Nihara R - Assignment 1

                                BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

The discipline of cultural studies does not have any clearly defined subject area. Like the word ‘culture’, cultural studies also has an all-inclusive nature. It is a study of all cultural practices. The discipline is really interdisciplinary. It has connections to other social sciences and branches of humanities and arts. The discipline of cultural studies has its origin in Britain and later it migrated to America, Canada, France, Australia and South Asia.

            The name ‘cultural studies’ derives from the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, established in 1964. The first issue of Working Papers in Cultural Studies was published by the University in 1972. The founding fathers of the discipline were associated with CCCS at various times. So this centre is important in the development of cultural studies.

            The industrialization has done a lot with the rise of the discipline in England. In fact, it has a crucial role as it caused the rise of a new group of people called working class who became richer by the industrialization. The scholars from working class background started to be the part of adult education system. Here the word ‘culture’ got more attention and it appears as problematic. The rise of cultural studies in England is closely associated with the New left movement which proliferated through the writings of working class intellectuals like Raymond Williams who considered Marxism as a problem than a theory. They revised the traditional Marxism and the notion about culture was re-written.

             Richard Hoggart (b.1918), Raymond Williams (1921-88), E P Thompson (1924-93), Stuart Hall (b.1932), etc. were the founding fathers of British cultural studies. Most of them came from working class background.  The question of culture in the caste-based English society was the starting point of cultural studies. They took the task of placing common man’s culture against the so called ‘high culture’. They celebrated the popular culture of the working class. They were concerned with how a particular culture is created, practiced/practicing and how the struggle for cultural domination takes place.

            Richard Hoggart, who started his career as a tutor in adult education system, founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The work The Uses of Literacy (1957) written by Hoggart shaped cultural studies for the first time. The book explained about media and popular culture. Hoggart argued that the critical reading of art could reveal “the felt quality of life” of a society.

            Raymond Williams also started his academic career as an adult education tutor. His book Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) are two important books which are important in the history of British Cultural studies. For Williams, culture is the “whole way of life, material, intellectual and spiritual”. He traced the evolution of culture through its various historical conditions. In his work Marxism and Literature (1977), the traditional Marxist notion of culture is challenged by Williams. Williams broadened the concept of culture in Marxism. According to traditional Marxists, culture lies in the superstructure which is determined by the economic base.  This was a kind of reductionism for Williams and his followers. Culture cannot be reduced into something determined by the economic base. There are other factors which can decide the culture of a particular community and culture can also determine many other things. The definition given by Williams enabled the critical practices in cultural studies.

            E P Thompson is another key figure in British cultural studies. He was the president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). In his work, The Making of the English Working Class (1978), he sought to demonstrate the coming- into-being of the working class in England in a specific time period and how the popular culture of the working class was ignored by the dominant tradition of conventional history. According to him, ‘class is a historical phenomenon that cannot be understood as a structure or category’. To understand class, it should be seen ‘as a social and cultural formation arising from processes which can only be studied as they work themselves out over a considerable historical period”. He was a radical historian in the sense that he brought out an idea that history should consider everything. It cannot be reduced into the history of the dominant or a particular group.

Stuart Hall is a major figure in cultural studies who was born in Jamaica and later (1960s and 70s) became a member of Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham. He believes that cultural studies need to hold both theoretical and political questions “in an ever irresolvable, but permanent tension”. Hall always insisted that cultural studies can actually have a practical impact on reality. He made seminal studies in media and culture. By the work Encoding,decoding, he gives theoretical account of how messages are produced and disseminated in television  by suggesting four relatively autonomous stages. That is, production, circulation, use (distribution/consumption) and reproduction. He demonstrates that how institutional power relations influences all these stages of message production. He explains how the communication circuit is reproducing the pattern of domination.

Catherine Belsey is a contemporary figure in British cultural studies who is arguing for a transfer from Cultural Studies to Cultural Criticism. She describes how lack of fluidity arouses from the institutionalization, and populism becomes a threat to the discipline of cultural studies. She also criticizes the lack of consideration of history in the practices of the discipline of cultural studies.

British Cultural Studies is distinguished by the remarkable diversity and originality of the topics that have been studied. Along with the studies on youth subculture and television news programmes, British Cultural Studies focused on images of women, masculinity and the history of sexuality. It has revealed the politics of sports, gender and many social constructions. British Cultural Studies has its own political dimensions. It gives importance to the politically engaged intellectual work. The relationship between power and culture is well analyzed. The Althusserian concept of ideology contributed a lot to the revived idea of culture according to the Marxism.  Althusserian analysis was absorbed by British cultural studies in the 1970’s. After this the ideological instruments like law, religion, education, family etc. were considered as important as economical condition in determining the culture. The ideas of Antonio Gramsci and the theory of Hegemony also contributed to the British cultural studies.

            British Cultural Studies was criticized for its Anglo centrism as it gives more importance to class rather than race and gender. The urban culture was celebrated in British cultural studies. When cultural studies was hailed for its consideration of all kind of marginalized cultures a kind of euro centrism and affinity towards western culture and civilization prevailed in the British cultural studies. Marxism has influenced British cultural studies in two specific ways. According to Marxism, the society is unequally divided with class and other categories such as caste and gender. This division is established in culture and cultural resistance.  The materialist notion of history in Marxism is also vital in cultural studies. Cultural studies attempts to analyze social structures in terms of how cultural forces have given them a historic form. The culture is crucial in shaping history.

             During the period of Thatcher (1979-90) cultural studies started its migration to other lands. According to the region, the treatment of the discipline and its methodologies got differed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lewis, jeff. Cultural Studies. London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2008.

Loon, Z. S. (1997). Introducing Cultural Studies. Australia: Allen and Unwin Pty. Ltd.

Nayar, Pramod K. An Introduction to Cultural Studies. New Delhi: Viva Books Pvt Ltd, 2008.

Shank, Barry. "The Continuing Embarrassment of Culture: From the Culture Concept to Culture Studies." American Studies (1997): 95-116.