Cultural Studies

What is cultural studies?

Cultural Studies is not a tightly coherent unified movement with a fixed agenda, but a loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues, and questions.”

Cultural studies, interdisciplinary field concerned with the role of social institutions in the shaping of culture. Cultural studies emerged in Britain in the late 1950s and subsequently spread internationally, notably to the United States and Australia. Originally identified with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham (founded 1964) and with such scholars as Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams, cultural studies later became a well-established field in many academic institutions, and it has since had broad influence in sociology, anthropology, historiography, literary criticism, philosophy, and art criticism. Among its central concerns are the place of race or ethnicity, class, and gender in the production of cultural knowledge.

Four Goals of Cultural Studies :

Cultural studies is politically engaged :

cultural critics see themselves as Opposition not only within their own disciplines but many of the power structure of society at large. they question inequality within power structure and seek to discover models for restructuring relationships among dominant and minority or subaltern discourses . because meaning and individual subjectivity are culturally constructed ,they can thus reconstructed. such a notion , taken to a philosophical extreme , denies the autonomy of the individual weather an actual  person or character in literature , a rebuttal of the traditional humanistic great man or great book theory and a relocation of aesthetic and culture from the ideal realms of taste and sensibility , into the arena of a whole society 's everyday life as it is constructed .

CULTURAL STUDIES TRANSCENDS THE CONFINES OF A PARTICULAR DISCIPLINE SUCH AS LITERARY CRITICISM OR HISTORY :

 Cultural studies involves scrutinizing the cultural phenomenon of a text- for example;

Italian opera , a Latino novella , the architectural styles of prisons , body piercing and drawing conclusions . Cultural studies is not necessarily about literature in the traditional sense or even bout art. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler emphasizes that, the intellectual promise of cultural studies lies in its attempts to cut across diverse social and political interest and address many of the struggles within the current scene .

CULTURAL STUDIES DENIES THE SEPARATION OF HIGH AND LOW 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 being found with a pair of tickets to a rock concert? Cultural critic’s today work to transfer the term popular, folk or urban. Following theorists Team Baudrillard and Andreas Hussein, 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 Boudoirs and Dick Hedge on how “Good taste” often only reflects prevailing social, economic and political power based.

CULTURAL STUDIES ANALYSES NOT ONLY THE CULTURAL WORK BUT 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 Cathy N. Davidson, which includes essays on literature and gender in colonial New England, urban magazine audiences in 18th 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”.

POWER AT THE CENTER OF CULTURAL STUDIES :

Power is probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his or her will even against resistance .

                                                                                         Max Weber 
                                                                                       
                                     

The study of Cultural Studies is incomplete without the study of power.Cultural studies makes us understand how we all are controlled by power. in our time media is the tool to control the perceptions and the subject , the power makes extensive use of media.All form of media ,print, radio, tv, electronic, digital, social. The critic  of media studies under cultural studies gives an opportunity to provoke our thoughts to understand how power makes use of media. the idea of power sustain the exact meaning of hierarchy.

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