and possible futures, what should Cultural Studies become and what can we do
with it? This is the question we have designed our Master of Arts in
Cultural Studies to address.
Edgar and Sedgwick write:
The theory of hegemony was of central importance to the
development of British cultural studies, particularly The Birmingham School. It facilitated the analysis of the ways
subordinate groups actively resist and respond to political and economic
domination. The subordinate groups needed not to be seen merely as the passive
dupes of the dominant class and its ideology.
Stuart Hall's
directorship of CCCS at Birmingham
Beginning in 1964, after the
initial appearance of the founding works of British Cultural Studies in the
late 1950s, Stuart Hall's pioneering work at CCCS, along with that of
his colleagues and postgraduate students gave shape and substance to
the field of cultural studies. This would include such people as Paul
Willis, Dick Hebdige, David Morley, Charlotte Brunsdon, John
Clarke, Richard Dyer, Judith Williamson, Richard Johnson, Iain
Chambers, Dorothy Hobson, Chris Weedon, Tony Jefferson, Michael Green, and Angela McRobbie.
“There is
no understanding Englishness without understanding its imperial and colonial
dimensions.”
Many cultural studies scholars
employed Marxist methods of analysis, exploring the relationships
between cultural forms (i.e., the superstructure) and of
the political economy. By the 1970s, the work of Louis Althusser radically
rethought the Marxist account of base and superstructure in
ways that had a significant influence on the "Birmingham School."
Much of the work done at CCCS studied youth-subcultural expressions
of antagonism toward "respectable" middle-class British
culture in the post-WWII period. Also during the 1970s, the politically
formidable British working classes were in decline. Britain's
manufacturing industries while continuing to grow in output and value were decreasing in the share of GDP and numbers employed, and union rolls
were shrinking. Millions of working-class Britons backed the rise
of Margaret Thatcher, through labour losses. For Stuart Hall and his
colleagues, this shift in loyalty from the Labour Party to the Conservative
Party had to be explained in terms of cultural politics, which they had
been tracking even before Thatcher's first victory. Some of this work was
presented in the cultural studies classic, Policing the Crisis, and
in other later texts such as Hall's The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis
of the Left, and New
Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s.
Gramsci and
hegemony
To understand the changing
political circumstances of class, politics, and culture in
the United Kingdom, scholars at The Birmingham School turned to the
work of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian thinker, writer, and Communist
Party leader. Gramsci had been concerned with similar issues: why would
Italian laborers and peasants vote for fascists? What strategic approach
is necessary to mobilize popular support in more progressive directions?
Gramsci modified classical Marxism and argued that culture must be understood
as a key site of political and social struggle. In his view, capitalists used
not only brute force to maintain control,
but also penetrated the everyday culture of working people in a variety
of ways in their efforts to win popular "consent."
It is important to recognize that
for Gramsci, historical leadership, or hegemony, involves the formation of alliances between class
factions, and struggles within the cultural realm of everyday common
sense. Hegemony was
always, for Gramsci, an interminable, unstable, and contested process.
Scott Lash writes:
In the work of Hall, Hebdige, and McRobbie, popular
culture came to the fore... What Gramsci gave to this was the importance of
consent and culture. If the fundamental Marxists saw the power in terms of
class-versus-class, then Gramsci gave to us a question of the class
alliance. The rise of cultural studies itself was based on the decline of
the prominence of fundamental class-versus-class politics.
Structure and
agency
The development of hegemony theory in cultural studies was in some ways consonant with
work in other fields exploring agency, a theoretical concept that insists
on the active, critical capacities of subordinated people As Stuart Hall
famously argued in his 1981 essay, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the
Popular'": "ordinary people are not cultural dopes. “Insistence on
accounting for the agency of subordinated people run counter to the work of
traditional structuralists. Some analysts have however been critical
of some work in cultural studies that they feel overstates the significance of
or even romanticizes some forms of popular cultural agency.
Globalization
In recent decades, as capitalism has
spread throughout the world via contemporary forms of globalization,
cultural studies have generated important analyses of local sites and practices
of negotiation with and resistance to Western hegemony.
Cultural
consumption
Cultural Studies criticize the
traditional view of the passive consumer, particularly by underlining the
different ways people read, receive, and interpret cultural
texts, or appropriate other kinds of cultural products, or otherwise
participate in the production and circulation of meanings. On this view, a
consumer can appropriate, actively rework, or challenge the meanings
circulated through cultural texts. In some of its variants, cultural studies
have shifted the analytical focus from traditional understandings of production
to consumption - viewed as a form of production in its own right. Stuart
Hall, John Fiske, and others have been influential in these developments.
A special 2008 issue of the
field's flagship journal, Cultural
Studies, examined "anti-consumerism" from a variety of
cultural studies angles. Jeremy Gilbert noted in the issue, cultural studies
must grapple with the fact that "we now live in an era when, throughout
the capitalist world, the overriding aim of government economic policy is to
maintain consumer spending levels. This is an era when 'consumer confidence' is
treated as the key indicator and cause of economic effectiveness."
Cultural studies often concern
itself with the agency at the level of the practices of everyday life and
approach such research from a standpoint of radical contextualism. In
other words, cultural studies reject universal accounts of cultural
practices, meanings, and identities.
Judith Butler, an American feminist
theorist whose work is often associated with cultural studies, wrote that:
The move from a structuralist account in which
capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous
ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition,
convergence, and rearticulating brought the question of temporality into the
thinking of structure. It has marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory
that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the
insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed
conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of
the rearticulation of power.
The concept of
"text"
Cultural studies, drawing upon
and developing semiotics, uses the concept of text to
designate not only written language, but also television programs, films, photographs, fashion, hairstyles,
and so forth; the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful
artifacts of culture. This conception of textuality derives especially from the
work of the pioneering and influential semiotician, Roland Barthes, but
also owes debts to other sources, such as Juri Lotman and his
colleagues from Tartu–Moscow School. Similarly, the field widens the
concept of culture. Cultural studies approach the sites and spaces
of everyday life, such as pubs, living rooms, gardens, and beaches, as
"texts."
Culture, in this context, includes not only high culture but
also everyday meanings and practices, a central focus of cultural studies.
Jeff Lewis summarized much
of the work on textuality and textual analysis in his
cultural studies textbook and a post-9/11 monograph on media and
terrorism. According to Lewis, textual studies use complex and
difficult heuristic methods and require both powerful interpretive
skills and a subtle conception of politics and contexts. The task of the
cultural analyst, for Lewis, is to engage with both knowledge systems and texts
and observe and analyze the ways the two interact with one another. This
engagement represents the critical dimensions of the analysis, and its capacity to
illuminate the hierarchies within and surrounding the given text and
its discourse.
Literary
scholars
Many cultural studies
practitioners work in departments of English or comparative
literature. Nevertheless, some traditional literary scholars such
as Yale professor Harold Bloom have been outspoken critics
of cultural studies. On the level of methodology, these scholars dispute
the theoretical underpinning of the movement's critical framework.
“I
have never worked on race and ethnicity as a kind of subcategory; I have always
worked on the whole social formation which is racialized”
Bloom stated his position during the 3 September 2000 episode
of C-SPAN's Book notes,
while discussing his book How to
Read and why:
There are two enemies of reading now in the world, not
just in the English-speaking world. One is the lunatic destruction of literary
studies...and its replacement by what is called cultural studies in all of the
universities and colleges in the English-speaking world, and everyone knows
what that phenomenon is. I mean, the...now-weary phrase 'political correctness
remains a perfectly good descriptive phrase for what has gone on and is, alas,
still going on almost everywhere and which dominates, I would say, rather more
than three-fifths of the tenured faculties in the English-speaking world, who
really do represent treason of the intellectuals, I think, a 'betrayal of the
clerks'.
Marxist literary critic Terry
Eagleton is not wholly opposed to cultural studies but has criticized
aspects of it and highlighted what he sees as its strengths and weaknesses in
books such as After Theory. For Eagleton, literary and
cultural theory have the potential to say important things about the
"fundamental questions" in life, but theorists have rarely realized
this potential.
English departments also host
cultural rhetorics scholars. This academic field defines cultural
rhetorics as "the study and practice of making meaning and knowledge with
the belief that all cultures are rhetorical and all rhetorics are cultural." Cultural
rhetorics scholars are interested in investigating topics like climate
change, autism, Asian American rhetoric, and more.
Work Cited
“Cultural hegemony.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony. Accessed 6 November 2022.
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