Name : Riddhi H. Rathod
Roll no : 17
Paper : 205 ( Cultural Studies)
Topic : Five types of cultural studies
Sem. : 3
Email i'd. :- riddhirathod1213@gmail.com
Submitted to: Smt S.B. Gardi Department
Five types of cultural studies
- What is culture?
It is very difficult to define the word ‘culture’ because it is an umbrella term. The word culture comes from the words ‘culture’ and ‘colere’. It means ‘to cultivate’. It also means to honor and to protect. By the 19th century in Europe its meaning was different; it meant the habits, customs and tastes of the upper classes.
- Five types of cultural studies:
Cultural studies were divided into five parts;
So let's take an introduction on five types of cultural studies.
1 British cultural Materialism
Cultural studies are referred to as cultural materialism in Britain. Matthew Arnold redefined the ‘givens’ of British culture.
- “There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing other people as masses”
-Williams
Britain has two trajectories for culture
1- First leads to past culture preserver
2- Second leads to future
Althusser insisted that ideology was ultimately in control of the people, that the main function of ideology was to produce the society’s existing relations of production and that function is even carried out in literary texts.
- Some cultural materialists are are:
1) Walter Benjamin
2) Leni Riefenstahl
3) Lukas
- Cultural materialists also turned to
Humanistic
Spiritual insight.
Cultural materialists also turned to the more humanized and even spiritual insights of the great students of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, Russian formalism Bakhtn, especially his amplification of the dialog form of communal, individual and social.
2) New historicism:
“If the 1970s could be called the age of deconstruction some hypothetical survey of late 20th century criticism might well characterize the 1980s as marking the Return to History, or perhaps the recovery of the referent.”
New historians seek “surprising coincidences “that may cross.”
Stephen Greenbelt coined the word New Criticism. “New historicism" explains the word “Laputa”from Gulliver’s travels.
“Laputa means the whore” it is described as a gigantic trope of the female body.
The “New Historicism” movement is led by Stephen Greenbelt. It refers to the historical nature of the text and textual nature of the history. It is different from the New Criticism in which theories like deconstruction and structuralism give importance to the linguistic approach of the text. On the other hand, new historicism connects the text with its non-literary, historical text and breaks down the distinction between them. It draws inspiration from Michel Foucault’s discourse and power that holds that we find the active reflection of the power relation of that time in the text and it makes and remakes the meaning. New historicism is less a theory for interpreting text and more a set of shared assumptions that history and text are intimately interconnected.
New Historicism focuses on the way literature expresses-and sometimes disguises-power relations at work in the social context in which the literature was produced, often this involves making connections between a literary work and other kinds of texts. Literature is often shown to “negotiate” conflicting power interests. 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:
In 1965 the Watts race riots drew worldwide attention. They were given rights equal to Whites. Leon Botstein emphasized on reading classical and traditional books Bernard Diaz says….
“Every American should understand Mexico from the point of view of the observers of the conquest and of the history before the conquest. No American should graduate from college without a framework of knowledge that includes at least some construct of Asian history, Latin American history, or African history.”
American political history and we witness bloodshed and atrocities in the name of racism. Fifty years later, if we look at the matter now, we find the idea of race and ethnicity has evolved over the years. Social scientists believe that “race” is the whites’ construct rather than scientifically approved, to assign their privilege and dominance over the black. Interracial marriage is so widespread that the bicultural or multicultural American is the norm rather than exception. With the huge influx of Mexican American, it is predicted that in 2050, English will no longer be the national language and Anglo-American a majority.
- American Multiculturalism includes:
- African American Writers
- American Indian Writers
- Latin Writers
- Asian American writers
- African American writers
African American writers' subjects are multiple and they write about folk. Their writings target humankind. They are with “double consciousness.”
2. Latin writers:-
They belong originally to Mexico. Latina/o Writer Hispanic Mexican American, Puerto Rican Nuyarican Chicane may be Huizhou or Maya. Which names to use/ the choice after has political implications.
We will use the term'' Latina/o to indicate a broad sense of Ethnicity among Spanish speaking people. The United States Mexican American are the largest and most influential of Latina/o Ethnicity in the United states.
3.American Indian Literature:
They are original American Red Indians. In predominantly oral cultures, stalling passes and 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 American.
4.Asian American Writers
They are Asian immigrants Chinese women make up the targets and most influential group of 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 the1950s.Edward said has written of Orientals, or the tendency to objectify and exoticism Asian, and their work has sought to respond to such stereotypes Asian American writer include Chinese Japanese , Korean Filipino, Vietnamese, Asian , Polynesian and many other peoples of as a the Indian subcontinent , and pacific.
The idea that American identity is vested in a commitment to core values expressed in the American Creed and the ideals of Exceptionalism raises a fundamental concern that has been the source of considerable debate. Can American identity be meaningfully established by a commitment to core values and ideals among a population that is becoming increasingly heterogeneous? Since the 1960s, scholars and political activists, recognizing that the “melting pot” concept fails to acknowledge that immigrant groups do not, and should not, entirely abandon their distinct identities, embraced multiculturalism and diversity. Racial and ethnic groups maintain many of their basic traits and cultural attributes, while at the same time their orientations change through marriage and interactions with other groups in society. The American Studies curriculum serves to illustrate this shift in attitude. The curriculum, which had for decades relied upon the “melting pot” metaphor as an organizing framework, began to employ the alternative notion of the “American mosaic.” Multiculturalism, in the context of the “American mosaic,” celebrates the unique cultural heritage of racial and ethnic groups, some of whom seek to preserve their native language and lifestyle.
(4) Postmodernism and popular culture:
“Postmodernism” is a term usually applied to the period in literature and literary theory since the 1960s, though some regard postmodernism as the prevailing intellectual mood since World War-2 ended in 1945. Numerous Philosophers, critics, and belletristic writers can be seen as precursors or early representatives of the cultural and aesthetic approach that would come to be called postmodernism, among them Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Bretch, Jorge Luis Borges, and Roland Barthes. Postmodernism is characterized by a strikingly radical skepticism toward all aspects of western culture, the impetus for which many practitioners of postmodern theory trace back to the writings of the nineteenth century philosopher Frederic Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s spiritual descendants seek, in so many words, a new kind of meaning independent of the prevailing cultural “myth” of objective truth.
Post modernism borrows from modernism disillusionment with the givens of society; a penchant for irony. The self-conscious “play “within the work of art: fragmentation and ambiguity; and a restructured, debentured, dehumanized subject.
Recently the notions of met modernism, post-postmodernism and the ‘death of postmodernism’ have been increasingly widely debated in his introduction to a special issue of the journal 20th century literature titled ‘After postmodernism’ that “declarations of postmodernism’s demise have become a critical commonplace”. The exhibition postmodernism- style and subversion 1970-1990 at the Victoria and Albert Museums was billed as the first however to document postmodernism as a historical movement.
Popular culture divideded
Popular culture is studied after 1960s popular culture reshaped……..
Popular culture…
1) Ethnicity
2) Race
3) Gender
4) Class
5) Age
6) Region
7) Sexuality.
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. Heavily influenced by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of the society.
Popular culture is often viewed as being trivial and dumber 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.
5) Post colonial studies:
Post colonialism is a historical phase undergone by third world countries after the decline of colonialism, post colonial theories.
Post colonial literary theorists study the English language within the political zed context.
Gayatri Chakravorly Spivak is postcolonial feminist who examined the effects of political independence upon “subaltern” sub proletarian women in the Third World. The critical nature of postcolonial theory entails destabilizing Western ways of thinking, therefore creating space for the subaltern or marginalized groups, to speak and produce alternatives to dominant discourse. Often, the term post colonialism is taken literally, to mean the period of time after colonialism. This however, is problematic because the ‘once-colonized world’ is full of “contradictions, of half-finished processes, of confusions, of hybridist, and liminalities'' .In other words, it is important to accept the plural nature of the word post colonialism, as it does not simply refer to the period after the colonial era. By some definitions, post colonialism can also be seen as a continuation of colonialism, albeit through different or new relationships concerning power and the control/production of knowledge. Due to these similarities, it is debated whether to hyphenate post colonialism as to symbolize that we have fully moved beyond colonialism.
Conclusion:
Thus, in cultural studies we can find five types of cultural studies. Which helped to recognize the different cultures with the different communities and histories.
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