This is a blog on assignment paper number 205 Cultural Studies and my topic is Five types of Cultural studies.
Cultural studies is one of the more controversial intellectual formations of the 1990s and the first decade of the third millennium. It has experienced a period of rapid growth in the academy, appearing at many universities in a variety of forms and locations (although rarely as degree-granting departments). At the same time, it has been broadly attacked both from inside the university and outside academia.
There are at least five distinct uses of cultural studies, making it difficult to know exactly what people are attacking or defending. It has been used to describe, alone or in various combinations:
1.Any progressive cultural criticism and theory (replacing "critical theory," which served as the umbrella term of the 1980s);
2.The study of popular culture, especially in conjunction with the political problematic of identity and difference;
3.So-called "postmodern" theories that advocate a cultural or discursive constructionism (and, thus, supposedly embrace relativism);
4.Research on the politics of textuality applied broadly to include social life, especially based in poststructuralist theories of ideology, discourse, and subjectivity;
5.A particular intellectual formation that is directly or indirectly linked to the project of British cultural studies, as embodied in the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS).
Second, the New Left emerged as a small but influential discussion group, and included many immigrants from the "colonies." It was sympathetic to (but not aligned with) the growing Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The New Left had a specific and ambivalent relation to Marxism, engaging Marxist theory and politics even as it criticized it for its failure (and inability?) to account for and respond to the challenges posed by the importance of ideology, colonialism and imperialism, race, and the failures of existing socialism. This work was enabled by the translation and publication of the early writings of Marx and a wide range of European Marxist thinkers.
Third, the British university system was, to put it mildly, elitist and classist, in terms of its student population and in its isolation, aestheticization, and limitation of culture to the field of the arts. Many of the influential early figures in cultural studies were working-class or immigrant students attending university on scholarship, who were driven to look for other accounts of culture that both expanded its referent and took it more seriously.
Finally, many of these figures were deeply influenced by their experience as teachers in various institutions of adult education outside the university. If nothing else, this experience played a role in convincing them, first, of the importance of culture (and intellectual work on culture) to both political struggle and people's everyday lives, and second, of the fact that the important questions do not usually respect the disciplinary boundaries of academic competence and expertise.
Five Types of Cultural Studies
1.British Cultural Materialism
2.New Historicism
3.American Multiculturalism
4.Postmodernism & Popular Culture
5.Postcolonial Studies
1.British Cultural Materialism
Cultural studies is referred to as "cultural materialism" in Britain, and it has a long tradition. In the later nineteenth century Matthew Arnold sought to redefine the "givens" of British culture. Edward Burnett Tylor's pioneering anthropological study Primitiae Culture (1877) argued that "Culture or
civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is a complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by
man as a member of society" (1). Claude Levi-Strauss's influence moved British thinkers to assign "culture" to primitive peoples, and with the work of British scholars like Raymond Williams, to attribute culture to the working class as well as the elite. As Williams memorably states: "There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing [other] people as
masses" .
To appreciate the importance of this revision of "culture" we must situate it within the controlling myth of social and political reality of the British Empire upon which the sun never set,an ideology left over from the previous century. 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 annul the distinction between labor and leisure classes and make transformation of status, not fixity, the norm. This cultural materialism furnished a leftist orientation"critical of the aestheticism, formalism, antihistoricism, and apoliticism common among the dominant postwar methods of academic literary criticism"; such was the description in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Groden and Kreiswirth L80).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. 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.
2.New Historicism
New historicism frequently borrows terminology from the marketplace: exchange, negotiation, and circulation of ideas are described. 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" (xiv). Greenblatt adds that "contemporary theory must situate itself . . . in the hidden places of negotiation and exchange" ("Towards a Poetics of Culture" 13). Bourdieu's insights are again a resource, especially his definition of tllte habi-
tus, a "system of dispositions' ' comparable to what linguists analyze as the sum of tacit knowledge one has to know to speak a given language.
Example
Some of the example in movies and boycott bollywood is also example of cultural studies.
Tanhaji
The recently released ‘Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior’ has hit the jackpot at the box office. Based on the legendary exploits of Maratha braveheart Subedar Tanaji Malusare, the Om Raut directed historical drama has won the hearts of audiences and critics alike. The film has earned a whopping total of almost Rs. 119 crores from the domestic box office and has earned Rs. 152 crores worldwide, making ‘Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior a clean ‘Box Office Hit’ as per the observations of many trade analysts.
Frankly speaking, this outburst from the ‘woke’ intellectuals wasn’t entirely unexpected, since the portrayal of Aurangzeb hit the nail right on the head. If you wondered what Aurangzeb was knitting in the trailer sequences, it was his actual profession that gave him his daily bread and butter. Aurangzeb lived an extremely austere life as he used to sew skull caps with his own hands apart from selling handwritten copies of the holy Quran for his living. He never took anything from the state exchequer for his personal expenses.
Keshari
History and movie debate with each other Kesari, set in 1897, follows the events in the Battle of Saragarhi, fought between the 21 Sikh Regiment soldiers, in the British army, and thousands of Afghans. The numbers tell their own story. Add to this the usual Kumarisms – patriotic fervour, unmitigated courage, inspirational belief – and you have a tailor-made film for him. But here’s the thing: Kesari is 150 minutes long, but the bare bones of its centrepiece, the Battle of Saragarhi, isn’t even in the picture for the first 35 minutes.
The initial segment, needlessly padded, sets up the metaphorical battleground. We first see the Afghans about to behead a woman for fleeing her husband’s house. Ishwar Singh (Kumar), a Sikh soldier, fires a bullet and saves her. He’s transferred to a different province for disobeying orders, where he’d fight the famed battle. Then we encounter the customary religious pride: Ishwar tells the Afghans that everything is fair game except his turban. There’s more information feeding: the film cuts to a flashback, detailing how Ishwar and his wife, Jiwani (Parineeti Chopra), fell in love and got married (right down to a song awkwardly shoehorned).
The film needs this contrived conflict because, as we know, the Britishers, not the Afghans, are the real villains here. All of this could have been smartly condensed in a few minutes, but Singh, unmindful of pacing and tonality, and relying on banal storytelling tropes, allows the obvious to run unchecked. The forced subplots don’t end there though. When Ishwar meets the new band of soldiers, his fellow fighters and compatriots, he’s unimpressed, as they lack motivation and discipline. You know the old trick: conflicts would lead to camaraderie, as the soldiers get ready for the eventual fight
But what is more disappointing is that Kesari tells us nothing new about the Battle of Saragarhi.
3.American Multiculturalism
In 1965 the Watts race riots drew worldwide attention. The Civil Rights Act had passed in1964, and the backlash was well under way in 1965: murders and other atrocities attended the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. President Lyndon fohnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The "long, hot sum-
mer" of 1966 saw violent insurrections in Newark, Detroit,Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Atlanta, San Francisco-the very television seemed ablaze. The Black Panther Party was founded. James Meredith, the first African American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, was wounded by a
white segregationist. Julian Bond, duly elected State Representative, was denied his seat in the Georgia House. Nearly 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.
1. African American Writers
African American studies is widely pursued in American literary criticism, from the recovery of eighteenth-century poets such as Phillis \A/heatleyto the experimentalnovels of Toni Morrison. In Shadow and Act (1964) novelist Ralph Ellison argued that any "viable theory of Negro American culture obligates us to fashion a more adequate theory of American culture as a whole". This seems too obvious even to mention today,when American arts, fashion, music, and so much besides is based upon African American culture, from Oprah to Usher. But in Ellison's day, the 1950s, such an argument was considered radical.
2. Latina/o Writers
Latina / o. Hispanic. Mexican American. Puerto Rican. Nuyorican. Chicano. Or maybe Huichol or Maya. \Alhich names to use? The choice often has political implications.We will use the term "Latina/ o" to indicate a broad sense of
ethnicity among Spanish-speaking people in the United States.Mexican Americans are the largest and most influential group.of Latina/o ethnicities in the United States.
3. American Indian Literatures
In predominantly oral cultures, storytelling passes on religious beliefs, moral values, political codes, and practical lessons of everyday life. For American lndians, stories are a source of strength in the face of centuries of silencing by Euro Americans.
4. Asian American Writers
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 were denied citizenship as late as the 1950s. 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,Filipino, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Polynesian, and many other peoples of Asia, the Lrdian subcontinent, and the Pacific. These cultures present a bewildering arcay of languages, religions,social structures, and skin colors, and so the category is even more broad and artificial than Latina/o or American Indian.Furthermore, some Asian American writers are relatively new arrivals in the United States, while others trace their American forebears for generations, as Mexican Americans do. Names can get tricky here too: people with the same record of residence and family in the United States might call themselves Chinese, Chinese American, Amer-Asian, or none of the above.In Hawaii the important distinction is not so much ethnicity as
being "local" versus haole (white).
4.Postmodernism and Popular Culture
1. Postmodernism
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 contingent and that most cultural constructions have served the function of empowering members of a dominant social group at the expense of "others." Beginning in the mid-1980s, postmodernism emerged in art, architecture, music, film, literature,sociology, communications, fashion, and other fields.
2. Popular Culture
There was a time before the 1960s when popular culture was not studied by academics-when it was, well, just popular cul-
ture. But within American Studies programs at first and then later in many disciplines, including semiotics, rhetoric, literary criticism, film studies, anthropology, history, women's 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.
5.Postcolonial Studies
Postcolonialism refers to a historical phase undergone by Third World countries after the decline of colonialism: for example,when countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean 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.
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