Cultural Studies

1. Cultural Studies

2. 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

3. 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.

4. Cultural studies involves scrutinizing the cultural phenomenon of a text and drawing conclusions about the changes in textual phenomena over time. Boundary 2

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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.”

8. Cultural critics aim to reveal the political, economic reasons why a certain cultural product is more baled at certain times than others. Johnny Depp’s funky performance in Disney’s 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

9. Finally, cultural studies analyzes not only the cultural work, but also the means of production. The book cover of Janice Radway’s Reading Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature.

10. Cultural studies joins subjectivity– that is, culture in relation to individual lives– with engagement, a direct approach to attacking social ills.

11. 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.

12. British Cultural Materialism 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 Materialism: Theory and Practice by Scott Wilson. Cultural Studies is referred to as “Cultural Materialism” in Britain.

13. 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!”

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. American Multiculturalism • African American Writers • Latina/o Writers • American Indian Literatures • Asian American Writers Henry Louis Gates uses the word “race” only in quotation marks.

17. 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,””signifying,” and “rapping.” W. E. B. Du Bois, circa 1907

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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 

21. 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”

22. 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. • Momaday’s 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.

23. 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.”

24. 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 Kingston’s 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/)

25. Asian American Writers • Chinese women make up the largest and most influential group of Asian American writers. • Jade Snow Wong’s female Bildungsroman was called Fifth Chinese Daughter. • Amy Tan’s 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 mother’s vignettes alternate with their daughters’ stories. Directed by Wayne Wang

26. 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.”

27. 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.

28. 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

29. 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.

30. Postcolonial Studies Edward Said’s 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.’”

31. 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.

32. 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. Bhabha’s 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 woman’s voice to rise up amidst the global social institutions that oppress her.

33. 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/ • <<文化研究月報>>。http://hermes.hrc.ntu.edu.tw/csa/ • M. butterfly : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkTMSm2dRZw