Five Types of Cultural Studies

Five types of Cultural Studies

As we know, culture is itself very difficult to pin down the term ‘culture’, Cultural studies is hard to define.

[1]British Cultural Materialism

As we know cultural studies is deeply concern with modern industrialized economy followed with media culture which is organized on capital lines. Here, representations are produced itself by profit-motivation corporation. Cultural studies have developed a form of a cultural materialism concerned with understanding how and why specific meanings are encoded at the time of production. By focusing on this, cultural studies try to connect these with political economy. So in this manner, cultural studies, as a discipline is concerned with power and distribution of social and economic resources.

British critic Graham Holderness defines cultural materialism as a "politicized form of historiography". 

Politics and Subjectivity in Cultural Materialism

As we have seen, new historicism is dogged by the problems associated with inadvertently replicating formalism at the level of culture. Cultural materialism, on the other hand, circumnavigates many of these problems by its more rigorous reading of Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams. Indeed, cultural materialism has been characterised as writing explicitly ‘under the sway of Althusser’.1 When Walter Cohen considered cultural materialism he concluded that, of its theoretical sources, ‘perhaps Althusser has exercised the greatest infl uence’.2 Michael D. Bristol has claimed that Jonathan Dollimore is ‘writing in the tradition of Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams’.3 And, of course, the term ‘cultural materialism’ itself is derived from Williams.

Two trajectories in British Cultural materialism

[2]American Multiculturalism

Before entering into the discussion of American Multiculturalism, let us define ‘What is multiculturalism?’ The term multiculturalism has a range of meanings within the contexts of sociology, of political philosophy, and of colloquial use.

[3]New Historicism

New historicism has been a hugely influential approach to literature and thus very necessary to look at this with different lens so we can reach to the new history rather than to believe upon what is said to us! In short, it goes beyond new criticism and result of formalist approach where history of historian is also much required. In its earliest iteration, new historicism was primarily a method of power analysis strongly influenced by the anthropological studies of Clifford Geertz (1973), modes of torture and punishment described by Michel Foucault (1977), and methods of ideological control outlined by Louis Althusser (1971).

Carol Thomas Neely put the problem very plainly: New historicism’s insistence on the textuality of history and the intertextuality of literature and other texts has brought into the discourse a wide range of fascinating period texts, brilliantly explicated. But these texts, more often than not, are much like or even identical with those favoured by old historical critics. They are male, upper class, hierarchical, prescriptive, virtually literary. It has a “disregard for the integrity of the literary text”

New Historicism is the theory to study and interpretation of literature with two different contexts:

It Connect with social hierarchy, hegemony and monarchy. It connects with Marxists also.

[4]Post-Modernism and Popular Culture

Citation:

Parvini, Neema. (2018). New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. 10.1002/9781118958933.ch19.