Anjana PP                  BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

                  
                          According to M.H Abrams Cultural studies is a cross- disciplinary enterprise which is rapidly growing and very recent one which is focused on the analysis of the condition that affect the production, reception, and cultural significance of all types of institutions, practices, and products. Today it becomes one of the most important set of theories and practices that come under humanities and social science as a whole. According to Simon During diffusion of people doesn’t the key to cultural studies, it is mobility that leads to cultural studies. It is not very easy to define this field of study however the field has now achieved recognition. It exists in different forms or in other words it is used in a variety of ways. For example different nation has developed different kinds of cultural studies. The definitions that they give to the area of study are very different. As it is British cultural studies also have a definition. The following part of the paper is dealing with the major characteristic of British Cultural studies.

                      Post war Britain was the emerging field of British cultural studies. It has a very specific root in post war Britain. The development of cultural studies was not a particular incident in Great Britain. It emerged all over the world. The intellectuals of the time moved from their old research paradigms to a new alternative, with special interest to society and culture. British Cultural Studies emerged from the activities that done at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)- was an interdisciplinary research centre.

                     Post war Britain witnessed a great cultural revolution. Rapid expansion of mass consumption and mass society were the part of this revolution.  Americanization of British culture was another important event that happened during that time. All these experiences that led to the loss of Great Britain’s tag as the power center of the world. They lost their identity, and the nation struggled to find and new cultural as well as national identity. A number of factors that are caused the development of British Cultural Studies. Some of them are given below;  the extension of educational opportunities was the most important one, it was after second World War. Britain government took initiative for this process. The promotion of adult education is an example for this project, and it was considered as a means of reconstruction after war. As mentioned earlier, Americanization of British culture takes place. The mass produced American popular culture. Pop music, Hollywood films, television programs etc are the major examples. The third factor that triggered the birth of cultural studies in Britain was the influence of the philosophy and social criticism of French thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault etc. They gave the British intellectuals new ways to frame the question of culture in different and new ways. In 1956 New Left which developed in Britain as a response to the Russian invasion of Hungary was revived the Marxist critique of capitalism. That also affected the development of cultural studies.   

                        While we are talking about British cultural studies some names are prominent in it. Sometimes British cultural studies known by their names- Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E.P Thompson, and Stuart Hall etc and one institution named The Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. In which Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E P Thompson- intellectuals coming from working class, they think of culture in terms of class based society. Their writings sometimes form the basis of cultural studies movement. Let us give a glance on the contributions of these people and that study center.

                   Begin with Richard Hoggart; one of the major brains behind the development of cultural studies. He was the founding director of Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Basically he was a tutor. From 1946-1959 he was an adult educator at the University of Hull. As mentioned earlier it was the part of larger British government project. He was against to the school of thoughts which separated high culture and real life. And he had suggested one program of research in which the researchers analyses the cultural artifacts and practices in a very broader sense. He explained that the cultural studies project would be made up of three parts; one would be historical and philosophical, one would be sociological, and one would be literally critical. The Uses of Literacy is a major book written by Richard Hoggart.   

                   Another key figure is Raymond Williams. As mentioned earlier Williams also came from a working class background. Just like Hoggart he also spent most of his early career as an adult educator. His first and famous book is Culture and Society (1966). He defined culture as a ‘whole way of life’- material, intellectual and spiritual. He was interested in the wholeness of the culture, its meaning and patterning. He insisted on the need to see the cultural process as a whole. The Long Revolution is another book written by him. Marxism and Literature is another one published in 1977. He put forth one body of Marxist thought that challenged the traditional Marxism- that divides the society into base and supra structure including culture. He says that culture is not merely a reflection of the economic base but it could create its own effects. According to his not the base or supra structure we should examine but the process that integrate both.

              E P Thompson is the next person. He unlike Williams developed his theory of culture within the frames of traditional Marxism. He resisted the base supra structure model in order to explain culture. He developed his theory through practice. For him culture is a struggle between the ways of life. His culture was constituted by the friction between competing interests and forces. Another person in this group is Stuart Hall. He joined in CCCS In 1966 in deputation and he became the director by replacing Hoggart. His famous book is The Popular Arts (1967) he co- authored with Paddy Whanned.

                The Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies is a key institution in the history of cultural studies. It was established in 1964. As mentioned earlier Richard Hoggart was the founding director of this center. It addressed the urgent questions about society and culture. Media got attention in the field of culture. The members of the center viewed media as important cultural and ideological forces, standing in a dominant position in making definitions of social relations and political problems. They rejected the notion that media are transparent bearers of meaning. They broke with the tradition of considering the audience as passive and undifferentiated. This thought is very mush reflected in Stuart Hall’s essay Encoding and Decoding. It is an interesting fact that the researchers in CCCS have no united definition for culture. These are all about British Cultural Studies.

Bibliography

Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A Treichler, ed. Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1997.

M H Abrams, Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Handbook of Literary terms. New Delhi: Cengage Learning, 2011.

Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe , Paul Willis, ed. Culture, Media, Language. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Turner, Graeme. British Cultural Studies an Introduction. 3. New York: Routledge, 2005.