Table of contents:-
Personal Information
Assignment Details
Abstract
Keywords
Introduction
Cultural studies
Five types
Conclusion
References
Name:- Divya Bharatbhai Jadav
Batch :- M.A.sem 3 ( 2024- 2025)
Email Address:- divyajadav5563@gmail. com
Roll number:- 7
Assignment Details:-
Topic:- Understanding the Five Core Categories of Cultural Studies
Paper:- 205A: Cultural Studies
Subject code:- 22410
Submitted to:- Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, MKBU, Bhavnagar
Date of Submission:- 20 November
2024
About Assignment:- In this assignment I will try to define Understanding the Five Core Categories of Cultural Studies
Abstract:
This assignment provides an in-depth exploration of five central approaches within cultural studies, each offering distinct tools to analyze society and culture. The types examined are Marxist cultural studies, feminist cultural studies, media and communication studies, postcolonial cultural studies, and subcultural studies. By exploring these approaches, the assignment aims to illuminate how cultural studies investigates cultural production, identity, power, and resistance. The analysis will draw on foundational theorists and case studies to demonstrate how each approach reveals unique insights into social norms, media representation, cultural conflict, and globalization. Through this comparative study, the assignment will showcase the versatility of cultural studies as a field that challenges conventional thinking and promotes a deeper understanding of cultural complexities in a globalized world.
Keywords:
Cultural studies, British Cultural Materialism New Historicism American Multiculturalism Postmodernism & Popular Culture Postcolonial Studies
Introduction:
Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field that explores the complexities of culture, power, and identity, drawing on diverse disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, history, and media studies. By examining cultural practices, texts, and institutions, cultural studies seeks to uncover the ways in which meaning is produced, shared, and contested within society. This assignment focuses on five significant types of cultural studies, each of which provides unique perspectives and tools for understanding cultural dynamics. These types include British Cultural Studies, known for its focus on popular culture and power structures; American Cultural Studies, which often examines issues of race, ethnicity, and multiculturalism; Postcolonial Cultural Studies, which critiques the lingering impacts of colonialism on contemporary identities; Media and Communication Studies, addressing the role of mass media in shaping public consciousness; and Globalization Studies, which explores the effects of global interconnectedness on culture. Together, these five approaches reveal how cultural studies offer valuable insights into societal changes, identities, and the continuous negotiation of cultural meaning in an increasingly complex world.
What is Cultural Studies?
Cultural studies, interdisciplinary field concerned with the role of social institutions in the shaping of culture. Cultural studies emerged in Britain in the late 1950s and subsequently spread internationally, notably to the United States and Australia. Originally identified with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham (founded 1964) and with such scholars as Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams, cultural studies later became a well-established field in many academic institutions, and it has since had broad influence in sociology, anthropology, historiography, literary criticism, philosophy, and art criticism. Among its central concerns are the place of race or ethnicity, class, and gender in the production of cultural knowledge.
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 power associated 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.
Cultural studies was initially developed by British Marxist 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.
Four Goals of Cultural Studies:
Cultural Studies transcends the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history.
Cultural Studies is politically engaged.
Cultural Studies denies the separation of 'high' and 'low' or elite and popular culture.
Cultural Studies analyzes not only the cultural work, but also the means of production.
Five Types of Cultural Studies:
1 )British cultural Materialism:
Cultural study is referred to as “cultural materialism in Britain. Matthew Arnold sought to redefine the “givens” of British Culture. Edward Burnett Tylor’s pioneering anthropological study ‘primitive Culture’
“Culture or civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is a complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”
Cultural Materialism began in the 1950s with the work of F.R.Leavis and heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold. Raymond Williams talks about attributes of the working class and elite class. As Williams memorably states:
“There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.”
In modern Britain two trajectories for "culture" developed: one led back to the past and the feudal hierarchies that ordered community in the past; here, culture acted in its sacred function as preserver of the past The other trajectory led toward a future, socialist utopia that would annual the distinction between labor and leisure classes. Cultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950s with the work of F.R.Leavis, heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold's analyses of bourgeois culture.
Cultural materialists also turned to the more humanistic and even spiritual insights of the great student of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, Russian Formalism Bakhtin, especially his amplification of the dialogic form of meaning within narrative and class struggle.
2 ) New historicism:
New Historicism is a school of literary theory, first developed in 1980. The term ‘new historicism’ was created by the American critic Stephen greenbelts. New Historicism is a literary theory based on the idea that literature should be studied and interpreted within the context of both the history of the author and the history of the critic.
Definition: New historicism
“New historicism is that it is a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts, usually of the same historical period”.
A number of historicists claim that these cultural and ideological representations in texts serve mainly to reproduce.
A New Historicist looks at literature in a wider historical context, examining both how the writer's times affected the work and how the work reflects the writer's times, in turn recognizing that current cultural contexts color that critic's conclusions.
“The text is historical, and history textual”
-Michael Warner phrases
“History is always historicized”
New historicism has made its biggest mark on literary studies of the Renaissance and Romantic periods and has revised motions of literature as privileged, apolitical writing. Much new historicism focuses on the marginalization of subjects such as those identified as witches, the insane, heretics, vagabonds, and political prisoners.
3 ) American multiculturalism:
As a philosophy, multiculturalism began as part of the Pragmatism movement at the end of the 19th century in Europe and the United States. American multiculturalism came into existence in 1964 with the passing of the Civil Right Act.
“Every American should understand Mexico from the point of view of the observer of the conquest and of the history before the conquest……”
In a 1972 Harvard University study by the geneticist Richard Lewontin found that most genetic differences were within racial groups, not between them. In the new country, if interracial trends continue, Americans will be puzzled by race distinctions from the past since children of multiracial backgrounds may be the norm rather than the exception. And given the huge influx of Mexican Americans 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.
In the literary field America exists with different cultures which belong to different ideas about literature. Cultural studies, regarding America with other cultures and then their multi production of Literary Forms also. Cultural Studies regards four writers from different cultures whose concerns are with the American Literary field.
4 )Postmodernism and Popular Culture :
Postmodernism
The term “postmodernism” first entered the philosophical lexicon in 1979, with the publication of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard. It’s a reaction against the philosophical assumptions, values, and intellectual worldview of the modern period of western history. Postmodernism questions everything rationalist European philosophy held to be true.
Postmodernism possesses several elements which are necessary which given by Jean Baudrillard
· Any Sign is empty
· Virtual world
· Status and Taboos
· Hyperreal between the private and the public .It also affected in
· Building
· Literature
· Cinema
· Painting
· Music
· Photography etc.
In the English speaking world, modernism has a very specific meaning among most literature scholars, referring not to the “Modern Age” since the Enlightenment, or to “Modern” in the sense of contemporary, but to the period after World War-1, When T.S.Eliot, James Joyes, W.B.Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein were in their heyday. Postmodernism offers no suggestion of anything like a comprehensive substitute world- view. Postmodernism means to make a clean break with the past in the sense that the past and its way of looking at the world become the subject of satirical, often sarcastic “play” with historical figures.
Popular Culture:
Popular culture is the entirety of ideas, perspective, attitudes, images and other Phenomena that are within the mainstream of a given culture, especially western culture of the early to mid-20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20th and early 21th century.
Once we define the term, then it becomes very easy to understand this term as it is also known as Pop-Culture, so The term ‘Popular Culture' was coined in the 19th century or earlier. Traditionally, the term has denoted the education and general “culturedness” of the lower classes, as opposed to the “official culture” and higher education emanated by the dominant classe.The stress in the distinction from “official culture” became more pronounced towards the end of the 19th century, a usage that became established by the interbellum period.
Popular culture is often viewed as being trivial and dumbed down in order to find consensual acceptance throughout the mainstream. As a result it comes under heavy criticism from various non-mainstream sources (most notably religious groups and counter cultural groups) which deem it superficial, consumerist, sensationalist, and corrupted.
There are four main types of popular culture studies analyses like:
· Production Analysis
· Textual Analysis
· Audience Analysis
· Historical Analysis
So with the help of these an individual can analyze the types as production analysis deals with the production and while on the other hand Textual analysis deals with the text and on the other side we can also say that the third one is audience analysis which has more importance in the popular culture because Audience remains at the center in this kind of analysis while last but not the list kind is Historical analysis which plays vital role in the popular culture or so called Pop-culture.
5 ) Postcolonial Studies :
So far as my reading is concerned about this study of Postcolonial we can say that it is against colonialism because colonialism came in to existence at the beginning of the century but slowly and steadily some people started to oppose against it so Anti-colonialism came into enlightenment so Post-colonialism came into utilization to oppose the Colonialism though it came into later on but we can find the post-colonial study in the play A Tempest which is written by Aime Caesar which also deals with the Post-colonial study because in this kind of study an Individual can find the conflict between colonizer and the colonized people as it is found in many of work of literature and the best example is A tempest which also highlights the same thing in the play.
At first glance postcolonial studies would seem to be a matter of history and political science, rather than literary criticism. Britain seemed to foster in its political institutions as well as in literature universal ideas for proper living, while at the same time perpetuating the violent enslavement of Africans and other imperialist cruelties around the world, causing untold misery and destroying millions of lives. Postcolonial 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. Foster, Jean Rhys, or Jamaica Kincaid. Earlier figures such as Shakespeare’s Caliban are re-read today in their New World contexts. Works such as ‘The Empire Writes Back’, edited by Bill Ashcroft and others, and ‘The Black Atlantic’ by Paul Gilroy have radically remapped cultural criticism.
Therefore we can say that all cultural studies possess their own value by their culture. Thus, postcolonial study studies are opposite to colonial studies; it studies beyond colonial studies.
Conclusion:
These Cultural Studies exist with particular ideas which show a particular cultural world. 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.
References :
https://blog.dilipbarad.com/2020/02/introduction-to-cultural-studies.html?m=1
Cultural Studies [From 'A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature - Wilfred Guerin et al.]
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