What is cultural Study?

 Topic:What is Cultural Study?

 SUBJECT: Paper no.8. The Cultural Studies:

  ROLL NUMBER: 32

Study: M.A SEM: 2

GUIDED By: D.P.Barad

 Department of English, Maharaja krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.

Topic: What is Cultural Study??

Introduction:

     

     A college class on the American novel is reading Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple. The Professor edentities Africen American literary and cultyral sources and describes the book’s mltilayerd narrative structure, moving on to a brief review of its feminist crituque of American gender and racial attitudes. Students and professor discuss these various approaches, analyzing key passages in the novel.

          A student raises her hand and recalls that the Steven Spielberg film version drew angry responses from many African American Viewers. The Discussion takes off: Did Alice Walker “betray” African Americans with her harsh depiction of black men? Did Spielberg enhance this feature of the book or play it down? Another hand goes up: “But she was promoting Lesbianism.” “Spielberg really played that down” the professor replies.

          A contentious voice in the back of the room: “Well, I just want to know what a serious film was doing with Oprah win frey in it. This is quickly answered by another student,” Dude, she does have a book club on her show!” Class members respond to these points, examining interrelationships among race, gender, popular culture, the media and literature. They question cultural conventions- both historical and contemporary that operate within novels, on The Oprah Winfrey show, in  Hollywood films. They conclude the class by trying to identify the most important conventions Walker Portrayts in constructing her characters and communities in The color purple.

          Because the Word “Culture” itself is so difficult to pin down “ “Cultural Studies” is hard to define. As was also the case in chapter 8 with Elainer Showalter’s “Cultural” model of feminine difference, “cultural studies”  is not so much a discrete approach  at all, but rather a set of practices. As  Patrick Brantlinger has pointed out, cultural studies  is not “ a tightly coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda,” but a “ loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues, and questions.”

          Arrising from the social turmoil of the 1960s , cultural studies is composed of elements of marxism, post structuralism, Feminism, gender studies, authropology, sociology, race and ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies: those fields that concerntrate on social and cultural forces that either create community or cause division and alienation. For example, Drawing from Roland Barthes on the nature of literary language and Claude Levi- Strauss on anthropology, cultural studies was influenced by structuralism and poststructuralism. Jaques Derrida’s “Deconstruction” of the World or text distincton , like all his deconstructions of hierarchical oppositions, has urged- or enabled- cultural critics “ To erase the boundaries between  high and low culture, classic and popular literary texts, and literature and other cultural discourse that, following Derrida, may be seen as manifestations of the same textuality.”

                   The discipline of psychology has also entered the field of cultural studies. For example, Jaques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious structured as a language promoted emphasis upon language and power as symbolic systems. From Michel Foucault came the notion that power is a whole complex of forces; it is that which produces what happens. A tyrannical aristocrat does not just independently wied power but is empowered by “discourses” accepted ways of thiking, writing and speaking and practicies that embody, exercise and amount to power. From punishment to sexual mores, Foucault’s “genearogy”. Of topics includes many things excluded by traditional historians, from architectual blue prints for prisons to memories of “ Devians” Psychoanalytic, Structuralist and post structuralist approaches are treated else where in this topic, in the present topic we review cultural studies connections with Marxism, the new historicism, multiculturalism, post modernism, popular culture and post colonial studies before moving on to our group of six literary works.

                   Cultural differences we can see in Bollywood movies also Like, Ek Tha Tiger, Gunday, Highway, Force, Madras café and meny other movies. In the movie Gunday there are two type of culture and and two types of person one who is suddenly angry on every one and one who calmly take the decisions. This is depend on nature and also depend on nature.

Five types of Cultural Studies:

1.    British cultural materialism.

2.    New Historicism.

3.    American multiculturalism.

4.    Postmodernism and popular culture.

5.    post colonial studies.

 British Cultural Materialism:

                        Cultural Studies is referred to as “ cultural materialism” in Britain and it has a long tradition. In the later ninteenth century Mathew Arnold sought to redefine the “givens” of British culture. Edward Burnett Tylorr’s pioneering anthropological study primilive Culture argued that “ Culture or civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is a complex whole which includes  knowledge, brief art, morals law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”

            Cultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950s with the work of F.R.leavis sought to use the educational system to distribute literary knowledge and appreciation more widely; Leavisites promoted the “great tradition” of Shakespeare and Milton to improve the moral sensibilities of a wider range of readers than just the elite.

          Cultural Materialists also turned to the more humanistic and even spiritual insights of the great student of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, Russian Formalist Bakhtin, especially his amplification of the valogic form of meaning within narrative and class struggle, at once conflictual, 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 versus old historicism: the latter, says porter, saw history as “ World views magisterially unfolding as a series of tableaux in a film called progress” as though all Elizabethans, for example, held views in common, The new historicism rejects this interplay of forms of power.

Laputa-“ The whore” what did Jonathan swift mean when he gave that name to the flying island in the third voyage of Guliver’s Travels? It is a question that has tantalized readers since the eightenth century. The science fiction aspects of that island still amuses us why “the whore”? There may be an answer, and as we will show later, new historicism is the right approach to answer this question.

          New historicism frequently borrows terminology from the marketplace: Exchange, negotiation and circulation of ideas are deswcribed. H.Aram Veeser calls “the moment of exchange” the most interesting to new historicists, since social symbolic capital may be found in literary texts:” the critic’s role is to dismantle the dichotomy of the economic and the non-economic, to show that the most purportedly disinterested and self –sacrificing practices, including art, aim to maximize personal or symbolic profit.”

          Laputa is a gigantic trope of the female body; the circular island with a round chasm at the center, though which  the astronomers of the island descend to a domelike structure of the “Flandona Gagnole”, or “astronomer’s cave.” Laputa has at its center a giant lodestone on which the movement of the lodestone and island, but also the entire society. As Bruce remarks, “It is this which engenders the name of the island; in a paradigmatic instance of misogyny, the achievement of male control over female body itself renders that body the whore; Laputa.

AMERICAN MULTICULTURALISM

        Nearly a half century later, evolving identities of racial ethnic groups have not only 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 invented by whites to assign social status and privilege, with out scientific relevance. Unlike sex For which there are X and Y chromosomes, race has no genetic markers. In fact, 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 century, if interracial trends 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 20580 Anglo-Americans will not longer be the majority, nor English necessity the most widely spoken language. Administrations of the 2000 census faced multiple problems with its assignment of racial categories, for many biracial or multiracial people did not identity with any of them.

          African American  writing often displays a folkloric conception of humankind; a “double consciousness,” as W.E.B. Dubois called it, arising from bicultural identity; irony, parody, tragedy and bitter comedy in negociation this ambivalence; attacks upon presumed white cultural superiority; a naturanstic focus on survival  ; and inventive reframings of language itself as in language games like “jiving”, “sounding”, “signifying”,“playing the dozens”, and rapping. These practices symbolically characterize “the group’s attempt to humanize the world”, as Ellison puts it . Ellison urged black writers to trust their own experiences and defininitions of reality. He also upheld folklore as a source of creativity; it was what “black  people “black people had before they knew there was such a thing as art”. This elevation of black folk culture  to art is important and it led to divisions among black artists: for example , zora Neale Hurston’s reliance upon folklore and dialect annoyed some of her fellow artists of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes, who wished to distance themselves from such “roots” and embrace the new international forms available in literary modernism.

           The history of the indigenous cultures of the New World is punctuated by conquest by Indian nations; European countries, Especially spain, Portugal, France and England; then by the United States. Over time, there emerged in former Spainish Possessions a metizo literary culture in addition to the colonial and native cultures.

          “Code Switching” is a border phenomenon studied by linguists. Speakers who code switch move back and forth between spanish and English, For instance, or resort to the “Spanish” of border towns ; linguists note why and when certain words are uttered in one language or another.

           American Indian Literatures, In predominantly oral cultures, Storytelling passes on religious beliefs, moral values, political codes and practical lessons of everyday life. For American Indians. Stories are a Source of strength in the face of centuries of silencing by “Euro Americans”

          Asian American Literature is written by people of Asian descent in the united States, Addressing the experience of living in a society that views them as alien. Asian immigrants weredenied citizenship as late as the 1950 s. Edward said has written of orientalism, or the tendency to objectify and exoticize Asians, and their work has sought to respond to such stereotyping. Asian American writers include Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Fllipino, Vietnamese, Malyasian, Polynesian and many other peoples of Asia the Indian Subcontinent, and the pacific. These cultures presents a bewildering array of languages, religions, social structures and skin colors and so the category is even more broad and artificial than Latina or American Indian.

POSTMODERNISM AND POPULAR CULTURE

         

          Postmodernism, like poststructuralism and deconstruction is a critique of the aesthetics of the preceding age, but besides mere critique, postmodernism celebrates the very act of dismembering tradition. Postmodernism questions everything rationalist, European Philosophy held to be true, arguing that it is all contingept and that most cultural cconstuctions have served the function of empowering members of a dominant social group at the expense of “others.” Beginning in the mid 1980s, post modernism emerged in art architecture, music, film, literature sociology, communications, fashion and other fields.

          Societies must have order jean Francois Lyotard argues that stability is maintained through “grand narratives” or “master narratives,” stories a culture tells itself about its practices and beliefs in order to keep  going. A grand narrative in American culture might be the story that democracy is the most enlightened or rational form of government and that democracy will lead to universal human happiness. But postmodernism, Lyotard adds , is characterized by “incredulity toward metanarratives”  that serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities inherent in any social organization. Postmodernism prefers “mini-narratives” of local events. Similarly, Jean Baudrillard Describes the “simulacra” of postmodern life which have taken the place of “real” objects.

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

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES:

          Postcolonialism refers to a historical phase undergone by third world countries after the decline of colonialism: foir example, when countries in Asia, Africa , and the Cabribbean separated from the European empires and were left to rebuild themselves. Many third world writers focus on both colonialism and the changes created in a postcolonial culture, Among the many challenges facing postcolonial writers are the Attempts both to resurrect their culture and to combat the preconceptions about their culture.

Conclusion:

        Cultural Studies is an innovative interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that investigates the ways in which “culture” creates and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power, Research and teaching in the field explores the relations between culture understood as human expressive and symbolic activities, and cultures understood as distinctive ways of life. Combining the strengths of the social Sciences and the humanities, cultural studies draws on methods and theories from literary studies, sociology, communications studies, history, cultural anthropology, and economics. By working across the boundaries among these fields, cultural studies new questions and problems of today’s world. Rather than seeking answers that will hold for all time, cultural studies develops flexible tools that adapt to this rapidly changing world.