CULTURAL STUDIES III

Abir A Chaaban
Lebanese American University

Introduction in Cultural Studies Theory and Practice, 4
th
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