Paper Name : Cultural Studies

Assignment Topic : Five types of Cultural Studies

Name: Solanki Pintu V

Sem : 2

Roll No : 31

Enrollment No: PG15101037

Email: solankipintu1991@gmail.com

Submitted to :

               M.K. BHAVNAGAR UNIVERSITY

                           Department Of English

TO EVALUATE MY ASSIGNMENT

  v      Cultural Studies:

                Culture is the word which is not possible to describe in one word. Culture is something which reflects in your identity. To know more about culture, we have to study about it. “Culture” itself is so difficult to pin down and “Cultural Studies” is very much hard to define. “Cultural Studies” is not so much a discrete approach at all, but rather a set of practice.

    If we go deeper in meaning of cultural Studies than we find that Cultural Studies is an educational field of critical theory and literary criticism initially introduced by British Academies in 1964 and subsequently adopted by allied academics throughout the world.

    Cultural Studies is an academic discipline aiding cultural researchers who theorize about the forces from which the whole of humankind construct their daily lives. It is not a unified theory, but a diverse field of study encompassing many different approaches methods and academic properties.

v There are five types of Cultural studies. They are:

 1.     British Cultural Materialism

 2.     New Historicism

 3.      American Multiculturalism

 4.     Postmodernism and Popular culture

 5.     Post colonial Studies

(1)          British cultural Materialism

Cultural materialism is “a politicized form of historiography.”

                -Graham Holderness

     Cultural study is referred to as “cultural materialism in Britain. Matthew Arnold sought to redefine the “givens” of British Culture. Edward Burnett Tylor’s pioneering anthropolog1ical study ‘primitive Culture’

     “Culture or civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is a complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

   Cultural Materialism began in 1950s with the work of F.R.Leavis and heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold. Raymond Williams talks about attributes of working class and elite class. As Williams memorably states:

“There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.”

          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 annual the distinction between labor and leisure classes. 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.

     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 dialogic form of meaning within narrative and class struggle.

(2)          New Historicism

     New Historicism is a school of literary theory, first developed in 1980. The term ‘new historicism’ was created by the American critic Stephen greenbelts. New Historicism is a literary theory based on the idea that literature should be studied and interpreted within the context of both the history of the author and the history of the critic.

  Ø Definition

  “New Historicism is that it is a method based on the parallel reading of literary and nonliterary texts, usually of the same historical period”.

            New historicism refuses to ‘privilege’ the literary text: instead of a literary, foreground and a historical ‘background’ it envisages and practices a mode of study in which literary and nonliterary texts are given equal weight and constantly inform or interrogate each other.

       In the definition of new historicism given by the American critic Louis Montrose: He defines it as a combined interest in the textuality of history, the historicity of texts’. It involves’ an intensified willingness to read ‘all’ of the attention traditionally conferred only on literary texts’ so new historicism embodies’ a paradox, it is an approach to literature in which there is no privileging of the literary. A new historical essay will place the literary text within the ‘frame’ of a nonliterary text.

      New historicism has made its biggest mark on literary studies of the Renaissances 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

 First we know what is Multiculturalism?

	“Multicultural is involving or relating to several ethnic groups or cultural groups within a society. It includes people who have many different beliefs and customs. It could be designed for cultures of different races.”

      As a philosophy, multiculturalism began as part of the Pragmatism movement at the end of the 19th century in Europe and the United States. American multiculturalism was come into existence   in 1964 with the passing Civil Right Act.

    “Every American should understand Mexico from the point of view of the observer of the conquest and of the history before the conquest……”

       In 1972 Harvard University study by the geneticist Richard Lewontin found that most genetic differences were within racial groups, not between them. In the new country, if interracial trends continue, Americans will be puzzled by race distinctions 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 2050 Anglo-Americans will no longer be the majority, nor English necessarily the most widely spoken language.

     In literary field America existence with different culture which belongs to different idea about literature.  Cultural studies, regarding America with other culture and then their multi production of Literary Forms also. Cultural Studies regards four writers from different culture whose concerns with American Literary field.

 (a)African American writer

                                          

                          African American writers is widely pursued in American literature criticism from the recovery of the eighteenth century poets such as Phillies wealthy to the experimental novel of Toni Morison, In Shadow and Act 1964novel Ralph Ellison Argue that any ''viable theater of Negro American culture obligates us to fashion a more adequate theory of American culture as a what''.

(b)Latin/o Writer:-

          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 n the united states Mexican American are the largest and most influential of Latina/o Ethnicities in the united states.

(c)American Indian literature:-

                                               In pre dominantly oral cultures, stalling passes and religious beliefs, moral values, political codes and practical lesson of everyday life .For American Indians stories are a source of strength in the face of centuries of silencing by Euro American.

(d)Asian American writer:-

                            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.

(4)          Post modernism and popular culture:-

  Ø Postmodernism

    The term “postmodernism” first entered the philosophical lexicon in 1979, with the publication of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard. It’s a reaction against the philosophical assumptions, values, and intellectual worldview of the modern period of western history. Postmodernism questions everything rationalist European philosophy held to be true.

     Postmodernism possesses several elements which are necessary which given by Jean Baudrillard

·        Any Sign is empty

·        Virtual world

·        Status and Taboos

·        Hyperreal between the private and the public etc.

It also affected in

·        Building

·        Literature

·        Cinema

·        Painting

·        Music

·        Photography etc.

      In the English speaking world, modernism has a very specific meaning among most literature scholars, referring not to the “Modern Age” since the Enlightenment, or to “Modern” in the sense of contemporary, but to the period after World War-1, When T.S.Eliot, James Joyes, W.B.Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein were in their heyday. Postmodernism offers no suggestion of anything like a comprehensive substitute world- view. Postmodernism means to make a clean break with the past in the sense that the past and its way of looking at the world become the subject of satirical, often sarcastic “play” with historical figures texts, and ideologies. New literature, art, and culture after world war 2 created, Analyzes of those is known as Postmodernism. It is opposed modernism.

  Ø Popular Culture

       Popular culture is the entirely 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.

          Once we define the term and then it becomes very easy to understand this term as it is also known as Pop-Culture so The term ‘Popular Culture' was coined in the 19th century or earlier. Traditionally, the term has denoted the education and general “culturedness” of the lower classes, as opposed to the “official culture” and higher education emanated by the dominant classe.The stress in the distinction from “official culture” became more pronounced towards the end of the 19th century, a usage that became established by the interbellum period.

          Popular culture is often viewed as being trivial and dumbed 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.

  Ø There are four main types of popular culture studies analyses like:

·        Production Analysis

·        Textual Analysis

·        Audience Analysis

·        Historical Analysis

       So with the help of these an individual can analyze the types as production analysis deals with the production and while on the other hand Textual analysis deals with the text and on the other side we can also say that the third one is audience analysis which has more importance in the popular culture because Audience remains at the center in this kind of analysis while last but not the list kind is Historical analysis which plays vital role in the popular culture or so called Pop-culture.

(5)  Post colonial Studies:

                Post colonialism refers to a historical phase undergone by third world countries after the decline of colonialism. Many third world countries focus on both colonialism and the changes created in post colonial writers are the attempts both to resurrect their culture and to combat the preconception about their culture. At first glance post colonial studies would seem to be a matter of history and political science rather than literary criticism.

                Post colonial literary theorists study the English language within this politicized context, especially those writings that developed at the colonial front such as works by Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, Jean Rhys or Jamaica Kincaid.  Earlier figures such as Shakespeare’s Caliban are re-read today in their new world contexts. Said concept of orientalism was an important touchstone to post colonial studies, as he described the stereotypical discourse about the East as constructed by the event.

                Homi. K. Bhabha’s post colonial theory involves analysis of nationality, ethnicity and politics with poststructuralist ideas of identity and indeterminacy, defining post colonial identities as shifting, hybrid constructions. We can see some powerful conflicts arising from the colonial past in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, for example which deconstructs the history of modern India.

                Among the most important figures in post colonial feminism is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who examines the effects of political independence upon “subaltern” women in the Third World. Spivak’s subaltern studies reveal how female subjects are silenced by the dialogue between the male dominated west and the male dominated east offering little hope for the subaltern women’s voice to rise up admits the global social institution that opposes her.

                “No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive”

TO EVALUATE MY ASSIGNMENT