Cultural Studies

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Cultural Studies
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• Roland Barthes on the nature of literary language
  and Claude Lévi-Strauss on anthropology, cultural
  studies was influenced by structuralism and post
  structuralism
• Patrick Brantlinger pointed out, cultural studies
  is not a tightly coherent unified movement with
  a fixed agenda, but a loosely coherent group of
  tendencies, issues and questions.

Roland Barthes
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Definitions of Cultural Studies

• First, cultural studies transcends the confines
  of a particular discipline such as literary
  criticism or history.
• Henry Giroux said that cultural studies
  practitioners are resisting intellectuals who
  see what they do as an emancipatory project
  because it erodes the traditional disciplinary
  divisions in most institutions of higher
  education.

Critical Inquiry, one of the most influential
journals about cultural studies.
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• Cultural studies involves scrutinizing the
  cultural phenomenon of a text and drawing
  conclusions about the changes in textual
  phenomena over time.

Boundary 2
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• Second, cultural studies is politically engaged.
  Cultural critics see themselves as
  oppositional, not only within their own
  disciplines but to many of the power structures
  of society at large.
• Meaning and individual subjectivity are
  culturally constructed , they can be thus
  reconstructed.

The picture of the online journal Representations
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Pierre Bourdieu, one of the theorists who
explores how good taste often reflects social,
economic, and political power bases.

• Third, cultural studies denies the separation of
  high and low or elite and popular (mass)
  culture.
• Cultural critics today work to transfer the term
  culture to include mass culture, whether popular,
  folk, or urban

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• Rather than determining which are the best
  works produced, cultural critics describe what is
  produced and how various productions relate to
  one another.

Drawing upon the ideas of Michel de Certeau,
cultural critics examine the practice of
everyday life.
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• Cultural critics aim to reveal the political,
  economic reasons why a certain cultural product
  is more baled at certain times than others.
• Johnny Depps funky performance in Disneys
  Pirates of the Caribbean The course of the Black
  Pearl (2003) real pirates of the Caribbean such
  as Blackbeard and Henry Morgan

Henry Morgan was a hard-drinking, hard-fighting
charismatic badass privateer
Blackbeard the pirate
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• Finally, cultural studies analyzes not only the
  cultural work, but also the means of production.

The book cover of Janice Radways Reading
Romance Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature.
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• Cultural studies joins subjectivity that is,
  culture in relation to individual lives with
  engagement, a direct approach to attacking social
  ills.

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Five Types of Cultural Studies

• British Cultural Materialism
• New Historicism
• American Multiculturalism
• Postmodernism and Popular Culture
• Postcolonial Studies

Poster for The Bride of Frankenstein (1935),
directed by James Whale.
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British Cultural Materialism

• Cultural materialism began in earnest in the
  1950s with the work of F. R. Leavis, heavily
  influenced by Matthew Arnolds analyses of
  bourgeois culture.

Cultural Materialism Theory and Practice by
Scott Wilson. Cultural Studies is referred to as
Cultural Materialism in Britain.
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New Historicism

• As a return to historical scholarship, new
  historicism concerns itself with extraliterary
  matters letters, diaries, films, paintings,
  medical treatises looking to reveal opposing
  historical tensions in a text.

Frederic Jameson insisted, Always historicize!
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• New historicists seek surprising coincidences
  that may cross generic, historical, and cultural
  lines in borrowings of metaphor, ceremony, or
  popular culture.

From Hayden White, cultural studies practitioners
learned how figurative relationships between
present and past tropes are shaped by historical
discourses.
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For Michel Foucault, history was not the working
out of universal ideas.

• The new historicism rejects the periodization of
  history in favor of ordering history only through
  the interplay of forms of power.

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American Multiculturalism

1. African American Writers
2. Latina/o Writers
3. American Indian Literatures
4. Asian American Writers

Henry Louis Gates uses the word race only in
quotation marks.
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African American Writers

• African American Writing often displays a
  folkloric conception of a humankind a double
  consciousness, as W.E.B. DuBois called it,
  arising from bicultural identity irony, parody,
  tragedy and bitter comedy in negotiating this
  ambivalence attacks upon presumed white cultural
  superiority a naturalistic focus on survival
  and inventive reframing of language itself, as in
  language games like jiving,sounding,signifyin
  g, and rapping.

W. E. B. Du Bois, circa 1907
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African American Writers

• The Harlem Renaissance (1918-1937) signaled a
  tremendous upsurge in black culture, with an
  especial interest in primitivist art the
  so-called New Negroes.

• Langston Hughes was a prominent member of the
  Harlem Renaissance -- a movement during the 1920s
  of black writers and intellectuals who engaged in
  intense debate regarding the place of the African
  American in American life, and on the role and
  identity of the African-American artist.
• Pictured here are Langston Hughes far left with
  left to right Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin
  Frazier, Rudolph Fisher and Hubert T. Delaney, on
  a Harlem rooftop on the occasion of a party in
  Hughes' honor, 1924.

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Latina/o Writers

• Spanish-speaking people in the United States.
• The majority of Mexican residents stayed in
  place, transformed into Mexican Americans with a
  stroke of the pen.
• One of the primary tropes in Latina/o studies has
  to do with the entire concept of borders-borders
  between nations, between cultures and within
  cultures.

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Latina/o Writers

• Code-switching is a border phenomenon studied
  by linguists. Speakers who code-switch move back
  and forth between Spanish and English, for
  instance, or resort to the Spanglish of border
  towns.
• Liminality, or betweeness is characteristic of
  postmodern experience but also has special
  connotations for Latina/o.

On Edge The Crisis of Contemporary Latin
American Culture   By George Yudice , Jean
Franco , Juan Flores 
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American Indian Literatures

• In predominantly oral cultures, storytelling
  passes on 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-Americans.
• American Indian is often preferred by Indians
  over Native American

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American Indian Literatures

• Two types of Indian literature have evolved as
  fields of study.
• Traditional Indian literature includes tales,
  songs, and oratory.
• Mainstream Indian literature refers to works
  written by Indians in English in the traditional
  genres of fiction, poetry and autobiography.
• Momadays House Made of Dawn(1968), which won the
  Pulitzer Prize, and his memoir, The way to Rainy
  Mountain(1969), beginning a renaissance of Indian
  fiction and poetry.

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Asian American Writers

• 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 literature can be said to have
  begun around the turn of the 20th century,
  primarily with autobiographical paper son
  stories and confessions.

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Asian American Writers

• Paper son stories were carefully fabricated for
  Chinese immigrant men to make the authorities
  believe that their New World sponsors were really
  their fathers.
• Asian American autobiography inherited these
  descriptive strategies, as Maxine Hong Kingstons
  The Woman Warriors Memoirs of Girlhood Among
  Ghosts(1976) illustrates.
• Identity may be individually known within but is
  not always at home in the outward community.

Maxine Hong Kingston has won the National Book
Critics Circle Award (for /The Woman Warrior/)
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Asian American Writers

• Chinese women make up the largest and most
  influential group of Asian American writers.
• Jade Snow Wongs female Bildungsroman was called
  Fifth Chinese Daughter.
• Amy Tans Joy Luck Club (1989) traces the lives
  of four Chinese women immigrants starting in
  1949, when they form their mah-jongg club and
  swap stories of life in China these mothers
  vignettes alternate with their daughters stories.

Directed by Wayne Wang
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Postmodernism and Popular Culture

• Postmodernism questions everything rationalist
  European philosophy held to be true.
• Beginning in the mid-1980s, postmodernism emerged
  in art, architecture, music, film, literature,
  sociology, communications, fashion and other
  field.
• Postmodernism 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 destructured, decentered,
  dehumanized subject.

Jean-François Lyotard argues that stability is
maintained through grand narratives.
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Postmodernism and Popular Culture

• Postmodernism argues 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.

Jean Baudrillard describes the simulacra of
postmodern life which have taken the place of
real objects.
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Postmodernism and Popular Culture

• They assess how such factors as ethnicity, race,
  gender, class, age, region and sexuality are
  shaped by and reshaped in popular culture.
• There are four main types of popular culture
  analysis production analysis, textual analysis,
  audience analysis, and historical analysis.

These analyses seek to get beneath the surface
(denotative) meanings and examine more implicit
(connotation) social meanings
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Postmodernism and Popular Culture

• Production analysis asks the following kinds of
  questions who owns the media? Who creates texts
  and why? Under what constraints?
• Textual analysis examines how specific works of
  popular culture create meanings.
• Audiences analysis asks how different groups of
  popular culture consumers, or users, make similar
  or different sense of the same texts.
• Historical analysis investigates how these other
  three other three dimensions change over time.

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Postcolonial Studies
Edward Saids concept of Orientalism was an
important touchstone to postcolonial studies.

• Postcolonialism refers to a historical phase
  undergone by the Third World countries after the
  decline of colonialism.
• others constructs them based upon Western
  anxieties and preoccupations. Said sharply
  critiques the Western images of the Oriental as
  irrational, depraved (fallen), child-like,
  different, which has allowed the West to
  define itself as rational, virtuous, mature,
  normal.

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• Many Third World writers focus on both
  colonialism and the changes created in a
  postcolonial culture.

Frantz Fanon drew upon his own horrific
experiences in French Algeria to deconstruct
emerging national regimes.
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Postcolonial Studies
Homi K. Bhabha says that what drives white
people to take over the world and spread their
way of doing things is not power or even wanting
to get rich, but their screwed-up way of looking
at the world.

• Homi K. Bhabhas postcolonial theory involves
  analysis of nationality, ethnicity, and politics
  with poststructuralist ideas of identity and
  indeterminacy, defining postcolonial identities
  as shifting, hybrid construction.
• Among postcolonial feminism is Gayatri
  Chakravorty Spivak, who examines the effects of
  political independence upon subaltern or
  subproletarian women in the Third World.
• Reveal how female subjects are silenced by the
  dialogue between the male-dominated West and
  East, offering little hope for the subaltern
  womans voice to rise up amidst the global social
  institutions that oppress her.

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Works Cited

• Munns, Jessica and Gita, Rajan. Eds. A Cultural
  Studies Reader History, Theory, Practice. London
  Longman, 1995.
• Ono A. Kent. Ed. A Companion to Asian American
  Studies. Malden Blackwell Press, 2005.
• Schwarz, Henry and Sangeeta, Ray. Eds. A
  Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Malden, MA
  Blackwell Press, 2000.
• Power, Dominic and Scott, Allen J. Eds. Cultural
  Industries and the Production of Culture. New
  York Routledge, 2004.
• Representations. http//www.representations.org/
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• M. butterfly http//www.youtube.com/watch?vwkTM
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