what is cultural studies essay

Free Cultural Studies Essay Examples & Topics

There is a field in academia that analyzes the interactions between anthropological, political, aesthetic, and socioeconomic institutions. It is referred to as cultural studies . This area is interdisciplinary, meaning that it combines and examines several departments. First brought up by British scientists in the 1950s, it is now studied all over the world.

The scope of cultural studies is vast. From history and politics to literature and art, this field looks at how culture is shaped and formed. It also examines the complex interactions of race and gender and how they shape a person’s identity.

In this article, our team has listed some tips and tricks on how to write a cultural studies essay. You will encounter many fascinating aspects in this field that will be exciting to study. That is the reason why we have prepared a list of cultural studies essay topics. You can choose one that catches your eye right here! Finally, you will also find free sample essays that you can use as a source of inspiration for your work.

The work process on an essay begins with a tough choice. After all, there are thousands of things that you can explore. In the list below, you will find cultural studies topics for your analytical paper.

• The role of human agency in cultural studies and how research techniques are chosen.
• Examining generational changes through evolution in music and musical taste in young adults.
• Does popular culture have the power to influence global intercultural and political relationships?
• Different approaches to self-analysis and self-reflection examined through the lens of philosophy.
• Who decides what constitutes a “cultural artifact”?
• The difference in religious and cultural practices between Japanese and Chinese Buddhists.
• Exploring the symbiotic relationship between culture and tradition in the UK.
• Do people understand culture nowadays the same way they understood it a century ago?
• Which factors do we have to take into account when conducting arts and culture research of ancient civilizations?
• Día de Los Muertos: a commentary on an entirely different perspective on death.
• American society as represented in popular graphic novels.
• An analysis of the different approaches to visual culture from the perspective of a corporate logo graphic designer.
• What can French cinema of the 20 th century tell us about the culture of the time?
• Narrative storytelling in different forms of media: novels, television, and video games.
• The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the direction of pop culture.

In case you haven’t found your perfect idea in the list, feel free to try our title generator . It will compose a new topic for your cultural studies essay from scratch.

With an ideal topic for your research, you start working on your cultural analysis essay. Below you will find all the necessary steps that will lead you to write a flawless paper.

• Pick a focus. You cannot write an entire essay on the prospect of culture alone. Thus, you need to narrow down your field and the scope of your research. Spend some time reading relevant materials to decide what you want your paper to say.
• Formulate your thesis. As the backbone of your assignment, it will carry you through the entire process. Writing a thesis statement brings you one step closer to nailing the whole essay down. Think “What is my paper about?” and come up with a single sentence answer – this will be your statement.
• Provide context for your intro. The introduction is the place for setting the scene for the rest of your paper. Take time to define the terminology. Plus, you should outline what you will talk about in the rest of the essay. Make sure to keep it brief – the introduction shouldn’t take up longer than a paragraph.
• Develop your ideas in the body. It is the place for you to explore the points you’re trying to make. Examine both sides of the argument and provide ample evidence to support your claims. Don’t forget to cite your sources!
• Conclude the paper effectively. The final part is usually the hardest, but you don’t need to make it too complicated. Summarize your findings and restate your thesis statement for the conclusion. Make sure you don’t bring in any new points or arguments at this stage.
• Add references. To show that you’re not pulling your ideas out of thin air, cite your sources. Add a bibliography at the end to prove you’ve done your research. You will need to put them in alphabetical order. So, ensure you do that correctly.

Thank you for reading! Now, you can proceed to read through the examples of essays about cultural studies that we provided below.

584 Best Essay Examples on Cultural Studies

What is popular culture definition and analysis.

• Words: 1399

Raymond Williams’ “Culture Is Ordinary”

• Words: 1248

Similarities of Asian Countries

• Words: 2356

Indian Custom and Culture Community

• Words: 2207

Culture and Development in Nigeria

• Words: 2718

The Influence of Ramayana on the Indian Culture

Nok culture’s main characteristic features.

• Words: 1483

UAE and Culture

• Words: 1210

Pashtun Culture: Cultural Presentation

• Words: 1083

The Luo Culture of Kenya

• Words: 3544

“Never Marry a Mexican”: Theme Analysis & Summary

• Words: 2244

The United States of America’s Culture

• Words: 1367

Comparing the US and Italian Cultures

• Words: 2217

Power and Culture: Relationship and Effects

• Words: 2783

The Jarawa People and Their Culture

• Words: 1438

The Nature of People and Culture

Art and science: one culture or two, difference and similarity, philippines dressing culture and customs.

• Words: 1454

Chinese Traditional Festivals and Culture

• Words: 2763

Culture and Health Correlation

Ballads and their social functions.

• Words: 3314

African Cultural Traditions and Communication

• Words: 1114

Discussion: Cultural Roots and Routes

• Words: 1469

Cultural Comparison: The United States of America and Japan

Three stages of cultural development.

• Words: 1165

Traditional and Nontraditional Cultures of the USA

Saudi arabian culture.

• Words: 1486

Culturagram of African Americans Living in Jackson

The role of chinese hats in chinese culture.

• Words: 2307

Stuart Hall’s Theory of Encoding and Decoding

Cultural prostitution: okinawa, japan, and hawaii.

• Words: 2370

What Role Does Food Play in Cultural Identity?

• Words: 1199

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Subculture

• Words: 2000

Society, Culture, and Civilization

Theory of the aryan race: historical point of view.

• Words: 2770

Dubai’s Food, Dress Code and Culture

• Words: 1124

Culture Identity: Asian Culture

• Words: 1101

Time in Mahfouz’s “Half a Day” and Dali’s “Persistence of Memory”

• Words: 1092

Chinese Manhua History Development

• Words: 5401

American Culture Pros & Cons

Polygamy in islam, the importance of cultural values for a society, birthday celebrations in the china.

• Words: 1664

Culture, Subculture, and Their Differences

• Words: 1157

Dairy Products Impact on Human Health in Saudi Arabia

• Words: 6593

The Beautiful Country of Kazakhstan: Kazakh Culture

• Words: 1644

Filial Piety

• Words: 1120

Comparison Between the Body Rituals in Nacirema and American Society

Anthropological approach to culture, cultural diversity and cultural universals relations: anthropological perspective, saudi traditional clothing.

• Words: 1815

Bedouin Tent : Review and Analysis

Natural resources and conflicts in asian countries.

• Words: 1567

Gothic Lifestyle as a Subculture

The importance of understanding national culture, the history of the hippie cultural movement.

• Words: 1485

Indigenous Australian Culture, History, Importance

• Words: 2102

Significance of the Rite of Passage: Maasai Lion Hunt

Cultural studies: what is folklore, wheeler’s theory and examples of pilgrimage, cultures of the middle east.

• Words: 2353

Cultural Appropriation: Christina Aguilera in Braids

Expanding chinese cultural knowledge in health beliefs.

• Words: 2291

Theodor Adorno’s “Culture Industry” Analysis

• Words: 1489

The Phenomenon of Queer Customs

Etiquette in traveling at home and abroad, non-material and material culture, indian culture, food, temples, and clothing.

• Words: 1035

The Impact of Ancient Greek Civilization and Architecture on Modern Culture

African american family cultural background.

• Words: 1441

Trobriand Society: Gender and Its Roles

• Words: 3118

African-American Cultural Group and the Provision of Services to African Americans

Cultural change: mechanisms and examples, impact of globalization on the maasai peoples` culture.

• Words: 1736

Asian Youth Gangs Analysis

• Words: 2451

Traditional and Non-Traditional Culture

Meaning of culture and its importance, muslim culture: history, values, notions, diaspora and diasporic imaginary.

• Words: 1144

The Sub-Culture of the American Circuses of the Early 20th Century

• Words: 3909

Football Impact on England’s Culture

• Words: 1096

Indian Culture: Dances of Rajasthan

Plants in lakota folklore.

• Words: 3727

African Folktales as a Reflection of Culture

A scarf as a cultural metaphor, the power of a symbol, hells angels as a motorcycle subculture, “signs of life in the usa” by maasik and solomon, symbol: the basic element of culture, “cargo cult science” by richard feynman, views of benjamin franklin on indian culture, cats in ancient egyptian culture: religious, social, and cultural significance.

• Words: 1377

Popular Culture and Social Change Across Cultures

• Words: 1102

Culture of the Dominican Republic

• Words: 2229

The Western Conception of Africa in “Things Fall Apart“ by Chinua Achebe

• Words: 2238

Japanese Popular Culture: Anime, Video Games, and the Film Industry

Cultural background: personal journey, cultural studies: folklore – the art of telling a story, lord of dance.

• Words: 1482

Punjabi: the Culture

The yanomami culture and survival, kazakhstani culture through hofstede’s theory.

• Words: 1480

Cultural Differences in Communication:Western and Eastern Cultures

Exegeses-ruling class and ruling ideas by karl marx, cultural effects on health care choices.

• Words: 3292

Implications of Korean Culture on Health

• Words: 1439

Arts and Crafts Movement and Modernism

The image of ravens and crows in different cultures, culture for sale: the national museum in singapore.

• Words: 1806

Korean Popular Culture: Attractiveness and Popularity

Japanese society: factors affecting the cultural development.

• Words: 1156

Greetings in Etiquette in Society by Emily Post

Hmong culture aspects, arab music and cinema development: western culture impact.

• Words: 3622

Researching of Rituals in Culture

• Words: 1174

Arab American Culture and Events

• Words: 2367

Cultural Artifacts and the Importance of Humanities

Music in china and some east asian countries.

• Words: 3039

The Igbo Culture: Use of Proverbs, Folktales and Song

Traditions and their impact on personality development.

• Words: 1131

What is Cultural Studies? Here’s The Simple Explanation

Cultural studies is a term that one can notice has increasingly become popular over the years in academia. Nowadays, universities worldwide offer both undergrad and postgrad cultural studies programs, and programs that focus on subsections of the field such as media studies or literary studies. However, it being a relatively newer field of study, there are still many who do not know what it entails. So, what exactly is cultural studies?

Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary academic discipline that is rooted in subjects from both the humanities and the social sciences and is based upon theories and practices from the same. While many of the seminal texts of cultural studies and early theorists of the discipline were based in the late nineteenth century and twentieth century, its establishment and recognition as an area of academic study happened later.

What is distinctive about CS is that it is extremely diverse and interconnected, drawing upon various methodologies and theories to perform analysis– thus, there is no one single definition of Cultural Studies. Jamaican scholar Stuart Hall, one of the biggest pioneers and arguably the most important figure in the field, wrote that “Cultural Studies as a project is open-ended” –  it does not have any singular origins and has multiple discourses, histories, and trajectories (Hall, 1996). As they maintained that cultures were unstable and always shifting, similarly CS thinkers refused to draw any rigid boundaries around the field or maintain oneness.

While the academic analysis of pop culture is not a new concept to us now, it was not so a few decades ago. In 1964, Richard Hoggart founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the first institution solely dedicated to cultural studies. They were not given much encouragement, however as their endeavour to study the workings of mass culture was not one that was easily accepted by other academicians around them or the establishment. It was only in the coming years that cultural studies expanded and gained intellectual attention all over the world and engaged with other schools of thought.

Redefining Culture:

Cultural theorists analyse not just texts themselves but also the ways in which cultural knowledge is produced and consumed in the real world. This means taking into account the socio-economic, political, and historical context in which texts are made, and the positionalities and marginalities of the makers and the people being represented in the texts. Texts here refer to not just books or literature but photos, art, films, television, fashion, etc – anything that is imbued with cultural meaning.

Cultural Studies as a field, especially with regard to its origins, is one that is hugely influenced by the Marxist school of thought and critical theory, and thus politically is aligned with the left. Some of the major theories that CS is influenced by include structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics, post-colonialism, feminist theory, queer theory, literary theory, etc. It aims to look into how the vectors of gender, race, sexuality, class, etc shape the production-consumption and dissemination of culture and media.

The encoding/decoding model, also known as Reception Theory is a landmark theory under CS developed by Hall initially in 1973, with reference to television media. He argued that the earlier present model of communication, which is linear, is not accurate as messages in media are encoded with meanings which may be interpreted (decoded) by audiences in different ways based on their sociocultural standing and experiences. He stated that based on this, audiences would arrive at one of three readings – the dominant or preferred reading, wherein audiences decode the messages the way the producer intended them to; the negotiated reading, where there is a mixture of accepting some of the intended meanings but also adding some of their own; and finally, the oppositional reading wherein audiences reject the intended meanings and form their own based on their background.

There are also various other theories and concepts that have been developed and expanded upon by CS thinkers. Some such important concepts and areas of study include themes of representation, identity, subcultures, power, ideology and hegemony. Ideology here is meant to be understood as  “commonly meant maps of meaning that, while they purport to be universal truths, are historically specific understandings that obscure and maintain power” (Barker, 2007). Hegemony is a concept that was first introduced by the scholar Antoni Gramsci, which can be explained as the processes through dominant groups maintaining social authority over marginalized groups – through producing and maintaining norms and ideas that legitimized their dominance.

Today, the field of cultural studies is one that is vast and has gained importance across the globe. There are numerous associations, research centres and journals centred around cultural studies present worldwide, and various international conferences. The importance of cultural studies is relevant now more than ever as the world is experiencing upheavals whether it be socio-cultural, political or environmental, with cultural practices and media playing a big role.

Hall, S. (1996). Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies. Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies , 262-275.

Hall, S. (1990). The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities. October, 53 , 11-23. doi:10.2307/778912

Cultural studies. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095652927

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Cultural Studies: A Theoretical, Historical and Practical Overview

Cultural studies has become an unavoidable part of literary criticism and theory. Cultural studies is an advanced interdisciplinary arena of research and teaching that examines the means in which "culture" creates and transforms day to day life, individual experiences, power and social relations. As a developing field of study it is important to know the beginning and growth of cultural studies as a field of knowledge. This article is an attempt to present an introductory information regarding the beginning, definitions, schools important theoreticians and practical aspects of cultural studies. This study is analytical in nature and historical information are presented mostly. The objective of this article is to give a quick understanding about the beginners in the field of Cultural studies.

Related Papers

Introductory Notes on Cultural Studies

Introduction to Cultural Studies is a course of study for students pursuing a Masters in English Literature. As part of the course, it will be helpful for the students if they get a quick-tour kind of an introduction to the discipline called Cultural Studies. As a study of culture, the title presupposes a knowledge about what encompasses the word 'culture', we may attempt a definition of it first. Culture can be defined as an asymmetric combinations of abstract and actual aspects of elements like language, art, food, dress, systems like family, religion, education, and practices like mourning and 'merrying', all of which we refer to as cultural artifacts. It is assumed that values and identities are formed, interacted and represented in a society in association with these artifacts. Cultural Studies, therefore, is a constant engagement with contemporary culture by studying, analyzing and interacting with the institutions of culture and their functions in the society.

Chun Lean LIM

This course introduces students to the work and significance of representation and power in the understanding of culture as social practice. It helps students to understand the relationships among sign, culture and the making of meanings in society. From this base it approaches the question of ideology and subjectivity in the shaping of culture. With reference to various cultural texts and social contexts, we study examples of cultural production from history and politics to lived experiences of the everyday, from photography and art to cinema and museum, from popular culture to lifestyle etc. In appreciating divergent concerns in the critical analysis of culture and power, we focus on selected topics both mainstream and emergent, with an emphasis on contemporary developments in the Asian contexts. A brief account of the intellectual formations of Cultural Studies will be provided to allow students to appreciate the global, regional and local perspectives in the evolving field of study.

Joanna Dziadowiec-Greganić

Until recently, cultural studies was a part of knowledge that was treated by the academic world in an ambivalent way. On one hand, there was a belief that the humanities, including the social sciences, in some way belong to each other, with the understanding that they at least partly create a common field. On the other hand, there was a visible tendency to diversify the expanding specializations, by creating new disciplines of knowledge which were separated from the original core. Cultural studies were perceived as an eclectic type of knowledge embracing almost everything, starting with demography and archeology through sociology, psychology and history, also encompassing economics and cultural management. This situation was also expressed by the institutional structure of scientific disciplines. Nowadays it has become apparent that this postmodern fragmentization of culture is petering out. This has created the necessity of a new synthesis in the humanities. It has resulted in the institutionalization of ‘cultural studies’ for which the Polish equivalent can be expressed as ‘kulturoznawstwo.’ Moreover, in relation to postmodernism, (especially models of postmodern narration and phenomena such as over interpretation while analyzing an investigated object), which is a common feature of all the humanities, we may go beyond the postmodern canons. While postmodernism is becoming the subject of reflection in the history of knowledge, there are new methodological propositions coming to light. They are partly the continuation of but also the opposition to postmodern depictions. In that exact moment, cultural studies as a scientific discipline arises. These two reasons, one institutional and the other thematic, have become an invitation for discussion about the identity of cultural studies as a field of knowledge. The aim of the conference was to bring together researchers who are engaged in research on culture. The discussion was not limited to their differences, but also included common points in particular disciplines. The research subject has taken the first step towards formulating a general methodology of the science of culture. The variety of presented research perspectives and the problems which cultural studies will face points towards the necessity of further ventures which would organize and order both subjects and methods of cultural studies research. The opportunity to take more profound reflections and desired polemics in this field will surely be included in the publication of the post-conference materials.

Dr. MANJEET K R . KASHYAP

The crossing of disciplinary boundaries by the new humanities and the “humanities-tocome”is lumped as “cultural studies” in a very confused way.The term, cultural studies, wascoined by Richard Hoggart in 1964; and the movement was inaugurated by Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958) and by The Uses of Literacy (1958), and it became institutionalized in the influential Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies [CCCS], founded by Hoggart in 1964. It is evident that much of what falls under cultural studies could easily be classified under various other labels such as marxism, structuralism, new historicism, feminism and postcolonialism. Since the term has become popularized, I would not focus on why it is named so. Instead, the concern of this paper is to provide a deep theoretical understanding of cultural studies. Cultural studies analyzes the social, religious, cultural, discourses and institutions, and their role in the society. It basically aims to study the functioning of the social, economic, and political forces and power-structure that produce all forms of cultural phenomena and give them social “meanings” and significance.

Dumitru Tucan

Jarosław Płuciennik

The main proposal of the article is to bring into focus humanism as a project which was always present in the Renaissance philology and is still into the main areas of reflection of the Enlightenment and Modernity. The large part of the article consists of a review of the philological tradition since the Renaissance, and it tries to describe an interdisciplinary nature of cultural studies, which always referred to politics and political science, and comparative multilingual approaches, which made them strictly international. Recent development in the area of digital humanities makes cultural studies similar to media studies. Humanism is the only component of the studies which is indispensable because it is not to be replaced by artificial intelligence.

JORGE GERMAN GARCIA HUGHES

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 31, 460-467

Manfred Engel

Discusses differences between the concept of "Cultural Studies" in the English-speaking world and the German "Kulturwissenschaft". Also sketches the project of a cultural and literary history of the dream as an example for "cultural literary studies". All essays of the volume freely available under: https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/crcl/index.php/crcl/issue/view/681

Simon During

Parvati Raghuram

© Richard Johnson, Deborah Chambers, Parvati Raghuram and Estella Tincknell 2004 First published 2004 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this ...

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cultural studies

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cultural studies , interdisciplinary field concerned with the role of social institutions in the shaping of culture . Cultural studies emerged in Britain in the late 1950s and subsequently spread internationally, notably to the United States and Australia . 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.

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• Cultural Studies

Is a book ever just a book? In cultural studies, if what you actually mean by 'book' is 'a carrier of cultural meaning produced in a specific cultural, economic, and social context', then yes! – and this is exactly what makes books (or any published text, for that matter) so interesting to analyse.

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Give three examples of cultural texts.

Which theory from linguistics is key to understanding cultural studies?

What is a 'sign' according to semiotic theory?

What is the name of the theory that cultural texts are produced like any other consumer item?

True or false: cultural materialism is the same as marxism.

What is marxism?

What is 'hegemony'?

The active audience theory was popularised by which cultural studies theorist in the essay 'Encoding, Decoding' (1973)?

How has the concept of 'hegemony' influenced cultural studies?

Early cultural studies scholars saw youth subcultures as examples of what?

What three keywords should you keep in mind when analysing literature from a cultural studies perspective? 

• American Drama
• American Literary Movements
• American Literature
• American Poetry
• American Regionalism Literature
• American Short Fiction
• Literary Criticism and Theory
• Critical Race Theory
• Deconstruction
• Derrick Bell
• Disability Theory
• Eco-Criticism
• Edward Said
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
• F. R. Leavis
• Feminist Literary Criticism
• Ferdinand Saussure
• Formalism Literary Theory
• Fredric Jameson
• Freudian Criticism
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
• Harold Bloom
• Helene Cixous
• Homi Bhabha
• Intersectionality
• Jacques Derrida
• Jacques Lacan
• Jean Baudrillard
• Jean-Francois Lyotard
• Julia Kristeva
• Kimberle Crenshaw
• Luce Irigaray
• Marxism Literary Criticism
• Mikhail Bakhtin
• Narratology
• New Historicism
• Patricia J. Williams
• Post-Structuralism
• Postcolonial Literary Theory
• Postmodern Literary Theory
• Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism
• Queer Theory
• Raymond Williams
• Reader Response Criticism
• Roland Barthes
• Roman Jakobson
• Rosemarie Garland Thomson
• Stephen Greenblatt
• Structuralism Literary Theory
• Terry Eagleton
• Walter Benjamin
• Walter Pater
• Literary Devices
• Literary Elements
• Literary Movements
• Literary Studies
• Non-Fiction Authors

When you're looking at literature through a cultural studies lens, anything involving words on a page, stage, or screen is up for your literary analyst brain to grab. Here you will find an introduction to everything cultural studies including the history of the field, key cultural studies theory, and examples of how you can use it in your own literary analysis.

Cultural studies summary

At its core, cultural studies is a field of academic study that looks at:

• how culture is created, maintained, shared, and reproduced.
• how structures of power in society influence this process .
• the relationships between culture, power, and social identities (such as ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, etc.).

Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field, meaning that it has its roots in many different subjects, including anthropology, philosophy, history, psychology, literary criticism and theory, and more.

What is culture?

It's not surprising that cultural studies involves so many different subjects, as culture is perhaps one of the biggest topics there is. So, before we delve further into cultural studies, history, and theories, let's first define what we mean by 'culture'.

The first things that pop into your mind when you think about culture may include food, music, religion, clothes, sports, language, and social rules. Culture is all of these things and more: c ulture is everything that makes up a 'way of life' 1 for one person, a group of people, a nation of people, or even the whole of humanity.

The most important thing to remember when talking about culture in cultural studies is that culture is a process , meaning that it never stays in one place – it's always on the go as it changes and develops.

History of cultural studies

Richard Hoggart (1918–2014) founded the University of Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in the UK in 1964 . This marked the beginning of the academic field of cultural studies.

The CCCS was groundbreaking because it challenged the idea that only elite 'high culture' was worth analysing . Scholars at the CCCS argued that 'low' popular culture and mass media – such as advertisements and TV shows – are also rich in meaning to be researched and explored.

What is meant by high culture vs low culture? The distinction between high and low culture has been a dominant idea in academia until recently. High culture was seen to consist of art, literature, and music thought to represent the most educated (and often upper-class) thinkers and creatives. Low culture, on the other hand, was seen to represent everyone else: the less educated 'masses' and the working class.

Today, cultural products and information are much more widely available due to the internet. Do you think this has challenged traditional distinctions between high and low culture?

Since it began, cultural studies has been highly focused on identifying systems of oppression and resistance in culture . Although the CCCS closed in 2002, it left a strong and widespread legacy. Cultural studies is a global field, and it has changed the way many of us look at the media we consume and its relationship to power in society.

However, cultural studies is not without its critics. Some argue that the field is just too broad, leading to it being about everything and nothing at the same time. The literary critic Harold Bloom (1930–2019) also said that cultural studies' focus on left-wing politics limits the enjoyment of art and the discussions we can have about it.

Cultural studies theory

In cultural studies, 'texts' are more than just pieces of writing. Cultural texts can be anything made to convey meaning, such as speeches, advertisements, radio shows, photographs, food, and fashion choices.

Just like books, these cultural texts can also be analysed. Let's look at some of the theories cultural studies theorists use when studying cultural texts.

Semiotic theory

In linguistics, semiotics is the study of language, its parts, and how it is interpreted. Semiotics has been highly influential within cultural studies, which sees culture as a kind of language and vice versa.

Culture and language are deeply connected as they both 'represent the world'. 3 Like language, culture uses 'signs' to communicate certain meanings.

Sign: something used to represent or symbolise an abstract meaning

• The word 'tree' is a sign that represents the idea of a tree.
• The ' ' emoji is a sign that represents the feeling of happiness.

In cultural studies, the creation of signs is a never-ending process that is influenced by and influences the way we perceive the world. Because of this, cultural studies theorists say that meaning is never 'fixed'; it is constructed and always subject to change. This process is influenced by many factors, explained further by the theory of cultural materialism.

Cultural materialism

Cultural materialism is a theoretical approach developed by Raymond Williams (1921–1988).

The key idea of cultural materialism is that cultural texts are produced like any other consumer item, such as a television or cosmetics. These products don't just come out of nowhere; cultural texts and the meanings they convey are influenced by many factors before, during, and after their production, including the economic and social backgrounds of their producers and audiences.

Cultural materialism is rooted strongly in Marxism , however, it is not the same.

Marxism: a socioeconomic theory based on the ideas of Karl Marx that capitalist societies are grounded in inequality between lower-class masses and ruling upper-class elites. The ruling upper classes maintain this inequality by controlling the economy and maintaining the dominance of the capitalist agenda.

It is from Karl Marx's theory that the term 'hegemony' emerged.

Hegemony: the dominating values, ideas, and interests of the ruling classes.

The idea of hegemony has been very influential within cultural studies and its argument that analysing cultural texts can reveal how hegemonic values, ideas, and interests in society are maintained or resisted.

Active audience theory

For cultural studies theorists, hegemony doesn't mean that non-ruling classes have no influence over culture. This is partly explained by t he active audience theory, popularised by cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall (1932–2014).

Stuart Hall argued that audiences of cultural texts are active. Instead of being passive couch potatoes, audiences engage with cultural texts by interpreting (or 'decoding') meaning based on their own personal experiences, even unconsciously. 3

Scholars at the CCCS were also interested in how hegemony was actively resisted and looked at contemporary youth subcultures (such as punks) as examples of resistance.

Cultural studies in literature

When you study literature from a cultural studies perspective, you analyse meaning by looking at the text in combination with the economic, social, and cultural context in which the text was produced.

Because of cultural studies' interest in the resistance of hegemonic power structures in society, it has incorporated political theories such as Marxism, disability theory, and postcolonial literary theory . When looking at literature from a cultural studies perspective, these are all lenses through which literature can be analysed.

Disability theory: an academic theory that looks at what disability means in society and how this meaning is influenced by culture and society Postcolonial literary theory: a literary theory that uses literature to explore the consequences of imperialism and colonialism (when countries exert their influence over other countries to gain wealth and power).

Furthermore, as cultural studies is concerned with questioning hegemonic ideas, literary and cultural studies scholars also work with texts outside of the literary canon , such as pop culture and literature, representing more diverse voices.

Literary canon: a collection of literature traditionally regarded as being 'high culture' and the most significant works from a time and place.

Geoffery Chaucer (c. 1340s–1400) and William Shakespeare (1564–1616) are two famous figures from the Western literary canon.

Cultural studies examples

When you're analysing literature from a cultural studies perspective, you'll want to keep these three keywords at the front of your mind: power, identity and representation. Guided by these three keywords, ask yourself the following questions about your chosen text or texts that you want to analyse:

Let's say we wanted to analyse the representation of youth subcultures in Netflix's Stranger Things (2016–present) series . Here are some key points we could cover:

• Power: Stranger Things was produced by Netflix, a popular, multinational American streaming service. The series explores a group of children and young adults who must overcome controlling adult figures (their parents, the police, the military, and government officials) as well as a deadly supernatural force in order to save their hometown.
• Identity: Stranger Things is mainly marketed to young adults between 18 and 30 years old, a demographic that also has the lowest amount of voters in politics, leading to older voters having more political power. Most of the lead characters in Stranger Things are young adults.
• Representation: Stranger Things represents youth subcultures as a place of belonging and resistance against hegemonic ideas and values. The main characters use the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (1974) to explain the supernatural happenings in their town rather than listening to adults, who mostly turn out to be wrong or villains in the series.

Cultural Studies - Key takeaways

• Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field of academic study that looks at how culture is created, maintained, shared and reproduced and how this process influences and is influenced by structures of power in society.
• Cultural studies views culture as a way of life that is always in process.
• The field of cultural studies began when the University of Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was established in 1964.
• Cultural studies challenges the distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture and is focused on identifying and resisting systems of oppression.
• You can study literature from a cultural studies perspective by focusing on a text's social, economic, and cultural context and how power, identity, and representation are connected in a text.

1 Raymond Williams . 'Culture is Ordinary'. 1958.

2 Stuart Hall. 'Encoding, Decoding'. 1973.

3 Stuart Hall. 'The Work of Representation'. 1997.

4 'Press Release Number CB21-TPS.49'. United States Census Bureau. April 29, 2021.

Flashcards in Cultural Studies 49

Your answers could include three of the following or anything similar:

• Advertisements
• Radio shows
• Fashion choices

Something used to represent or symbolise and abstract meaning

Cultural materialism is rooted in marxism but they are not the same.

Marxism is a socioeconomic theory based on the ideas of Karl Marx that capitalist societies are grounded in inequality between lower-class masses and   ruling upper-class elites.

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Frequently Asked Questions about Cultural Studies

What is an example of cultural studies? 

An example of cultural studies is studying a cultural text such as a book in combination with the economic, social, and cultural context in which it was produced. 

What are the key concepts in cultural studies?

At its core, cultural studies is a field of academic study that looks at how culture is created, maintained, shared, and reproduced, how structures of power in society influence this process, and the relationships between culture, power, and social identities.

What does cultural anthropology study?

Cultural anthropologists study different human cultures.

Why is cultural studies important?

Cultural studies is important because it helps us to understand the processes behind the creation of culture and meaning in the cultural texts we are analysing.

What is cultural studies?

Cultural studies is a field of academic studies that was developed in the 1980s by the University of Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. 

Test your knowledge with multiple choice flashcards

The active audience theory was popularised by which cultural studies theorist in the essay 'Encoding, Decoding' (1973)?

At which university did cultural studies become an academic field?

In which year was the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies established?

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25 What Is New Historicism? What Is Cultural Studies?

When we use New Historicism or cultural studies as our lens, we seek to understand literature and culture by examining the historical and cultural contexts in which literary works were produced and by exploring the ways in which literature and culture influence and are influenced by social and political power dynamics. For our exploration of these critical methods, we will consider the literary work’s context as the center of our target.

New Historicism is often associated with the work of Stephen Greenblatt , who argued that literature is not a timeless reflection of universal truths, but rather a product of the historical and cultural contexts in which it was produced. Greenblatt emphasized the importance of studying the social, political, and economic factors that shaped literary works, as well as the ways in which those works in turn influenced the culture and politics of their time.

New Historicism also seeks to break down the boundaries between high and low culture, and to explore the ways in which literature and culture interact with other forms of discourse and representation, such as science, philosophy, and popular culture.

One of the key principles of New Historicism is the idea that literature and culture are never neutral or objective, but are always implicated in power relations and struggles. It also emphasizes the importance of the reader or interpreter in shaping the meaning of a text, arguing that our own historical and cultural contexts influence the way we understand and interpret literary works. When using this method, we often talk about cultural artifacts as part of the discourse of their time period.

New Historicism has been influential in a variety of fields, including literary and cultural studies, history, and anthropology. It has been used to analyze a wide range of literary works, from Shakespeare to contemporary novels, as well as other cultural artifacts such as films and popular music.

Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing literature that emerged in the late 20th century. Unlike traditional literary criticism that focuses solely on the text itself, cultural studies criticism explores the relationship between literature and culture. It considers how literature reflects, influences, and is influenced by the broader cultural, social, political, and historical contexts in which it is produced and consumed.

In cultural studies literary criticism, scholars may examine how literature intersects with issues such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and power dynamics. The goal is to understand how literature participates in and shapes cultural discourses. This approach emphasizes the importance of considering the cultural and social implications of literary texts, as well as the ways in which literature can be a site of contestation and negotiation.

Key concepts in cultural studies literary criticism include hegemony, representation, identity, and the politics of culture. Scholars in this field often draw on a variety of theoretical perspectives, including postcolonial theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and critical race theory, to analyze and interpret literary works in their cultural context. We will explore these approaches to literature in more depth in future parts of the book.

Learning Objectives

• Understand how formal elements in literary texts create meaning within the context of culture and literary discourse. (CLO 2.1
• Using a literary theory, choose appropriate elements of literature (formal, content, or context) to focus on in support of an interpretation (CLO 2.3)
• Emphasize what the work does and how it does it with respect to form, content, and context (CLO 2.4
• Understand how context impacts the reading of a text, and how different contexts can bring about different readings (CLO 4.1)
• Demonstrate through discussion and/or writing how textual interpretation can change given the context from which one reads (CLO 6.2)
• Understand that interpretation is inherently political, and that it reveals assumptions and expectations about value, truth, and the human experience (CLO 7.1)

Scholarship: An Excerpt from the Introduction to Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and historian, is widely credited with the ideas about history that led to the development of New Historicism as an approach to literary texts. In this passage, Foucault explains his aims in proposing that history does not consist of stable facts. Understanding Foucault’s approach to history is necessary for understanding the New Historicism critical approach to literature.

In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should like to begin with a few observations. My aim is not to transfer to the field of history, and more particularly to the history of knowledge (connaissances), a structuralist method that has proved valuable in other fields of analysis. My aim is to uncover the principles and consequences of an autochthonous transformation that is taking place in the field of historical knowledge. It may well be that this, transformation, the problems that it raises, the tools that it uses, the concepts that emerge from it, and the results that it obtains are not entirely foreign to what is called structural analysis. But this kind of analysis is not specifically used; my aim is most decidedly not to use the categories of cultural totalities (whether world-views, ideal types, the particular spirit of an age) in order to impose on history, despite itself, the forms of structural analysis. The series described, the limits fixed, the comparisons and correlations made are based not on the old philosophies of history, but are intended to question teleologies and totalisations; in so far as my aim is to define a method of historical analysis freed from the anthropological theme, it is clear that the theory that I am about to outline has a dual relation with the previous studies. It is an attempt to formulate, in general terms (and not without a great deal of rectification and elaboration), the tools that these studies have used or forged for themselves in the course of their work. But, on the other hand, it uses the results already obtained to define a method of analysis purged of all anthropologism. The ground on which it rests is the one that it has itself discovered. The studies of madness and the beginnings of psychology, of illness and the beginnings of a clinical medicine, of the sciences of life, language, and economics were attempts that were carried out, to some extent, in the dark: but they gradually became clear, not only because little by little their method became more precise, but also because they discovered – in this debate on humanism and anthropology – the point of its historical possibility. In short, this book, like those that preceded it, does not belong – at least directly, or in the first instance – to the debate on structure (as opposed to genesis, history, development); it belongs to that field in which the questions of the human being, consciousness, origin, and the subject emerge, intersect, mingle, and separate off. But it would probably not be incorrect to say that the problem of structure arose there too. This work is not an exact description of what can be read in Madness and Civilisation, Naissance de la clinique, or The Order of Things. It is different on a great many points. It also includes a number of corrections and internal criticisms. Generally speaking, Madness and Civilisation accorded far too great a place, and a very enigmatic one too, to what I called an ‘experiment’, thus showing to what extent one was still close to admitting an anonymous and general subject of history; in Naissance de la clinique, the frequent recourse to structural analysis threatened to bypass the specificity of the problem presented, and the level proper to archaeology; lastly, in The Order of Things, the absence of methodological signposting may have given the impression that my analyses were being conducted in terms of cultural totality. It is mortifying that I was unable to avoid these dangers: I console myself with the thought that they were intrinsic to the enterprise itself, since, in order to carry out its task, it had first to free itself from these various methods and forms of history; moreover, without the questions that I was asked,’ without the difficulties that arose, without the objections that were made, I may never have gained so clear a view of the enterprise to which I am now inextricably linked. Hence the cautious, stumbling manner of this text: at every turn, it stands back, measures up what is before it, gropes towards its limits, stumbles against what it does not mean, and digs pits to mark out its own path. At every turn, it denounces any possible confusion. It rejects its identity, without previously stating: I am neither this nor that. It is not critical, most of the time; it is not a way of saying that everyone else ‘ is wrong. It is an attempt to define a particular site by the exteriority of its vicinity; rather than trying to reduce others to silence, by claiming that what they say is worthless, I have tried to define this blank space from which I speak, and which is slowly taking shape in a discourse that I still feel to be so precarious and so unsure. ‘Aren’t you sure of what you’re saying? Are you going to change yet again, shift your position according to the questions that are put to you, and say that the objections are not really directed at the place from which you, are speaking? Are you going to declare yet again that you have never been what you have been reproached with being? Are you already preparing the way out that will enable you in your next book to spring up somewhere else and declare as you’re now doing: no, no, I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you?’ ‘What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.’

After reading this brief excerpt from Foucault’s approach to history, how do you feel about his assertion that there are no stable facts, that history is essentially like any other text that we can deconstruct? Is there such a thing as “objective” or “true” history? Why or why not? How does this approach compare with what you learned about deconstruction in our previous section?

Scholar Jean Howard has said of the historical/biographical criticism (which we studied in part one) that it depends on three assumptions:

• “history is knowable”;
• “literature mirrors…or reflects historical reality”;
• “historians and critics can see the facts objectively” (Howard 18).

Foucault and the New Historicists reject these three assumptions.

Cultural Studies: From “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular'” by Stuart Hall

Now let’s look at an example of Cultural Studies criticism: Stuart Hall’s “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular.'” Hall, a Jamaican-born cultural theorist and sociologist, was one of the founders of British Cultural Studies. He explored the process of encoding and decoding that accompanies any interaction readers have with a text. When Hall talks about “periodisation” in the passage below, he is discussing historians’ and literary theorists’ attempts to classify works through “periods” (e.g., the English Romantic poets; the Bloomsbury Group , etc.). Hall extends this difficulty to the phrase “popular culture,” which is often used in cultural studies criticism.

First, I want to say something about periodisations in the study of popular culture. Difficult problems are posed here by periodization—I don’t offer it to you simply as a sort of gesture to the historians. Are the major breaks largely descriptive? Do they arise largely from within popular culture itself, or from factors which are outside of but impinge on it? With what other movements and periodisations is “popular culture” most revealingly linked? Then I want to tell you some of the difficulties I have with the term “popular.” I have almost as many problems with “popular” as I have with “culture.” When you put the two terms together the difficulties can be pretty horrendous. Throughout the long transition into agrarian capitalism and then in the formation and development of industrial capitalism, there is a more or less continuous struggle over the culture of working people, the labouring classes and the poor. This fact must be the starting point for any study, both of the basis for, and of the transformations of, popular culture. The changing balance and relations of social forces throughout that history revealed themselves, time and again, in struggles over the forms of the culture, traditions and ways of life of the popular classes. Capital had a stake in the culture of the popular classes because the constitution of a whole new social order around capital required a more or less continuous, if intermittent, process of re-education, in the broadest sense. And one of the principal sites of resistance to the forms through which this “reformation” of the people was pursued lay in popular tradition. That is why popular culture is linked, for so long, to questions of tradition, of traditional forms of life, and why its “traditionalism” has been so often misinterpreted as a product of a merely conservative impulse, backward-looking and anachronistic. Struggle and resistance—but also, of course, appropriation and ex -propriation. Time and again, what we are really looking at is the active destruction of particular ways of life, and their transformation into something new. “Cultural change” is a polite euphemism for the process by which some cultural forms and practices are driven out of the centre of popular life, actively marginalised. Rather than simply “falling into disuse” through the Long March to modernization, things are actively pushed aside, so that something else can take their place. The magistrate and the evangelical police have, or ought to have, a more “honoured” place in the history of popular culture than they have usually been accorded. Even more important than ban and proscription is that subtle and slippery customer—“reform” (with all the positive and unambiguous overtones it carries today). One way or another, “the people” are frequently the object of “reform”: often, for their own good, of course—in their “best interest.” We understand struggle and resistance, nowadays, rather better than we do reform and transformation. Yet “transformations” are at the heart of the study of popular culture. I mean the active work on existing traditions and activities, their active reworking, so that they come out a different way: they appear to “persist”— yet, from one period to another, they come to stand in a different relation to the ways working people live and the ways they define their relations to each other, to “the others” and to their conditions of life. Transformation is the key to the long and protracted process of the “moralization” of the labouring classes, and the “demoralization” of the poor, and the “re-education” of the people. Popular culture is neither, in a “pure” sense, the popular traditions of resistance to these processes; nor is it the forms which are superimposed on and over them. It is the ground on which the transformations are worked. In the study of popular culture, we should always start here: with the double stake in popular culture, the double movement of containment and resistance, which is always inevitably inside it.

Now that you’ve read examples of scholarship from these two approaches, what similarities and differences do you see? Despite significant overlaps—both approaches consider power structures and view texts as artifacts, for example—Cultural Studies tends to have a broader scope, incorporating insights from various cultural disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. New Historicism focuses more specifically on the interplay between literature and history. Additionally, Cultural Studies may engage more directly with contemporary cultural and political issues, while New Historicism tends to focus on historical periods and their relevance to understanding literature.

How to Use New Historicism and Cultural Studies as  Critical Approaches

When using a New Historicism or cultural studies approach to analyze a literary text, you should consider the connections between the text and its historical context. With cultural studies, you will also consider how the text influenced and was influenced by popular culture, and how the text’s reception changed over time. You can do this in a variety of ways. Here are a few approaches you might consider. Some of them such as author background, reader response, and identifying power dynamics will feel familiar to you from previous chapters.

• Research the Historical Context: Investigate the time period in which the literary work was written. Explore political events, social structures, economic conditions, and cultural movements.
• Author’s Background: Examine the life and background of the author. Consider their personal experiences, beliefs, and the historical events that may have influenced them.
• Identify Power Dynamics: Analyze power relationships within the text and in the historical context. Consider issues of class, gender, race, and other forms of social hierarchy.
• Interdisciplinary Approach: Draw on insights from various disciplines such as history, sociology, anthropology, and political science to enrich your understanding of the historical and cultural context.
• Cultural Artifacts: Treat the literary work as a cultural artifact. Identify elements within the text that reflect or respond to the cultural values, norms, and anxieties of the time.
• Dialogues with Other Texts: Explore how the literary work engages with other texts, both literary and non-literary. Look for intertextual references and consider how the work contributes to broader cultural conversations (the discourse Foucault talks about).
• Language and Literary Techniques: Analyze the language, narrative structure, and formal elements of the text. Consider how these literary techniques contribute to the overall meaning and how they may be influenced by or respond to historical factors.
• Ideological Critique: Investigate the ideologies present in the text and how they align with or challenge the dominant ideologies of the historical period. Consider the ways in which literature participates in ideological struggles. We will explore more specific examples of how to do this when we focus on Marxism and Postcolonial Studies in our next section.
• Social and Cultural Constructs: Examine how social and cultural constructs are represented in the text. This includes exploring representations of identity, social norms, and cultural practices.
• Historical Events and Allusions: Identify direct or indirect references to historical events within the text. Consider how the events are portrayed and what commentary they offer on the historical moment.
• Historical Change and Continuity: Assess how the text reflects or responds to processes of historical change and continuity. Consider whether the text aligns with or challenges prevailing attitudes and structures.
• Reader Response: Reflect on how the historical context might shape the way readers interpret and respond to the text. Consider how the meaning of the text may evolve across different historical and cultural contexts.

You do not need to consider every aspect of the text mentioned above to write an effective New Historicism analysis. You can focus on one or a few of these elements in your approach to the text.

As noted above, a cultural studies critical approach is similar to New Historicism but focuses more on the text as it is received in a particular culture, with more emphasis on intersectionality. A cultural studies approach may consider a variety of artifacts in addition to literary texts (such as film and other media) for analysis. A cultural studies approach might also consider how cultural influences, receptions, and attitudes have changed over time.

Let’s look at how do do these types of criticism by applying New Historicism to a text.

Applying New Historicism Techniques to Literature

As with our other critical approaches, we will start with  a close reading of the poem below (we’ll do this together in class or as part of the recorded lecture for this chapter). After you complete your close reading of the poem and find evidence from the text, you’ll need to look outside the text for additional information to place the poem in its context. I have provided some additional resources to demonstrate how you might do this. Looking at the text within its context will help you to formulate a thesis statement that makes an argument about the text, using New Historicism as your critical method.

“Lament for Dark Peoples”

I was a red man one time, But the white men came. I was a black man, too, But the white men came.

They drove me out of the forest. They took me away from the jungles. I lost my trees. I lost my silver moons.

Now they’ve caged me In the circus of civilization. Now I herd with the many— Caged in the circus of civilization.

The first thing we need to know is more about Langston Hughes as a poet. Who was he? When did he write? What was the cultural context for his writing? We can go to Wikipedia as a starting point for our research, but we should not cite Wikipedia. Instead, we will want to find higher-quality literary scholarship to use in our analysis.

The open source article “ Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative Encoded Language” by Christine Dualé informs us that “Hughes gained his reputation as a “jazz poet” during the jazz era or Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s” ( Dualé 1). Dualé quotes a study of Black poets during the Harlem Renaissance that provides some context for this poem: “Many black intellects were disquieted by the white vogue for blackness. They recognized how frivolous and temporal it was, and the extent to which their culture was being admired for all the ‘primitive’ qualities from which they wished to be distanced” ( Dualé quoting Archer Straw). 

This quote helps us to understand lines 9-12 of the poem, where Hughes describes the “circus of civilization” that he felt under the gaze of this “white vogue for blackness.”

In considering the question of social constructs and power dynamics during this period, we need to know more about the Harlem Renaissance, preferably looking for contemporary sources that describe this period. JSTOR is a good database for this type of research. I limit my search by year to get five results, and I choose an article from Alain Locke (in part, because I already know enough about the Harlem Renaissance to know that Locke was an important part of it—it’s totally acceptable to use your own existing knowledge of the historical context, if you have it, to guide your research!).

When I read “The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature,” written by Howard University philosophy professor Alain Locke in 1928,  I quickly find the prevailing social construct that the dominant intellectual culture at the time (white American men) had formed about African American writers during the period when this poem was written. I have quoted from the first page of the article below:

THERE are two distinctive elements in the cultural background of the American Negro: one, his primitive tropical heritage, however vague and clouded over that may be, and second, the specific character of the Negro group experience in America both with respect to group history and with regard to unique environing social conditions. As an easily discriminable minority, these conditions are almost inescapable for all sections of the Negro population, and function, therefore, to intensify emotionally and intellectually group feelings, group reactions, group traditions. Such an accumulating body of collective experience inevitably matures into a group culture which just as inevitably finds some channels of unique expression, and this has been and will be the basis of the Negro’s characteristic expression of himself in American life. In fact, as it matures to conscious control and intelligent use, what has been the Negro’s social handicap and class liability will very likely become his positive group capital and cultural asset. Certainly whatever the Negro has produced thus far of distinctive worth and originality has been derived in the main from this source, with the equipment from the general stock of American culture acting at times merely as the precipitating agent; at others, as the working tools of this creative expression (Locke 234).

In reading this article, it’s important to note that the author, Alain Locke, is  a noted African American scholar and writer and the first African American to win a prestigious Rhodes scholarship. He is widely considered to be one of the principal architects of the Harlem Renaissance. What does this passage tell us about the social constructs and contemporary views of African Americans in the late 1920s, when Langston Hughes wrote “Lament for Dark Peoples”? What important historical context seems to be “missing” or glossed over from this cultural description of African Americans in the 1920s? Hint: It’s only 60 years since President Lincolin signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and yet we see no explicit mention of slavery here.

Now to consider how history and context changes, I might also look for a contemporary appraisal of Langston Hughes’s work in the context of the Harlem Renaissance.

Again, I do a JSTOR search, limiting to articles from 2018 through 2023. I get 157 results using the same search terms. Clearly, Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance are playing a prominent role in our contemporary scholarly discourse, especially in the fields of literature, history, and cultural studies. In fact, there’s even a journal called The Langston Hughes Review ! I choose an article from this journal entitled “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Remembering Langston Hughes: His Art, Life, and Legacy Fifty Years Later” by Wallace Best, Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University.

In this article, I get some corroboration for what my search results have already told me: “Langston Hughes, one of the principal writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, is having a renaissance all his own” (Best 1).

Best goes on to demonstrate how Langston Hughes’s role in our culture has shifted since his death:

“There is good reason for all this attention. Arguably one of the most significant writers in United States history, Hughes has left an indelible mark, culturally and politically, on American society. Hailed in his lifetime mainly as the “Poet Laureate of the African American community,” he is now generally embraced as one of the most important poets speaking to, and on behalf of, all Americans. Since his death in May 1967, his writing, particularly his poetry, has been invoked to articulate both our loftiest hopes and our deepest fears as a nation. Seldom has there been a national crisis or an important political event in the United States over the last half-century in which his work has not been recounted. Speakers from across the social, ideological, and political spectrum, from Tim Kaine, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry to Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama have cited Hughes’s powerful compositions. His poetry has helped to shape our country’s thinking about itself, our often-troubled past, and our continuing hope for a brighter, more enlightened future.”

With these three external sources and the original poem, I can now begin to think about the kind of thesis statement I want to write.

Example of a New Historicism thesis statement: In one of his earlier poems, “Lament for Dark Peoples,” African American poet Langston Hughes makes a powerful argument against the “circus of [white] civilization (line 12), demonstrating how the cultural norms toward marginalized peoples in place during the early twentieth century damaged all Americans.

I would then use the evidence from the poem as one cultural artifact, including the additional sources I found to provide more context for when the poem was written, the social constructs and power dynamics in place at that time, and the shifts in culture that have now made Langston Hughes a poet for “all Americans” (Best 1).

With New Historicism, because we are considering the context, we must cite some outside sources in addition to the text itself. Here are the sources I cited in this section:

Works Cited

Best, Wallace. “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Remembering Langston Hughes: His Art, Life, and Legacy Fifty Years Later.” The Langston Hughes Review , vol. 25, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–5. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.5325/langhughrevi.25.1.0001 . Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.

Dualé, Christine. “Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative Encoded Language.”  Angles. New Perspectives on the Anglophone World 7 (2018). https://journals.openedition.org/angles/920  . Accessed 3 Oct. 2023. Locke, Alain. “The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , vol. 140, 1928, pp. 234–47. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/1016852 . Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.

One additional note: depending on your approach, it would also be appropriate to borrow research techniques from historians for a New Historicism analysis. This might involve working with archive primary source documents. One example of this type of document that I found in my research on the Harlem Renaissance is this one from the U.S. Library of Congress entitled “The Whites Invade Harlem.”

As noted above, a cultural studies approach would be similar to a New Historicism approach. However, if I were using cultural studies, I might want to focus on the difference between the text’s critical reception when it was published (how it affected and was affected by the discourse in the 1920s) and the text’s critical reception today, focusing on the explosion of academic interest on Langston Hughes’s work in since 2018. I would then look at the particular aspects of culture, such as the election of America’s first Black president and the backlash this created in popular culture, as well as the focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia and how this was reflected in popular culture. For example, I could consider how twenty-first century scholarship focusing on Langston Hughes is one example of a larger desire for inclusion and representation of marginalized groups in literature, what we sometimes refer to as “exploding the canon” (Renza 257).

Limitations of New Historicism and Cultural Studies Criticism

While New Historicism offers valuable insights into the interconnectedness of literature and historical context, it also has its limitations. Here are some potential drawbacks:

• Relativism: New Historicism can sometimes be accused of cultural relativism, as it emphasizes understanding a text within its specific historical context. This might lead to a reluctance to make broader judgments about the quality or significance of a work across different times and cultures.
• Overemphasis on Power Relations: Critics argue that New Historicism can place an excessive focus on power dynamics and political aspects, potentially neglecting other important elements of literary analysis, such as aesthetics or individual authorial intentions.
• Determinism: There’s a risk of determinism in assuming that a text is entirely shaped by its historical context. This approach may downplay the agency of individual authors and the role of artistic creativity in shaping literature.
• Selective Use of History: Scholars employing New Historicism may selectively use historical evidence to support their interpretations, potentially overlooking contradictory historical data or alternative perspectives that challenge their readings (don’t do this!)
• Overlooking Textual Autonomy/Author Authority: Critics argue that New Historicism sometimes neglects the autonomy of literary texts, treating them primarily as reflections of historical conditions rather than as creative and independent entities with their own internal dynamics.
• Tendency for Presentism: There’s a risk of imposing contemporary values and perspectives onto historical texts, leading to anachronistic interpretations that may not accurately reflect the attitudes and beliefs of the time in which the work was created (note how I initially looked for scholarship from the time period of the text I was analyzing above).

These limitations do not mean we shouldn’t use New Historicism; rather, they suggest areas where a more balanced and comprehensive approach to literary analysis may be necessary.

Similarly, cultural studies might place an overwhelming emphasis on cultural factors, sometimes neglecting economic or political considerations that could also shape social dynamics. The relativist stance of cultural studies may hinder critical evaluation and potentially overlook harmful practices or ideologies.

New Historicism and Cultural Criticism Scholars

New historicism.

• Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher who viewed history as a text that could be deconstructed. Foucault’s concept of “the discourse” is essential to both New Historicism and Cultural Studies criticism.
• Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943) is the American Shakespeare scholar who coined the term “New Historicism.”

Cultural Studies

• Stuart Hall (1932-2014) was a Jamaican-born British philosopher and cultural theorist whose ideas were influential to the development of cultural studies as a field.
• Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German philosopher and thinker whose ideas about media were foundational to cultural studies.
• Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian philosopher and critic who focused on the importance of context over text in approaches to literary works.
• Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a French philosopher whose 1967 essay “L’Morte de Auteur” critiqued traditional biographical approaches to literary criticism.

Further Reading

• Benjamin, Walter. “The Author as Producer.” Thinking Photography  (1982): 15-31.
• Brannigan, John.  New Historicism and Cultural Materialism . Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.
• Coates, Christopher. “What was the New Historicism?” The Centennial Review , vol. 37, no. 2, 1993, pp. 267–80. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/23739388. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Cotten, Angela L., and Christa Davis Acampora, eds.  Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women’s Writings . State University of New York Press, 2012.
• Dollimore, Jonathan. “Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism.” New Historicism and Renaissance Drama . Routledge, 2016. 45-56.
• Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt.  Practicing New Historicism . University of Chicago Press, 2000.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. “Racial Memory and Literary History.” PMLA , vol. 116, no. 1, 2001, pp. 48–63. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/463640. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. “What Is the History of Literature?” Critical Inquiry , vol. 23, no. 3, 1997, pp. 460–81. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344030. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Hall, Stuart. “Encoding and decoding in the television discourse.” .https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-artslaw/history/cccs/stencilled-occasional-papers/1to8and11to24and38to48/SOP07.pdf
• Hall, Stuart. “Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies.”  Stuart Hall . Routledge, 2006. 272-285.
• Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Foucault and the New Historicism.” American Literary History , vol. 3, no. 2, 1991, pp. 360–75. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/490057. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Hoover, Dwight W. “The New Historicism.” The History Teacher , vol. 25, no. 3, 1992, pp. 355–66. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/494247. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Howard, Jean E. “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies.” English Literary Renaissance  16.1 (1986): 13-43.
• Porter, Carolyn. “History and Literature: ‘After the New Historicism.’” New Literary History , vol. 21, no. 2, 1990, pp. 253–72. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/469250. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Renza, Louis A. “Exploding Canons.” Contemporary Literature , vol. 28, no. 2, 1987, pp. 257–70. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/1208391 . Accessed 13 Feb. 2024.
• Ryan, Kiernan. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Critical Worlds Copyright © 2024 by Liza Long is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Cultural Studies in the United States

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 16, 2020 • ( 0 )

Cultural studies emerged as a distinctive academic discipline in the English-speaking world between the 1960s and the 1990s as part of the broad shift in universities to new kinds of interdisciplinary analysis. Parallel to contemporaneous developments in ethnic studies and women’s studies, programs in cultural studies, which often originated as units of English or communications departments, tended to be institutionalized as centers and institutes rather than as departments. What most readily distinguished cultural studies from mainline literary studies were new and different objects of study and modes of inquiry. In addition, cultural studies both reflected and propounded a cultural politics opposed to the belletrism and formalism characteristic of postwar academic literary studies in the Anglophone world. Typically, adherents of cultural studies conceived themselves—and were conceived by others—as being in opposition to the reigning establishment of university disciplines and values.

Among the objects of study commonly examined in programs of cultural studies were such wildly diverse “discourses” as advertising, art, architecture, urban folklore, movies, fashion, popular literary genres (thrillers, romances, Westerns, science fiction), photography, music, magazines, youth subcultures, student texts, theories of criticism, theater, radio, women’s literature, television, and working-class literature. Against the regnant exclusive focus on aesthetic masterpieces of canonized high literature, advocates of cultural studies characteristically advanced the claims of “low,” popular, and mass cultures. (In this work they followed in the wake of the earlier Frankfurt school scholars and the New York Intellectuals, among others, who pioneered modes of cultural inquiry from the 1930s to the 1960s.) During the postmodern period the arts and activities to be found in the ordinary shopping mall appeared as worthy of serious study and analysis as the artifacts and artworks enthroned in the traditional monumental museum. Potentially, the whole spectrum of cultural objects, practices, and texts constituting a society provided the materials of cultural studies. In the event that belletristic literature was examined from the perspective of cultural studies, the emphasis was invariably put on literature as communal event or document with social, historical, and political roots and ramifications. In short, the work of “literature” was not treated as an autonomous aesthetic icon separable from its conditions of production, distribution, and consumption—quite the contrary.

The modes of inquiry employed in cultural studies included not only established survey techniques, field interviews, textual explications, and researches into sociohistorical backgrounds but also and especially institutional and ideological analyses. For scholars of cultural studies institutional analysis entailed a conception of institutions as productive agencies that both constituted and disseminated knowledge and belief by means of systematic practices and conventions affecting cultural discourses. For example, studies of present-day popular romances examined the practices of publishing companies and bookstores in shaping and maintaining the rules of the romance genre as well as in packaging and promoting ongoing avalanches of “successful” (reproductions of the form. Since institutions overlap, an investigation into one frequently leads to a second. In the case of romance, a scrutiny of the genre’s powerful presence in television soap operas and women’s magazines links together publishers, booksellers, television programmers, and magazine editors. To generalize, networks of institutions play crucial roles in creating, conditioning, and commodifying cultural works. As such, the application of institutional analysis is central to the enterprise of cultural studies.

Whereas institutional analysis is focused on the material means and methods employed by institutions involved in the circulation of cultural objects and texts, ideological analysis is given over to examining the ideas, feelings, beliefs, and representations embodied in and promulgated by the artifacts and practices of a culture. Obviously, institutional and ideological analysis overlap. For instance, Richard Ohmann in English in America (1976) depicted the institution of English studies as a disseminator not only of the skills of analysis, organization, and fluency but of the “attitudes” of detachment, caution, and cooperation, all of which aid the smooth operation of modern capitalist societies. Because the objects, texts, and institutions of a culture create and convey ideology, the use of ideological analysis is fundamental to the work of cultural studies, which invariably seeks to investigate the ideological dimensions and forces of cultural works.

Characteristic of cultural studies in English-speaking universities is a leftist political orientation rooted variously in Marxist, non-Marxist, and post-Marxist socialist intellectual traditions all critical of the aestheticism, formalism, anti-historicism, and apoliticism common among the dominant postwar methods of academic literary criticism. Advocates of cultural studies regularly apply to the analysis of cultural materials insights from contemporary anthropology (esp. ethnography), economics, history, media studies, political theory, and sociology. Not surprisingly, the twin habits of isolating and of monumentalizing the arts and humanities are anathema to adherents of cultural studies. To sacralize is to deracinate and mummify. Cultural studies seeks to analyze and assess the social roots, the institutional relays, and the ideological ramifications of communal events, organizations, and artifacts. Such a project predisposes analysts to intervene actively in arenas of cultural struggle. The conservative role of the traditional intellectual as disinterested connoisseur and custodian of culture is widely regarded as suspect and unworthy by proponents of cultural studies.

The most well-known academic program in cultural studies in Anglophone countries exists at the Centre (lately Department) for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), which was established at the University of Birmingham in England in 1964 under the directorship of Richard Hoggart. Initially part of the Department of English, the Centre became independent in 1972 during the directorship of Stuart Hall , whose term lasted from 1969 to 1979. Previously, Hall was the inaugural editor of Britain’s New Left Review . It was during the 1970s that over 60 Stencilled Papers and 10 issues of the journal Working Papers in Cultural Studies (founded in 1971) were brought out. This journal was absorbed into a CCCS-Hutchinson Company book series that published in the closing years of the decade the collectively edited Resistance through Rituals: Youth Sub-Cultures in Post-War Britain (1976), On Ideology (1978), Women Take Issue (1978), Working Class Culture (1979), and especially Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79 (1980), which amounted to a CCCS reader, complete with an introductory account of the Centre by Stuart Hall. At the peak of this pioneering period in the 1970s, the Centre had 5 faculty members and 40 graduate students. By decade’s end other university programs in cultural studies were set up in England, primarily at polytechnical institutes. With the founding in England of the Cultural Studies Association in 1984, the whole contemporary movement toward establishing cultural studies in the academy attained a significant moment of maturation.

Stuart Hall/The New Yorker

During the mid-1980s the then director and longtime member of the Birmingham Centre, Richard Johnson, had occasion to publish in the United States a landmark manifesto, “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?” which, following Hall, observed that two distinct methodological branches of cultural studies had developed at the Centre. The “culturalist” line, derived from sociology, anthropology, and social history and influenced by the work of RAYMOND WILLIAMS and E. P. Thompson, regarded a culture as a whole way of life and struggle accessible through detailed concrete (empirical) descriptions that captured the unities or homologies of commonplace cultural forms and material life. The “(post)structuralist” line, indebted to linguistics, literary criticism, and semiotic theory and especially attentive to the work of Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Michel Fucault, conceived of cultural forms as semiautonomous inaugurating “discourses” susceptible to rhetorical and/or semiological analyses of cognitive constitutions and ideological effects. While the members of the former group preferred to research, for instance, oral histories, realistic fictions, and working-class texts, seeking to pinpoint and portray private social “experience,” the latter group analyzed avant-garde or literary texts and practices, attempting to uncover underlying constitutive communal codes and conventions of representation. One especially influential American study blending culturalism and poststructuralism was Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which depicted the history of Western research on the Near East as a massive disciplinary discourse structuring and dominating the Orient in a consistently racist, sexist, and imperialistic way that bore little relation to actual human experience.

In the United States widespread academic interest in cultural studies flowered particularly during the 1980s and 1990s, primarily among university intellectuals and critics on the left. In addition to pioneering programs being established, new journals appeared, for example, Cultural Critique, Differences, Representations and Social Text . The editors of Cultural Critique , founded in 1985 at the University of Minnesota, declared their representative objects of study to be “received values, institutions, practices, and discourses in terms of their economic, political, social, and aesthetic genealogies, constitutions, and effects” ( Cultural Critique 1 [1985]: 5). Regarding preferred disciplinary modes of inquiry, they singled out a “broad terrain of cultural interpretation that is currently defined by the conjuncture of literary, philosophical, anthropological, and sociological studies, of Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist methods” (6). On the advisory board of the journal were leading American and British Marxists, nonsectarian leftists, and feminists. In the North American setting, cultural studies aspired to be a new discipline but served as an unstable meeting point for various interdisciplinary feminists, Marxists, literary and media critics, postmodern theorists, social semioticians, rhetoricians, fine arts specialists, and sociologists and historians of culture.

During the 1980s, one of the more influential American literary proponents of cultural studies was the liberal Robert Scholes, who in Textual Power (1985) argued that “we must stop ‘teaching literature’ and start ‘studying texts.’ Our rebuilt apparatus must be devoted to textual studies…. Our favorite works of literature need not be lost in this new enterprise, but the exclusivity of literature as a category must be discarded. All kinds of texts, visual as well as verbal, polemical as well as seductive, must be taken as the occasions for further textuality. And textual studies must be pushed beyond the discrete boundaries of the page and the book into the institutional practices and social structures” (16-17). Over a period of 10 years, Scholes had moved from an apolitical and belletristic structuralism to an increasingly political “textual” (cultural) studies steeped in (post)structuralist thought, as revealed in his trilogy Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (1974), Semiotics and Interpretation (1982), and Textual Power (1985). Typical of some other American university intellectuals advocating cultural studies in the 1980s, Robert Scholes evidently had little knowledge of the pioneering work done by the British school in the 1970s.

What most American literary intellectuals in the postVietnam decade knew about British views of cultural studies came mainly from the influential last chapter of Terry Eagleton’s highly popular text Literary Theory (1983) or occasionally from Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) or sometimes from Janet Batsleer and others’ Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class (1985), the latter two of which were works from the CCCS that gained limited notoriety in the United States. Cast in a poststructuralist mode and indebted to the Centre’s earlier Resistance through Rituals , Hebdige’s book, for example, illustrated how the spectacular styles of postwar subcultures of English working-class youths, particularly teddy boys, mods, rockers, skinheads, and punks, challenged obliquely social consensus, normalization, ideology, and hegemony, functioning through displacement as symbolic forms of dissent and resistance. “Style,” in Hebdige’s formulation, consisted of special disruptive combinations of dress, argot, music, and dance, often “adapted” by white youths from marginal black groups such as the Rastafarians and frequently subjected to cooption and mainstreaming by being turned into products for mass markets. As a scholar of cultural studies, Hebdige conceived “style” to be a complex material and aesthetic ensemble rooted in specifiable historical and socioeconomic contexts, possessing demonstrable semiotic values and ideological valences, all potentially subject to diffusion, routinization, and commodification by means of the agencies and institutions of established societies. From the vantage point of cultural studies, the aesthetic and the social, innovation and history, the avant-garde and the lower-class, creative words and common gripes, disco and assembly line, nestled together inseparably and inevitably.

It was not surprising that in the closing years of the 1980s a new journal, Cultural Studies , was launched under the guidance of an international editorial collective with the explicit goal of fostering “developments in the area worldwide, putting academics, researchers, students and practitioners in different countries and from diverse intellectual traditions in touch with each other and each other’s work” (1 [1987]: flyleaf). What this emergent internationalization indicated was the increasing expansion of research interest and commitment among university intellectuals and scholars to the work of cultural studies. At the same time, cultural studies scholars stepped up work on postcolonial cultures, focusing on deracinated subaltern subjects, heterodox traditions, and hybrid regimes scattered across the globe. Near the end of the century the diffusion of cultural studies appeared headed for increasing diversification into multiple branches and modes.

Bibliography Janet Batsleer et al., Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class (1985); Cultural Studies and New Historicism, special issue, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 24 (1991); Terry Eagleton, “Conclusion: Political Criticism,” Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983); Michel Foucault, La Volonté de savoir (1976, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, 1978); Henry Giroux et al., “The Need for Cultural Studies: Resisting Intellectuals and Oppositional Public Spheres,” Dalhousie Review 64 (1984); Lawrence Grossberg, “The Circulation of Cultural Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6 (1989), “Cultural Studies Revisited and Revised,” Communications in Transition: Issues and Debates in Current Research (ed. Mary S. Mander, 1983), “The Formation of Cultural Studies: An American in Birmingham,” Strategies 2 (1989), “History, Politics, and Postmodernism: Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986, special issue on Stuart Hall); Lawrence Grossberg, Carey Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (1992); Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: The Two Paradigms,” Media, Culture, and Society 2 (1980, reprint, Culture, Ideology, and Social Process, ed. Tony Bennett et al., 1981); Stuart Hall et al., Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79 (1980); Richard Johnson, “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?” Social Text 16 (1986-87); Vincent B. Leitch, “Cultural Criticism,” New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (3d ed., ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, 1993), Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism (1992), “Leftist Criticism from the 1960s to the 1980s,” American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (1988); Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988); Richard Ohmann, English in America: A Radical View of the Profession (1976); Jeffrey M. Peck, “Advanced Literary Study as Cultural Study: A Redefinition of the Discipline,” Profession 85 (1985); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978); Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (1985); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987); Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (1990); Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978); Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

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Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies

In the summer of 1983, the Jamaican scholar Stuart Hall, who lived and taught in England, travelled to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to deliver a series of lectures on something called “Cultural Studies.” At the time, many academics still considered the serious study of popular culture beneath them; a much starker division existed, then, between what Hall termed the “authenticated, validated” tastes of the upper classes and the unrefined culture of the masses. But Hall did not regard this hierarchy as useful. Culture, he argued, does not consist of what the educated élites happen to fancy, such as classical music or the fine arts. It is, simply, “experience lived, experience interpreted, experience defined.” And it can tell us things about the world, he believed, that more traditional studies of politics or economics alone could not.

A masterful orator, Hall energized the audience in Illinois, a group of thinkers and writers from around the world who had gathered for a summer institute devoted to parsing Marxist approaches to cultural analysis. A young scholar named Jennifer Daryl Slack believed she was witnessing something special and decided to tape and transcribe the lectures. After more than a decade of coaxing, Hall finally agreed to edit these transcripts for publication, a process that took years. The result is “ Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History ,” which was published, last fall, as part of an ongoing Duke University Press series called “Stuart Hall: Selected Writings,” chronicling the career and influence of Hall, who died in 2014.

Broadly speaking, cultural studies is not one arm of the humanities so much as an attempt to use all of those arms at once. It emerged in England, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, when scholars from working-class backgrounds, such as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, began thinking about the distance between canonical cultural touchstones—the music or books that were supposed to teach you how to be civil and well-mannered—and their own upbringings. These scholars believed that the rise of mass communications and popular forms were permanently changing our relationship to power and authority, and to one another. There was no longer consensus. Hall was interested in the experience of being alive during such disruptive times. What is culture, he proposed, but an attempt to grasp at these changes, to wrap one’s head around what is newly possible?

Hall retained faith that culture was a site of “negotiation,” as he put it, a space of give and take where intended meanings could be short-circuited. “Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle,” he argues. “It is the arena of consent and resistance.” In a free society, culture does not answer to central, governmental dictates, but it nonetheless embodies an unconscious sense of the values we share, of what it means to be right or wrong. Over his career, Hall became fascinated with theories of “reception”—how we decode the different messages that culture is telling us, how culture helps us choose our own identities. He wasn’t merely interested in interpreting new forms, such as film or television, using the tools that scholars had previously brought to bear on literature. He was interested in understanding the various political, economic, or social forces that converged in these media. It wasn’t merely the content or the language of the nightly news, or middlebrow magazines, that told us what to think; it was also how they were structured, packaged, and distributed.

According to Slack and Lawrence Grossberg, the editors of “Cultural Studies 1983,” Hall was reluctant to publish these lectures because he feared they would be read as an all-purpose critical toolkit rather than a series of carefully situated historical conversations. Hall himself was ambivalent about what he perceived to be the American fetish for theory, a belief that intellectual work was merely, in Slack and Grossberg’s words, a “search for the right theory which, once found, would unlock the secrets of any social reality.” It wasn’t this simple. (I have found myself wondering what Hall would make of how cultural criticism of a sort that can read like ideological pattern-recognition has proliferated in the age of social media.)

Over the course of his lectures, Hall carefully wrestles with forebears, including the British scholar F. R. Leavis and also Williams and Hoggart (the latter founded Birmingham University’s influential Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which Hall directed in the seventies). Gradually, the lectures cluster around questions of how we give our lives meaning, how we recognize and understand “the culture we never see, the culture we don’t think of as cultivated.” These lectures aren’t instructions for “doing” cultural studies—until the very end, they barely touch on emerging cultural forms that intrigued Hall, such as reggae and punk rock. Instead, they try to show how far back these questions reach.

For Hall, these questions emerged from his own life—a fact that his memoir, “ Familiar Stranger ,” published by Duke, in April, brings into sharp focus. Hall was born in 1932, in Kingston. His father, Herman, was the first nonwhite person to hold a senior position with the Jamaican office of United Fruit, an American farming and agricultural corporation; his mother, Jessie, was mixed-race. They considered themselves a class apart, Hall explains, indulging a “gross colonial simulacrum of upper-middle-class England.” From a young age, he felt alienated by their cozy embrace of the island’s racial hierarchy. As a child, his skin was darker than the rest of his family’s, prompting his sister to tease, “Where did you get this coolie baby from?” It became a family joke—one he would revisit often. And yet he felt no authentic connection to working-class Jamaica, either, “conscious of the chasm that separated me from the multitude.” The mild sense of guilt that he describes feels strikingly contemporary. And he had trouble articulating the terms of this discomfort: “I could not find a language in which to unravel the contradictions or to confront my family with what I really thought of their values, behaviors, and aspirations.” The desire to find that language would become the animating spark of his professional life.

In 1951, Hall won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. He was part of the “Windrush” generation—a term used to describe the waves of West Indian migration to England in the postwar years. Although Hall came from a different class than most of these migrants, he felt a connection to his countrymen. “Suddenly everything looked different,” he would later remember of his arrival in England. He clipped a newspaper photo of three Jamaicans who arrived around the time he did. Two of them are carpenters and one is an aspiring boxer; they are all dressed to the nines. “This was style . They were on a mission, determined to be recognized as participants in the modern world and to make it theirs. I look at this photograph every morning as I myself head out for that world,” he writes.

Hall found ready disciples in American universities, though it might be argued that the spirit which animated cultural studies in England had existed in the U.S. since the fifties and sixties, in underground magazines and the alternative press. The American fantasy of its supposedly “classless” society has always given “culture” a slightly different meaning than it has in England, where social trajectories were more rigidly defined. What scholars like Hall were actually reckoning with was the “American phase” of British life. After the Second World War, England was no longer the “paradigm case” of Western industrial society. America, that grand experiment, where mass media and consumer culture proliferated freely, became the harbinger for what was to come. In a land where rags-to-riches mobility is—or so we tend to imagine—just one hit away, culture is about what you want to project into the world, whether you are fronting as a member of the élite or as an everyman, offering your interpretation of Shakespeare or of “The Matrix.” When culture is about self-fashioning, there’s even space to be a down-to-earth billionaire.

How did we get here, to this present, with our imaginations limited by a common sense of possibility that we did not choose? “ Selected Political Writings ,” the other book of Hall’s work that Duke has published as part of its series, focusses largely on the lengthy British phase of Hall’s life. The centerpiece essay is “The Great Moving Right Show,” his 1979 analysis of Margaret Thatcher’s “authoritarian populism.” Her rise was as much a cultural turning point as a political one, in Hall’s view—an enmity toward the struggling masses, obscured by her platform’s projected attitude of tough, Victorian moderation. Many of the pieces in this collection orbit the topic of “common sense,” how culture and politics together reinforce an idea of what is acceptable at any given time.

This was the simple question at the heart of Hall’s complex, occasionally dense work. He became one of the great public intellectuals of his time, an activist for social justice and against nuclear proliferation, a constant presence on British radio and television—though this work is given only a cursory mention in “Familiar Stranger.” Similarly, he doesn’t mention Marxism, his key intellectual framework, until the final chapters of that book. Instead, as in much of his more traditional scholarship, he focusses on his shifting sense of his own context. Culture, after all, is a matter of constructing a relationship between oneself and the world. “People have to have a language to speak about where they are and what other possible futures are available to them,” he observed, in his 1983 lectures. “These futures may not be real; if you try to concretize them immediately, you may find there is nothing there. But what is there, what is real, is the possibility of being someone else, of being in some other social space from the one in which you have already been placed.” He could have been describing his own self-awakening.

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CFP: Fusions of Culture, Time, and Space| 19th-C. Studies Assoc. Conference

Nineteenth Century Studies Association: Call For PAPERS, “Fusions of Culture, Time, and Space,” 46th Annual Conference  New Orleans, Louisiana    March 27-31, 2025

Proposal Deadline: September 30, 2024

Website:  https://ncsaweb.net/2025-conference-information/

If America were a melting pot, New Orleans would be its capital. Even before the United States gained control of the city with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, New Orleans had been usurped from indigenous peoples and changed hands several times between the French and Spanish. This amalgamation of inhabitants created complex and fascinating fusions of people, culture, language, food, music, and systems of belief which have become ubiquitous within the city’s history and its identity. Throughout the 19th century, New Orleans had the second-largest port in the United States, contributing to a steady stream of visitors, migrants, enslaved people, and new settlers that spread throughout the South and the quickly expanding nation. New Orleans is also renowned for its strategic importance during the various rebellions, skirmishes, and wars of the long 19th century. The city’s resilience is evident in the many economic alterations made over the last two hundred years and its ability to recover from man-made and natural events like slave rebellions, race riots, outbreaks of yellow fever, and hurricanes. Despite many moments of trepidation about the city’s future, it remains today a dynamic fusion of past and present that exemplifies the diversity of the US and the growing global intersections between nations which define the 19th century on a worldwide scale.

This call welcomes proposals for papers of 15-20 minutes in length from a broad range of disciplines and perspectives that explore the literal, figural, and abstract understanding of the notion of fusion or fusions in the long-nineteenth century, particularly those of culture, time, and space. Topics might include the fusion of people through forced or voluntary migration through the lens of the literary, historical, art historical, musical, or biological. Papers may engage in critical discussions of food or music, performance or play as aesthetic fusions of culture. Temporal fusions might be explored through the study of science (both factual and fictional), the supernatural, material and materiality, liminality, spiritualism, mysticism, or voodoo. Submissions could consider spatial fusions through the lens of micro- or macro- economics, architecture, landscape, geographical boundaries and borders, or the vast expanse of outer space. Papers might also consider pedagogical fusions, fusions of disciplines, fusions of theoretical perspectives, or other abstract understandings of the theme. Finally, papers might explore instances where fusion is conspicuously absent.

We also encourage proposals for various types of conference engagements beyond the standard panel presentation of papers including, but not limited to: round table discussions, “speed-dating” sessions, poster sessions, creative and/or practical workshops, fireside chats, panels which combine both research and practice etc.

Submit 250-word paper, panel, and alternative-session proposals with 2-page CVs via this google form  by September 30, 2024.  [direct URL: https://forms.gle/ovFKBwqrUCkgYe5E8 ] 

Questions about submissions or the conference may also be directed to: [email protected]

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The Australian Professor Who Turned Breaking on Its Head

Rachael Gunn, known as B-girl Raygun, displayed some … unique moves as she competed in a field with breakers half her age. The judges and the internet were underwhelmed.

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By Dodai Stewart and Talya Minsberg

Reporting from Paris

Breaking made its debut as an Olympic sport Friday, and among the competitors was Dr. Rachael Gunn, also known as B-girl Raygun, a 36-year-old professor from Sydney, Australia, who stood out in just about every way.

By day, her research interests include “dance, gender politics, and the dynamics between theoretical and practical methodologies.” But on the world’s stage in Paris, wearing green track pants and a green polo shirt instead of the street-style outfits of her much younger fellow breakers, she competed against the 21-year-old Logan Edra of the United States, known as Logistx.

During the round robin, as Raygun and Logistx faced off, Raygun laid on her side, reached for her toes, spun around, and threw in a kangaroo hop — a nod to her homeland. She performed a move that looked something like swimming and another that could best be described as duckwalking. The high-speed back and head spins that other breakers would demonstrate were mostly absent.

The crowd cheered Raygun politely. The judges weren’t as kind. All nine voted for Logistx in both rounds of the competition; Logistx won, 18-0.

Online, Raygun’s performance quickly became a sensation, not necessarily in a flattering way.

“The more I watch the videos of Raygun, the Aussie breaker, the more I get annoyed,” one viewer posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “There’s 27.7 million Australians in the world and that’s who they send to the Olympics for this inaugural event??? C’mon now!”

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