CULTURAL STUDIES III

Abir A Chaaban

Lebanese American University

Introduction in Cultural Studies Theory and Practice, 4th Edition Chris Barker ( SAGE, 2012).

Historical Background References

Stewart Brown and Timothy Tackett eds. The Cambridge History

of Christianity, Volume II. Enlightenment, Reawakening and

Revolution, 1660-1815. Cambridge University Press 2006).

Wilson Coats et al. The Emergence Of Liberal Humanism: an

intellectual history of Western Europe. Volume I. from the Italian

Renaissance to the French Revolution. Mcgraw-Hill Company

1966.

The Study of Culture and Cultural

Studies ( p. 5)

The study of culture has taken place in a variety of academic

disciplines. It has no origin.

Cultural studies is a discursive formation, a cluster of images

and practices, which provide ways of talking about forms of

knowledge and conduct associated with practices and

institutions of society.

Cultural Studies

Cultural studies has a moment to its beginning as an intellectual

project.

Its main concern is acceptance of institutional legitimating.

Its main concern is the study of institutions of higher education.

Cultural Studies

As a field that developed during the 60s of the

twentieth century, its major critic has been the truth

claimed by theoreticians of the Enlightenment.

The discipline started to take shape with the

emergence of Marxist and critical theory.

The aim of such theory is to question the legitimacy of

power.

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is an era of intellectual endeavor

that accompanied the Reformation until the collapse

of the European Christian Divine Rights of sovereign

Kings system and the birth of the nation-state.

Cultural Studies

Is an interdisciplinary field that brings into analysis perspectives of different disciplines to examine the relations of culture and power.

It is concerned with institutional practices, values and habitual forms of conduct.

It explores and include forms of power associated with gender, race, class and colonization.

Cultural studies main target is institutions of higher education. It also forges connections outside the academy into social and political movements.

Key Concepts in Cultural Studies

Representation:

The question of how the world is socially constructed.

Examination of the textual generation of meaning through

language.

It analysis modes by which meaning is generated.

Cultural representation of meaning is imbedded in

sounds, inscriptions, objects, images, books,

magazines and television programs.

Key Concepts in Cultural Studies

Materialism and non-reductionism

How and why meanings are inscribed at the moment of production.

Who owns and controls cultural production.

The distribution mechanism of cultural products.

The consequences of patterns of ownership and control of cultural landscape.

Culture has its own specific meanings, rules and practices that cannot be reduced and explained in terms of another category.

Key Concepts in Cultural Studies

Articulation:

Theorize the relationships of a social formation.

The sudden unity of elements that normally do not go

together.

Discussing the relationship between culture and political

economy.

Culture is said to be articulated with moments of

production but not determined in any necessary

way by that moment, and vice versa.

Key Concepts in Cultural Studies

Power

Power is centralized within the discipline of academic inquiry.

Power is not simply the coercive sovereign glue that holds

society together.

Power is to be understood in terms of the processes that

generate and enable any form of social action, relationship or

order.

Key Concepts in Cultural Studies

Popular Culture

Popular culture refers to the dynamics that manufacture

consent.

Such culture incorporates ideologies representing

meanings through revisionist historical discourse to

legitimize power and maintain power.

Key Concepts in Cultural Studies

Texts and Readers

The production of consent requires popular identification of meaning through texts implying hegemony and authority.

It includes the generation of meaning through images, sounds, objects.

The meaning critics read in cultural texts is not necessarily the same meaning produced by active readers.

Meaning of the same text differs as it is produced by various perspectives.

Key Concepts in Cultural Studies

Subjectivity and Identity

Consumption of knowledge is associated with the process of

personification, or the formation of the person.

The subject, its relationship to the event and interaction with

the event interferes in claims of objectivity.

What are the cultural practices that constitutes and construct

identity, gender, race and relations of power between races

and gender.

The Intellectual Strands of Cultural Studies

Marxism and the Centrality of Class

Culturalism and Structuralism

Post structuralism ( and Postmodernism)

Psycho Analysis and Subjectivity

Feminism, race and postcolonial theory