What is cultural studies?

     

Assignment-1

What is cultural studies?

Name:   Avani Jani

paper: 205 Cultural Studies

Roll no: 03

Enrollment no: 4069206420220014

Email id: avanijani.18@gmail.com

Batch: 2023-2024 (M.A Sem 3) 

Submitted to: S. B. Gardi Department of English, maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Cultural studies:

    Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary field that investigates the intricate connections between aesthetics, anthropology, and political-economic dimensions in cultural production and preservation. Scholars and practitioners in Cultural Studies typically initiate their inquiries by challenging conventional beliefs, common knowledge, and historical narratives that influence our world. This approach assumes that culture is not an objective reality to be comprehended and defined, but rather, it focuses on how culture shapes diverse realities and can be harnessed to instigate change within these contexts.

        Cultural Studies heavily depend on interdisciplinary research to explore the creation of knowledge, the dynamics of power, and the impact of differences within society. Scholars and practitioners in this field delve into the construction of categories such as race, class, ability, citizenship, gender, and sexuality to gain insights into the structures of dominance and resistance that mold contemporary societies. This exploration encompasses a wide range of topics, including the everyday practices that underpin the creation and reception of cultural artifacts, the relationships between producers and consumers in the global circulation of commodities, and the evolving notions of belonging within various communities.

 “Yesterday's deconstructions are often tomorrow's orthodox clichés.”

            The Master of Arts program in Cultural Studies at the University of Washington Bothell places a strong emphasis on both the local and global dimensions of this field. Our program is designed to equip students with the skills and knowledge needed to pursue careers within or outside academia. In our program, students engage in academic research and community-based projects that offer critical perspectives on the arts, humanities, social and natural sciences, as well as the cultural practices that influence power dynamics in local and global communities. This approach to Cultural Studies represents a fresh perspective, one that acknowledges the active role of culture in today's world.

        However, it's important to note that Cultural Studies is a diverse field that takes on various forms, and its shape evolves in response to different institutional settings, pressures, and opportunities. Therefore, it's essential to reframe the original question. Given its history, current state, and potential future directions, we must ask: What should Cultural Studies become, and what possibilities can we explore with it? This is the question that guides the design and purpose of our Master of Arts program in Cultural Studies.

According to Edgar and Sedgwick:

        The concept of hegemony played a pivotal role in the evolution of British cultural studies, notably within The Birmingham School. It provided a framework for examining how marginalized groups actively challenge and react to political and economic forms of control. This perspective emphasized that subordinate groups should not be perceived solely as passive recipients of the dominant class and its ideology.

Stuart Hall's Leadership and the Formation of Cultural Studies at CCCS, Birmingham:

        Commencing in 1964, Stuart Hall's leadership at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham was instrumental in shaping and solidifying the discipline of cultural studies. Alongside his colleagues and postgraduate students, Hall's pioneering efforts significantly contributed to the development of this field. Key figures in this endeavor included individuals such 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.”

        Numerous cultural studies scholars employed Marxist analytical methods to investigate the interplay between cultural expressions (the superstructure) and the political economy. By the 1970s, the influence of Louis Althusser's reinterpretation of the Marxist concepts of base and superstructure had a profound impact on the "Birmingham School." At the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), a significant portion of their research focused on the manifestations of youthful subcultures expressing resistance against the perceived "respectable" middle-class British culture in the post-World War II era.

        During the 1970s, the once-politically influential British working class was experiencing a decline in its power and influence. While Britain's manufacturing industries continued to expand in terms of output and value, their contribution to the GDP and employment figures diminished. Simultaneously, union memberships were on the decline. In a surprising political shift, a considerable number of working-class Britons supported the rise of Margaret Thatcher, despite the losses suffered by labor.

        For Stuart Hall and his colleagues, the transition of loyalty from the Labour Party to the Conservative Party had to be understood through the lens of cultural politics, a theme they had been tracking well before Thatcher's initial election victory. Some of this research was presented in the seminal work of cultural studies, "Policing the Crisis," as well as in later texts like 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 the Concept of Hegemony:

        In the context of examining the evolving dynamics of class, politics, and culture in the United Kingdom, scholars at The Birmingham School turned their attention to the insights of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian intellectual, writer, and leader in the Communist Party. Gramsci grappled with similar questions: Why did Italian laborers and peasants support fascist ideologies, and what strategic approaches were needed to mobilize popular support in more progressive directions? Gramsci introduced significant modifications to classical Marxist theory, emphasizing that culture played a pivotal role in political and social struggles. He argued that capitalists, in their pursuit of maintaining control, employed not only brute force but also infiltrated the everyday culture of working people in various ways to gain popular "consent."

        It's worth noting that, according to Gramsci, the concept of historical leadership, known as hegemony, entails the formation of alliances among different class factions and the ongoing battles within the cultural domain of common sense. Hegemony, in Gramsci's perspective, was always an enduring, precarious, and contested process.

Scott Lash's Perspective on Gramsci's Influence

        In the contributions of Hall, Hebdige, and McRobbie, popular culture assumed a central role. What Gramsci added to this discussion was the recognition of the significance of consent and culture. While traditional Marxism primarily framed power dynamics as class-against-class, Gramsci introduced the concept of class alliances, prompting us to question the nature of these alliances. The emergence of cultural studies as a field was closely tied to the diminishing prominence of the traditional class-against-class political paradigm.

Structure and Agency in Cultural Studies:

            The development of hegemony theory in cultural studies was, in some ways, in line with research in other fields that explored the concept of agency, a theoretical notion emphasizing the active and critical capacities of marginalized individuals. As famously argued by Stuart Hall in his 1981 essay, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular,'" he asserted that "ordinary people are not cultural dopes." This insistence on recognizing the agency of subordinated individuals contradicted the work of traditional structuralists. However, it is worth noting that some analysts have been critical of certain aspects of cultural studies, feeling that they may overstate the significance of, or even romanticize, particular forms of popular cultural agency.

Globalization

        In recent decades, as capitalism has proliferated globally through contemporary forms of globalization, cultural studies have produced significant analyses of local sites and practices involving negotiation with and resistance to Western hegemony.

Cultural Consumption:

            Cultural Studies challenge the conventional view of the passive consumer by emphasizing the various ways in which people read, receive, and interpret cultural texts, appropriate different types of cultural products, or actively participate in the production and dissemination of meanings. According to this perspective, a consumer can appropriate, actively reinterpret, or contest the meanings conveyed through cultural texts. In some of its variations, cultural studies have shifted their analytical focus from traditional production-centered understandings to consumption, viewing it as a form of production in its own right. Scholars like Stuart Hall, John Fiske, and others have played influential roles in these developments.

        A special 2008 issue of the field's flagship journal, Cultural Studies, explored "anti-consumerism" from various cultural studies angles. Jeremy Gilbert noted in the issue that cultural studies must grapple with the reality that "we now live in an era when, throughout the capitalist world, the primary objective of government economic policy is to sustain consumer spending levels. This is an era when 'consumer confidence' is regarded as the key indicator and driver of economic effectiveness."

        Cultural studies often focus on agency within the practices of everyday life and approach such research with a perspective of radical contextualism. In other words, cultural studies reject universal explanations of cultural practices, meanings, and identities.

Judith Butler, an American feminist theorist often associated with cultural studies, wrote:

            The transition from a structuralist framework in which capital is seen as shaping social relations in relatively uniform ways to a perspective of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation introduced the element of temporality into the understanding of structure. This marked a shift from an Althusserian theory that treats structural totalities as theoretical constructs to one in which insights into the contingent nature of structure give rise to a renewed conception of hegemony, intertwined with the contingent locations and strategies of power rearticulation.

The Concept of "Text":

        Cultural studies, building upon and advancing semiotics, employ the concept of text to encompass not only written language but also television programs, films, photographs, fashion, hairstyles, and so on. In cultural studies, texts encompass all meaningful cultural artifacts. This notion of textuality is particularly influenced by the work of the pioneering semiotician Roland Barthes, with contributions from sources like Juri Lotman and his colleagues from the Tartu–Moscow School. The field also extends the concept of culture to include not only high culture but also everyday meanings and practices, which constitute a central focus of cultural studies.

        Jeff Lewis summarized much of the work on textuality and textual analysis in his cultural studies textbook and in a post-9/11 monograph on media and terrorism. According to Lewis, textual studies employ intricate and challenging heuristic methods, necessitating both robust interpretive skills and a nuanced understanding of politics and contexts. The cultural analyst's task, according to Lewis, is to engage with both knowledge systems and texts, observing and analyzing the ways in which the two interact. This engagement illuminates the hierarchies within and surrounding the given text and its discourse.

Literary Scholars:

Numerous cultural studies practitioners are affiliated with departments of English or comparative literature. Nonetheless, some traditional literary scholars, like Yale professor Harold Bloom, have been vocal critics of cultural studies. On the methodological front, these scholars challenge the theoretical foundations of the critical framework that underpins the movement.

“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 expressed his position during the September 3, 2000 episode of C-SPAN's Booknotes 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 does not entirely oppose cultural studies but has criticized certain aspects of it while highlighting its strengths and weaknesses in books like "After Theory." For Eagleton, literary and cultural theory have the potential to address essential questions in life, but theorists have often fallen short of realizing this potential.

English departments also serve as hosts to 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 focus on investigating topics such as climate change, autism, Asian American rhetoric, and more.

Conclusion : 

In conclusion, the relationship between traditional literary scholarship and cultural studies remains a subject of contention, with differing perspectives on the impact and value of this interdisciplinary field. This debate underscores the evolving nature of academic disciplines and the ongoing quest to address the ever-changing questions and challenges in the study of culture and literature.

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• Referencess cited:

• Bloom, Harold. "How to Read and Why." Interviewed by Brian Lamb, C-SPAN, 3 Sept. 2000.

• Eagleton, Terry. "After Theory."

• Cultural Rhetorics. "What Is Cultural Rhetorics?" Michigan State University, https://rhetoric.msu.edu/cultural-rhetorics/.

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