Cultural Studies for Troubling Times E-Book

• Herausgeber: EECLECTIC
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 261

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Haben Sie sich schon einmal gefragt, warum es so viele irische Männer nach Barbados verschlagen hat? Oder wie das Schwarze Detroit zu Kraftwerk tanzte? Warum es auf dem Trafalgar Square keine Frauenstatuen gibt? Und was all das mit den wirtschaftlichen und politischen Aspekten von Kultur zu tun hat? Das multimodale E-Book führt mit elf kurzen Texten und elf Lehrvideos Studierende verschiedener Fachrichtungen, aber auch alle, die sich für Fragen kultureller Identität, medialer Materialität, der Repräsentation, Popkultur und des kulturellen Gedächtnisses interessieren, in Grundbegriffe und zentrale theoretische Ansätze der Kulturwissenschaften ein. Darüber hinaus geben wir einen ersten Einblick in die Kulturgeschichte der anglophonen Welt. Jedes Kapitel enthält zudem eine Auswahlbibliografie für weiterführende Literatur. Die Publikation soll Lesenden ermöglichen, die Kultur, die wir leben, besser zu verstehen und sie zu verändern.

Leseprobe

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Cultural Studies for Troubling Times

A Multimodal Introduction to British and American Cultures

Edited by Christian Huck

With contributions from Victoria Allen, Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich, Nicola Glaubitz and Marlon Lieber

EECLECTIC, 2024

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Did you ever wonder how Irish people ended up on Barbados? Or how Black Detroit danced to Kraftwerk? Or why there are no statues of women on Trafalgar Square? And what all this has to do with the economy and politics of culture?

In the form of eleven short texts accompanied by eleven educational videos, this multimodal e-book introduces basic terms and central theoretical approaches within Cultural Studies to students from various disciplines, but even more so to everyone interested in questions of cultural identity, media materialities, representation, popular culture and cultural memory. Additionally, we provide a first insight into the cultural history of the anglophone world. Each chapter also contains a selected bibliography for further reading. This publication aims to enable its readers to understand the culture we live just a little bit better, and to transform it.

Contents

Introduction

► 1 Why Cultural Studies?

► 2 What is Culture?

► 3 Signs & Meaning

► 4 Media & Materiality

►5 Subjects & Identities

►6 How to Study Culture

►7 Representation & Cultural Memory

►8 Guy Fawkes & the Tudors

►9 Ireland & the Colonies

►10 Cowboys & the American West

►11 King Kunta & the Black Atlantic

Rearticulating Cultural Studies for Troubling Times

Cultural Studies for Troubling Times

#culturewars #identitypolitics #woke #transgender #blacklivesmatter #badbunny #fridaysforfuture #culturalappropriation #reservationdogs #class #taylorswift #cancelculture #trump #fossilfuel #chatGPT #settlercolonialism #metoo #altright #marvel #culturalmemory #hactivism #sexeducation #culturalmarxism #diversity #gender #race #media #heartstoppers #complicity #affect #criticalracestudies #tippingpoints

Culture is a contested terrain – that is the starting point of Cultural Studies. Social media, it appears, is the field where such contestations are most visible today. Streaming series are attacked for miseducating teenagers and promoting homosexuality; others are celebrated for representing authentic trans lives and Indigenous people. Some people only follow accounts that praise the culture they love; others retreat to message boards where they attack everything that feels different. Some are criticized for an insensitive joke; others rally behind those that feel hurt. Dissenters are condemned, solidarity is demanded, outrage multiplied, indignation expressed, anxiety provoked. All too often, the memes, tweets and hashtags that dominate social media leave little room for dialogue; words become weapons rather than tools, deployed to terminate rather than facilitate debate.

The things that are talked about on social media are real, despite the excesses and distortions. The oppression of Indigenous people is real, as are the exclusionary practices against trans folks and other minoritized groups. The destruction of nature is real, as much as the erosion of democracy and the proliferation of violence. The discrepancies of wealth are real, as are the food banks and Help-to-Heat schemes. Unfortunately, such realities won’t be stopped by a hashtag or a post. There are real destructive forces at work, and a growing number of people identifies the central force behind these devastations as capitalism. Capital’s need for energy and drive for profit demand cheap oil, cheap labor and cheap food, and its fierce resolve seems to conquer everyone and everything that stands in its way. That much is probably true, although it has to be said that the so-called ‘real existing socialisms’ of the twentieth century did not fare much better when it comes to the protection of nature, the nursing of democracy and the prevention of violence. The more pressing question is: if we see all this, if we know all this, why are we unable to do anything about it? Why can’t we change our ways, why can’t we come together? What’s going on, and what can be done?

Cultural Studies has been engaging with questions of power and the promise of the popular for at least half a century. It has criticized media representations that constrict and silence minoritized groups and it has celebrated music and films that speak with voices not heard in the mainstream before. It has developed a vocabulary to discuss the possibilities and restrictions of popular media and it has provided theories of how cultures facilitate inclusion and exclusion. It has provided case studies of how cultures are formed by the historical conditions from which they emerge, and of how culture participates in constituting the worlds we live in. It has examined how culture upholds the status quo and how it enables transformation. Most of all, Cultural Studies has analyzed culture not as a flight of fancy, but as a way of making sense of, and challenging the reality we live in.

Cultural Studies emerged in recognizable form when Stuart Hall, a Jamaican-born sociologist, encountered American popular culture in 1960s Britain. Ever since, Hall worked tirelessly to conjoin the political project of the left with the affective energies of music, photography and film. Cultural Studies, then, can be seen as an attempt to attune politics to the desires and anxieties, the dreams and fears articulated in popular culture. Unfortunately, the new right, from Thatcher and Reagan to Trump and Johnson, seems to have been much more successful in (pretending to be) listening to the people than anyone on the left. It is in response to these forces that it appears about time to Make Cultural Studies Great Again: to recognize the imaginaries and the passions expressed in popular culture that have to be the foundation of any political project – and to work through them collaboratively.

This book wants to share the tools of Cultural Studies with everyone seeking to engage with the manifold contradictions of contemporary culture. In the form of eleven short texts accompanied by eleven videos, this multimodal publication introduces basic terms and central theoretical approaches not only to students from all disciplines, but to everyone interested in questions of cultural identity, mass and social media, representation and cultural memory. Our goal is to enable readers to understand the culture they live in just that little bit better, and to provide a basis for participating in an exchange that is understanding and caring rather than aloof and dismissive.

The first unit engages with the pivotal question of “Why Cultural Studies?” Why, in a world of multiple crises, in a world of war and climate destruction, a world full of poverty and violence, why should anyone be interested in words and images, in books and films, in music and media? Because “to analyze certain things about the constitutive and political nature of representation itself, about its complexities, about the effects of language, about textuality as a site of life and death” is essential to our struggles: culture is central to determining who is worthy of a good education and who is granted access to an efficient health system; culture (among other factors) determines who values nutritious food and who has to suffer most from environmental hazards, warfare and dangerous workplaces. “Those are the things cultural studies can address.”

The second unit discusses and defines what culture is, and can be. Cultural Studies uses the word culture in two ways: “to mean a whole way of life” and “to mean the arts and learning”. While other disciplines might focus on one or the other of these aspects, Cultural Studies insists on both, “and on the significance of their conjunction”. Cultural Studies investigates precisely how a way of living and its creative articulations, how art and society are intertwined and interacting; it analyses how we form culture and how culture forms us. In order to understand this constitutive nature of culture, we have to understand how the formations of culture are “writing themselves into the land”, creating social geographies and material conditions of living that in turn form those who inherit and inhabit them. Cultural Studies defies the usual separation of culture, politics and economy, but instead explores its intricate intra-relations. Only if we can grasp such relations, we can understand the politics behind the statue of General Lee in Charlottesville, USA, and the cultural geographies that contributed to the disaster of Grenfell Tower in London, UK.

The third unit explains how we make sense of the world through culture, how culture classifies and distinguishes events and objects. More specifically, it addresses the production of meaning, and the power relations that are at play here: “Which meanings are shared within society, and by which groups? What other, counter meanings are circulating? What meanings are contested? How does the struggle between different sets of meanings reflect the play of power and the resistance to power in society?” Most importantly, such struggles in the ‘symbolic world’ are not seen as mere forms of shadowboxing; they take place because they have real-life consequences, because they define the relations to our conditions of existence and the possibilities of changing these. To define what it means to be an ‘American’, for example, determines the policies of a given time: it defines whose jobs will be subsidized, and whose will be laid off, whose roads will be repaired and whose not, whose children will be taken away and whose not.

How media communicate culture is the subject of unit four. Here, we are specifically interested in the material forms used to share meaning; because media materialize meaning, they insert it into a technological, economic and political grid. For Cultural Studies, mediation is therefore “a process in which real determining factors set limits and exert pressures” on who can communicate what. Communication is understood here as a “practical material activity” influenced by social, economic and political circumstances and the power structures inherent in these. What a book means to a reader, for example, is not only determined by the author, but by a whole network of “editor-booksellers, retailers, educators, librarians, organizers of reading rooms, administrators of provincial academies, etc.”

The question of how humans relate to meaning and media is examined in unit five and linked to questions of cultural identity. In contemporary culture, it is popular media that provide people with “preformed frameworks of meaning or ways of making sense of our social experience, with value systems by which to orient ourselves toward the events of our everyday lives, and that teach us to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate pleasures”. Cultural Studies is particularly interested in how consumers of media relate to the “preformed frameworks of meaning” they are confronted with, and what subject positions they create for themselves on this basis. It is in relation to what is deemed legitimate and what illegitimate that processes of identification and dis-identification become the basis for political action. A politics that recognizes different cultural identities understands that a single Black mother has different needs than a white family father of two or a young woman living in a multi-generational household: they need different working hours and different structures of care, as well as different forms of ‘industrial action’.

Unit six asks how Cultural Studies’ understanding of meaning, media and identity can help us to study culture. As the smallest unit of investigation, Cultural Studies suggests ‘articulations’. These are linkages that connect specific meanings, things, persons or activities as if the two (or more) were indeed one: as if women were bound to do unpaid housework, as if heterosexuality was indeed a natural fix, as if the unemployed were actually lazy. Cultural Studies is especially interested in the circumstances under which such connections can be forged and maintained by particular actors. These circumstances are defined by the ‘conjuncture’, the particular but contradictory historical conditions within which cultural practices take place. Only if we understand specific formations as being forged under specific conditions, these formations open up to change.

Unit seven introduces representation and cultural memory as central concepts for understanding the creation of images of who we are (or want to be) and of what we think of others. Representation is understood here as a productive, constitutive force, rather than an act of mechanically reproducing something already existing. Cultural Studies asks how representations contribute to the constitution of an event, person or thing: which terms, images and stereotypes are employed to represent something, which qualities, values and social roles are ascribed to the represented, which “narratives, stories – and fantasies – are woven around them”? Cultural memory, then, is a form of representing the past in order to create an understanding of bygone eras and events that serves the desires of the present. Based on such understanding, we can now ask: what future do the people of England imagine, when they mourn the death of the Queen?

The final four chapters of this introductory course aim to provide a first insight into the cultural history of the Anglophone world, not in the sense of a succession of artworks, but as a process of remembering, and forgetting, and thereby creating cultural traditions. Such history is important for students of the Anglophone world, but relevant for many others, too. Politically, economically and ideologically, the legacies of the British Empire and the USA continue to reverberate around the world; legal frameworks, economic formations and technological infrastructures with global reach and impact often have very specific historical origins. Only if we understand “the circumstances in which we now find ourselves”, if we understand how these circumstances arose and “what forces are sustaining them”, only then can we define “what forces are available to us to change them”. Only if we challenge the past, we can liberate the future.

Unit eight presents early modern Britain as a time which saw a major redistribution of people, land and wealth inside and outside Britain, which started the process of converting a largely subsistence-based agriculture into a surplus-oriented and wage-based economy, and which set the foundations for the exploitation of people and the extraction of resources under colonial regimes. A celebratory cultural memory consequently stabilizes economic, political and ideological forms like a centralized state, a merely representative democracy and a capitalist economy, as well as racialized and gendered forms of domination, and not at least, the exploitation of nature.

Unite nine takes Ireland as a case study of how political violence and cultural legitimization enable a colonizer’s accumulation of land and labor. The so-called ‘plantation’ scheme of the 17th century “resulted in a massive transfer of property from Irish to English ownership”. Renting the land to the dispossessed previous owners was guaranteeing a stable income to colonizers – but not before the land was extensively plundered: “The most spectacular profits were derived from the felling and processing of timber, which found a ready market in England, the Netherlands, and further afield.” While the Irish population would eventually develop a cultural nationalism that allowed them to fight British occupation, the Irish landscape never recovered from the draining of natural resources under colonialism. Whether a re-united Ireland of the future can reverse such environmental destruction is one of the central political questions in contemporary Ireland.

Across the Atlantic, the violence that settler colonialists meted out against the Indigenous population was similarly motivated by a hunger for land and resources. Unit ten shows how the American dream of freedom and of the absence of domination was not only premised on violence, but also undermined by the mute compulsions of a capitalist economy. Instead of giving home to family farms and independent cowboys, the West came to be populated by ranch hands in desperate need of unionization. And although the popular myths of the frontier and the cowboy have little foundation in reality, the idea that the future has to be ushered in through acts of disruptive violence enjoys unbroken prominence in popular American culture.

Unit eleven presents the slave trade that brought millions from Africa to the USA as the violent import of ‘free’ labor to work on the ‘free’ land taken from Indigenous Peoples. In this context, racialization becomes an ideology that legitimates unjust procedures. But slavery is just the first of such “race-making institutions”: legal segregation (Jim Crow laws), the ghetto and an extensive prison system continued this work. The text emphasizes the significance of (stereotypical) media representations in this context, such as the “dissolute teenage ‘welfare mother’ on the female side and the dangerous street ‘gang banger’ on the male side”. Even bestial metaphors such as ‘super-predators’, ‘wolf-packs’ or ‘animals’ are common in the journalistic and political field – when denigrating and devaluing poor people, in general, and Black poor people, in particular.

The final chapter attempts to identify what it takes to get Cultural Studies in shape to tackle our troubling times of multiple crises. It identifies gaps in the foundation that is presented in this publication, and suggest themes and topics that need to be (re‑)addressed. It presents culture as a field of struggle that is political, and politics as deeply cultural; it presents culture as formed by economic structures and as forming the economy at the same time. If understood in this way, Cultural Studies can enable academics, artists and activists alike. Engaging in culture, whether through studying, creating or caring for culture, is engaging in society, and that is always a political act.

1 Why Cultural Studies?

► Watch full-length video

Our first video-text duo addresses a central question that every academic subject has to answer: why should you care about it, why work hard to study it? While the video hopes to capture your attention and emphasize the topicality of Cultural Studies, the text provides a more scholarly answer to the question. Before you start watching the video, please be aware that there might be some disturbing images – however, nothing worse than what’s on the daily news.

Why Cultural Studies

Christian Huck

As ancient forests and modern police stations burn in the USA, as the UK faces another winter of discontent, as Canada’s first nations defend their land against oil pipelines, as Australia melts in the heat of a climate catastrophe, and as Ireland fears for the erection of new borders, you may ask yourself: culture?1WTF? Why should you invest your time and energy in studying culture? Aren’t there more important things these days than books and flicks, posts and reels? Shouldn’t we care more for the real world rather than what people make of it?

Stuart Hall, one of the main thinkers of Cultural Studies, was facing a similar dilemma when he was confronted with a virus that caused havoc and anxiety in the 1980s and 1990s:

AIDS is one of the questions which urgently brings before us our marginality as critical intellectuals in making real effects in the world. [...] Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name is the point of cultural studies? What is the point of the study of representations, if there is no response to the question of what you say to someone who wants to know if they should take a drug and if that means they’ll die two days later or a few months earlier? At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we’ve been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything.2

Compared to nurses and doctors, to public health planners and cashiers that keep on working in the supermarket during lockdown, thinking about culture seems futile, if not a waste of time. “In one sense, the efficacy of poetry is nil — no lyric has ever stopped a tank”, the Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney once wrote in the face of the violent ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland.3 And if the efficacy of culture is nil, what then is the efficacy of the study, analysis and criticism of culture? Sub-zero?

But this is not the conclusion that Stuart Hall is coming to (and neither Seamus Heaney). It’s not either-or, it is not either the real world or culture; instead, the two are inexorably intertwined:

In the end, I don’t agree with the way in which this dilemma is often posed for us, for it is indeed a more complex and displaced question than just people dying out there. The question of AIDS is an extremely important terrain of struggle and contestation. In addition to the people we know who are dying, or have died, or will, there are the many people dying who are never spoken of. How could we say that the question of AIDS is not also a question of who gets represented and who does not?4

Doing Cultural Studies means to tackle the problems of the real world, not in an immediate way, but in form of a detour, examining movies, streams, news reports and other forms of culture for their connection to the real world:

Unless we operate in this tension, we don’t know what cultural studies can do, can’t, can never do; but also, what it has to do, what it alone has a privileged capacity to do. It has to analyze certain things about the constitutive and political nature of representation itself, about its complexities, about the effects of language, about textuality as a site of life and death. Those are the things cultural studies can address.5

To study British and American cultures from a Cultural Studies perspective you will have to learn to understand how texts, images, films, etc. from the Anglophone world are formed and how they work. But as much as we are interested in the structure and form of representations, Cultural Studies puts the focus on the “effects” of texts, as Hall emphasizes. Cultural Studies is interested in the “constitutive and political nature of representation”, in the way that representations shape the world, in the way they influence how we perceive and act in the world.

Instead of seeing culture and reality (or culture and society, or culture and nature) as opposites, Cultural Studies looks at the relations between culture and what is not culture. As Raymond Williams, another central figure in Cultural Studies, highlighted, “the crucial theoretical invention that was made” by Cultural Studies was “the refusal to give priority to [...] the art or the society”.6 It is not a matter of whether art reflects life, or life follows art. The central question is instead: how do art and life interact; how do they interface? To answer the question, Williams developed a new understanding of culture, which will be presented in the following chapter. Here, we are more concerned with what Cultural Studies can do, and why it might be worth your time and energy.

As soon as we talk and write about Covid (to move to a phenomenon closer to our current attention than AIDS), we give meaning to it, place it on our cultural map, trying to get a grip on what we are faced with.7 Covid is cultural, too, and not merely a biological entity, because we have constituted it as a meaningful object. We can sing and think about and imagine it. It is also cultural because it connects with a distinct set of social practices (like wearing masks or keeping social distance, for example) which seem to be at odds with our usual way of life (and are heavily disputed as a consequence). Covid is cultural because it is associated with certain kinds of people (old people, for example, or people with pre-existing conditions, but also people of specific ethnicities, people of specific income groups), and with certain places (ski-resorts, concert halls, care homes, night clubs). If our culture had not created such places, and if our culture had not segregated people in these ways, the effects of the virus would certainly have been different.

Protest against the ‘shelter-in-place’ order, May 2020

Covid is also cultural because it frequently appears in and is represented within our visual languages and media of communication. Indeed, the image of the coronavirus (small, agentic, disruptive) has become a sort of metaphor which stands for or represents the vulnerability of a distinctively late-modern, anthropocenic, unsustainable way of life. These meanings, practices, images and identities allow us to place, to situate, to decipher and to study Covid as a cultural artefact.8 (Which is not at all to say that Covid is somehow not real, or merely a cultural construction; it is real, and people are suffering, still.)

To adapt Stuart Hall’s phrase, the question of Covid “is an extremely important terrain of struggle and contestation”. There is not just one way for a society to deal with a virus, and cultural convictions (freedom, safety, self-responsibility, solidarity) were at the heart of the debate of how to react. While the virus exists as a biological agent, a society’s response to the virus is formed by the unwritten rules of the community as much as by its material restraints. However, within today’s cultures, there is never a full consensus on what these rules should be. Political parties argued about the right course to take, companies demanded support, and sometimes members of the public took to the street to protest against the powers that be. Hall described “the field of culture” as “a sort of constant battlefield”.9

There seem to be a lot of battlefields these days, new protests and riots appear in people’s feeds almost every single day, competing for attention with the horrors of a real war. It’s easy to lose track of what they are all about. While each of these events has its own specific context and its own specific trajectory, and while not every individual action within such events can be explained culturally, most of the action we see has its roots in a struggle about culture, asking pertinent questions like these:

Whose culture shall be the official one and whose shall be subordinated? What cultures shall be regarded as worthy of display and which shall be hidden? Whose history shall be remembered and whose forgotten? What images of social life shall be projected and which shall be marginalized? What voices shall be heard and which be silenced? Who is representing whom and on what basis?10

A good example of such a struggle over culture, and of the actual battlefields that can ensue from this, is the case of the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, which caused quite a storm on social media at the time. In August 2017, around twenty people were struck by a vehicle driven into a group of people protesting against a ‘Unite the Right’ rally, just a block away from the Lee monument; one of those struck by the car, 32-year-old Heather Heyer, died as a consequence. The driver of the car, who took part in the ‘Unite the Right’ rally earlier, was later to be convicted of murder.

How could it come to this? Six months before the clash of protesters and counter-protesters, the City Council of Charlottesville had voted in favor of removing the statue of Robert E. Lee, who had been a leading General in the Confederate Army, the military of the Southern States of the USA during the American Civil War in the 1860s. Charlottesville is no more than eighty miles away from the former capital of the Confederate States of America, Richmond, and thus in the heartland of the Old South.

Lee Park, Charlottesville, Virginia

In the early 1920s, a local benefactor who had worked as a stockbroker in Chicago and New York commissioned the statue and privately bought a whole city block to provide a public setting for the monument. Most likely, Paul Goodloe McIntire, who was born in the South but earned his money in the North, was trying to revive a South which had been on the losing end of both the Civil War and the ensuing economic development of the Reconstruction Era. The statue of Lee was supposed to function as a reminder of former glory, and, especially in the form of a 26 feet high monument, as something to look up to, something to edify the public.

At least since 2012, opposition to the statue gathered force.11 What was once devised as a sign of Southern heritage, now became a symbol for an ethnic divide that had not been properly addressed since. In 2016, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, a high-school student from Charlottesville started an online petition to remove the monument:

As a younger African American resident in this city, I am often exposed to different forms of racism that are embedded in the history of the south and particularly this city. My peers and I feel strongly about the removal of the statue because it makes us feel uncomfortable and it is very offensive.12

Charlottesville’s Vice Mayor at the time, Wes Bellamy, took up the case and argued that the statue was part of the reason why some citizens avoided the park: “I’ve spoken with several different people who have said they have refused to step foot into that park because of what that statue and the name of that park represents.”13

What does the statue represent, what do Confederate flags and monuments stand for? They signal different things to different people, as the New York Times reported: “Those who favored removal saw the symbols as monuments to white supremacy, but their opponents accused them of trying to erase history”.14 For Bellamy and the petitioners, Lee is a symbol for the ongoing heritage of slavery, the fact that US citizens of color still have not achieved full equality, culturally, but also in economic terms. Rather than looking up to Lee as a role model, they feel looked down upon: “For me, it’s hard because there are no statues in Charlottesville that depict African-American heroes. And so for that reason alone, black people have nothing to look up to in our public spaces. We are not represented”.15 For those on the other side, the removal of the statue signals “the replacement of our people, our heritage and our culture”.16 The exact historical role of Robert E. Lee during the Civil War, and his precise political opinions at the time, are of little importance in this debate. What is at stake, instead, is the question of which image of social life shall be projected: what does the statue tell us about how Americans (in the South) want to live now?

A second petition tried to strike a compromise by suggesting to supplement the existing symbol with another:

Rather than tear down Lee’s statue, this petition serves as a proposal to keep it and add a statue of another leader of modern times, the late Julian Bond. Bond was an honored professor at the University of Virginia for over 20 years and member of the Charlottesville community. He impacted our area and our nation in many ways and his recent passing in 2015 makes this decision both timely and appropriate. A memorial for Mr. Bond would serve as a unique contrast to whatever legacy General Lee left on racial tensions. [...] By converting Lee Park into Lee-Bond Park, or creating some other alternative, the City could send a clear message that history is not to be forgotten, but progress is to be celebrated.17

At least for those who fought against