Key Concepts of Cultural Studies
Introduction to Anglophone Cultural Studies
Annika McPherson
12/17/2008
What is Cultural Studies?
Different (Hi)stories

Cultural Studies borrows
theories and methodologies
from...
 Literary Studies
 Sociology
 Anthropology
 Philosophy
 Psychoanalysis
 History
 Geography
 Sciences

...

Cultural Studies within...
 American Studies
 British Studies
 Canadian Studies
 Australian Studies
 South Asian Cultural
Criticism
 ...
Links to Previous Sessions

What is/are Cultural Studies?


Diasporas


“paradigms” and “paradigm shifts”
Media and the Public


“Class”
Science, Technology and Knowledge Production


“Postcolonial”
Economics


“culture”
“Encoding/Decoding”
Representations of Justice

“representations” in movies
Remember...?
Culture(s)
Identity formations
Knowledge
Hybridity
Race, Class, Gender
Visual Culture(s)
Feminist Theory
Colonization/De-Colonization
Postcolonialism
Diaspora
Minority Literatures
Popular Culture
Globalization
Interculturality
Interdisciplinarity
Geopolitical space(s)
Multi-culturalism
History
Religion
Economics
Ideologies
Global culture(s) industry
Internet
Media
Social criticism
Cosmopolitanism
(Post)Modernity
Signifying Practices
Discourse
Encoding/(De)-Coding
Power relations
New English Literatures
Citizenship
Transnationality
Outline and Aims
Disciplinarity and Interdisciplinarity
 The Role of Theory
 American Studies, British Studies, Cultural Studies
 Developments
 Methods
 Key Concepts
You should...
 become familiar with some of the main concepts
employed in the analysis of social and cultural change
 begin to consider different approaches to “textual”
analysis and (historical) contextualization in cultural
criticism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMo2uiRAf30
Remember...
The Production of Knowledge



knowledge production in historical perspective
the development of the modern university
the division of academic knowledge
 how is knowledge organized into disciplines?
But...
“Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of
you that all of this is simply one grand misunderstanding?
Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so
you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so
that it can be taught and it has to be reduced to information so
it can be organized, do you follow that? In other words this
leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property
of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are
simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from the outside. In
fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous
condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos...”
William Gaddis. JR. London: Jonathan Cape, 1976: 20. Quoted in Joe Moran.
Interdisciplinarity. London and New York: Routledge, 2002: 1.
The Rise of Disciplines






a particular branch of learning or a particular body of knowledge
 but also the maintenance of order and control
 specialized, valued knowledge
classical division of knowledge:
 Aristotle: theoretical, practical, and productive subjects
institutional change:
 from medieval studia generalia to ‘disciplines’ such as medicine,
law, theology
Enlightenment: project of ordering and classifying knowledge
(encyclopaedias)
Positivism (Auguste Comte, Hippolyte Taine)
early 19th century: secularized, state-controlled, research-oriented
university (Prussia)
Disciplines as Tribes?
“Men of the sociological tribe rarely visit the land of
physicists and have little idea what they do over there. If
the sociologists were to step into the building occupied
by the English department, they would encounter the
cold stares if not the slingshots of the hostile natives ...
The disciplines exist as separate estates, with distinctive
subcultures.”
B.R. Clark quoted in Tony Becher. Academic Tribes and Territories:
Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of the Disciplines. Milton Keyes:
Open University Press, 1989: 23.
Particular Types of “Discourse”


language as constructed and constrained by social
patterns or conventions
modes of thought, cultural practice or institutional
framework that makes sense of and structures the world,
often from the partial perspective of a particular interest
group
 disciplines as “discursive constructions” permit certain
ways of thinking and operating while excluding others
Inter- (Multi-, Trans-, Post-,
Anti-) disciplinarity...

How is knowledge reorganized into new
configurations and alliances when old ways of
thinking have come to seem stale, irrelevant,
inflexible or exclusionary?

...a critical, pedagogical and institutional concept

...implies a critical awareness of the relationship between
knowledge and power
What is Theory?
Jonathan Culler. Literary Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

e.g. literary theory


a systematic account of the nature of literature and of the
methods for analysing it
Theory as an established set of propositions...




offers an explanation that is not obvious
is not easily confirmed or disproved
makes people think differently about their objects of study
shows that what we take for granted as ‘common sense’ is
in fact a historical construction
Two Examples
Michel Foucault, The History
of Sexuality (1976-1984)
 ‘sex’ as a complex idea
produced by a range of
social practices,
investigations, talks and
writing, i.e. by ‘discourses’
or ‘discursive practices’
 culturally or socially
produced groups of ideas
 texts (signs and
codes)
 representations (give
signs meaning)
Edward Said, Orientalism
(1978)



a theory of representation
Orient vs. Occident
 a Western style for
dominating the Orient
Post-colonial theory
Theory is...

...intimidating?




interdisciplinary
analytical and
speculative
a critique of common
sense
reflexive
“Area Studies”

Interdisciplinary inquiries into a specific region, e.g.







History
Political science
Sociology
Cultural studies
Languages
Geography
Literature(s)
Different (Hi)stories
American Studies as the
interdisciplinary study of
American history and
culture
 economic
 social
 political
 cultural
 developments
 (self-)perceptions
 interpretations

American
exceptionalism?


Cultural Studies within
American Studies
traditions


From the “Myth and
Symbol School” to Cold
War contexts
e.g. Chicago School of
Sociology
American Studies
and/as Cultural Studies
http://www.wsu.edu/~amerstu/tm/i
ndex.html
Different (Hi)stories

British Cultural Studies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyUYG1J3tKI



From New Criticism via Structuralism and PostStructuralism to New Historicism and Cultural Studies
from “High Culture” to the culture of “everyday life”
theory in practice
Texts in History

http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/anglistik/litwiss/intro-to-literature/2007-02-06/2007-20clit-hist.html

http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/anglistik/litwiss/pre/bm1-lit-theory-timeline-2.pdf
Anglophone Cultural Studies...





American Cultural Studies
 mass culture and audience studies
Canadian Cultural Studies
 technology and society
Australian Cultural Studies
 cultural policy
South African Cultural Studies
 from resistance to cultural politics
...
Characteristics and aims of
Cultural Studies...






study cultural practices and their relation to power
social and political contexts within which culture
manifests itself
culture as the location of political criticism and action
reconcile intuitive and objective forms of knowledge
moral evaluation of modern society
aims to understand and change structures of
dominance
Cultural Theory in Practice:
Key Methodologies



Textual Approaches
 Interpretive Analysis
 Content Analysis
 Discourse Analysis
Media Analysis
Historical Approaches
 Memory and History




Ethnography
 Qualitative research
Lives and Lived
Experiences
 Experience and Stories
Reception Studies
 Audience Analysis
Production and
Consumption
Central Problems...








Language, Practice and the Material
Truth, Science and Ideology
Culture as a Way of Life
Subjects and Agency
Identity, Equality and Difference
Global Culture/Media Culture
Transforming Capitalism
Cultural Politics
Approaches to Studying
Popular Culture...








Film
Music
Sports
Comix
Fashion
Television
Advertising
Cyberculture
http://www.wsu.edu/~amers
tu/pop/






Race
Class
Gender
Sexuality
Censorship
Imperialism
http://www.youtube.com/wat
ch?
v=zQUuHFKP-9s
Intellectual Strands of
Cultural Studies

Marxism


Culturalism and Structuralism





culture is ordinary
culture as like a language
Poststructuralism and Postmodernism


the centrality of class
the instability of language
discursive practices
Psychoanalysis and Subjectivity
The Politics of Difference

Feminism, Race, and Postcolonial Theory
Concepts as a Methodological Basis
of Interdisciplinarity
“Cultural studies has, if nothing else, forced the academy to realize its
collusion with an elitist white-male politics of exclusion and its
subsequent intellectual closure.”
Mieke Bal. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2002: 6.
Concepts “travel” from systematic theory into cultural
analysis as tools with which to study cultural objects
on their own terms.
Summary: Concepts of Culture and
Cultural Concepts






Culture and signifying
practices
Representation
Articulation
Power
Popular culture
Texts and Readers







Subjectivity and Identity
Ethnicity, Race and Nation
Sex, Subjectivity and
Representation
Television, Texts and
Audiences
Cultural Space and Urban
Place
Youth, Style and Resistance
Cultural Politics and Cultural
Policy
Genealogies of Cultural Studies







Social Enquiry
Marxist and Critical Theory
British Studies
Language Theories
Cultural Feminism
Postmodernism
Audiences
Sex, Subjectivity and
Representation

gender vs. sex




cultural assumptions and practices governing the
social construction and social relations of men
and women
a matter of representation and performance
feminist cultural politics
queer theory
“Floating Signifiers”...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMo2uiRAf30
Study Questions…

Explain the revised notion of culture within
cultural studies
Lewis-Genealogy2.pdf
Keywords-Barker.pdf
Glossary-Barker2.pdf
Keywords….
Culture
Discourse
Identity
Representation
Theory


http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/anglistik/lit-wiss/introto-literature/2007-02-06/2007-20c-lit-hist.html

http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/anglistik/litwiss/pre/bm1-lit-theory-timeline-2.pdf
Consult:
Chris Barker, “Keywords“ and
“Glossary”









Race
Class
Gender
Ethnicity
Diaspora
Sources
Chris Barker. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice.
London: Sage, 2000.
Chris Barker. Making Sense of Cultural Studies:
Central Problems and Critical Debates. London:
Sage, 2002.
Jonathan Culler. Literary Theory: A Very Short
Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Joe Moran. Interdisciplinarity. London and New York:
Routledge, 2002.