Introducing Cultural Studies E-Book

Ziauddin Sardar

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 110

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Cultural Studies signals a major academic revolution for the 21st century. But what exactly is it, and how is it applied? It is a discipline that claims not to be a discipline; it is a radical critical approach for understanding racial, national, social and gender identities. "Introducing Cultural Studies" provides an incisive tour through the minefield of this complex subject, charting its origins in Britain and its migration to the USA, Canada, France, Australia and South Asia, examining the ideas of its leading exponents and providing a flavour of its use around the world. Covering the ground from Gramsci to Raymond Williams, postcolonial discourse to the politics of diaspora, feminism to queer theory, technoculture and the media to globalization, it serves as an insightful guide to the essential concepts of this fascinating area of study. It is essential reading for all those concerned with the quickening pulse of old, new and emerging cultures.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected] 

ISBN: 978-184831-181-7

Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

What Is Cultural Studies?

What is Culture?

What is the Subject of Cultural Studies?

Characteristics of Cultural Studies

How to do Cultural Studies: Semiotics

Signs, Codes and Texts

Representation of the Other

Discursive Analysis

Decoding the Indian Restaurant

Origins of Cultural Studies

Founding Fathers

Richard Hoggart

Authentic Working-Class Life

Raymond Williams

E.P. Thompson: Understanding Class

Remembering History

Stuart Hall

Intellectual Practice

Culture Makes a Difference

British Cultural Studies

The Internationalism of Cultural Studies

Broadening the Issues

Althusser’s Structuralism

The Influence of Antonio Gramsci

Hegemony

Intellectuals

Criticism of British Cultural Studies

The Migration of Cultural Studies

American Cultural Studies

Canadian Cultural Studies

Australian Cultural Studies

French Cultural Studies

Pierre Bourdieu

South Asian Cultural Studies

The CSDS

CCS or the “Teen Murti”

The Subaltern Studies Collective

The Influence of Gandhi

The Place of English

Ashis Nandy

The Stereotyped Oriental

The Permeable Self

The Non-Player and the Future

What is the Solution?

Cultural Studies of Science

The Paradigm Shift

Science Defended …

… And Science (de)Constructed

Technoculture Theory

Haraway’s Cyborgs

Orientalism

Forerunners to Orientalism

Criticisms of Said

Post-Colonial Discourse

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Homi Bhabha

Sara Suleri

Race and Identity

Multiculturalism and its Critics

Cornel West

bell hooks

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Diaspora

Diaspora Space

The Black Atlantic

Women and Gender

Women Take Issue

Queer Theory

Representing Homosexuality

Challenging the Representation

Media and Culture

Media Codes

The Basic Issues of Representation

Globalization

Consequences of Globalization

Resisting Globalization

Where is Cultural Studies Going?

Further Reading

Index

Biographies

Acknowledgements

What Is Cultural Studies?

Cultural studies is an exciting and “hot” field of study. It has become the rage amongst progressives of all sorts – not least because culture as a theme or topic of study has replaced society as the general subject of inquiry among progressives.

Cultural studies has made its presence felt in academic work within the arts, the humanities, the social sciences and even science and technology. It appears to be everywhere and everyone seems to be talking about it.

But what exactly is cultural studies? The term “studies” suggests a broad field of inquiry – like business studies or management studies. So is cultural studies simply the study of culture?

We know what business is. And what management is.

But culture? Well, that’s an altogether different thing.

What is Culture?

The ambiguity of the concept of culture is notorious. Some anthropologists consider culture to be social behaviour. For others, it is not behaviour at all, but an abstraction from behaviour. To some, stone axes and pottery, dance and music, fashion and style constitute culture; while no material object can be culture to others.

Yet for still other, culture exists only in the mind.

One of the oldest definitions of culture was given by the British anthropologist, Sir E.B. Tylor (1832–1917) in the opening lines of his book, Primitive Cultures (1871):

Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

Here are a few more attempts to define culture …

American anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901–78)

Culture is that learned behavior of a society or a subgroup.

Raymond Williams (1921–88), one of the founders of cultural studies

Culture includes the organization of production, the structure of the family, the structure of institutions which express or govern social relationships, the characteristic forms through which members of the society communicate.

Clifford Geertz (b. 1926), Professor of Social Science at Princeton University

Culture is simply the ensemble of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

On the basis of these definitions, culture seems to be (almost) everything and cultural studies the study of (almost) everything!

What is the Subject of Cultural Studies?

Not surprisingly, cultural studies does not have a clearly defined subject area. Its starting point is a very broad and all-inclusive notion of culture that is used to describe and study a whole range of practices.

Apart from the ambiguous nature of its subject area, cultural studies also lacks its own principles, theories or methods.But it does have its own very distinct and distinctive history.If cultural studies does not have its own theories or methodology, how does it actually function?

Cultural studies functions by borrowing freely from social science disciplines and all branches of humanities and the arts. It appropriates theories and methodologies from

Almost any method from textual analysis, ethnography and psychoanalysis to survey research can be used to do cultural studies.

Cultural studies takes whatever it needs from any discipline and adopts it to suit its own purposes.

All this makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to agree on any basic definition of the nature of the beast that is cultural studies. Cultural studies is not one thing, it is many things. It straddles the intellectual and academic landscape from old established disciplines to new political movements, intellectual practices and modes of inquiry such as Marxism, post-colonialism, feminism and post-structuralism. It moves from discipline to discipline,

methodology to methodology, according to its own concerns and motivations.

This is why cultural studies is not a discipline. It is, in fact, a collective term for diverse and often contentious intellectual endeavours that address numerous questions, and consists of many different theoretical and political positions.

This is why cultural studies is often described as an “anti-discipline” – a mode of inquiry that does not subscribe to the straitjacket of institutionalized disciplines.

Characteristics of Cultural Studies

Just because cultural studies is practically impossible to define, it does not mean that anything can be cultural studies or cultural studies can be just anything. The history of cultural studies has provided it with certain distinguishable characteristics that can often be identified in terms of what cultural studies aims to do.

1. Cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their relation to power. Its constant goal is to expose power relationships and examine how these relationships influence and shape cultural practices.

2. Cultural studies is not simply the study of culture as though it was a discrete entity divorced from its social or political context. Its objective is to understand culture in all its complex forms and to analyse the social and political context within which it manifests itself.

3. Culture in cultural studies always performs two functions: it is both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action. Cultural studies aims to be both an intellectual and a pragmatic enterprise.

4. Cultural studies attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge, to overcome the split between tacit (that is, intuitive knowledge based on local cultures) and objective (so-called universal) forms of knowledge. It assumes a common identity and common interest between the knower and the known, between the observer and what is being observed.

5. Cultural studies is committed to a moral evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of political action. The tradition of cultural studies is not one of value-free scholarship but one committed to social reconstruction by critical political involvement. Thus cultural studies aims to understand and change the structures of dominance everywhere, but in industrial capitalist societies in particular.

How to do Cultural Studies: Semiotics

To understand how cultural studies is done, we need to equip ourselves with a few of its key concepts and principles.

A major concept in cultural studies is that of sign. A sign has three basic characteristics.

It has a concrete form.It refers to something other than itself.And it can be recognized by most people as a sign.…what the sign refers to, its mental association, is known as the signified.

This linguistic theory of the sign had its impact in the 1950s and 60s as the intellectual revolution known as Structuralism which affected anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, Marxism and much else, and remains vital to subsequent post-structuralism.

The theory of signs developed from the work of Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). He argued that language is a cultural phenomenon; and it generates meaning in a special way. Language produces meaning by a system of relationships, by producing a network of similarities and differences.

We understand the sign “girl” as … not-boy, not-woman, not-man, not-animal, not-deity.

The principles which govern linguistic systems also organize other type of communication systems, such as writing, film and fashion.

The way we dress, what we eat and how we socialize also communicate things about ourselves, and thus can be studied as signs.

Saussure’s followers developed a study of signs – semiotics – to establish the basic features of signs and explain the way they work in social life.

Signs, Codes and Texts

Signs are often organized as codes governed by explicit and implicit rules agreed upon by members of a culture or social group. A system of signs may thus carry encoded meanings and messages that can be read by those who understand the codes. A signifying structure composed of signs and codes is a text that can be read for its signs and encoded meanings.

Text can only be fully appreciated if seen in context.

When the social and power relationships are examined, the historical forces shaping the text are understood.

The combination of signs and significations is considered, and the general environment within which the text exists is recognized.

Readers are advised to consult Introducing Semiotics to orientate themselves in this crucial subject.

Representation of the Other

The process, and the products, that gives signs their particular meaning is representation. Through representation, abstract and ideological ideas are given concrete form. Thus the idea/sign “Indian” is given a specific ideological shape in the way “Indians” have been represented in colonial literature – in the novels of Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) and E.M. Forster (1879–1970) for example – as cowards, effeminate, untrustworthy.The representative entity outside the self – that is, outside one’s own gender, social group, class, culture or civilization – is the Other.

Broadly speaking, all non-Western cultures and civilizations are seen as the other of the West.Within Western society, women, homosexuals and immigrants are often seen as the other.

The most common representation of the Other is as the darker side, the binary opposite of oneself: we are civilized, they are barbaric; the colonists are hard-working, the natives are lazy; heterosexuals are good and moral, homosexuals are immoral and evil.

Discursive Analysis

The notion of discourse binds all these concepts into a neat package. A discourse consists of culturally or socially produced groups of ideas containing texts (which contain signs and codes) and representations (which describe power in relation to Others). As a way of thinking, a discourse often represents a structure of knowledge and power. A discursive analysis exposes these structures and locates the discourse within wider historical, cultural and social relations.

Let us apply these concepts to a concrete example – the restaurant in the photograph.What signs and codes does it contain? What culturally significant meaning is it communicating?

Decoding the Indian Restaurant

We can see that “Raj Balti” is located in an ordinary London street. The words “Take Away” tell us something of its status: a working-class restaurant in a working-class area. “Raj” in the name suggests a colonial link to India (it could also be the name of the owner!). The word “Balti” too has significance. But what, exactly?

To explore what our text is telling us, let us put “Raj Balti” in context – in relation to other Indian restaurants, their history and cultural significance in Britain. The Indian restaurant made its presence felt in Britain in the 1950s after the arrival of immigrants from the Subcontinent.

Indian food was then associated with “curry” and the Indian restaurant was at the bottom of the heap of desirable places to eat.It catered largely for working-class patrons.

Now the word “curry” itself has a history. It was a sought-after commodity in the Middle Ages. When the Mughal Emperor Jahangir granted permission to Sir Thomas Roe in 1605 to establish a company in India, it was specifically for exporting Indian curries and spices.

Four hundred years later, after colonization had done its work, and the Indian Others had been represented in a specific way, curry came to signify the lowest form of cheap food, equivalent to chips, which it has replaced as the most popular food item in Britain.

The Indian restaurant itself was seen and represented as a monolithic entity. All restaurants serving food from the vast continent of India were “Indian restaurants”. But “eating Indian” incorporates eating a diverse variety of distinctively different foods from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka; Punjabi, Mughal and South Indian dishes; “veg or non-veg”. But to the British, everything was “curry”. Until the 1970s, “going for a curry” had a special meaning. It was what the lads did when the pubs closed and they were looking for somewhere to vomit their intoxication.

The Indian restaurant was treated as though it was a colony, an extension of the “Raj”.For almost half-a-century, the Indian restaurants put up with the most uncouth, uncivil and ignorant behavior from their white patrons.