Assignment paper : 8 Cultural studies

Hello Readers,

"Maharaja Krushnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University"

• Name : Sanjay A. Dharaiya

• Course : M.A.

• Sem : 2

• Year : 2019-2020

• Roll : 24

• Enrollment : 2069108420200009

• Email id : dharaiy9@gmail.com

• Paper 8 : Cultural Studies

• Topic : Analysis of five types of Cultural Studies

• Total word : 2115

• Submitted to : S.B. Gardi Department of English MKB University

Analysis of five types of Cultural Studies


What is Cultural studies ?


Cultural studies is an innovative interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that investigates the ways in which “culture” creates and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power. Cultural Studies traces the relationships among aesthetic, anthropological, and political economic aspects of cultural production and reproduction. Cultural Studies relies on interdisciplinary research on the formation of knowledge, power, and difference. Cultural Studies scholars and practitioners explore constructions of race, class, ability, citizenship, gender, and sexuality in their effort to understand the structures and practices of domination and resistance that shape contemporary societies.


Types of Cultural Studies :

Culture is a word that is impossible to describe in one word. Culture is something that reflects on your identity. To know more about culture, we have to study about it. The "culture" itself is so hard to decipher and the "cultural studies" are so difficult to determine. “Cultural studies” is not so much a specific approach, but rather a set of practices.

  If we go deep into the meaning of cultural studies, we find that Cultural Studies is an educational field of critical theory and literary criticism that was started by British academies in 1964 and subsequently adopted by fellow academics around the world. Cultural studies is an academic discipline that assists cultural researchers, who provide theories about the forces through which the whole of humanity builds their daily lives. It is not a unified theory, but a study of a variety of fields incorporating different approach methods and educational properties.

  "The culture of a nation lives in the heart and in the lives of its people."

  Cultural Studies: Feminist theory, political theory, social theory, history, philosophy, literature, literature theory, media theory, film / video studies, communication studies, political economy, translation studies, museum studies and art history, to study cultural events in different societies. Thus, cultural studies seek to understand how meaning is generated, disseminated, and produced from the social, political and economic spheres within a given culture. Cultural studies, which are made up of elements of structural post-structuralism and postmodernism: areas that focus on the social and cultural forces that make up a community or cause differentiation and instability.

  The term cultural learning was used by Richard Hogart in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Studies or CS. Cultural studies transcends the limits of certain disciplines, such as literary criticism or history. Cultural studies rejects the division of "high" and "low" or elite and popular culture. One is culturally politicized. Cultural studies have not only analyzed cultural work, but also the meaning of production.

  Although cultural studies practitioners reject "humanism" or "humanitarians" as global classes, they strive for what they call the "social cause" that often resembles the goals and values ​​of humanitarian and democratic ideals.



Five Types of Cultural Studies :-


(1) British Cultural Materialism

(2) New Historicism

(3) American Multiculturalism

(1) African American Writers

(2) Latina/o Writers

(3) American Indian Literatures

(4)  Asian American Writers

(4) Postmodernism and Popular Culture

  (5)  Postcolonial Studies


So let's discuss about details,


(1) British Cultural Materialism :


Cultural materialism in literary theory and cultural studies traces its origins to the work of left-leaning literary critic Raymond Williams. Cultural studies in Britain is known as "cultural materialism" and has a long tradition.

  "Cultural materialism is a school of thought in anthropology."

  Cultural materialism says that the best way to understand human culture is to examine the physical conditions. Cultural materialism analyzes on the basis of critical theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. In the next 19th century, Matthew Arnold sought to redefine "given" British culture. The post-war methods of cultural literary criticism portray left-leaning trendy cultural materialism, aesthetically, formally acknowledged, ant historical historiography and politicized. Cultural materialism is also about culture or membership. cultural studies emerged as a theoretical movement in the early 1980s, with a new historical historiography, an American approach to modern early literature, with which it has a very common area. The term was coined by Williams, who used leftist culture to describe theoretical fusion and Marxist analysis, cultural materialists deal with specific historical historical documents and try to analyze and recreate the zoologist of the political movement in history. Ironically the threat to his project was mass culture. Raymond Williams lamented the richness of honest forms of life. Williams viewed culture as a "productive process", often referring to the resources of production and cultural materialism that he referred to as "residual", "evocative" and "anti" cultural elements that followed in the tradition of Herbert Marcuse. Antonio Gramsci and others expand the class-based analysis of traditional Marxism, with an additional focus on marginalizing cultural materialists. cultural physicists analyze the process by which hegemonic forces in society use texts such as Shenopier and Us Stein, of historical significance and use them in an attempt to validate or imply certain values ​​on cultural fantasy. The political Shakespearean Jonathan Dolimore and Alan Sinfield writers have made a significant impact in the development of this movement and his book is considered to be a semi-text. They have identified four defining characteristics of cultural materialism as a theoretical device.


(2) New Historicism

Returning to historical scholarship scholarship, the new historical historiography deals with additional literary letters, letters, diaries, films, paintings, medical remedies - which reveal anti-historical historical tensions in the text. New historians look for "surprising coincidences" that can cross ordinary, historical, historical and cultural lines in the metaphor, ceremony, or orrow of popular culture. The new historicism rejected the period of history in favor of the ingathering of history through the interplay of forms of authority only. The way in which New or Tahitianism expresses literature and sometimes the way literature is constructed focuses on disguising power relations in the social context, often involving the connection between literary work and other types of texts. Literature is often shown to "negotiate" the interests of conflicting powers. The new historical historiography has made its greatest place on literary studies of the Renaissance and Romantic period and has revised the pace of literature as a privileged, extraordinary article. Much of the new historiography focuses on the margins of subjects known as witches, lunatics, heresies, secular and political prisoners.

  What does Jonathan mean when he names the flying island on Gulliver's Travels Third Journey? It is a question about the political reality of the British Empire, on which the sun never set any ideology from the previous century. Two paths to cultural development in modern Britain led to a past and ordered a feudal hierarchy or a culture of listening to the community in the past, which acted as a defense to the past in its sacred work.


(3) American Multiculturalism :

Multiculturalism is related to communities with multiple cultures. The term is used in two broadly descriptive or informative ways. It usually refers to the simple fact of cultural diversity. It usually applies to the demographic composition of a particular location, sometimes at the organization level. Multiculturalism centers on the idea of ​​political philosophy as a way to respond to cultural and religious differences. It is closely associated with "politics of identity", "politics of difference" and "politics of belief." Multiculturalism can refer to demographic facts, specific sets of philosophical ideas, or specific approaches by governments or institutions toward different populations. The term multicultural is often used in the context of western states.

  America has a long silent history of multiculturalism. In 1965, riots of the Vu લtas race attracted worldwide attention. All African American students in the South attend different schools and most of the industries were still discriminated against. International marriage was still illegal in many states. Nearly half a century later, the evolving identities of racial and ethnic groups have not claimed the place of mainstream American life, but have challenged the notion of race; Social sciences are increasingly viewed as constructs invited by whites to assign social status and privilege, without scientific relevance. Unlike sex, for which there are X and Y chromosomes, there is no genetic marker in the breed. for the last fifty years that Mexican Americans have been in a rush to the United States, immigration patterns indicate that by the year 2050, Anglo-Americans will not be the majority, or English will be the most widely spoken language. The census administrators of the 2000s faced a number of problems with the assignment of their ethnic categories to people of many races with whom no one could identify.


(4) Postmodernism and Popular Culture :

Modernism describes a series of conceptual frameworks and ideologies that are generally attributed to modernist notions of modernism and knowledge and science, such as materialism, reality, positivism, formalism, structuralism, and reductionism. Postmodernist approaches criticize the possibility of real-world objective knowledge, and consider ways in which social dynamics, such as power and hierarchy, influence the world's human perceptions on the way knowledge is constructed and used. In contrast to modernist examples, postmodern modern thought often emphasizes idealism, creativity, relativism, pluralism and skepticism in its approaches to knowledge and understanding. It is not a philosophical movement in itself, but does include many philosophical and critical methods that can be considered 'postmodern'; Most familiar include feminism and post-structuralism. In other words, modernism is not a method of philosophy, but rather a way of interacting with traditional ideas and methods in the traditional ways that stray from pre-established super-structural modes. This has led to difficulties in deciding what northern modernity really means or should mean, and is therefore a complex and controversial concept, which remains under discussion. The idea of ​​pre-modern modernity, which dominated the literature, art and intellectual scene of the 1960s, gained momentum until the 1950s. The origin of pseudo-modernism is generally accepted as a concept of late-nineteenth-century art, as the response to different heritage continued to expand into other disciplines, as a response to modern art and to modernity in the early twentieth century.

The term "popular culture" was coined in the 19th century or solely by vices, perspectives, attitudes, images and other events. Abbreviated from the "pop" for the popular culture id connected to our society and our daily lives. Prior to the 1960's, there was a time when popular culture was not practicing academics, but when it was just a popular culture, comic books, television films, advertising popular music and computer cyber culture were the factors that influenced the culture of ethnicity, race, gender. access was cessed. , Class, age, region and sexuality are shaped in popular culture.

Sometimes popular culture can end, and it can reproduce a literary work that is impossible without original lessons without references to many levels of popular culture. Here we will add one more point to the popular culture reconstruction of works like Frankenstein, which may open it up for unexpected new interpretations.



(5)  Postcolonial Studies :

The collapse of colonization indicates the historical historical phase carried out by third world countries. Many third world countries focus on colonialism, and the changes created by post-colonial writers are both attempts to revitalize their culture and fight against their culture's preconceptions. At first glance post-colonial studies will be the subject of literary criticism in history and political science. post-colonial literary theorists study the English language in this political context, especially the writings that developed in the colonial front such as works by Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, Jean Rhys or Jamaica Kincaid. Previous figures such as Shakespeare's Liban are re-read today in their New World context. The notion of orientalism was an important touchstone for post-colonial studies, as they described the racist discourse about the East as created by the event.

  Homi K. Bhabha's post-colonial theory defines colonial identity as a migratory, hybrid construction, with poststructuralist ideas of identity and uncertainty in the analysis of nationality, ethnicity and politics. We see some powerful conflicts arising from the colonial past in Rushdie's Midnight Children, for example, which decontextualizes the history of modern India. one of the most important figures after colonial feminism is Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, who examines the effects of political freedom on third-world "subletter" women. Spivak's sublettern studies show how female subjects are silenced by a dialogue between male-dominated Westerns and male-dominated pretests, suggesting that subalterns have little hope of raising the voices of women who oppose them.


Conclusion :

As we all now know about Culture Studies, Post-Culture Studies and the four goals and types of Cultural Studies and represent that reality and culture, etc., and special ideas, customs, arts, societies, etc.