What is Cultural Studies
Cultural studies combines a variety of politically engaged
critical approaches drawn including semiotics, Marxism, feminist theory,
ethnography, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, social theory, political
theory, history, philosophy, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies,
communication studies, political economy, translation studies, museum studies
and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies and
historical periods. Cultural Studies Cultural studies seeks to understand how meaning is
generated, disseminated, contested, bound up with systems of power and control,
and produced from the social, political and economic spheres within a particular
social formation or conjuncture. Important theories of cultural hegemony and
agency have both influenced and been developed by the cultural studies
movement, as have many recent major communication theories and agendas, such as
those that attempt to explain and analyze the cultural forces related and
processes of globalization.
Cultural studies is a field of theoretically, politically,
and empirically engaged cultural analysis that concentrates upon the political
dynamics of contemporary culture, its historical foundations, defining traits,
conflicts, and contingencies. Cultural Studies Cultural studies researchers generally
investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated
with or operating through social phenomena, such as ideology, class structures,
national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation.
Cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete
entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices
and processes.
The field of cultural studies encompasses a range of
theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. Although distinct
from the discipline of cultural anthropology and the interdisciplinary field of
ethnic studies, cultural studies draws upon and has contributed to each of
these fields.
Cultural studies was initially developed by British Marxist
academics in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and has been subsequently taken
up and transformed by scholars from many different disciplines around the
world. Cultural studies is avowedly and even radically interdisciplinary and
can sometimes be seen as antidisciplinary. A key concern for cultural studies
practitioners is the examination of the forces within and through which socially
organized people conduct and participate in the construction of their everyday
lives.
During the rise of neo-liberalism in Britain and the US,
cultural studies both became a global movement, and attracted the attention of
many conservative opponents both within and beyond universities for a variety
of reasons. What is Cultural Studies Cultural Studies Some left-wing critics associated particularly with Marxist forms
of political economy also attacked cultural studies for allegedly overstating
the importance of cultural phenomena. While cultural studies continues to have
its detractors, the field has become a kind of a worldwide movement of students
and practitioners with a raft of scholarly associations and programs, annual
international conferences and publications. Distinct approaches to cultural studies
have emerged in different national and regional contexts.
In the US, prior to the emergence of British Cultural
Studies, several versions of cultural analysis had emerged largely from
pragmatic and liberal-pluralist philosophical traditions. What is Cultural Studies However, in the
late 1970s and 1980s, when British Cultural Studies began to spread
internationally, and to engage with feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism,
and race, critical cultural studies (i.e., Marxist, feminist,
poststructuralist, etc.) expanded tremendously in American universities in
fields such as communication studies, education, sociology, and
literature. What is Cultural Studies Cultural Studies, the flagship journal of the field,
has been based in the US since its founding editor, John Fiske, brought it there
from Australia in 1987. A thriving cultural studies scene has existed in
Australia since the late 1970s, when several key CS practitioners emigrated
there from the UK, taking British Cultural Studies with them, after Margaret
Thatcher became Prime Minister of the UK in 1979. A school of cultural studies
known as cultural policy studies is one of the distinctive Australian
contributions to the field, though it is not the only one. Australia also gave
birth to the world's first professional cultural studies association (now known
as the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia) in 1990.
Cultural studies journals based in Australia include
International Journal of Cultural Studies, Continuum: Journal of Media &
Cultural Studies, and Cultural Studies Review. In Canada, cultural studies has
sometimes focused on issues of technology and society, continuing the emphasis
in the work of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, and others. Cultural studies
journals based in Canada include Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.
In Africa, human rights and Third-World issues are among the central topics
treated. There is a thriving cultural and media studies scholarship in Southern
Africa, with its locus in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Cultural Studies journals based in Africa include the
Journal of African Cultural Studies. In Latin America, cultural studies have
drawn on thinkers such as José Martí, Ángel Rama, and other Latin-American
figures, in addition to the Western theoretical sources associated with
cultural studies in other parts of the world. Leading Latin American cultural
studies scholars include Néstor García Canclini, Jésus Martín-Barbero, and
Beatriz Sarlo. Among the key issues addressed by Latin American cultural
studies scholars are decoloniality, urban cultures, and postdevelopment theory.
Latin American cultural studies journals include the Journal of Latin American
Cultural Studies. Even though cultural studies developed much more rapidly in
the UK than in continental Europe, there is significant cultural studies
presence in countries such as France, Spain, and Portugal.
The field is relatively undeveloped in Germany, probably due
to the continued influence of the Frankfurt School, which is now often said to
be in its third generation, which includes notable figures such as Axel
Honneth. What is Cultural Studies Cultural studies journals based in continental Europe include the
European Journal of Cultural Studies, the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies,
French Cultural Studies, and Portuguese Cultural Studies. In Germany, the term
cultural studies specifically refers to the field in the Anglosphere, especially
British Cultural Studies, to differentiate it from the German
Kulturwissenschaft which developed along different lines and is characterized
by its distance from political science. However, Kulturwissenschaft and
cultural studies are often used interchangeably, particularly by lay people.
Throughout Asia, cultural studies have boomed and thrived since at least the
beginning of the 1990s. Cultural studies journals based in Asia include
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. In India, the Centre for Study of Culture and
Society, Bangalore and the Department of Cultural Studies at The English and
Foreign Languages and the University of Hyderabad are two major institutional
spaces for Cultural Studies.
Cultural studies is a relatively new interdisciplinary field
of study, which came into being in the UK in the post-war years. It emerged out
of a perceived necessity on the part of two of its founding figures, Raymond
Williams and Richard Hoggart. It came to fruition, however, in
circumstances that, as its third founding figure Stuart Hall often
acknowledged, contested its legitimacy.
Housewives scrubbing their front
doorsteps in Liverpool, from 'The Best And The Worst Of British Cities',
published in 1954. Photo by John Chillingworth / Getty Images
Why did it seem necessary to give an academic label to the
kind of research Williams, Hoggart and then Hall were engaged in? Each of these
thinkers knew there was a minor tradition of studying culture ‘from below’;
that is, the cultural practices and rituals of everyday life associated with
ordinary people, or with groups and populations who did not belong to the
powerful social classes or to the political elites. All three figures were
trained in English Literature. Williams looked to writers like D H Lawrence and
Thomas Hardy, whose work drew on experiences of poor mining or farming
communities as they were undergoing transitions and displacement brought about
by urban modernity. Richard Hoggart grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in
Leeds and went on to become a ‘scholarship boy’. He produced what quickly came
to be seen as a classic work, puzzlingly titled The Uses of Literacy, which
was based partly on his personal memory of the habits, rituals and everyday
lives of the people who lived in his own neighbourhood from the interwar period
through to the post-war years. He documented how women cleaned their front
doorsteps and gossiped over the fences as they hung out the washing. The
popular women’s magazines they read, often with lurid covers, brought some
glamour and excitement amidst the hardship. These lives did not appear in
official histories and Hoggart aimed to show their richness and solidarity.
Stuart Hall came from Jamaica in 1951 as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford. His
intellectual formation took place in the heightened atmosphere of the CND
movement, the ‘New Left’ and the anti-colonialist struggles of the 1960s.
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