British

1
British Cultural Studies

• Lecture 1
• An Introduction to British Cultural Studies
• 13 March 2006

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Orientations British Cultural Studies is

• A porous field of inquiry into culture and power
• that examines questions of class, gender and
  ethnicity in post-war Britain
• through an interdisciplinary approach to theory
  and methodology
• And a commitment to intellectual as well as
  academic work

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The rise and fall of British Cultural Studies

• 1950s Key texts challenging approaches to
  cultural analysis
• 1964 Establishment of the Birmingham Centre for
  Contemporary Cultural Studies
• 1970s widespread internationalisation of
  Cultural Studies
• 1980s-90s wide range of foci of analysis, key
  criticisms of cultural studies
• BCCCS closed as part of University restructuring,
  2002

4
Multiple and contested senses of being British

• In terms of everyday patterns of living, Britain
  is an increasingly pluralistic society, with a
  range of religions, languages, customs and
  rituals all part of what can be rightly termed
  British
• Susan Bassnet, Studying British Cultures

5
End of Empire

• Gordon Brown Stop apologising for Empire
• Paul Gilroy When did we start?

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Disavowal of Empire?

• Although the Caribbean lies at the heart of the
  western hemisphere and was historically pivotal
  in the rise of Europe to world predominance, it
  has nevertheless been spatially and temporally
  eviscerated from the imaginary geographies of
  Western modernity. The imagined community of
  the West has no space for the islands that were
  its origin, the horizon of self-perception, the
  source of its wealththe shores that Columbus
  first stumbled upon now appear only in tourist
  brochures, or in occasional disaster tales
  involving hurricanes, boat-people, drug barons,
  dictators, or revolutions. Despite its
  indisputable narrative position at the origin of
  the plot of Western modernity, history has been
  edited and the Caribbean left on the cutting room
  floor.
• Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean (20031)

7
Postcolonial migration

• From the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948,
  postcolonial and global migration has changed the
  nature of British society
• Special interactive report www.guardian.co.uk/bri
  tain/london

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Other factors

• Disappearance of an industrial base and the
  industrial welfare state
• European Union membership
• Conflict in Northern Ireland
• Devolution in Scotland and Wales

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Britain

• Out go bowler hats, fox hunting and Shakespeare,
  in comes fashion, new media, and
  multiculturalism..

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Qualifying culture

• When we consider the possible meanings,
  connotations and uses of the word culture we
  face a mass of interpretations and symbolic
  associations. How are we to make sense of this
  concept? It is at one and the same time a mark of
  distinction and of the assumptions on which such
  distinctions are forged
• Mark J. Smith, Culture Reinventing the Social
  Sciences

• The concept of culture does not represent a
  fixed entity in an independent object world but
  is best thought of as a mobile signifier that
  denotes different ways of talking about human
  activities with divergent uses and purposesthe
  concept of culture is plastic, political and
  contingent
• Chris Barker, Making Sense of Cultural Studies

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The politics of C/culture

• It is one of those rare ideas which have been as
  integral to the political left as they are vital
  to the political right, and its social history is
  thus exceptionally tangled and ambivalent
• Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (2000 4)

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Culture is ordinary

• (Culture) is not artifice and manners, the
  preserve of Sunday best, rainy afternoons and
  concert halls. It is the very material of our
  daily lives, the bricks and mortar of our most
  commonplace understandingsit is one of the most
  fundamental paradoxes of our social life that
  when we are at our most natural, our most
  everyday, we are also at our most cultural that
  when we are in the roles that look the most
  obvious and given, we are actually in roles that
  are constructed, learned and far from inevitable
• Paul Willis, Shop Floor Culture Masculinity and
  the Wage Form (1979)

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Studies

• Analytical, pedagogical and political functions
• Graeme Turner culture must be studied within
  the social relations and system through which
  culture is produced and consumed, and that thus
  the study of culture is intimately bound up with
  the study of society, politics and economics

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Traditionally, an academic discipline is defined
by three criteria first there is the object of
study, second there is the method of approach to
the object of study, third there is the history
of the discipline itself

• John Storey, Introduction to Cultural Theory and
  Popular Culture

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Significant breaks in the Cultural Studies
story

• Antecedents Culture and Civilisation tradition
• Phase 1 Culturalism (1950s-60s)
• Phase 2 Engagement with French structuralism
  (1960s-early 1970s)
• Phase 3 Engagement with Gramsci, postmodernism,
  postcolonial studies and international cultural
  studies (1970s-)

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Criticisms of political self-importance

• Cultural Studies writers offer another variety
  of storytelling in the market place. Along with
  many other good stories, those of cultural
  studies are best thought of as inspirational
  guidebooks with consequences. Cultural studiesis
  a potent tool for activists and policy-makers
  rather more than a form of direct political
  activity. Cultural Studies is no less valuable
  for that story tellers have had an important
  role in human history, but we should avoid
  confusing the power and agency of the King with
  the play of the Fool (who tells the best stories)
• Chris Barker, Making Sense of Cultural Studies
  (2002 7)

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Rajamuffin Britain

• What does the article discuss in relation to
• Postcolonial Britain?
• Jamaican culture?
• The politics of popular culture?
• Transnational (hybrid culture)?
• (implicitly) the methodology of cultural studies?