Assignment 5 : The Impact of Cultural Studies on the Major Cultures of the World : 22410 Paper 205A : Cultural Studies

• Name : Nirav Lalitbhai Amreliya

• Batch : M.A. Sem. 3 (2021-2023)

• Enrollment N/o. : 4069206420210002

• Roll N/o. : 18

• Subject Code & Paper N/o. : 22410 – Paper 205A : Cultural Studies

• Email Address : niramreliyaunofficial@gmail.com

• Submitted to : Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English – Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University – Bhavnagar – 364001

• Date of Submission : 7th November, 2022

The Impact of Cultural Studies on the Major Cultures of the World

Introduction : Cultural Studies is an academic discipline in which all types of studies are incorporated. It gives the interdisciplinary field to academics in order to blend all modes of learning in a same bowl for getting the best understanding of cultures. 

Originally identified with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham (founded 1964) and with such scholars as Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams, cultural studies later became a well-established field in many academic institutions, and it has since had broad influence in sociology, anthropology, historiography, literary criticism, philosophy, and art criticism. Among its central concerns are the place of race or ethnicity, class, and gender in the production of cultural knowledge.

Cultural Studies as being interdisciplinary field of study touches most of the aspects present in cultures of the world. To get better understanding of few of them, here are some articles, and we will try to understand how it deals with various dynamics of day-to-day life.

Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism : Sam Binkley & Jo Littler give good insight in understanding the concept of Anti-Consumerism in their article ‘Introduction’. They opine :

‘The phenomenon of contemporary anti-consumerism presents not only a

complex development in a terrain the contours of which cultural studies has

long held a rich familiarity, but also an opportunity for the field to build upon

its strengths and apply them to emerging new objects, discourses and practices. Such an inquiry does not demand cultural studies practitioners to jettison those assets that have traditionally proven useful in the study of consumption, such as the deep distrust of manipulationist theories or a longstanding devotion to the intrinsic politics of everyday practice. Nor does an inquiry into anti-consumerist politics (which can sometimes be defined by ideologies of personal authenticity and essentialist notions of community) mean that cultural

studies has to forfeit its traditional commitment to a politics of anti-foundationalism and a deep reluctance to include essentialist categories in

any of its critical frameworks. Cultural studies’ anti-essentialism does not

consign it to relativism a point often lost on its most vociferous critics nor

does it prohibit it from uncovering the liberatory potential of movements and

cultural articulations bearing the mark of essentialist beliefs. While it is certainly true that many anti-consumerist groups counter the dislocations and wild vertigo of contemporary neo-liberalism with appeals to the authenticity of

consumer subjectivity, or to the ontologically innocent sociality of consumers themselves, it is the work of cultural studies to locate these essentialist assertions conjuncturally, as contextual negations, not as flat-out doctrinal beliefs to which we must subscribe. Neither does an anti-essentialist commitment somehow align cultural studies with the same machinations of capitalism (now expressed in the rebellious, anything-goes triumphalism of the new economy) against which it has traditionally mobilized (Frank 2002).

Whilst it is important to recognize that relativism, in and of itself, does not

necessarily mark a critical position for cultural studies in the face of neo-liberal marketization, clearly critiques of anti-essentialism do not necessarily stand between the critical aims of cultural studies and the activities and strategic essentialisms of contemporary anti-consumerist movements.’ (Binkley)

This is the way when marketing is involved in the studying humanity. Market is also part of study. Another thing is that Cultural Studies has one goal which is that it focuses not only products, but means of production too is taken into glance.

Future of the World : In synchronization of the ongoing technology, Patricia Clough has good things in her article titled as ‘Future Matters’ :

‘It was to face what seemed difficult, even undesirable, that is, to think about technoscience not only as an object of social criticism but as a resource of thought for social criticism, that in 2000 began to plan a symposium titled “Future Matters: Technoscience, Global Politics, and Cultural Criticism.” As the director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society (CSWS) at the Graduate Center, CUNY, I hoped to have as symposium cosponsors other scholars who directed centers and programs with research agendas focused on critical theory and cultural criticism, especially on the differences of gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, and nation. With these colleagues, I hoped to invite other scholars and cultural critics to join us in rethinking late-twentieth-century critical theories in terms of the future of technoscience and thereby to draw from the thought of technoscience a framework for social criticism. Carolyn Dinshaw at New York University, Janet Jacobsen at Barnard College, Rosalind Morris at Columbia University, Linda Nicholson at Washington University in St. Louis, Joanna Regulska at Rutgers University, and Robyn Wiegman at Duke University agreed to be cosponsors.’ (Clough)

Post-Modern Pedagogy and Counter Narratives : This is good aspect of Cultural Studies as it follows the narrative and understanding of the modern technology through pedagogical lens has now become important. In their book titled as ‘Counter Narratives’ Henry Giroux along with some contributors writes that :

‘As developed here, the idea of postmodern counternarratives has two dimensions. The first observes the existence of counternarratives which function generically as a critique of the modernist predilection for "grand," "master," and "meta" narratives. These take issue with the narratives which have come down to us as part of the culture of the Enlightenment. They can be construed as countercultural critique, issuing from a basic skepticism, of the philosophies of history accompanying the grand claims concerning Man, Truth, Justice and Beauty, representing the West, and "America" as the last projection of European ideals, as the apex of an unbroken, evolutionary development of two thousand years of civilization. One model of the counternarrative in this sense is Theordor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's (1972) Dialectic if the Enlightenment, a counternarrative which emphasises the dark 

side of the Enlightenment. Another model is that of Jean-Franyois Lyotard's (1984) The Postmodem Condition which, utilizing a Wittgensteinian approach, emphasizes the radical incommensurability of "language-games." Counternarratives in this sense serve the strategic political function of splintering and disturbing grand stories which gain their legitimacy from foundational myths concerning the origins and development of an unbroken history of the West based on the evolutionary ideal of progress.’ (Giroux)

The Importance of Comparable Corpora : In her article, Ana I. Moreno writes that :

‘It has been four decades since Kaplan (1966) proposed the idea 

that the rhetorical structures of texts in different languages might vary 

greatly, and that such variation should be taken into account in language 

teaching programs. He also suggested that these differences in writing 

across cultures may reflect different writing conventions and, in an 

attempt to revise his initial notion – which was severely criticized –Kaplan 

(1987) later on suggested that these differences in writing do not 

necessarily reflect different patterns of thinking that are acquired, but are 

more likely to reflect cultural and educational training factors which help 

to shape the writing conventions that are learned in a culture.’ (Moreno)

The Inter Asian Cultural Studies : In the book named as ‘Trajectories’ Kuan Hsing-Chen says :

‘This desire to retrieve the forgotten tradition of ‘cultural studies’ as practiced and produced outside the imperial center also has its own conjuncture: it happens in an intense moment of this so-called post-cold war era when all of us are forced to walk out of our own little disciplinary ghettoes and geographical sites in order to more adequately respond to the questions of globalization and subsequent regionalization posed by the imperatives of transnational and global capitals. Under the fashionable sign, cultural studies, we might be able to get the necessary work done; at the same time, we might also be able to change the terrain of dominant cultural studies practices (which have run into a moment of crisis—depoliticization, dehistoricization and lack of sense of vision). The long term structural transformations from territorial colonialism to neocolonialism under the stamp of globalization signal the shifting gravity of capitalism. From Western Europe to the Atlantic and North America to the so-called Asia-Pacific, the entire Inter-Asia continent emerges as the forefront and site for political and economic struggles (I take special note of the rather unexpected coinage of the term, Inter-Asia, which is inspired by the establishment of the Inter-America Cultural Studies Network, to designate the linkage between North and Latin America). Throughout the Inter-Asia region, there is a weird sense of ‘triumphalism’ directed against the ‘West’, despite ‘internal’ antagonisms: the twenty-first century is ‘ours’; ‘we’ are finally centered. Wherever one is geographically positioned, there is an emerging, almost clichéd formula: ‘Asia is becoming the center of the earth and we are at the center of Asia, so we are the world.’ This is where history comes in. Contrary to the now fashionable claim that we have entered the postcolonial era, the mood of triumphalism as reaction and reactionary to colonialism indicates that we still operate within the boundary of colonial history which has generated a whole set of what I would call the colonial cultural imaginary in which all of us are caught up. Triumphalism, one must point out, can be a foundational desire, preparing for the coming of the next wave of imperial colonialism. My own concern with decolonizing the cultural imaginary can thus be located at this general level: unless the cultural imaginary we have been living with can be decolonized, the vicious circle of colonization, decolonization and recolonization will continue to move on.’(Trajectories : Inter-Asian Cultural Studies : Kuan-Hsing Chen : Taylor)

Climate Change : Ultimately, the climate issue are there, and surroundings are needed to be learnt properly. Julie Sze and Michael Ziser in their collaborative paper write that they :

‘The complex interplay of basic U.S. notions about the cycles of history, the finitude of empires, the political meaning of nature, and the status of China as the main economic producer and polluter in the world all help explain the current appeal of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, who has made a name for himself documenting what the major exhibition of his work calls “manufactured landscapes,” large-scale man-made alterations in the environment. Burtynsky’s earliest works depicted—with a minimum of editorial context—the landscapes of resource extraction in North America: the gigantic quarries of Vermont, Pennsylvania valleys decimated by steel-smelting operations, the toxic remnants of an Ontario uranium mine, etc. High-gloss prints of enormous size, these photographs deliberately played with and advanced beyond the aesthetics of the industrial documentary photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher, David Plowden, Andrew Borowiec, and others. The Bechers began photographing the industrial architecture of the United States and Germany in the 1950s, when factories that had served the prewar industrial economy were being abandoned in large numbers. Aiming to memorialize this passing era and its functionalist aesthetic, their work organizes deteriorating structures into “typologies” that are both quasiscientific and vaguely elegiac, much in the tradition of Karl Blossfeldt’s earlier systematic nature photography.’ (Ziser)

Thus the criticism should also be there of anything as a part of social structure thence the good results can be derived.

Conclusion : Cultural Studies as interdisciplinary field kf study has touched almost all the present aspects of world culture in all the possible ways. This helps in better understanding of surrounding and thus improves life-expectancy rate indeed. This way holistically any culture should fall to be studied in hands and glance of experts.

Thank you!

Works Cited :

 Binkley, Sam, and Jo Littler. “Introduction: Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism: A Critical Encoun.” Taylor & Francis, Taylor & Francis, 25 Feb. 2014, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315874531-6/introduction-cultural-studies-anti-consumerism-critical-encounter-sam-binkley-jo-littler.

 Clough, Patricia Ticineto. “Future Matters: Technoscience, Global Politics, and Cultural Criticism.” Social Text, Duke University Press, 14 Oct. 2004, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/174057/summary. 

 Giroux, Henry A., et al. “Counternarratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmo.” Taylor & Francis, Taylor & Francis, 7 Nov. 1996, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9780203699102/counternarratives-henry-giroux-peter-mclaren-michael-peters-colin-lankshear. 

 Moreno, Ana I. “Contrastive Rhetoric.” Edited by Ulla Connor et al., Google Books, Google, https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=xXdqnuQtlW0C&oi=fnd&pg=PA25&dq=info%3AtiUiftHxuP8J%3Ascholar.google.com%2F&ots=cvK36MeP3g&sig=S9RxeWni_uBzKzQhpAIM6_uE2Rw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false.

 “Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Kuan-Hsing Chen: Taylor.” Edited by Kuan-Hsing Chen, Taylor & Francis, Taylor & Francis, 2 July 1998, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203976586/trajectories-kuan-hsing-chen. 

 Ziser, Michael, and Julie Sze. “Climate Change, Environmental Aesthetics, and Global Environmental Justice Cultural Studies.” Discourse, Wayne State University Press, 4 June 2009, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/266843/summary. 

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