British Cultural
studies
Samuel P Huntington, about twenty years ago,
forecasted that the fundamental source of conflict and the great divisions
among humankind and the dominating cause of conflict will be cultural. He had
added to this that the clash of civilizations will dominate global politics and
the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future. When
this Huntingtonian prognostication is taken into consideration, being aware of
the culture and its distinguished aspects would be a significant matter. Discussing the advent and evolution of cultural
studies as a discipline without mentioning the British cultural studies would
be incomplete. Nowadays, The term ‘cultural studies’ is well known as a
title for an important set of theories and practices within the humanities and
social sciences. There are various ways of understanding culture. These ways
are collectively termed as ‘cultural
studies’.
We
are not alien to the cultural studies as it keeps a strong connection with our
life and living atmosphere. In fact, ‘cultural studies’ explores the meaning of
everyday processes, places and acts such as communication, space and shopping. To put this in another way, it is the very material of our
daily lives as Paul Willis once said, ‘the ‘culture’ that is the subject of
British cultural studies is ‘not artifice and manners, the preserve of Sunday
best, rainy afternoons and concert halls. It is the very material of our daily
lives, the bricks and mortar of our most commonplace understandings’. ‘Cultural
studies’ gives emphasis on the discursive aspects of everyday life.
It
is clear as the day light that, the formation of new theories comes about due
to the irresistible arguments and findings against the existing one. This was
Tennyson trying to convey ‘the old changes, yielding to new’. It seems to me
that literary theory, to an extent, deals with the demolishing of existing hierarchies.
Before the advent of cultural studies, precisely, by the nineteenth century in
Europe, culture meant the habits, customs and tastes of upper/elite class. But,
once it arrived into the scene, the concept of culture was understood as the
mode of generating meanings and ideas. And the elite culture’s indisputable
citadel began to be interrogated. The popular culture or mass culture started
to turn into spotlight. This can clearly be apprehended by penetrating through
some established notions. That is to say, to read a Shakespearian text is fine,
whereas the text written by Agatha Christie is not considered as great dealing
with literature. Even though it had got the popularity and read by majority of
people, it is not up to the mark of a Shakespearian work. So, why a book having
wide readability is not regarded as the high art or put this in another way,
why the popular culture is not taken for granted? So, it is in popular culture
studies that ‘cultural studies’ finds its first moments.
From the post war context of Britain, British
cultural studies had gradually been emerged. Post war Britain could be
congratulated for its reputed break with the pre war and it started a
representation of new culture where the class system was said to have
disappeared and popular culture started to be celebrated. Raymond Williams,
Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall are the proponents of British cultural studies.
They were the scholarship boys (those got the admission in universities and
colleges on the basis of merit, irrespective of their income or back ground). In
their college days they had realized that viewing things through their culture
is not a fine thing. And their culture was completely strange to the academic
hue and cry. They were from the
background of labor culture. The predominant elite culture’s dominance was
started to fade out. And then, there British Cultural Studies came into being.
Culture of a community has different
factors such as economic, spatial, ideological, erotic and political. Cultural Studies
tries to include all these factors in its ambit. So, in this regard, Cultural Studies
is an interdisciplinary. It takes the relation of culture with power, ideology,
gender, ethnicity and national formation.
Raymond Williams is one of the
harbingers of British Cultural Studies. According to Williams, culture is a
representative of condition of literary theory. And he says that today the
concepts are not simply the concepts rather they are problems. He differentiates
between the culture and civilization and strives to substantiate that culture
developed in opposition to civilization as an affirmation of the inner life. Further,
culture for him is the secularization of earlier metaphysical forms.
Richard Hoggart is another literary
figure in the British cultural studies. He had explored the relationship
between working-class culture and folk culture, and the imposed and external
culture of mass-produced popular texts. Hoggart’s contribution to the evolution
of cultural theory is important.
As it is mentioned earlier, culture
had become the mode of generating meanings and ideas. Elite or upper culture
has the control of meanings as it controls the terms of the debate. So, certain
components of culture are becoming more visible and significant. This field of
academic study originated in Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural
studies. Cultural Studies begins with the publication of Richard Hoggart’s The
Uses of Literacy (1958) and Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society
1780–1950 (1966; first published in 1958) and The Long Revolution (1975;
first published in 1961).
Stuart Hall is one of the famous
literary figures of British Cultural Criticism. Hall argues that British
Cultural Studies is necessarily implicated in the politics and postulates of Marxism.
As far as Hall is considered, the
cultural studies exists ‘ within shouting distance of Marxism, working on Marxism,
working against Marxism, working with it, working to try to develop Marxism’. Hall’s
essay named Encoding/ Decoding is an important contribution to this field. Actually,
the encoding/ decoding process is designed to supplant simple notions of
authorship and interpretation. He is known for his textual analysis. According to
him the text is a product of individual, hegemonic and cultural ingredients. In
addition to that, texts carry a series of meaning possibilities whereby
signifiers can be interpreted in umpteen ways. When we go through the essay of
him above mentioned, we can understand that by decoding he means that a mirror
process by which the audience or consumer is confronted with a series of
meaning potentials in the particular text.
Cultural Studies has evoked an intense
attraction in academics and students around the globe with its deft application
of complex theories to everyday life. A discipline between disciplines, it
makes the academic popular and the popular, academic as Pramod. K. Nair once
wrote in his book An Introduction to
Cultural Studies .British cultural studies had exerted the great influence
in the field of cultural studies. Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart
are the chief exponents of this British Cultural Studies.
Bibliography
Lewis, J. (2008). Cultural Studies The Basics.
London: Sage Publications Ltd.
Nair, P. (2008). An
Introduction to Cultural Studies. New Delhi: Viva Book Pvt.Ltd.
Turner, G. (2003). British
Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge.
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