Culture Studies

DR. KALYANI VALLATH

The Beginnings
What is Culture?
• Culture is a highly contested and complex term.
• Generally, it comprises social behaviour which encompasses:
• Art, festivals, dance, music, fashion, lifestyle
• Morals, law, customs, habits
• Earlier, critics like Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis have attached a sense of moral
perfection and social good to acquiring culture, often associated with the practices of
the educated classes in the higher strata of society.
 Cultural Studies
• Cultural studies recognises the intersection of power and meaning-making in such
practices.
• Margaret Mead: Culture is the learned behaviour of a society
• Raymond Williams: Culture includes the organisation of production, the structure of
the family, the structure of institutions which express or govern social relationships,
and the characteristic forms through which members of the society communicate.
• For him, culture involves the meanings and practices of ordinary men and women,
which also takes into account mass/popular culture.
• Cli ord Geertz: Culture is the ensemble of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
ff
Cultural Studies
• It deconstructs the previous elitist assumptions of culture by giving emphasis to
working-class culture and popular culture.
• It understands that what is considered “universal” or “natural” culture is rooted in
power relations and is homogenised and naturalised by marginalising other elements
of culture.
 What is Cultural Studies?
• It is an interdisciplinary study encompassing methods and methodologies from varied
elds like anthropology, literary studies, history, sociology, ethnography, and
semiotics.
• Its central concern is how culture relates to the larger society.
• It looks at:
• Political dynamics of mass media and everyday cultural practices.
• How culture transforms individual experiences, social realities and power relations.
fi
Main Features
• It examines cultural practices in terms of their relation to power.
• It deals with culture in all its complexity within its socio-political context.
• It involves both the theory (of culture as an object of study) as well as practice (culture as the
location of political criticism and action).
• It focuses on both knowledge as subjective experience and knowledge as objective and
universal.
• Cultural studies attempt to evaluate and change structures of dominance, especially in
industrial, capitalist societies.
• Since culture is commonly concerned with shared social meanings, culture studies also focus
on various signifying practices and how language creates meaning and values in society.
• It also looks at the politics of representation in the speci c social and material contexts of
production, circulation, and reception. fi
Basic Assumptions
• Culture as the product of signifying practices involving signs organised as codes.
• Cultural signs include representation and Othering.
• Culture is discursive — involving a structure of knowledge and power.
• The diverse cultural forms and practices should all be studied, as well as how di erent
groups/classes compete for cultural domination.
• The focus is on how culture is practised and how it is made.

ff
The Beginnings
• Cultural Studies developed in Britain as a reaction against
• Liberal humanism and orthodox Marxism
• As an engagement with New Left in the 1950s
• The discussion of ‘culture and civilization’ in literary studies from Matthew Arnold
• Culture and Anarchy (1869)
• High, elite culture
• Reached its peak in the works of F.R. Leavis and Q.D. Leavis (1930s-1950s, Leavisism)
• Great Tradition
• Narrow de nition of value in culture
• Rejected popular culture as contaminated by capitalism
• From here, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams took up the discussion of culture
• Rooted in New Left, and in Frankfurt School
fi
 Frankfurt School
• A group of philosophers and social scientists
• In uenced New Left and Cultural Studies
• Associated with the Institute of Social Research at the Goethe University, Frankfurt
• Emerged during the Inter-war period (1918-39) in the Weimar Republic (Germany)
• Important gures were intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents
• Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin,
Frederick Pollock, Leo Lowenthal
• Jurgen Habermas
• Critical of capitalism as well as orthodox Marxism/Leninism
• Explored alternate paths of social development
fl
fi
Institute for Social Research, U of Frankfurt
• Founded in 1923 by Felix Weil and Friedrich Pollock under the Directorship of Carl Grunberg
• In 1930, philosopher Max Horkheimer became the director
• It was the time of the growing in uence of the Nazis and the rise of Hitler
• In 1933, the Institute was shifted to a branch in Geneva and in 1934 to New York
• In New York, it became a liated with Columbia University
• Reopened in Frankfurt in 1951
• Second generation began with Jurgen Habermas
• There is also a third generation
• Major Ideas and Practices
• Critical Theory, Culture Industry, Negative dialectics, Eclipse of reason, Dialectical
method, critique of modernity and capitalism
ffi
fl
Culture Industry
• Discussed in the chapter “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Dialectic
of Enlightenment
• A phenomenon of late capitalism
• Art no longer denotes pure autonomous forms, but are commodi ed products that carry power
• Art is now imitative and super cial whose aesthetic goal is merely to entertain super cially (not
to convey truths)
• Even when we seem to make “free” choices, we don’t make any; our actions and preferences
are noted and manipulated by the industry; we are part of the system inevitably
• Present-day entertainment merely appeases us or distracts us
• Example of Disney Movies (Video)
• Routine, recycled, formulaic narratives and images
fi
fi
fi
New Left
• 1960s-70s
• Partly a reaction against orthodox Marxism and Communist Party’s authoritarianism;
inspired by Gramsci, Althusser
• Engaged in issues like civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, etc.
• Herbert Marcuse
• German-Jewish philosopher associated with Frankfurt School; “father” of New Left
• Eros and Civilization: In the Post-War mass culture, there is a profusion of inauthentic
false needs, sexual provocations and instantaneous grati cation that keep people
repressed, apolitical and uncritical (Repressive Desublimation)
• One-Dimensional Man: Bourgeois life in Europe and America is one-dimensional; with
no critical thought

fi
New Left in Britain
• 1950s
• Emerged as a British response to the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956
• The New Left comprised European Leftist thinkers who denounced the Stalinist variety of Marxism
• Students and intellectuals from former British colonies who were not part of the mainstream
institutions earlier, played a major role in the New Left
• E.P. Thompson
• Along with John Saville, he founded the journal The Reasoner
• They were members of the Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG)
• Asked to stop the journal; refused; suspended from the Party
• Started The New Reasoner
• Later merged with another journal and became the famous New Left Review (1960 onwards)
• Departed from orthodox Marxism; engaged in Marxist revisionism; Party’s confused response to the
suppression of Hungarian Revolution by the Soviet Union and the British and French invasion of Suez
Canal Zone
 New Left in Britain
• 1960s
• Raymond Williams
• Very in uential thinker of the early New Left
• Laid the foundations of Cultural Studies and Cultural materialism
• Terry Eagleton was his student
fl
Other Theoretical Influences

• Michel Foucault • Roland Barthes

• Jacques Derrida • Julia Kristeva
• Jacques Lacan • Claude Levi-Strauss
• Louis Althusser • Jean Baudrillard
• Antonio Gramsci • Noam Chomsky
• Martin Heidegger
 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)
• Formed as a result of re-evaluation of the class/elite character of culture as appeared
in the traditional literary studies
• New approaches to culture pioneered by Hoggart and Williams in 1950s and 60s
• In uences: Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (1957) and Williams’ Culture and Society (1958)
• Hoggart founded CCCS at the University of Birmingham in 1964 and became the rst
director of it
• Hoggart appointed Stuart Hall as assistant; Hall became the Director of CCCS (Acting
Director in 1968, Director in 1972)
• In the late 1990s, “restructuring” of the university led to the elimination of CCCS
fl
fi
 British Cultural Studies
• Emerged from the work done at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
• Major gures: Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Richard Johnson,
Stuart Hall, Charlotte Brunsdon, Meaghan Morris
• Two features
• Remarkable diversity and originality
• Never before anyone studied television programmes or youth subcultures so
seriously!
• Political angle
• Aimed at empowering people by helping them understand the relationship between
culture and power, and develop strategies for survival
• Despite its claims, British Cultural Studies is criticised for being Eurocentric
fi
Founding Fathers
• Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall
• All associated with CCCS at various times
• All came from working class backgrounds, and endorsed working class culture (authentic popular culture)
against high culture (upheld by middle and upper classes)
• The 1970s saw the rise of working class subcultures like mods, rockers and punks who represented a
symbolic resistance to the dominant system.
• In Thatcherite England, when privatisation and free market economics became the norm, subcultures
became the focus of cultural analysis seeking to expose the impact of liberalisation on the marginalised
sections of the society
• All were associated with institutes of adult education that had come into prominence as part of postwar
reconstruction
• Engaged with the question of culture in English society
• England still retained the pre-war class politics
• England was then at a critical point in history
• Rapid Americanization was shaping public consciousness
Richard Hoggart • Came from a working-class background
• Founded the CCCS at the University of
(1918-2014) Birmingham in 1964
• Used the term “Cultural Studies” for the rst time
• Tried to privilege the pre-war “authentic” working
class culture over Americanized mass-culture
• Discussed the changes that happened to
working class culture with the advent of
capitalism
• The dominant culture expressed its power by
giving legitimacy to its own “ elds of value”
(their mindsets, customs, values)
• Cultural struggle resulted, involving a war for
legitimacy and cultural status
fi
fi
 Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life (1957)
• An attempt to understand the changes in culture in Britain caused by “massi cation”
(in uence of mass media)
• Has two parts
• Recalls the lost working class culture in Northern England
• The pubs and working men’s clubs merged neatly with family structure, language
styles and social activities, creating a rich, organically connected culture
• Traditional popular culture is directly connected through experience to the social
condition of the working classes
• Attacks the impact of postwar consumer culture
• Banal and pretentious culture of imported pop music, television shows, comics and
pulp ction
• American mass media colonised the working classes
fl
fi
fi
E.P. Thompson • British historian, a New Left scholar
• Peace campaigner who worked for nuclear
(1924-1993) disarmament
• Wrote The Poverty of Theory against Louis
Althusser’s Structuralist Marxism,
advocating Marxist Humanism.
• Different from traditional Marxists in his
understanding that class is a historical
phenomenon (not a thing)
• Class is not a structure or category
• Class is something that happens in
human relationships
Understanding the Working Class
• Class is “a social and cultural formation arising from processes which can only be
studied as they work themselves out over a considerable historical period.”
• Working class culture has the same sources as high culture
• But it creates totally new areas of cultural engagement, association and creative
activity
• Culture is about the upper classes as well as the lower.
• Popular culture is not the creation of a consumer society — it has a history.
• Culture made for the working class and culture made by the working class.
 The Making of the English Working Class
• The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
• Massive book on the development of the working class in the 18th-19th centuries
• First systematic history of the working class
• De ned class as a relationship (not as a social structure)
• Studied documents of their lives and opinions such as court records, folk art, songs,
ballads
• Documents very di erent from what historians looked at in those times
• To study the development of a working class consciousness
fi
ff
 Raymond Williams • Born in a working class family in Wales
• Cultural and literary theorist and as a novelist
(1921-1988) • Joined the Communist Party; fought in the II
WW
• Culture and Society (1958)
• Inspired by TS Eliot’s Notes Towards the
De nition of Culture
• Against the prevalent notion of high,
spiritual culture
• High culture separated itself from the
popular and ordinary
• High culture was against social equity
and democracy
fi
Concept of Culture
• Regarded culture as an all-inclusive entity
• Asserted
• (1) “culture is a whole way of life”
• The idea of “lived” culture, material, intellectual, spiritual
• Language gives meaning to lived culture
• (2) Culture means the arts and learning
• Traced the evolution of a “general human culture” shaped by local and temporary systems
• Related concept “Culture is ordinary” (democratic, not elitist)
• Asserted that democracy and culture should develop together
• Shows that how we describe, modify, exchange and preserve experience is fundamental to the
development of culture and society
• Studies cultural production to understand how forms of communication (the press, advertising,
education, etc) were instrumental in the function of capitalism
On High and Popular Culture
• No simple contrast between “high culture” (universal) and “popular culture” (local) is
possible
• High Culture has no speci c social structure
• Despite its “universal” claims, High culture is always local and selective; it includes
(whether these are noticed or not) elements of the popular culture
• Cultural tradition can be seen as a continual selection and re-selection of ancestors
• Selective tradition is Raymond Williams's term for the process by which we select
from the legacy of the past to explain, support, and justify actions in the present.
fi
The Long Revolution (1961)
• Published in 1961, a continuation of Culture and Society, and the arguments are carried
forward in Towards 2000 (1983).
• The title refers to a revolution in culture that unfolds alongside the industrial revolution
(economic) and the democratic revolution (political)
• In other words, how coming generations will change culture and society
• Williams had a vision of all citizens participating fully in a 'common culture’
• He focused attention on the role of media technologies and education in the
development of modern societies
• The increasing role of popular and democratic values in the society will bring freedom
and change
• Culture includes lived culture, recorded culture and traditional culture
• Later, he also categorised culture as ideal, documentary and social
Three Categories of Culture
• Culture is complex and cannot be categorised into neat exclusive de nitions
• Ideal Culture
• Culture as a state of human perfection
• Documentary Culture
• Culture as a body of intellectual and imaginative work
• Social Culture
• Culture as a way of life, when values are formed through social institutions

fi
Realism and the Contemporary Novel
• Chapter 7 of The Long Revolution
• Discusses realism and traces its history
• In the beginning, a technique opposed to idealisation or caricature
• In the Renaissance came to be associated with the rising middle class
• Later realism passed on to the progressive and revolutionary movements
• Argues that it needs to be rede ned in the twentieth century to re ect the struggles of
the age
• The old kind of realism was naive and re ective, while today through realism we
literally create the world we see
fi
fl
fl
Communications (1962)
• Williams’ approach of cultural materialism stresses ‘the centrality of language and
communication as formative social forces’
• Studies various forms of communication of the 1960s to show how they continually
construct and negotiate reality
• Computers, radio, television, printing, photography, lm
• Main ideas
• Communications are a major way in which reality is continually formed and changed
• Contemporary 'extension' of communications is a highly dynamic social process
• It is a 'cultural revolution' that is 'part of a great process of human liberation,
comparable in importance with the industrial and democratic revolutions
fi
Communications (1962)
• Distinguishes between authoritarian, paternal, commercial and democratic organisational
forms of the media
• Authoritarian communications—political communications involve state control,
manipulation and censorship of the media
• Paternal communications—authoritarian communications ‘with a conscience’; there is
ideological control that aims to impose certain moral values on audiences
• Commercial communications—It is market-driven; there is commercial control
• Democratic communications—based on cooperative rationality and the freedom to speak
and receive. Such communications are ‘means of participation and of common discussion’
• Williams later argued for a ‘cultural democracy’ that combines public-service media,
cultural co-operatives and local media that establishes ‘new kinds of communal,
cooperative and collective institutions’ (similar to public sphere)
A Related Term
• Mobile Privatisation
• The term was rst used by Raymond Williams in his 1974 book Television:
Technology and Cultural Form
• Williams described the main contradiction in modern society as the one between
mobility and home-centered living
• Mobile privatization can be described as the feeling of being "at home" while
connected to a device in a mobile setting
• Modern Tragedy (1966) discusses tragedy as directly related to culture, society and
also to the experiences in life.
fi
The Country and the City (1973)
• Analyzes the concepts of the countryside and the city to show how these concepts
symbolize socio-economic changes under industrialization and capitalism
• Williams explores the images of the rural and urban worlds in English literature since
the 16th century and shows how some have remained while others have changed
• Gives literary examples to support the argument that there has been no boundary line,
no sharp dichotomy between town and country
• Capitalism did not come from the outside and destroy a manorial Utopia, but that
the seeds of urbanism and commercialism were sown by the rural aristocracy itself
Marxism and Literature (1977)
• Keywords (1976) discusses the various concepts and categories of culture
• Marxism and Literature
• Three parts—Basic Concepts, Cultural Theory, and Literary Criticism
• Problematizes Marxist concepts of ideology, hegemony, base and superstructure
• Introduced the concept of Cultural Materialism (culture as a productive process and
not just a whole way of life)
• The concept of culture is undergoing a paradigm shift
• But we are still following the bourgeois ideals of culture, society, and economy,
which centre on commerce and capitalism
A Materialist View
• Cultural materialism is the ‘analysis of all forms of signi cation… within the actual
means and conditions of their production’
• It is through ‘communication systems that the reality of ourselves, the reality of our
society, forms and is interpreted’
• He sees communication as material and asserts that the production of social relations
through communication is a key feature of society
• Rejects the orthodox Marxist assumption that language is a re ection of material
reality that lies outside of it and was created after human labour came into existence
• Instead asserts that language is an activity and a social relationship; Language and
communication are part of the material reality, not external to it

fi
fl
Cultural Materialism
• A method of criticism rooted in Marxism
• A critique of base/superstructure theory
• Marxist theory is that changes in the base bring about changes in the superstructure
• Williams held that
• Changes in economic structure cannot completely explain cultural organisation,
which are diverse and complex
• Base and superstructure cannot be separated; they are part of a larger social whole
and continuously interact with one another and mutate
Cultural Materialism
• Stresses the interrelationship between cultural artefacts (language and literature) and
their socio-historical contexts
• Culture is a “productive process” (rooted in the means of production and its ideology)
• Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sin eld in Political Shakespeare
• How dominant hegemonic forces appropriate canonical texts to make us accept
certain cultural values rather than others
• Cultural Materialism is the British counterpart of American New Historicism and is
more political
fi
Three Elements of Culture
• Three elements within culture mediated by “structures of feeling” (lived experiences of
people, their shared values and attitudes, struggling to gain dominance in every
period)
• Dominant culture: the clearly visible aspects of our practices and attitudes (E.g.
consumerism)
• Residual culture: in uence of old cultural practices that remain in traces in modern
cultures (E.g. feudalism)
• Emergent (Oppositional) culture: new cultural practices that are being constantly
created in modern culture. (For e.g. Counter cultures that challenge dominant cultures)
• Structures of feeling are the experiences that give rise to emergence
fl
Culturalism
• The central importance of culture as an organizing force in human a airs
• The idea that individuals are determined by their culture, that these cultures form
closed, organic wholes, and that the individual is unable to leave his or her own
culture but rather can only realise him or herself within it
• An ontological approach that seeks to eliminate simple binaries between seemingly
opposing phenomena such as nature and culture.

ff
 • Marxist sociologist and cultural theorist born in
Stuart Hall Kingston, in colonial Jamaica

(1932-2014) • Ambivalent relationship with the identity of his

aspiring, privileged black family
• Arrived in Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1951
• Ambivalent feelings for Britain also; embraced
his blackness
• Founder of the New Left Review (1960)
• Became Director of CCCS in 1974
• Helped establish Cultural Studies
• He focused on popular, low-status cultural forms
and traced in them the interweaving of culture,
power and politics
• No single-authored work to his name; astonishing
volume of collectively written and edited work
Stuart Hall
• 1979—Professor of Sociology at the Open University
• Was delighted to reach out to those who couldn’t survive in the conventional educational
system
• At this time, the Conservative Margaret Thatcher was elected as PM
• Wrote against what he called Thatcherism as “authoritarian populism”
• In the late 1990s, served on the Runnymede Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain
• Wrote against Britain’s racist thinking
• After his university career ended
• Collaborated with young artists and lmmakers
• Explored the politics of black subjectivity
• A new lease of intellectual life
fi
Features of His Work
• Activism as well as theoretical work
• Ambivalent relationship with Marxism
• Society is based on con icts related to not only class, but also sex, space, religion,
region
• People’s sense of identity is shaped not only by Economics but also Culture.
• Multidisciplinary and collaborative work
fl
Stuart Hall (1932-2014)
• Model of Communication (1973)
• Laid the foundation of a cultural understanding of communication
• Four Stages (E.g. A fairness cream ad)
• Production (of the message)
• Circulation (of the message in visual or written forms)
• Use (consumption of the message as meaningful)
• Reproduction (e ect of the message, leading to action)
ff
Stuart Hall (1932-2014)
• Encoding and Decoding
• Part of Communication Theory and Reception Theory
• Rejected the linear view of mass communication and promoted the idea of
circulation
• Encoding the production of a message using verbal and non-verbal symbols
• Decoding is the negotiation of the receiver with the text based on his/her
knowledge, cultural background, experiences
• Decoding can be Preferred Reading, Negotiated Reading or Oppositional Reading
• Important in Psychology & Media Studies
• Subculture arises when dominant cultures are decoded in new ways (Dick Hebdige)
Stuart Hall (1932-2014)
• Cultural Representation
• From the book Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices
(1997), edited by Hall
• Culture has a central role in representation
• There are multiple, shifting meanings to images
• The absent part of the image is equally important as the present part
• However, power structures attempt to x meanings, as in stereotypes
• We need to expose stereotypes
fi
 Circuit of Culture
• Paul du Gay and Stuart Hall et.al. introduced this theory in a study of the SONY Walkman Cassette
Player
• A concept that connects Communication and Capitalism
• (Take for e.g. a movie that creates a nationalistic image of India)
• Creation and propagation of culture involves
• Production: Making cultural products (clothes, festivals, TV shows), reproducing them, distributing
them; how and why production happens
• Consumption: how these products are used/interpreted, who pays for it
• Identity: the individuals/groups/non-human entities—how they got to be in the circuit
• Regulation: the formal and informal rules that a ect (and are a ected by) these cultural products;
who makes these rules; how are they enforced
• Signi cation: what these cultural products mean; to whom; in what context
fi
ff
ff
Spaces: Major Approaches
• Space Studies
• City Studies / Urban Studies
• Modernity Studies
• Globalization Studies
• Development Studies
• Subaltern Studies
• Empire Studies
• Ecological Studies
Major Figures
• Pierre Bourdieu — Cultural Capital, Habitus, Field
• Edward Soja — Third Space
• Roland Robertson — Glocalization
• Arjun Appadurai — Disjuncture and Five Scapes
• Paul Virilio — Dromology
• Ulrich Beck — Risk Theory
• Doreen Massey — sense of place
• Anthony Giddens — structuration, modernity
• Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri — Empire
Major Figures
• Ranajit Guha
• Dipesh Chakrabarty
• Partha Chatterjee
• Slavoj Zizek
• Andrew Ross
• David Easton
Public Sphere
• The spaces where public opinions are formed
• Jurgen Habermas
• 18th Century
• The community of lawyers, teachers, doctors, writers and other educated people who in uenced the
formation of bourgeois public opinion
• United by faith in Enlightenment
• Clubs and co eehouses
• Later, newspapers and magazines
• Now cyberspace
• Literature and art also important parts of the public sphere
• In public sphere, di erent artistic and commercial interests converge
• Public sphere is characterised by transgression of borders
ff
ff
fl
 Pierre Bourdieu • French sociologist who taught in Algeria during
the French colonial rule
(1930-2002) • During the Algerian War, he did an ethnographic
study of the Kabyle people, the largest native
community in Algeria
• Two Kinds of Capital
• Social Capital (WHO you know); related to
Collective Capital
• Cultural Capital (WHAT you know / have)
• Embodied (qualities of the mind, body:
skills, accent)
• Objecti ed (material belongings: cars)
• Institutionalized (symbols of authority and
cultural competence: university degrees)
fi
Cultural Intermediaries
• In Bourdieu’s book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984)
• Feature of a globalised economy
• Workers in the areas of advertisements, design and management involved in the
production and circulation of symbolic goods and services in Post-War Western
societies
• They bring together production and consumption in new ways
• They in turn produce people’s tastes, lifestyles and fashions
Bourdieu’s Concepts of Field and Habitus
• Cultural Capital takes the form of Habitus
• Deeply ingrained habits and attitudes of people
• The physical embodiment of Cultural Capital
• With our Habitus, we enter Fields of practice
• Art, Education, Law and so on
• An arena where production, circulation, and exchange of goods, services,
knowledge, etc take place
• In every Field, there is a struggle to monopolise power and dominate
• The Fields overlap, but each has unique rules, knowledges and forms of capital
• Fields are not strictly dependent on social class
 • Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other
Edward Soja Real and Imagined Places (1996)—based on
Lefebvre
• Firstspace
• Space seen from the top of a skyscraper
• Mapping and compartmentalization of actual
space
• Secondspace
• The same space when seen in art or a
photograph, or when verbally described, becomes
Second space
• It is a representation; it shows how the space is
used
• Thirdspace
• How people live together in that space, share their
knowledge, their emotions, dreams and
experiences regarding that space
Globalization Studies: Disjuncture
• Globalization has led to a borderless economy that has brought in huge changes in
cultures. Though the world seems borderless now, it is far from being homogenous or
united.
• Arjun Appadurai:
• When money, people, culture, etc " ow" or get exchanged in this globalized world, it
results in a “Disjuncture".
• Disjuncture means disjointed in nature, lacking in harmony.
• What Appadurai means is that even when there is a growing interrelationship and
interdependence between various elements in the globalized world, there is also an
increasing disjuncture between them.
• This he discussed in his most famous work, the essay "Disjuncture and Di erence in the
Global Cultural Economy”.
fl
ff
Appadurai’s Five Scapes
• People perceive their globalized realities in terms of ve elements:
• Ethnoscape (global ow of People)
• Mediascape (global ow of Media images / Information)
• Technoscape (global ow of Technology)
• Finanscape (global ow of Money)
• Ideoscape (global ow of Ideologies)
• These scapes are in disjuncture or con ict with one another
• For example, the Ethnoscape of Kashmir is in disjuncture with the Ideoscape of India. The
Finanscape of multinational corporations undermine local Ideoscapes.
• The relation between these scapes creates contemporary culture
• Appadurai's views are similar to Benedict Anderson's view of Nations as imagined
communities
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fi
Glocalization
• A combination of the words "globalization" and “localization”
• The "simultaneous occurrence of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies in
contemporary social, political, and economic systems”
• Popularized by the sociologist Roland Robertson
• He said the term was coined by Japanese economists to explain Japanese global
marketing strategies
• Against essentialist polarities in favour of hybrids
 • French cultural theorist, urbanist, and aesthetic
Paul Virilio philosopher

(1932-2018) • Writings about technology in relation to speed

and power as well as architecture
• Main ideas
• The "war model" of the modern city—study of
information technology and technologies of
vision, such as cinema and photography,
especially in time of war
• Dromology
• Science (or logic) of speed; the impact
of speed on politics
• The logic of speed that is the foundation of
technological society (Dromos is an Ancient
Greek noun for race or racetrack)
• Studies the "dromocratic" revolution
Structuration
• Concept propounded by Anthony Giddens in The Constitution of the Society: Outline of the
Theory of Structuration (1984)
• The social theory of the creation and reproduction of social systems that is based on the
analysis of both structure and agents, without giving primacy to either.
• [Agency is the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make free choices. Structure
is those factors of in uence such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, etc that determine or
limit an agent in his/her actions and decisions.]
• Agents produce and reproduce social structure through their actions
• For e.g. you exist within the structure of gender as man or woman, father or mother, we act as
agents in accordance with those rules, reproducing the social structure again.
• The social structure has a “duality”—it is constraining as well as enabling (as in motherhood)
• Similarly, we are constructed and constrained by language, but it is also our means of self-
awareness and creativity. We can only say what is sayable in language, but language is also the
medium by whim we can say anything at all.
fl
People: Major Approaches
• Youth Culture
• Popular Culture
• Subculture
• Counterculture
• Race Studies
• Ethnicity
• Food Studies
• Art Studies
Major Figures
• Dick Hebdige — subculture
• Theodore Roszak — counter culture
• Angela McRobbie — youth culture, post feminism, illusion of equality, complexi cation
of backlash, subjects of capacity
• Paul Gilroy — Black Atlantic
• Paul Willis — learning to labour, struggle for superiority, di erentiation and integration
• Angela Davis — Black Radicalism, Black Marxism, Prison
• Andy Bennett — youth culture, popular culture,

ff
fi
 Popular Culture Studies
• Late 1970s and 80s onwards
• Studies comic books, television, internet, etc
• As opposed to High Culture
• High Culture is regarded as stable, complex and formal
• Popular Culture was regarded as inauthentic, banal, conformist, consumerist, standardized
• Now Popular Culture is regarded as the meanings and practices produced by the mass
audiences at the moment of consumption
• First institution to o er degrees in Popular Culture was Bowling Green State University, US
• In uences: Frankfurt School, Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes
• No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989) by Andrew Ross
fl
ff
 Postmodernism and Popular Culture
• Postmodernism which erased the distinctions between high culture and low culture, is deeply
related to the development of popular culture
• American cultural critic Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation (1966), celebrates a ‘new
sensibility’ against the cultural elitism of modernism—“One important consequence of the
new sensibility [is] that the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low' culture seems less and less
meaningful.”
• The rst expression of Popular Culture—the American and British pop art movement of the
1950s and the 1960s
• Iain Chambers in Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience (1986) traces the history and
disruptive eruption of popular culture with numerous examples
• Angela McRobbie in Postmodernism and Popular Culture (1994) asserts that postmodernism
has created a new body of intellectuals; voices from the margins speaking from positions of
di erence
ff
fi
 Popular Culture: Popular Fiction
• As part of diminishing the hierarchy between high art and low art, many have studied
the production, circulation, and consumption of popular ction, sometimes known as
‘pulp ction’.
• In Reading the Romance (1981) by Janice Radway, the production and consumption
of the romantic genre in the midwestern community of Smithton (a pseudonym) is
analysed.
• Using reader-response criticism, she found out that women often identi ed with the
female characters in the novels they read, especially the characters’ struggles from
losing their social identity to reclaiming it in new ways.
fi
fi
fi
 Popular Culture: Pop Music and Rock Music
• Adorno and Horkheimer studied the production of pop music as a standardised form
of art created by the culture industry.
• But some have also looked at the subversive potential of pop and rock music.
• Major gures:
• Simon Frith—The Sociology of Rock (1978), Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular
Music (1996)
• Lawrence Grossberg—Dancing in spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture (1997)
fi
Subculture Studies
• A cultural group within a larger culture whose beliefs or interests vary with those of the
larger culture
• First developed by sociology scholars at the Chicago School in the 1920s
• Initially interpreted as delinquent or deviant
• Now considered resistance
• John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Je erson, Brian Roberts, Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige
• As forms of distinction
ff
 Subculture Studies
• Features
• Di use, without formal leadership
• Shared meanings and identity (especially of marginalisation)
• Specialized vocabulary
• Often negative relations to work
• Ambivalence with regard to class
• Non-domestic types of belonging like social groups other than the family.
• Stylistic features of exaggeration
• Anti-Establishment
ff
Youth Culture
• Studies of youth cultures emerged in the 1960s and 1970s
• Youth cultures was a primary concern for the in uential Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies (CCCS)
• Early studies were based on the idea that young people are a distinct social group
who are troubling to society
• Later studies focused upon countercultural and subcultural practices as a form of
resistance
• Youth as agents of cultural reproduction (as opposed to views that conceptualize
culture as preexisting individuals and social interactions)
• The con icts and di erentiations between mainstream and youth subcultures
fl
ff
fl
 Black Atlantic
• Paul Gilroy’s book published in 1993
• Black identities cannot be understood in terms of being African, American, British or West
Indian
• But in terms of the black diaspora across the Atlantic
• Advocates a hybrid, cultural-political space
• United by experience / inheritance of African slave trade and American plantation
system, transcending both nation and ethnicity
• A provocative critique of cultural nationalism
• The rst chapter is titled “Black Atlantic as a Counter-Culture of Modernity”
• Imagine Islamic identity transcending nations and ethnicities—you’ll see why Black
Atlantic was provocative
fi
Gender: Major Approaches
• Feminism, Post Feminism, Cyber Feminism
• Queer Studies
• Transgender Studies
• Body Studies
• Trauma Studies
• Disability Studies
• Men’s studies
• Camp
Major Figures
• Kate Millett — sexual politics, politics of cruelty
• Adrienne Rich — motherhood, compulsory heterosexuality, lesbian continuum
• Judith Butler — performativity, gender as non-binary, body
• Susan Sontag — camp, photography, critical modernism
• bell hooks — imperialist-white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy, marginality as the
site of resistance, liberation & engaged pedagogy
• Jack / Judith Halberstam — female masculinity, queer failure, low theory
• Kimberle Crenshaw — intersectionality
Major Figures
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick — centrality of sexuality in modern culture, subtexts in the
canon
• Robert McRuer — compulsory ablebodiedness, crip theory
• Cathy Caruth — trauma theory
• Kali Tal — literature of trauma
• Annamarie Jagose
• Elizabeth Grosz
• David Halperin
• Sadie Plant
Post Feminism
• Contemporary feminism? End of feminism? Feminism has failed?
• Against conventional feminism
• Still attached to poststructuralist, postmodern ideas
• Women as people
• A new focus on the female body and empowering power of sexuality; celebrates sexuality
openly, sexual pleasure (strippers, porn stars)
• Advanced debates on abortion, employment, fertility, choice, etc
• All pervasive in media and public discourses
• 1980s-90s youth
• Judith Butler pejoratively called postfeminist
• Bitch/slut insults as well as empowering
Post Feminism
• Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991) book by Susan
Faludi, in which the author presents evidence demonstrating the existence of a media-
driven "backlash" against the feminist advances of the 1970s
• The feminist ght for equality has largely been won, but now it has created a
backlash (women are perhaps more miserable than before) as there is a counter
attack on the liberated women in order to reverse the hard-won gains of feminism
• The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (2008), book by
Angela McRobbie
• Women’s Publishing Houses
fi
Angela McRobbie
• Popular Culture e ectively dismantles the gains of Feminism
• Everyday forms of power are organised in such a way as to create the “illusion of equality”
for women and make them feel that they are “subjects of capacity” or the “can do”
generation.
• The result is that the contemporary Postfeminist acts in ways that directly undermine the
principles that traditional Feminism had upheld.
• One example is the mainstream acceptance of pornographic images that objectify women.
Young women increasingly support or refuse to condemn the normalisation of
pornography. Sexual freedom in Postfeminism is expressed through the exposure of and
eroticisation of the female body.
• In other words, Popular Culture is the site where Feminism is undone, even while Feminism
involved and got empowered from aspects of popular Culture. She calls this a “double
entanglement”. This “undoing” of Feminism is called “complexi cation of backlash”.
ff
fi
Cyberfeminism
• Feminist approach which foregrounds the relationship between cyberspace, the Internet, and
technology.
• In conjunction with International Women's Year, the rst world conference on women was held
in Mexico City in 1975. It resulted in the Declaration of Mexico on the Equality of Women and
Their Contribution to Development and Peace
• VNX Matrix, an Australian artist collective penned The Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st
Century in 1991
• British cultural theorist Sadie Plant used cyberfeminism to describe the feminizing in uence of
technology on western society. Sadie Plant wrote that Cyberfeminism describes “the work of
feminists interested in theorizing, critiquing, and exploiting the Internet, cyberspace, and new-
media technologies in general.”
• Black Cyberfeminism, as an extension of virtual feminisms and Black feminist thought,
incorporates the tenets of interconnected identities, interconnected social forces, and distinct
circumstances to theorize better how women are operating within internet technologies.
fi
fl
 Queer Studies
• The process of attaining new positive meanings for “queer” identities against Heteronormativity
• Involves ideas of Identity politics, Lived experience, Performance
• Also cross dressing, gender ambiguity, against homophobia and its manifestations
• A new understanding of gender, sex and sexual identities as not biological xities but as sites
where the very idea of a xed gender is problematised
• Focus on the dynamic nature of sexuality and the political organisation of it—sexuality as
biologically, culturally, legally and socially determined
• Gender is uid and multiple
• LGBTIQA+
• Di erentiates between Gender and Sexuality
• Grew out of Feminist Studies in the 1990s
• Related to Transgender Studies, Men’s Studies and Disability Studies
ff
fl
fi
fi
Major Figures
• Teresa de Lauretis coined the term
• Adrienne Rich: Lesbian Continuum, Compulsory Heterosexuality
• Diana Fuss, Jack/Judith Halberstam (Female Masculinities), David Halperin
• Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Transgender Studies
• It aims to problematise pre-conceived notions about gender in both mainstream
discourses and academia.
• It is primarily concerned with nuances of gender expression, gender identity,
embodiment etc.
• Some of the important gures in the area are Julia Serano (Whipping Girl: A
Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, 2007), Susan
Stryker (Transgender History, 2008).
• Transgender Studies Quarterly, started in 2014, is a pioneering journal in the area.
fi
Performativity
• Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990)
• Gender is not pre-determined by nature or biology
• Gender is not merely a social construct
• Gender is a performance: the words that appear to be describing gender actually create gender
• Gender is not a thing but a process by which patterns of language and actions repeat
themselves
• For e.g., a masculine handshake versus a feminine namaste
• Ideas drawn from J.L. Austin
• Language is a means of accomplishing things in this world; not just describing them
• Idea developed by John Searle
• For e.g., when a judge pronounces a verdict, or the bride / groom says “I do” during a wedding
ceremony
Intersectionality
• Term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor of law and social theorist in her 1989
paper “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of
Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.”
• Social identities are overlapping and intersecting and this often a ects how we live in
the society
• In other words, the various identities of one person (such as race, gender, sexuality
and class) are not independent of one another, but intersecting
• This intersectional identity determines the person's role in the society.
• Often these identities that intersect are related to oppression, domination and
discrimination experienced by the individuals who possess these identities. For
example, a black woman is doubly marginalized on account of her intersectional identity
of race and gender.

ff
Crip Theory
• Developed by Robert McRuer; studies the ways in which neoliberal capitalism has imagined and
composed sexual and embodied identities
• From Adrienne Rich’s concept of compulsory heterosexuality, developed the concept of compulsory
able-bodiedness
• The concept of sexuality depends on normal, ideal bodies, not on perverse or deviant bodies
• Heteronormativity (idea introduced by Michael Warner) was also based on compulsory heterosexuality
• Critical cultural analysis where ‘queer perspectives and practices’, have ‘been deployed to resist the
contemporary spectacle of able-bodied heteronormativity’
• Critiques of normalisation of bodies and of Deviant bodies relate to obesity or fat studies, prosthetic
performativity
• Erwin Go man’s Stigma (1963)
• Analyzes a person’s feelings about himself and his relationship to people whom society calls
“normal.”
• Normalization (of beauty, and other body processes) not only protects the interests of the normal, but
also puts the normal at risk
ff
Trauma Studies
• Explores the impact of the disruptive experience of trauma on individuals and societies
• By analyzing its psychological, cultural and literary signi cance
• Began in the 1990s with
• Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries
• Joseph Breuer (who co-authored Studies on Hysteria with Freud)
• Jean-Martin Charcot (who for the rst time studied the relationship between trauma and mental
illness), etc
• Main concerns
• How identity and memory are a ected by trauma
• How the individual's conception of the external world and social relationships are de ned by trauma
• How trauma shapes (and is shaped by) language and representations
• Intergenerational transmission of trauma
ff
fi
fi
fi
Kinds of Trauma
• Psychological Trauma
• Hysteria
• PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)
• Developmental Trauma Disorder (in children)
• Trauma related to war and terrorism, etc.
• Cultural and Collective Trauma
• As a result of mass genocides like the Holocaust, war, etc.
Major Works and Theorists
• The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature by Ann Kaplan
• Analyses the impact of trauma on individuals as well as on cultures and nations
• Traumatic Realism by Michael Rothberg studies Holocaust representations.
• Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996) by Cathy Caruth
• Here Caruth asserts that in present times, trauma has become universal and
bewildering both as an experience and as a subject of study. Because of this, our
understanding of history also becomes more complex and con icting.

fl
Major Works and Theorists
• Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (1995) by Kali Tal
• Here she has reviewed hundreds of scholarly works and presented hundreds of
interviews with trauma survivors.
• The Trauma Question by Roger Luckhurst
• Trauma: Explorations in Memory by Cathy Caruth
• On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies by Geo rey Hartman
• Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History by
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub

ff
Media: Major Approaches
• Television Studies
• Film Studies
• Media Studies
• New Media Studies
• Visual Culture Studies
• Museum Studies
• Cybernetics
• Posthumanism
• Digital Humanities
Major Figures
• John Berger — seeing • Donna Haraway — cyborg
• Nicholas Mirzoe — visual culture • Katherine Hayles — posthuman
• Marshall McLuhan — global village, • Richard Dyer —stardom
medium is the message
• John Fiske
• Stuart Hall — encoding and decoding,
• Quentin Fiore
circuit of culture
• Laura Mulvey — gaze • Henry Jenkins

• Tony Bennett — museum studies • Robert Stam

• Janet Murray
ff
Visual Culture Studies
• Our culture is increasingly visual
• Multiple, hybrid mediascapes create our world
• Images constitute a language
• Understanding images: Visual Literacy
• Understanding relationship between media and society: Visual culture
• Questions like
• What is visible and why?
• How seeing, knowing and power are interrelated
• Not only how society constructs images but how images construct society
Visual Culture: Works
• Ways of Seeing (1972) by John Berger
• Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) by Laura Mulvey
• What is Visual Culture (1998) by Nicholas Mirzoe
• Practices of Looking (2008) by Lisa Cartwright and Marita Sturken

ff
 Media Studies
• All media are constructions.
• The media construct reality.
• Audiences negotiate meaning in media.
• Media messages have commercial implications.
• Media messages contain ideological and value messages.
• Media messages contain social and political implications.
• Form and content are closely related in media messages.
• Each medium has a unique aesthetic form.
• New media theory or media-centered theory of composition focuses on how writing is created,
keeping in mind particularly the tools and mediums used in the composition process. New media
refers to a range of digital modes of communication, usually incorporating a multi-modal mix of the
visual or oral in addition to traditional text. Stemming from the rise of computers as word
processing tools, media theorists now also examine the rhetorical strengths and weakness of
di erent media, and the implications these have for literacy, author, and reader.
ff
Marshall McLuhan
• McLuhan is known as "the high priest of pop culture" and "father of the electronic
age"
• Major books
• The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
• Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
• The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of E ects (with Quentin Fiore, 1967)
• Main Ideas: The medium is the message, global village, gure and ground, hot and
cool media, media ecology

ff
fi
Television Studies
• First mediated event John F Kennedy’s assassination
• John Fiske claims in Media Matters (1994) that all events that ‘matter’ are media
events. The media do not simply report or circulate the news, they produce it.
• History, Policies, Genres, Codes, Representation, Ideology
• Audience research
• John Fiske, Television Culture
Film Studies
• Study of
• Narrative
• Mise-en-scene or setting
• Cinematography
• Sound and editing
• Director/Auteur
• Stardom
• Genres (Gangster Movies, Road Films, Queer Cinema…)
 Posthumanism
• Manfred E Clynes coined the word “cyborg”
• Major Tests and Theorists
• How We Became Posthuman by Katherine Hayles
• The Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway
• Cary Wolfe
• What is beyond the human
• A rede nition of what is meant by the human in the context of the exponential growth
of technology
• Implies a loss of subjectivity based on bodily boundaries
fi
 Information Society and Network Society
• Information Society
• A society where the creation, distribution, use and manipulation of information is a
signi cant economic, political and cultural activity
• Network Society
• Expression coined by the Norwegian theorist Stein Braten in 1981
• Denotes the socio-political, economic and cultural changes brought about by the
spread of networked, digital information and communications technologies
• E.g. Medical transcription, surveillance of the government, our personal data being
used by corporates
• Manuel Castells’ The Rise of a Network Society is the rst part of his trilogy The
Information Age
• Such a society follows the instrumental logic of capitalism
fi
fi
Cyberfeminism
• Feminist approach which foregrounds the relationship between cyberspace, the
Internet, and technology
• The term cyberfeminism was coined by VNS Matrix (read Venus Matrix), an Australian
artist collective active between 1991 and 1997, who, inspired by Donna Haraway's
Cyborg Manifesto, wrote the Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century.
Precarity Studies
• The social consequences of precarity in contemporary times primarily emerge from the unequal
distribution of wealth/income.
• Precarity studies deal with the economic, geopolitical, and gendered dimensions of marginalities
arising in a neoliberal context due to the unjust distribution of all types of resources.
• Precariat is a diverse group of people who lack legal and economic capital:
• The unemployed or temporarily employed
• The full-time working poor
• Creative workers
• Adjunct academics
• Welfare recipients
• Refugees
• Undocumented immigrants
Major figures
• Judith Butler
• Butler explored the political dimension of precarity in Precarious Life: The Powers of
Mourning and Violence (2004).
• She looks at precarity from an existential perspective that will enable one to
recognise one’s own and other’s humanity, especially of those who su er from
political or economic insecurity.
• Guy Standing
• He coined the term ‘precariat’, a combination of ‘proletariat’ and ‘precarity’ in The
Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) to discuss the economic dimensions of
this phenomenon.

ff
Major figures
• Simon During
• In his “From Subaltern to the Precariat” (2015), he argues that precarity is
exacerbated by the contemporary capitalist mode of production, which “invests in
insecurity”.
• Scholarship should criticize conditions that enable precarity and should think of
reformist e orts that may remedy it.
• Isabell Lorey
• In State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious (2015), she comments that
under the hegemonic mode of neoliberalism, precarity is a new normal.
• Systemic precarization constantly keeps citizens in a state of fear, which is no
longer an exception or limited to previously marginalized classes.
ff
Major figures
• Pramod K. Nayar
• Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture (2019) focuses on the
precarious lives human beings lead in the wake of ecological disasters caused by
human interventions.
 Major Journals

• Angelaki • Identities
• ariel • Media Culture Society
• boundary 2 • New Left Review
• Continuum • October
• Cultural Studies • Parallax
• di erences
• Journal of Popular Culture
ff