Cultural Studies and Its Four Goals

Amita C. Jani
Roll no. – 11
SEM – II
Paper no – X
Year – 2011
Topic: Cultural Studies and Its Four Goals

Submitted to Dr. Dilip Barad
Department of English,
Bhavnagar University.

What is cultural studies ? 

Cultural studies are not any kind of method that shows a difference between western and Indian! Because our views are different from the each and every thing and these different views to see a particular thing or study it, itself become a part of cultural studies. Cultural study is not something that we can say that this is culture, we can’t bind if by the culture or any words so that we have to forgot that this is good or bad. 

For example,

Language or food also a very much important in culture so that all are culture.

We can give the definition of cultural study that studying things as it is that is culture study. It is not like my study is better than you or this is not the limited view of looking things because culture study goes beyond all the traditional or it does not denied the popular cultural, but it is study. Cultural dimension is how different thing so if two things are shown to us than why there are different look at that things? So it is about likeness. The phenomenon of the culture is that happens every day not at sometime. Revival of interest is also a part of the cultural study so the difference of the two cultures has to be understood by everyone. 

The word “culture” itself is a so difficult to pin down, “Cultural Studies” is not so much discrete approach at all, but rather a set of practices. As Patrik Brantlinger has pointed out, cultural studies are not “a tightly coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda” but “loosely coherent group of tendencies issue and questions”. Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960s, cultural studies is composed of elements of Marxism, Post structuralism and Post Modernism, Feminism, Gender studies, film theory, urban studies, public policy, popular culture studies and post colonial studies : those field that concentrate on social and cultural forces that either create community or cause division and alienation. 

For example,

Drawing from Roland Bartner on the nature of literary language and  claude Levi-Strauss on anthropology, cultural studies was influenced by structuralism and post structuralism. Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruction” of the world distinct, like all his deconstructions or enabled cultural critics “to erase culture, classic and popular literals texts and literature and other cultural discourses that following Derrida may same textually”. 

The discipline of psychology has also entered the field of cultural studies. For example, Jacques Lacan’s psycho analytic language prompted emphasis upon language and power as symbolic systems. From Michel Foucault came the notion that power is a whole complex of forces, it is that which produces what happens. A tyrannical aristocrat does not just independently wield power but it is empowered by “Discourses” – accepted ways of thinking, writing and speaking – and practices that embody, exercise and amount to power. From punishment to sexual mares, Faucaults’ “genealogy”  of topics included many things excluded by traditional historians, from architectural blue prints for prisons to memories of “deviants” . Cultural studies also connected with Marxism, the new historicism, multiculturalism, post modernism, popular culture and post colonial studies.

 Cultural studies approaches generally share four goals : 

1.   Cultural studies transcend the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history :

Practiced in such journals as critical inquiry, representation and foundry, cultural studies involvs scrutinizing the cultural phenomenon of a text.

For example,

        Italian opera, a Latino telenivela, the architectural style of prisons, body piercing and drawing conclusion about the changes in textual phenomenon over time. Cultural studies is not necessarily about literature in the traditional sense or even about “art”.

        In their introduction to cultural studies, editors Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler emphasize  that the intellectual promise of cultural studies lies in its attempts “to cut across diverse social and political interests and address many of the struggles within the current scene”.

        Intellectual works are not limited by their own “borders as a single texts, historical problems or discipline and the critic’s own personal connections to what is being analyzed may also be describe their Delhousie Review manifesto that cultural studies practitioners are “resisting intellectuals” who what they do as “an emancipator project” because it erodes the traditional disciplinary divisions in most institutions of higher educationa. For students, this sometimes means that a professor might make his or her own political views part of the instruction, which of course can lead to problems. But this kind of criticism, like feminism, is an engaged rather than a detached activity. 

2.   Cultural studies are politically engadged :

Cultural critics see themselves as “oppositional” not only within their own disciplines but to many of the power structures of society at large. They question inequalities within power structures and seek to discover models for restructuring relationships among dominant and “mirority” or “subaltern” discourses. Because meaning and individual subjectivity are culturally constructed they can thus be reconstructed. Such a notion, taken to a philosophical extreme, denies the autonomy of the individual whether an actual person or a character in literature, a rebuttal of the traditional humanistic “Great Man” or “Great Book” theory and a relocation of Gestnetics and culture from the ideal realism of taste and sensibility, into the arena of a whole society’s everyday life as it is constructed.

3.   Cultural studies denies the separation of “high” and “law” or elite and popular culture :

You might hear someone remarks at the symphony or at art museum “I came here to get a little culture”. Being a “cultured” person used to mean being acquainted with “highbrow” art and intellectual pursuits. But is not culture also be found with a pair of tickets to a rock concert? Cultural critics today work to transfer the term popular, folk or urban. Following theorists Tean Baudrillard and Andreas Huyssen, cultural critics argue that after world war-II the distinction among high, low and mass culture collapsed and they cite other theory such as Pierre Bourdires and Dick Hebdige on how “Good taste” often only reflects prevailing social, economic and political power bases.

For example,

The images of India that were circulated during the calonial rule of the British Raj by writers like Rudyrd Kiplling seem innocent but reveal an entrenched imperialist argument for white superiority and worldwide domination of other races, especially Asians. But race alone was not the issue for the British Raj, money was also a deciding factor. Thus, drawing also upon the ideas of French historian Michel de Certeaul, cultural critics examined “The practice of everyday life”. Studying literature as an anthropologist would, as a phenomenon of culture, including a culture’s economy. Rather than determining which are the “best” works produced, cultural critics describe what is produced and how various production relate to one another. They aim to reveal the political economic reasons why certain cultural product is more valued at certain times.

Transgressing of boundries among discipline high and law can make cultural studies just plain fun.

For example,

A possible cultural studies research paper with the following title : The Birth of Caption Jack Sparrow : An Analysis”. For sources of Johnney Depp’s funky performance in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, the curse of the Black Pearl (2003). You could research cultural topics ranging from the trade economies of the sea two hundred years ago, to real pirates of the Caribbean such as Blackbeard and Henry Morgan, then on the Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver in Treasure  Island (1881).

4.  Cultural Studies analyses not only the cultural work, but also the means of production :

Marxist critics have long recognized the importance of such par literary questions as these : Who published his or her books and how are these books distributed? Who buys books? For that matter, who is literate and who is not? A well known analysis of literary production is Janice Radway’s study of the American romance novel and its readers, reading the romance women, patriarchy and popular literature, which demonstrates the textual effects of the publishing industry’s decisions about books that will minimize its financial risks. Another contribution is the collection reading in America, edited by Catny N. Davidson, which includes essays on literature and gender in colonical new England, urban magazine audiences in 18^th century New York city. The impact upon reading of such technical innovations as cheaper eye glasses, electric lights and trains, the book-of-the-month club and how writers and texts go through fluctuation of popularity and canonicity. These studies help us recognize that literature does not occur in a space separated from other concerns of over lives.

Cultural studies thus joins subjectively – that is, cultural in relation to individual lives – with engagement a direct approach to attacking social ills. Though cultural studies practitioners deny “humanism” or “the humanities” as universal categories, they strive reason”, which often resembles the goals and values of humanistic and democratic ideals. What difference does a cultural studies approach make for student? First of all, it is increasingly clear that by the year 2050 the United States will be demographers call a “Majority – Minority” population, that is the present numerical majority of “white”, “education” and  “Anglo-Americans” will be the minority, particularly with the dramatically increasing number of Latin / residents, mostly Mexican Americans. As Gerald Graff and James Phelan observe “It is a common prediction that the culture of the next century will put a premium on people’s ability to deal productively with conflict and cultural difference. To the question “Why teach the controversy?” they note that today a student can go from one class in which the values of western culture are prorated as hopelessly compromised by racism, sexism and homophobia. Professors can acknowledge these differences and encourage student to construct a conversation for themselves as “the most exciting part of their education”.

       All the culture taken as a equal culture in cultural studies like western culture, minority culture so we have to drive the tendency of mix culture and the acception of every culture is become an important thing in a cultural studies.