BRITISH CULTURAL
STUDIES
Culture
is an umbrella term which covers the area such as literary text, film, media
studies, sociology, politics, geography, women’s studies, and study of
different racial-ethnic groups and so on. Cultural studies is an
interdisciplinary field which do research on how culture creates and transforms
individual’s everyday life, social relations and power. Culture is defined as
distinctive ways of everyday life. What is culture is itself a problematic
question. Culture differs from different people.
The
beginning of British Cultural Studies can be traced back to 1950s. Richard
Hoggart, E. P Thomson and Raymond Williams are considered as the founding
fathers of British Cultural Studies. They are left-wing academics in British
Universities. They tried to explore the
history and culture of working class people. In 1964 Hoggart founded the Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, to encounter the development,
which was undergoing in middle class traditions and culture. At that point of
time, mass media and culture industry were under the process of
Americanization.
British
cultural studies begin with the texts of Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society, and Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy. In which the culture is subjected to daily
lives, what we hear, wear, watch and eat, the how we see relations with each
other, the everyday activities such as cooking or shopping. In 1960s British
Marxist thoughts were underwent some changes. There is a break from traditional
Marxism and have believed in complex or critical Marxism. According to
traditional Marxism there is no value for culture; culture is a part of
superstructure of society and a product of economic base. Althusser said that
there are conflict between economic, political and culture; in order to sustain
a complex unity of society. During the period of 1960s and 1970s, the CCCS had
a powerful influence on British academics and cultural life. A number of
continental critics were influenced by the worth noting the text, which were
produced by the CCCS. They were also influenced by the works of Barthes’ and
Michel Foucault and Marxist critical theory. In 1960s, British Cultural Studies
started to explore the issues of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. It is a
kind of social response with a broad mind. After that they started to
intertwine the problems such as women rights, gay liberation, post colonial
politics and racial equality. There after cultural studies became an academic
discipline, courses, journals and criticism. It appeared in the countries such
as the America, Asia, Africa, Europe and Australia. The literature students are
interested in connecting literary text to other forms of cultural art and
production in relation to the question of politics and power.
The
major figures in British Cultural Studies are Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart;
both of them were coming from working class. Williams’s famous work Culture and Society published in the
year 1958 is about the literary history, which focused on literary texts and
its relationship to an idea. In this book, Williams discovers culture is a key
category, and it connects literary analysis and social inquiry. He said that
Eliot’s conclusion of culture as ‘a whole way of life’ is critical and about
Leavis he rejects the text based approach to media and popular culture. He
argues that we cannot criticize the institutions such as popular press,
advertising and cinema without the reference of life.
Raymond
Williams another work is Marxism and
Literature. In the first chapter Williams says about culture. According to
social scientist culture is civilization of human faculty. The society, culture
and economics are interdisciplinary terms. Society is active fellowship or
common doing. Economy is related to the system of production, distribution and
exchange. Culture is established before these two and it is the growth of human
faculties. According to Raymond Williams, culture is a constitutive process,
and different ‘ways of life’. Here he breaks the traditional notion of Marxist
theory and he foreground culture. One of the striking points in this text is
that his final outline view of ideology.
Another
important personality is E. P Thompson; he is less equivocal of this tradition.
His famous work is entitled as The Making
of the English Working Class(1978). Thompson created his theoretical views
on culture from Marxist theory. He resisted the traditional Marxist idea of
base and superstructure to regain the significance of culture. He maintained a
basic humanism instead of lived culture and subjective experience. For Williams
and Thompson, the culture is everyday life, within that the individual subject
is fore grounded.
Stuart Hall’s seminal work is Encoding and Decoding in Television
Discourse’. In this article, Hall argues that communication is a loop of direct
line from sender to receiver. In communication, every moment is important. When
a message has been sent, there is no guarantee that it will arrive. So that in
communication, every moment became very important. From the point of composing
of the message to receiving the message has its own importance of existence. Our
society is heterogeneous in nature. It is created out of different groups and
interests. The television audience receives a single meaning in different ways.
At that time, a context makes meaning everything. And the meaning production is
also closely related to each individual’s perceptions. It will lead to the
misunderstanding of the message.
In the study of cultural studies we
are actually dealing with the ways we live in and make knowledge out of it. Now
a days, British Cultural Studies started textual analysis of the
representations, which is exactly like an academic practice. Catherine Belsey
in her text ‘From Cultural Studies to Cultural Criticism’ actually says about
the academic discipline of it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ø Turner, Graeme. British
Cultural Studies An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Ø Ziauddin Sardar
and Borin Van Loon. Cultural Studies. Malta: Guttenberg, 1997.
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