2 - 2 Prasad 2018

Popular Culture and Cultural Studies
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication

M. Madhava Prasad
Subject: Critical/Cultural Studies , Communication and Culture
Online Publication Date: Jul 2018 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.561
Summary and Keywords
At the core of what we know as popular culture studies today is the work of scholars associated
with or influenced by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Popular
culture itself and intellectual interest in its risks and possibilities, however, long predate this
moment. Earlier in the 20th century, members of the Frankfurt School took an active interest in
what was then referred to as “mass culture” or the culture industry. Semiotics, emerging in the
latter half of the 20th century as an exciting new methodology of cultural analysis, turned to
popular culture for many of its objects as it redefined textuality, reading, and meaning. The
works of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco are exemplary in this regard. The work of the
Birmingham school, also known as British cultural studies, drew from both of these intellectual
traditions but went on to forge its own unique methods drawing on Marxist and poststructuralist
theoretical legacies. Quickly spreading across the Anglophone world, Cultural Studies is now
widely recognized, if not as a discipline proper, as a distinctive branch of the humanities. Other
methodologies contemporaneous with this trend are also now clubbed together as part of this
generalized practice of cultural studies. Important among these are feminist approaches to
popular culture exemplified by work on Hollywood cinema and women’s melodrama in
particular, the study of images and representations through a mass communications approach,
and ethnographic studies of readers of popular romances and television audiences. A minor,
theoretically weak tradition of popular culture studies initiated by Ray Browne parallelly in the
Unites States may also be mentioned. More recently, Slavoj Zizek has introduced startlingly new
ways of drawing popular cultural texts into philosophical debates. If all of these can be taken
together as constituting what is generally referred to as popular culture studies today, it is still
limited to the 20th century. Apart from the Frankfurt School and semiotics, British cultural
studies also counts among the precursors it had to settle scores with, the tradition of cultural
criticism in Britain that Matthew Arnold and in his wake F. R. Leavis undertook as they sought to
insulate “the best of what was thought and said” from the debasing influence of the commercial
press and mass culture in general. But the history of popular culture as an object of
investigation and social concern goes further back still to the 18th and 19th centuries, the
period of the rise and spread of mass literature, boosted by the rise of a working-class
readership.
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Subscriber: State Library of Ohio: SLO; date: 08 August 2018
Keywords: popular culture, cultural studies, mass culture, culture industry, culturalism, populism, working class
culture, Indian popular culture, communication and critical studies
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Definitions
No single definition can capture the range of meanings associated with the term popular
culture. A survey has found six prevailing definitions, which taken together, enable us to
conceive the field in the broadest terms (Storey, 2013). The first, quantitative definition, takes
popular culture simply to mean what is liked by a large number of people. Quantitative
approaches are useful and widely employed in the study of culture, most often in the form of
readership and viewership surveys. As a definition, however, it refers only to a field of objects
and is of little conceptual value. A purely quantitative definition would also include products of
high culture, such as classical music, thus rendering the distinction meaningless. The second
definition is value normative and residual, treating popular culture as whatever is not high
culture, thus constituting a binary opposition in which popular equals inferior, with an implicit
correspondence to social class distinctions of taste (Bourdieu, 1984). A defining element here is
the difference between an individual artist’s creation and the product of a culture industry
where the artist’s role is subordinated to commercial interests. The implication is that high
culture is not so much culture as art, while low or popular culture is merely culture and rarely
art. But a few examples will suffice to upset this neat division. On the one hand, Shakespeare
and Dickens were popular in their own time but are now central exhibits in the canon of high
culture. On the other hand, there is the opera singer Pavarotti’s tremendous popular success
both in terms of record sales and concert attendance. A third definition equates popular culture
with “mass culture,” which is often compared to junk food and blamed for turning people into
passive consumers of a crassly commercial product. Sometimes equated wholesale with
American culture, the mass culture perspective also comes with a contrastive image of a more
organic culture that may have existed before rampant commercialization or might emerge after
the demise of capitalism. As Storey (2013, p. 8) puts it: “What are under threat are either the
traditional values of high culture, or the traditional way of life of a ‘tempted’ working class.”
Fourth, popular culture is the culture of, by and for the people, an authentic people’s culture.
While this definition, associated with, for instance, E. P. Thompson has value as a means of
historical comparison, it is more often used to identify among the cultural products of today
those that are deemed to be genuinely of the people and hence immune to commercial
exploitation. The question of the necessary mediation of the market tends to be avoided in
making such claims.
Storey’s last two definitions are very much confined to academic discourse, unlike the above
four that have circulation outside the academy. In brief, they are approaches, rather than
definitions, arising out of new conceptual shifts in academic discourse: the Gramscian
constellation of concepts centered on the concept of hegemony, and the theory of
postmodernism.
To appreciate the degree of consensus there is on what popular culture means, let us look briefly
at another attempt at defining it. Stuart Hall sees three possible ways of doing so. One is
quantitative, what is consumed by vast masses of people, which he calls the “market” or
commercial definition that comes with the figure of the “cultural dope” who passively consumes
whatever is dished out by the market. On the one hand, Hall dismisses this as an “unsocialist
perspective,” which in righteously denouncing the manipulative machinations of the industry
also condemns the people as helpless victims of false consciousness. On the other hand, Hall
warns against underestimating “the power of cultural implantation” (2013a, p. 512) and seeking
easy alternatives. His second definition is “descriptive”: popular culture is all that the people do,
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which echoes the anthropological definition of culture as “a whole way of life.” This definition
suffers from being too general and lacking any determinate criteria of inclusion. Second, since
popular culture defined in this way makes sense only by reference to the elite culture to which it
is opposed, historical changes in the content of this category tend to be neglected. There is a
ceaseless transaction between elite and popular domains of culture, Hall points out, which
frustrates any attempt at drawing up durable inventories. “The categories remain, though the
inventories change” (p. 514). Hall’s preferred definition then is the third “rather uneasy one”:
This looks, in any particular period, at those forms and activities which have their roots
in the social and material conditions of particular classes; which have been embodied in
popular traditions and practices. In this sense, it retains what is valuable in the
descriptive definition. But it goes on to insist that what is essential to the definition of
popular culture is the relations which define “popular culture” in a continuing tension
(relationship, influence and antagonism) to the dominant culture. It is a conception of
culture which is polarized around this cultural dialectic. It treats the domain of cultural
forms and activities as a constantly changing field. Then it looks at the relations which
constantly structure this field into dominant and subordinate formations. It looks at the
process by which these relations of dominance and subordination are articulated. It
treats them as a process: the process by means of which some things are actively
preferred so that others can be dethroned. It has at its center the changing and uneven
relations of force which define the field of culture—that is, the question of cultural
struggle and its many forms. Its main focus of attention is the relation between culture
and questions of hegemony. (2013a, pp. 514–515)
Hall’s preferred definition, like Storey’s, is part of a methodological strategy and emphasized
relations of tension between opposed terms in order to desubstantialize the popular and render
it a dynamic field of forces.
The definitions that take a relational, contrastive approach to the popular, when examined
together, can give us insight into other facets of the field so defined. The opposition high and
low, as we have seen, involves an evaluation that stems from and reinforces social distinctions.
Classical and popular is another relation of contrast that overlaps with the normative valuation
of high and low to some extent but retains a certain conceptual value insofar as popular within
this equation can be taken to mean “vernacular” as opposed to the culture of the educated elite.
The distinction popular versus mass likewise retains its charge even though in many instances
the two are assumed to be synonymous. One way that these terms are distinguished is by
reference to the degree of “industrialization” or market mediation involved. Another criterion is
the existence of a concrete relationship to a specific cultural region, ethnic, or social group that
can sometimes override considerations of commercialization, as in the case of Black music in
Britain, which, while clearly a part of contemporary mass culture, cannot be dissociated from
the Black community’s restricted public sphere within which it resonates with meanings that
may not be of interest or accessible to the general consumer. Finally, there is also a distinction
posited between popular and folk culture that in a way replicates the popular mass distinction
on another plane. As with the latter, the popular and folk distinction is also a matter of degrees.
Here folk culture is that which remains strongly bound to specific community identities as an
expression of the life of the community itself, whereas popular culture, though still identified
with specific social groups, is no longer their own cultural expression serving ritual or existential
needs but a site of multiple forms of expression and cultural consumption that such groups are
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most likely to frequent. By this reckoning, popular thus falls between folk and mass on a scale
running from unmediated cultural expression at one end to completely mediatized cultural
commodities at the other.
Popular Culture in History
What is common to all these definitions though is “that whatever else popular culture is, it is
definitely a culture that only emerged following industrialization and urbanization” (Storey,
2013) Perhaps more accurately, it is from the advent of capitalism and print culture that we
should date the rise of the popular as cultural historians, prompted by the new interest in
popular culture, have shown. As Stuart Hall has pointed out, the mass culture debate “really
goes back as far, at least, as the eighteenth century” (Hall, 2013B, p. 113). Although cultural
studies rejects the terms in which cultural questions of the era of industrial capitalism were
debated, Hall among others has recognized the continuing relevance of the “mass society”
debate that, while failing to adequately theorize the social and cultural transformations wrought
by industrial capitalism, did succeed in identifying the most important changes. Hall identifies
three types of effects that the “mass society” debate attributed to the rise of industrial
capitalism: cultural effects involving the debasement of high culture by the flood of mass media
products, political effects such as the masses’ vulnerability to propaganda and media influence,
and social ones including the dissolution of communities. These perceptions have prevailed in
intellectual and academic discourse from the 18th century to the late 20th centuries.
For our purposes, therefore, studies of popular culture in the academy today can be divided into
two broad streams: historical and contemporary. As an object of historical inquiry, popular
culture is a vast archive of cultural texts that includes Renaissance drama, mass circulation print
literature of various genres that has been in circulation since the 17th century or before, stage
melodrama and other popular variety entertainments of the 19th century, and so on. In the 20th
century, popular or mass culture became the object of synchronic study informed by urgent
political concerns about industrial mass society. We will henceforth refer to these as historical
and political approaches to popular culture, keeping in mind that historical approaches are
informed by political concerns and political approaches are not devoid of historical references.
In a way, it was the perception that historical popular culture had disappeared with the rise of
industrial mass culture that led to the investigation of the character of culture available to the
working class or ordinary people in the 20th century. This long period thus appears as a
synchronic field of cultural production and consumption in which the central paradigm relates
culture as a marketed commodity to a consumer who no longer has the choice of producing her
own cultural texts. This situation of captivity to a culture industry has been analyzed and
evaluated from two broad, mutually opposed positions: one that has been described as “left
pessimism” for its portrayal of the culture industry as an all-powerful profit-making machine that
reduces culture to an instrument for the reproduction of the working class body’s laboring
capacity; and the other an attempt to see agency, meaning making, and discrimination in the
acts of consumption, the cultural practices that make use of but are not dictated by the
commodity texts.
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Popular Culture as an Object of History
The archive of popular culture is the cultural and literary historian’s field of activity. One
distinguishing feature of popular culture has always been its strict contemporaneity. Popular
culture is always here and now, today’s culture being replaced by something else tomorrow.
Yesterday’s popular culture passes into history. A nostalgia industry has come up in recent
decades that recycles popular culture of past decades but apart from that, much of what was
tremendously popular at one time is today totally forgotten and relegated to the archive where
only the historian seeks them out. Other highly popular works pass into the canon of high
culture there to be prescribed to schoolchildren and university students. The archive of popular
culture also contains records of transient performative or visual art forms and a wide variety of
genres of writing.
Leo Lowenthal, for instance, in his study of popular culture in 18th-century England raises a
number of important questions relevant for historical research as well as present-day critical
approaches to popular culture. Is there really a dichotomy of “genuine art” and “popular
culture” or are these concepts “formed in different logical contexts”? In other words, Lowenthal
raises the possibility that the normative coupling of the two concepts may be an error, that each
of them deals with a different object without reference to quantitative or other definitions of
popularity. When we consider something as art, we take it up individually, we are interested in
its inner structure and norms, its aesthetic properties. When considered as popular culture, we
are concerned with consumption, dissemination, and impact. In art we try to discern the truth
while with culture our main concern is about its “effects.” Ideally, he suggests, the two methods
ought to be combined (Lowenthal, 1961, p. xix).
Then again, the equations “art ↔ insight ↔elite … and popular culture ↔entertainment ↔mass
audience” are themselves questionable. The elite is not congenitally averse to entertainment nor
is the mass audience immune to the beauty of works of art. Entertainment can afford insight and
art can also entertain. Further there are historical conditions in which art can become popular
culture. Lowenthal gives us some interesting examples: the etchings of Albrecht Durer served as
posters for the 16th-century “partisans of Protestantism.” The operas of Verdi were used in mass
demonstrations by the Risorgimento in Italy, and in a less edifying case Nazi Germany employed
Wagner’s operas as “devices for mass identification” (Lowenthal, 1961, p. xix).
Intimations of the rise of popular culture are already observable in the 16th and 17th centuries,
Lowenthal shows, citing the contrasting views of Montaigne and Pascal on “diversion.” But it is
in the 18th century that the literary mass market really picks up, and “the painful process of the
separation of literature into art and commodity came for the first time into the light of full
intellectual awareness” (pp. xxiii–xxiv).
Although both Lowenthal and E. P. Thompson trace the rise of popular culture back to the 18th
century, they are focusing on two different social groups and consequently examining two almost
entirely different sets of materials. While Thompson tracks the emergence of a substantially
autonomous working-class culture, Lowenthal focuses on the debate about the future of genuine
art faced with “the tide of popular culture,” in which poets, playwrights, novelists, and scholars
were engaged, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Lowenthal’s discussion clearly shows
that the “mass culture” critiques of the 20th century were already anticipated in the age when
the market was replacing the aristocratic patron, posing a threat to established cultural values.
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The artist discovers that entertainment involves manipulation, that the “business intermediary
between artist and public” tempts the artist to compromise on his principles, and that the needs
of the mass audience will clash with the artist’s perception of his creative mission. Goethe,
remarking on these developments also notes a new restlessness among audiences, combined
with passivity and conformism, which he blames on newspapers. Inferior art, whose primary aim
is entertainment, is the work of “manipulators of popular taste” who appeal to the baser
instincts of the public. From Goethe to Wordsworth in England, to Flaubert in France, the same
anxiety continues to be expressed in different ways and will culminate in the devastating
critique mounted by Adorno and Horkheimer on the culture industry. These last authors draw
together many of the criticisms, expressions of civilizational despair and projects for
improvement to address a situation that, in the mid-20th century, is far more complex and
technologically mediated than what Goethe or Arnold in their time witnessed.
Lowenthal’s archive consists of evaluations of the culture of the people by generations of artists
and critics in their own time, rather than the archive of cultural texts themselves. E. P.
Thompson, by contrast, is writing a history of the culture of the working classes. Thompson’s
remarks about popular culture in The Making of the English Working Class and Customs in
Common have often been cited critically as representing a culturalist view of plebeian culture
that neglects the structural dimension. These remarks occur in the course of his argument for
the emergence in 18th-century England of a plebeian culture that, though operating within the
field of power of the landed gentry, was not under the latter’s control. As he puts it, “we have a
customary culture which is not subject in its daily operations to the ideological domination of the
rulers. The gentry's overarching hegemony may define the limits within which the plebeian
culture is free to act and grow, but since this hegemony is secular rather than religious or
magical it can do little to determine the character of this plebeian culture” (Thompson, 1991, p.
9). For Thompson, popular culture is a contradictory field, “a pool of diverse resources, in which
traffic passes between the literate and the oral, the superordinate and the subordinate, the
village and the metropolis; it is an arena of conflictual elements, which requires some
compelling pressure—as, for example, nationalism or prevalent religious orthodoxy or class
consciousness—to take form as ‘system’” (Thompson, p. 6). Plebeian culture is a paradoxical
thing, “a rebellious traditional culture” defending custom in the face of capitalist innovations
that threaten the autonomy and continuity of its own communal life (Thompson, p. 9).
Thus we might say that popular culture enters the academic discourse along two parallel
channels that converge and clash only in the late 20th century with the introduction of popular
culture as a field of research in the university under the aegis of cultural studies. One,
essentially British tradition, is concerned with what is called working-class culture. It is in
Britain that the social polarization that pits the working class against the bourgeoisie is most
fully developed. Arnold’s social categories are the aristocracy, the philistine bourgeoisie, and the
working classes. The aristocracy is a waning power that makes the bourgeoisie and the working
class the main actors in the drama of what Arnold calls “culture and anarchy,” although the
philistinism of the bourgeoisie will have to be counteracted by the new aristocracy of sensibility.
F. R. Leavis continued to uphold this powerful theme of the social and cultural decline
precipitated by the rise of popular culture and the need to secure the “minority culture” of good
taste and refinement, against its incursions. This paradigm ruled the Anglophone intellectual
world for a century and continues to be influential in postcolonial Anglophone societies like India
where comparable social conditions are present. In postwar Britain, Raymond Williams, Richard
Hoggart, and E. P. Thompson turn the tables on Leavisite elitism by restoring to the working
class the cultural capabilities that were denied them. Williams and Hoggart in particular,
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entering the institutional spaces for debate opened up by the Leavisite project and in partial
agreement with its premises, turn their attention to working-class culture that they describe as
possessing its own internal cohesion and a community-forming and sustaining role. Whatever
the merits of the criticism leveled against their positing of an organic working-class culture, it is
these scholars, with Marxist and socialist leanings, who brought working-class culture into the
center of the debate and laid the ground for the advent of cultural studies. From Arnold to
Thompson and Williams then, the culture of the working classes has remained at the center of
scholarly concern but has undergone a thorough rehabilitation and revaluation. Mention may
also be made of Mary Triece’s Protest and Popular Culture, which marks an unusual turn in this
history of attention to the working class’s relation to popular culture. Against the grain of the
populist strain in cultural studies (see below), Triece’s study of workers in Progressive Era
America sets out to examine “the ways that subordinate groups construct themselves
rhetorically as laborers in contradistinction to popular ideologies that address and define them
as consuming agents” (Triece, 2001, p. 4).
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The Frankfurt School
The other channel along which the study of popular or “mass” culture has proceeded on
somewhat different lines can be initially identified with the Frankfurt School and in particular
the work of Adorno and Horkheimer. These authors do not refer to their object as “popular
culture,” reserving that term for something long past that can never be recovered. We have just
seen that this paradigm has a longer history that has been unearthed in more recent decades by
researchers like Lowenthal, who is also associated with the Frankfurt School, and a host of
others. Studies of the popular culture of 19th-century England, to give one instance, have
proliferated over the last few decades, covering such topics as stage melodrama, the serialized
three-decker novels, the sensation novels of the 1860s, the commercial newspapers, vaudeville,
the panoramas, etc. We have seen how the category of popular culture, once introduced,
discloses a rich archive dating back several centuries. In going back to the 18th century and
encompassing the novel and the stage entertainments, this paradigm shifts or expands the social
reference of popular culture beyond the working class. It is the middle class that is the restless,
conformist, and easily satisfied audience of inferior plays in Goethe’s description. Even the
mid-18th-century popular bestsellers like G. M. Reynolds or the sensation novels of a decade
later are essentially middle-class reading although by now the social borders may have
expanded to include working-class readers. These historical studies do not dwell on the class
question to the same extent as the other strand that we have just looked at. Class identification
of readership and viewership is essential to the analysis, but the primary concerns here have to
do with the market, with the impact of capitalist social relations and technological innovations
on culture and audiences, the changing expectations that are either readily catered to by the
publishing and entertainment industries or induced by them. Adorno’s contribution to mass
communications theory is the high point of this approach to the culture of the people.
A widely prevalent understanding of Adorno’s work on popular culture sees it as “a snobbish

reaction to the vulgarity of popular art advanced by a devotee of so-called high art.” But
Adorno’s cultural theory is “not a judgment of taste but a theory concerning the moral and
political projects inhering in both “serious” and “popular” art” (Williams, 2003, p. 1). Adorno’s
writings on popular culture were based on a deep familiarity with it. Witkin notes his fondness
for the films of Charlie Chaplin and the humor of the Marx brothers as evidence that his was not
a wholesale condemnation of popular culture from an elitist perspective. Films, television,
music, astrology columns in newspapers, radio programs, and advertising were some of the
topics on which he wrote, analyzing texts in great detail. He rejected the terms “popular
culture” and “mass culture” for carrying the suggestion of a culture made by the people and
preferred the term “culture industry.” This industry he regarded as motivated by the producer’s
profit seeking and the demands of the market. Genuine culture, popular or otherwise, in
Adorno’s understanding referred to a culture that emerged from “the life-process of individuals
or communities” (Williams, 2003, p. 2), and it was the waning of this essential dimension and its
consequences to social life rather than a regression in taste (Arnold & Leavis) that Adorno was
concerned with. Faced with the power of the culture industry, Adorno saw the individual
consumer as a powerless victim who yet desired its products in the absence of real choice.
Individuals in modern society are alienated in the Marxist sense, cogs in the capitalist system
performing repetitive, meaningless tasks. As atomized individuals bearing the commodity labor
power, workers have left their communities behind and modern social conditions offer no
opportunity for establishing the kind of human ties that can restore or reinvent community. As
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consumers of mass culture, they are sold a standardized product marked by the repetition of
formats (song patterns, genres, formulas) broken by occasional infusions of novelty to combat
the boredom that inevitably follows prolonged repetition. Adorno does not deny that there are
genuine artists involved in developing the products of the culture industry, but he points out that
the industry forces them to serve its needs. Unlike other industries, the culture industry still
depends on the “handicraft mode” of artistic production that involves the work of individual
artists. It is in the fields of promotion and circulation of the finished cultural commodity that the
industrial character of mass culture shows itself.
Art, its production or consumption, requires free time and an effort that is qualitatively different
from the effort put into the production of goods to meet basic needs. In industrial capitalism,
free time is known as leisure, the time that is left over from working and sleeping, during which
the modern individual is “free” to pursue leisure activities among which the consumption of
cultural commodities has become increasingly important. For Adorno, this leisure is not
genuinely free time but has been drawn into the calculations of the capitalist, “the leisure
sphere is intended as an escape from work but, in reality, the production of leisure is dominated
by the same mechanized work process” (Williams, 2003, p. 44). The process of “transferring the
profit motive naked onto cultural forms” goes through two stages, as with other processes in the
history of capitalism: first, the capitalist seizes the cultural texts as they are and profits from
their wider circulation. Next, they introduce standardization, force the artist to conform to set
patterns, and colonize all art forms (Hall, 2013A). A manufactured dominant culture, devoid of
any hint of individual artistic expression, mired in cycles of repetition and innovation,
supplemented by “heart throbs” and other celebrity figures, enforcing submission and
conformity on all its consumers, the culture industry is “an instrument of mass deception”:
The total effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment, in which, as

Horkheimer and I have noted, enlightenment, that is the progressive technical
domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering
consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who
judge and decide consciously for themselves. These, however, would be the precondition
for a democratic society which needs adults who have come of age in order to sustain
itself and develop. If the masses have been unjustly reviled from above as masses, the
culture industry is not among the least responsible for making them into masses and
then despising them, while obstructing the emancipation for which human beings are as
ripe as the productive forces of the epoch permit.
(Hall, 2013A)
British Cultural Studies
Both the British “culture and anarchy” tradition and the Frankfurt School critique left the mass
audience looking like a witless dupe of commerce, devoid of culture and selfhood, a passive
victim of capitalist forces. One of the primary tasks undertaken by the cultural studies formation
was the restoration of culture and dignity, selfhood, desire, and meaning-making ability to this
figure of “the working class consumer of culture.”
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It is with the institution of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham with
Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall leading a team of researchers that “cultural studies” as a
quasi-discipline began its journey. Some of the studies of popular culture undertaken under this
rubric are now classics in the field: David Morley’s The Nation-wide Audience, Dick Hebdige’s
Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Paul Gilroy’s several books and essays, Angela McRobbie’s
Postmodernism and Culture, Simon Frith’s work on music, and Stuart Hall’s essays and books on
culture and politics. With studies of working-class television viewing habits, youth cultures
among teenagers, young men and women, popular music, Black British culture, the Walkman as
a cultural device, popular cultural studies would explode in the 1980s and 1990s and capture the
imagination of humanities students, in particular those who were historically new entrants into
the university. Cultural studies soon spread to the United States, Australia, and other
Anglophone corners of the world, acquiring local inflections wherever it went. Stuart Hall, as the
leading figure in what was sometimes seen as a movement rather than simply a new area of
academic research, in a series of writings provided clarification of the methodological and
theoretical underpinnings of the cultural studies project.
In a pathbreaking essay called “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” Hall undertakes an

exercise in periodization that pulls together some of the different strands we have been
outlining, providing a historical perspective on the emergence of the popular. Drawing on the
work of historians like Gareth Stedman Jones, Hall identifies the period 1880s–1920s as a crucial
time of change that created the conditions that are still with us today. The essay registers the
decline of an autonomous radical working-class culture and the rise in its place of a commercial
culture. The press is his central exhibit. Newspapers run by working-class associations like the
Chartists, which contained discussions of workers’ issues, went into decline as a commercial
press arose to produce the kind of tabloid news that Arnold would rail against. Hall notes that
unlike the radical press that was for and by the working class, the commercial press was for the
working class but owned and run by capitalists. The kind of press that he is referring to here is
part of that history of sensation and modernity that is the concern of the second strand of
historical popular culture studies discussed above. The commercial press is already in formation
in the magazines that printed the serial novels, in the sensation novels that disrupted the
leisurely time of the bildungsroman to introduce shocks and surprises at every turn and offer
thrills to an insatiable reading public. Thus, although Hall tells it in the restricted form of a
change in the reading habits of the working class, this shift is part of the larger story of
developments in the 19th century where the middle class was equally at the center of attention.
The British historian’s focus on working-class culture and the Frankfurt School preoccupation
with the industrial character of cultural production in capitalist societies and its effects on
human subjectivity thus come together in Hall’s revisionist look backward in his efforts to found
a theoretically sophisticated practice of cultural studies. Though the “culturalist” tendency is a
clear target of attack, Hall acknowledges a key insight owed to it; that what is euphemistically
called “cultural change” actually involves willful destruction of older ways of life that meets with
popular resistance, the rebellious traditionalism of Thompson’s working class whose
“conservatism” is misperceived when taken out of context. Having said this, however, Hall
moves on to note that “[t]here is no separate, autonomous, ‘authentic’ layer of working-class
culture to be found” (Storey, 2013, p. 510). Rather than persist with the illusion of such a
separate and heroic culture, Hall wants us to acknowledge the profound changes wrought by
capitalism in all spheres of human activity and to recalibrate the scholarly apparatus
accordingly. Cultural studies must distance itself from both the heroic agentiality of the working
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class and the idea that the people are “cultural dopes” to treat popular culture as a site defined
by “the double movement of containment and resistance” (p. 509):
I think there is a continuous and necessarily uneven and unequal struggle, by the
dominant culture, constantly to disorganize and reorganize popular culture; to enclose
and confine its definitions and forms within a more inclusive range of dominant forms.
There are points of resistance; there are also moments of supersession. This is the
dialectic of cultural struggle. In our times, it goes on continuously, in the complex lines
of resistance and acceptance, refusal and capitulation, which make the field of culture a
sort of constant battlefield. (p. 513)
In the efforts at theoretical clarification by Hall and others at the Centre, an important first step
was to critically engage with the existing paradigms of popular cultural study. In the process, the
aforementioned two schools of thought came to be recognized and critically addressed as the
structuralist and culturalist tendencies respectively. The structuralist tendency assumes the
existence of a dominant ideology that effectively invades and subdues popular cultural traditions
and turns producers of culture into passive consumers, whereas the culturalists, posit a resistant
and autonomous popular culture without any structural constraints. This analysis was a moment
of clarification and theoretical progress brought about by the wider dissemination of Gramsci’s
thought in the English-speaking world with the publication of Selections from the Prison
Notebooks in the 1970s. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony was seen as providing a solution to this
dualism. As Tony Bennet puts it, from the structuralist perspective, popular culture was an
“‘ideological machine’ which dictated the thought of the people” while culturalism was
“uncritically romantic in its celebration of popular culture as expressing the authentic interests
and values of subordinate social groups and classes” (Bennett, 2013, p. 82). Culturalism
spawned essentialist claims to a distinctive female or Black or working-class culture. Most often
the choice between these options depended on disciplinary location, with cinema and television
studies being more prone to the structuralist option while studies of working class or youth
cultures or sports, especially among historians and sociologists, would opt for a culturalist
approach. The structuralists took little or no account of the consumer’s agency while the
culturalists ignored the structural determination of the individual or collective capacity for self-
fashioning. The turn to Gramsci was, Bennett concludes, a “way out of this impasse” (Bennett,
2013, p. 83).
Gramsci’s writings on culture, published as a separate volume in due course (Cultural Writings),
reveals the keen interest he took in popular culture as an integral element in the cultural life of
the working class. His reflections on the popular literature available to the Italian working class,
for instance, are very suggestive. Beginning with the observation that in the absence of Italian
writers of detective fiction, the working-class papers were publishing translations from French
and other sources, Gramsci relates this absence to the class character of Italian society
(Gramsci, 1985). The concept of hegemony and related concepts like common sense marked a
sharp departure from the discourse of false consciousness that had dominated Marxist thinking
on cultural matters. In Gramsci there is neither the “intolerable condescension of the mass
culture critic” nor a “celebratory populism” (Bennett, 2013, p. 85). Set against Gramsci, the
structuralist and culturalist perspectives turn out to have a shared conception of the sphere of
cultural and ideological practices: They are in essential agreement about the existence of a
dominant ideology that is bourgeois in character; where they differ is in the degree of success
they attribute to its will to dominance. Gramsci’s thought brought into focus the hitherto
unrecognized problems with the idea of a monolithic and unilateral dominant ideology.
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Distinguishing domination (by the use of force) from hegemony (the achievement of consent),
Gramsci placed culture squarely within the purview of hegemony, as a site on which the struggle
to establish a social consensus was waged. “A bourgeois hegemony is secured not via the
obliteration of working class culture, but via its articulation to bourgeois culture and ideology so
that, in being associated with and expressed in the forms of the latter, its political affiliations are
altered in the process” (Storey (Ed.), 2013, p. 84). Neither bourgeois culture nor working-class
culture can retain its essential nature, assuming there is one, in a hegemonic process marked by
compromise and negotiation.
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Feminist Studies of Popular Culture
Apart from scholars like Angela McRobbie whose work falls within the field of British cultural
studies proper, there were parallel developments in feminist investigations of popular culture.
Some of this work is inspired by the mass communications approaches such as the “images and
representations approach” or adopted similar methodologies. McRobbie discusses the practices
such as shopping and clothes through which young girls make their own cultural world. One of
the classic works of feminist popular culture scholarship is Janice Radway’s Reading the
Romance, in which Radway undertakes ethnographic work among a group of readers of romance
novels. Radway finds, among other things, that her women readers use romance novels to
construct fantasies that compensate for the deficiencies of their real lives. Another equally
acclaimed work is Ien Ang’s Watching Dallas, which is a reading of responses to a questionnaire
from women watchers of the American television serial. There have been many studies of
popular literature and television following these early works. Ang’s study was undertaken
among European watchers of the show. In her study the audience’s acts of meaning making are
related to their personal lives and a cultural context far removed from the show’s country of
origin. Other scholars have looked at the way American serials like Dallas and Dynasty,
circulating in developing countries of Africa and Asia, have taught women there new desires and
provoked acts of rebellion against entrenched patriarchal repressions.
Though undertaken independently, these studies share with works like The Nation-wide
Audience a methodological shift away from textual interpretation to audience studies. Radway, in
her preface to the British edition of her book, is at pains to emphasize the similarities between
the aims and methods of her project and that of cultural studies. Cinema studies is another field
where feminist scholarship played a central role in the elaboration of the apparatus theory and
the theory of gendered spectatorship in studies of Hollywood. In reaction to this, and especially
focused on Hollywood women’s melodrama, a more audience-oriented approach has since come
into prominence.
Some of the problems surrounding the relations between the feminist researcher and the women
audiences they studied had already been highlighted in Ien Ang’s critical note on Radway.
Returning to this question in the moment of the “post-feminist” turn, Angela McRobbie,
following Charlotte Brundson, points to a new awareness of the way the housewife figured in the
feminist imagination. It had been expedient to conceive audiences as “housewives who would be
studied empathetically by feminists” (McRobbie, 2001, p. 13) of an earlier time. But in the run-
up to the post-feminist moment, the more important development was the “wider circulation of
feminist values across the landscape of popular culture” (McRobbie, 2001, p. 13). This
“feminization of popular media” goes hand in hand with strident media hostility to feminist
arguments accompanied by or prompting counter-identificatory moves by women. McRobbie
shows through an analysis of texts from the post-feminist popular culture how they incorporate
ironic or cheeky references to feminism even as they stage the pleasures of voyeurism. Sexism
in these advertisements and commercials, she argues, is no longer embedded in the image
waiting to be brought to light by a feminist critic but “enacted,” in a knowing way, as a post-
feminist pleasure, with sometimes the suggestion that feminist concerns have been addressed
and overcome.
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Populism
One of the risks of popular culture study is the adoption by the scholar of a populist stance
toward her object of research. The affirmative stance adopted by scholars toward the groups or
texts they study has often been seen as closing the critical gap essential for scholarly
investigation. Claims about the subversive effects of “proletarian shopping” and resistant or
deviant readings of texts or use of commodities have invited skeptical responses. Dick Hebdige’s
landmark study of subcultures, for instance, has been seen as exaggerating their political
significance and overestimating their ability to resist commodification.
In contemporary cultural studies John Fiske has served as a favorite target for critics of
populism in the study of popular culture. Fiske’s two books, Understanding Popular Culture and
Reading Popular Culture have been bestsellers in the field and have been very influential in
cultural studies departments across the world. Fiske discusses a wide variety of cultural
practices and texts supported by a formidable armory of theoretical tools derived from
philosophers, sociologists, semioticians, and historians.
Fiske’s definition of popular culture as “the culture of the subordinated and disempowered” is
sharply political (Fiske, 1989B, p. 4) and assigns to it a role in the ongoing day-to-day struggle
between the powerful and the powerless. The drama of popular culture is played out between
the two contending forces, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Fiske sometimes sounds like a journalist
reporting from the frontlines on the ongoing resistance of working-class consumers assaulted by
a battery of commercially produced and distributed cultural commodities. Like other cultural
studies scholars, Fiske rejects the Thompsonian or culturalist proposition of an autonomous
working-class culture and accepts the Frankfurt School thesis of a thoroughly commodified and
industrially produced and distributed mass culture. But unlike “left pessimists” like Adorno and
his American follower Dwight Macdonald, Fiske does not think that the culture industry has
won. He introduces a twist whereby popular culture is a set of practices involving the use of
cultural commodities by the consumers, rather than the commodities themselves. In other
words, the idea of culture as a set of objects, texts, performances, is replaced by a dynamic idea
of culture as what the people make of the objects, what “meanings, pleasures, and identities”
they derive from it: “There is no “authentic” folk culture to provide an alternative, and so
popular culture is necessarily the art of making do with what is available. This means that the
study of popular culture requires the study not only of the cultural commodities out of which it is
made, but also of the ways that people use them. The latter are far more creative and varied
than the former” (Fiske, 1989B, p. 15). This redefinition also expands the field of popular culture
to include such non-textual practices as going to the mall, wearing jeans, etc.
The consumer of commodities has become “a user of a cultural resource” (Fiske, 1989B, p. 11):
This marks a significant theoretical difference between the Frankfurt School and what Fiske is
trying to elaborate here. Fiske is not trying to deny the thorough commodification of culture. His
argument is rather that by focusing on the commodity character of cultural texts, we miss out on
the cultural dimension of their consumption, focusing only on the economic aspect. As a
commodity, a pair of jeans serves a function. It is the wearer who brings to its use a cultural
significance, thus creating a field of meaning around the practice of wearing jeans. Meanings
are produced where desire is activated. Meaghan Morris suggests that Fiske’s ideal consumer of
popular culture is emblematic of the ideal type of the cultural studies scholar himself!
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Fiske shows how the industry responds to the meanings produced by wearers of jeans by trying
to incorporate them in their own advertising and branding process. For the theory of ideology, by
contrast, jeans are a marketed commodity and to wear them is to participate in capitalist
ideology. To the charge of “incorporation” by capital implicit in this analysis, Fiske answers with
a theory of “excorporation,” which is “the process by which the subordinate make their own
culture out of the resources and commodities provided by the dominant system” (Fiske, 1989B,
p. 15).
Among the theorists Fiske mobilizes in his cause are Michel de Certeau, Umberto Eco, Roland
Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Pierre Bourdieu. From de Certeau Fiske takes the idea that people
cope with the dominant by employing tactics of evasion, while Eco suggests the idea of a
“semiotic guerilla warfare” waged by the consumer to frustrate the intentions of the producers
of cultural commodities, to refuse to submit to the intended meaning. From Bourdieu he derives
the sociological determination of the relation between taste and class location. Much of what
Fiske has to say is in keeping with the general trend of cultural studies thinking. Where he
deviates from it is in the degree of freedom he seems to grant to the consumers to make their
own meaning. Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival allows Fiske to move from the question of
resistant meaning making to bodily pleasures as subversive. The inversions, excesses, physical
proximity, fusion of consciousnesses involved in the carnivalesque are still to be found in the
contemporary world in roller-coaster rides, wrestling matches, monster truck shows, and other
attractions. The populist tone of Fiske’s writings could also be read as the effect of a
determinedly partisan political redefinition of the popular. He is aware that there is a regressive
dimension to popular culture but he is determined not to let it pollute his definition. Stuart Hall,
cautioning against such one-sided views, pointed out for instance that “the people” becomes an
unstable and troublesome category when Margaret Thatcher invokes it to defend her own
policies. Carnivalesque features are often seen in ultra-nationalist gatherings, as in the current
climate of Hindu mobilization in India. Clearly there is a need to exercise caution so as not to
overstate the subversive character of popular practices of cultural consumption. Even so, the
very advent of popular culture as an object of study in recent decades is a political event where
disidentification with high cultural pretensions and solidarity with the dominated majority is an
enabling condition. Perhaps an element of populism is bound to remain as long as popular
culture continues to be an object of study.
Whether inspired by Fiske or not, the populist tendency has become more widespread and has
been widely criticized. It will be useful to look at some of the exchanges between scholars within
the field about the rights and wrongs of popular culture studies practice.
We have noted how with the advent of mass culture, popular culture in the old sense, which is a
culture still substantially defined and to some extent controlled by the people, is seen to have
disappeared. Fiske accepts this argument but he, like all the cultural studies theorists continues
to use it. In a way Fiske is resurrecting the popular after its destruction by mass culture with the
simple gesture of shifting the focus from the products to the field of use. A “popular culture” is
produced within the belly of the mass cultural beast by this act of redefinition. If the way people
use commodities is where culture is to be found, then the existence of a “mass culture” of
industrialized commodities does not rule out the existence of a popular culture. Fiske even
removes mass culture itself from the equation, there is only the culture industry and then
popular culture (Fiske, 1989B, p. 23).
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Disciplines like history and sociology, and in developing countries, anthropology have also seen a
rush to study popular cultural objects. In the initial years of its existence, cultural studies’ claim
to the field of culture was challenged by anthropology, which had its own concepts of culture.
Cultural studies survived by defining its object differently, as a concern with ideological
processes and strictly contemporary struggles for hegemony. In the wake of the boom in cultural
studies, many anthropologists have turned their attention to the contemporary, in the process
revising and expanding the prevailing definitions. Some see in these developments a
revitalization of the concept of popular culture as well as a new “undiscriminatingly sentimental
view of it” (Schudson, 2013, p. 556). Critical interrogation of the academy as a space of selective
valorization of texts has led to a more inclusive approach to texts as well as the extension of
textuality itself to new objects not previously so regarded. This change raises the question of the
continuing relevance of the distinctions of high and low. In the wake of the populist turn, the
critical reaction has tended to resituate the debate within the institutional space of the
university. Schudson thus treats popular culture as a subject taught as part of the university’s
humanities curriculum. With the curriculum now expanding to include “all that is human,” the
question of judgment returns with new force. The judgment that one thing is better than
another, now delinked from class divisions, is seen to be a common enough occurrence in all
fields.
In retrospect we realize that scholars have underestimated the role played by the educational
apparatus in shaping the definitions and classifications that operate in the field of culture by
keeping the attention focused on the world at large and treating the university as merely a space
of investigation. Humanities education is not the dissemination of knowledge produced by
research but an engagement in conversations about the meanings of culture. The “culture and
anarchy” school, we may note here, was engaged in setting up the educational institution as a
bulwark against the media world, for them it was a battle for the souls of children and youth
between the school and the tabloid press. Discrimination was to combat indiscriminate and
unhealthy consumption and fortify the souls of all with the nourishment of good culture. Does
the popular culture turn imply the invasion of education by bad culture? The university’s cultural
elitism has now been substantially diluted, but are the choices of texts now to be governed by no
criteria at all? Or does it mean the redefinition of good and bad culture so as to be less in
alignment with class boundaries? Some of the critics of populism in cultural studies have opted
for the latter. Lowenthal had suggested that the difference between art and culture may reside
in the approach we take to the text, whether we take it as the work of an artist and examine it
closely for its aesthetic qualities or whether we treat it as part of a cultural phenomenon.
Similarly it is now suggested that neither the highbrow works of art nor the commodities
produced by the culture industry are by definition good or bad and the exercise of taste remains
a necessary stage in the appreciation of either kind of text or practice. Retreat from populism
has also meant a fresh look at the scope of the field. Popular culture studies have tended to
become more and more exclusively concentrated on the sphere of consumption, based on the
argument that the working class or mass audience no longer has a role in the production of
culture and is condemned to consume the products put before it by the industry. This kind of
subjective identification of the scholar with the mass audience has meant that the sphere of
cultural production under capitalist conditions no longer holds any interest. Against this, critics
more recently have argued for a serious investigation of production processes as an integral part
of popular cultural studies (MacGuigan, 2013; Morris, 1990; Nowell-Smith, 1987).
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Critical responses to the populist turn have raised a number of important questions. Skepticism
about the subversive effects of pleasure have been expressed and about the indiscriminate use
of “subversion” as the default political result (Webster, 2013). Important essays by Meaghan
Morris and Judith Williamson have generated much debate in the aftermath of the populist
moment. Morris somewhat sarcastically refers to a “master-disk from which thousands of
versions of the same article about pleasure, resistance, and the politics of consumption are
being run off under different names with minor variations” (Webster, 2013, p. 597). She sees in
Fiske’s resistant, resignifying consumer a version of the scholar himself. In her argument, an
exhausted populism now tries to rejuvenate itself by positing new groups who need lessons in
the politics of consumption. Williamson too raised a critical voice against the abdication of
critical responsibilities by cultural studies scholars. Teresa Ebert’s critique sees in populist
cultural studies a case of what she calls “delectable materialism,” which sees “the details of
everyday life as blissful singularities and in doing so segregates them from their historical
conditions and severs them from the social totality whose generality actually makes singularity
possible” (Ebert, 2009, pp. 46–47). Ebert discusses a text by the literary critic Elaine Showalter
that exemplifies the “consumer as radical” genre of cultural studies. Showalter readily confesses
to being a shopaholic and prides herself on this fact, identifying herself as one of “those of us
sisters hiding Welcome to Your Facelift inside The Second Sex” who wishes to “make the life of
the mind co-exist with the day at the mall” (Ebert, 2009, p. 47). Noting the shared indebtedness
of Showalter and Fiske to de Certeau, Ebert finds this approach to be a retreat from political
action rather than an intervention.
More important to the future of popular culture studies than the changing views of scholars in
the field (which in any case continue to see-saw between a limited set of opposed alternatives) is
perhaps historical change itself, which has significantly altered the situation on the ground as
far as cultural consumption is concerned. Most of the debates that we have surveyed here
belong to a time before the digital turn, one of the immediate effects of which has been to
dismantle the mass cultural institutions and reorganize them in new ways. What Nowell-Smith
pointed out about Britain a while ago is now true of the world in general: Popular culture now
occupies the center of the cultural field and is no longer caught up in a class-determined
subordinate relationship to a high culture. The most important element of the 20th-century mass
cultural moment—the deprivation of the ordinary person of the means of cultural production—
has now been substantially remedied. There are avenues for exhibiting one’s creations on the
Internet, and cameras and other technologies of cultural expression are available at affordable
prices. Culture is now no longer the monopoly of the culture industry. What all this means for
discussions of popular culture is as yet not at all clear. But it is not hard to see that the mass
phenomena of the 20th century have either crashed or undergone total transformation. Does
this mean new possibilities for the rise of genuinely “popular cultures”? Are we now going to see
a horizontal spread of autonomous cultures between which no hierarchy can be established?
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Popular Culture, Globalization, and the Postcolony
Popular culture’s role in global power politics has been an object of study at least since the early
1970s when the classic text exemplifying the “cultural imperialism thesis,” Ariel Dorfman and
Armand Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck was first published. The United States has been
the most prolific and successful production center for popular culture in the world throughout
the 20th century. Emblematic of this history are Hollywood, the center of American film
production; and Walt Disney, the company named after its founder, whose comic strips, and later
films, have circulated throughout the world and continue to enjoy immense popularity.
Compared to the Old World, with its imperialist hierarchies and strict separation of classes,
America was the land of the free where a cinema made for working-class audiences flourished,
drawing talent from across the Atlantic. The dynamism of its cinematic style proved immensely
popular and impressed even Soviet filmmakers like Eisenstein. That was in the early decades of
the 20th century. By the 1970s, America had become the new imperial power in the world,
competing with the socialist bloc led by the Soviet Union. How to Read Donald Duck
demonstrates that the Disney comics are not the innocent pleasure they appear to be but loaded
with imperialist ideology. The discourse of cultural imperialism (Tomlinson, 1991) evoked the
horrors of the destruction of local cultures by the spread of American commercial cultural
products disseminated through cinema and television. Even though the Third World was the
perceived victim of cultural imperialism, the most eloquent criticism often came from European
countries where American popular culture was crowding out local cultural content. A French
culture minister famously spoke of a “cultural Chernobyl” and the growing success of shows like
Dallas caused considerable alarm. The cultural imperialism thesis soon came under attack for
assuming a passive audience and overestimating the power of American popular culture.
Questions were also raised about the elitist character of the national cultures that were sought
to be defended against American or Western imports (Appadurai, 1996). Scholars wrote about
the positive, reformist effects of American popular culture in the world at large (Abu-Lughod,
2005). What is important for us in this is the fact that popular culture is at the heart of the
imperialism discourse. In course of time this area of cultural exchange appears to lose its
imperial character in the eyes of commentators as new terms, such as “soft power” come to
define the relation of cultural properties of nations to geo-politics. The discourse of hybridity too
has been an important critical response to the imperialism argument inspired by the
poststructuralist turn (Young, 1995). In conclusion, let us look at a particular postcolonial
national cultural space that falls within the Anglophone sphere while remaining peripheral to it,
in order to see how popular culture is defined and studied there.
Studies of Indian popular culture have in the past focused on objects such as calendar art, film
posters, cigarette and soap box illustrations, popular cinema, television, political and religious
statuary, the general elections, etc. Overwhelmingly, popular cultural objects in India tend to
have religious or political associations. This is of course in addition to film and television studies
of a more recognizable kind, although even here some of the important works are studies of the
Hindu epics serialized on television, films with mythological content, and film stars and politics.
Not surprisingly, popular culture studies in India have attracted a number of scholars from
anthropology and Indology in addition to those trained in the modern methods of film, media,
and cultural studies. A brief look at the field of Indian popular culture studies will provide a
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contrastive picture to the one developed above of the Western scene and enable us to throw light
on the historical determinants of culture.
An anthology entitled Popular Culture in a Globalised India (Gokulsing & Dissanayake, 2011)
contains 18 essays in 7 sections. The section titles are as follows: Film-Television-TV Soaps-
Indian Feminisms; Folk Theatre—Myths Mahabharatha—Ramayana—Religious Nationalism;
Music-Dance-Fashions; Comics/Cartoons-Photographs/Posters-Advertising; Cyberculture-the
software industry; Sports-tourism; Food culture. Most of these section titles are simply
compilations of the topics dealt with in the essays. There is a mixture of traditional cultural
references and more “modern” ones (sports, cyberculture, comics). A look at the articles
themselves however confirms the preponderance of religious or political themes even in the
sections that appear to be dealing with items of modern culture. Popular culture, in other words,
serves as an umbrella term under which a diverse range of topics and objects are discussed. The
definitions prevailing in the Western context do not feature here at all. These appear to be two
almost entirely different fields of knowledge sharing a name.
Visual images made by traditional artists for a mass market have been a popular object of study
among scholars of popular culture. Calendar art is one of the most ubiquitous of such items.
Jyotindra Jain, Chris Pinney, Patricia Oberoi, Kajri Jain, and others have done much work in this
field. Another important object has been the “Durga pandals” of Kolkata, temporary structures
that sprout all over town to house the idol of Durga during the festival season. These are
elaborate works of architecture and design undertaken increasingly by a combination of
traditional and modern artists. These pandals, traditionally places visited by the devout, are now
also attracting art lovers. Possibly, a new subject combining aesthetic with religious interest has
come into existence. Tapati Guha-Thakurta has studied these pandals and written extensively
about the art practices and the aesthetic qualities of these structures.
These appear to be closer to the conception of a vanished “popular culture” that figured in
Western discussions. Although India remains a peripheral member of the Anglophone world, the
preoccupations of the developed world do not find much of an echo here. Its colonial past, the
dirigiste paternalist politico-economic order maintained for over four decades after
independence, the social paralysis evidenced by the continued domination of the upper castes in
all fields, and other factors have combined to produce a situation where the commodification of
fetishes is a more robust feature of the economy than the fetishism of commodities. As such it is
not surprising that so much of popular culture studies in India is focused on fields contiguous
with or overdetermined by religion and charismatic politics. Central to British cultural studies is
the idea of a polarized society with high and low, dominant and dominated, elite and working
class, etc., constituting a series of binaries that lead to the equation of the popular with the
working class and the dominated. The intricate and fragmented hierarchies of premodern Indian
society have until recently resisted the polarizing power of capitalist industrialization. The old
subjectivities with the entrenched values of deference to power have not been affected by the
introduction of the formal structures and procedures of republican democracy. There were
always restricted enclaves of the modern in the metropolises like Bombay (now Mumbai),
Calcutta (Kolkata). These cosmopolitan social spaces were islands of modernity, exercising a
seductive power over members of the traditional society all around it but unable to work a
transformation on the society as a whole. In the last couple of decades, however, full-blown
capitalism has transformed the field and now the cultural spaces of urban India resemble more
and more their Western counterparts.
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If we look at popular cinema, which is still today the biggest and most influential of the many
popular cultural practices in India, we see a preponderance of narratives of collective fantasy.
Studies of popular cinema, increasingly under the name of “Bollywood” constitute the biggest
portion of popular culture studies. Repackaging of Hindi cinema as Bollywood coincides with the
liberalizing, globalizing policy changes introduced in the early 1990s. Since then, Bollywood has
achieved worldwide success and the Indian State, for long disdainful of commercial Hindi
cinema, has now embraced it as an integral part of India’s “soft power.” Indian and Western
writers have responded to this growing demand with books on Bollywood while other scholars
disapprove of this easy adoption of a marketing term as a name for India’s biggest film industry.
While Indian cinema has for long been popular in Africa, Asia, countries of the Soviet Union; and
other European countries like Greece, Western Europe, and America have also now opened up to
this phenomenon. There is a hint in the reports about non-Indian enthusiasts that it is the
“backwardness” of these films, their unabashed display of sentimental romance, which provides
a nostalgic rush, apart from the new style of dancing that has now spawned many schools all
over the world, and the outrageous costumes which appeal to the postmodern sensibility. The
films themselves rarely offer any scope for a disidentificatory move on the part of the Indian
audience. On the contrary, they tend to draw the audience into a performance of social fusion,
bordering on the carnivalesque. In cricket stadiums, in cinema halls, in all kinds of public
gatherings, we see people willing and eager to be included in some larger formation, some
manifestation of collectivity. The popular cultural character of Indian political life too can be
counted with these. The fascistic tendencies that have for some time been discernible in Indian
politics should be placed alongside Stuart Hall’s Thatcherism and Nazism in Lowenthal’s
account, both instances of popular upsurge. In this way, Indian popular culture certainly
confirms Jameson’s idea that a utopian dimension is a necessary ingredient in any culture
industry product. As for dissent, it tends to take the form of indifference rather than any active
resistance or attempt at counter-signification.
Scholarly differences over the meaning and significance of popular culture have arisen primarily
over the question of artistic quality. Partha Chatterjee, in an essay dealing with the work of
Pinney, Jain, Guha-Thakurta, and others has argued, citing Stuart Hall in support, that popular
cultural texts cannot be exempt from judgments about taste. He takes many of these scholars to
task for bracketing out the question of aesthetic value and the estimation of popular culture by
other criteria. He argues that artists themselves, working in popular cultural formats, are
nevertheless quite conscious of the aesthetic quality of the work that they do and are well aware
when they have produced something mediocre. While this is a relevant point to make in the
context of Indian cultural studies, Chatterjee does not have much to say on the possibility of
approaches other than aesthetic. In Indian film studies too, a wave of populism that celebrated
all things Bollywood, reinforcing this high valuation with a dismissive approach to art house
cinema (Rajadhyaksha, 2003; Vasudevan, 2011) appears to have now subsided as new
developments in popular cinema show up the limits of the Bollywood efflorescence.
This brief discussion of popular culture in a peripheral modern location shows that history,
sociopolitical, and economic conditions determine the nature and function of popular culture in
any society.
References
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M. Madhava Prasad
Department of Cultural Studies, The English and Foreign Languages University
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Popular Culture and Cultural Studies

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication

Summary and Keywords

Popular Culture in History

Popular Culture as an Object of History

The Frankfurt School

A widely prevalent understanding of Adorno’s work on popular culture sees it as “a snobbish

The total effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment, in which, as

British Cultural Studies

In a pathbreaking essay called “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” Hall undertakes an

Feminist Studies of Popular Culture

Popular Culture, Globalization, and the Postcolony

Abu-Lughod, L. (2005). Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Chicago:

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis:

Barthes, R. (1973). “Myth today” in mythologies. London, UK: Jonathan Cape.

Chatterjee, P. (2008). Critique of popular culture. Public Culture, 20(2), 321–344.

Fiske, J, (1989a). Reading the popular. London, UK: Unwin Hyman.

Fiske, J. (1989b). Understanding popular culture. London, UK: Unwin Hyman.

Guha-Thakurta, T. (2004). From spectacle to “art.” Art India, 9(3), 34–56.

Hebdige, D. (1979). Sub-culture: The meaning of style. London, UK: Routledge.

McRobbie, A. (1994). Postmodernism and popular culture. London, UK: Routledge.

Morris, M. (1990). Banality in cultural studies. In P. Mellencamp (Ed.), Logics of television:

Nowell-Smith, G. (1987). Popular culture. New Formations, 2(Summer), 79–90.

Radway, J. (1987). Reading the romance. London, UK: Verso.

Rajadhyaksha, A. (2003). The Bollywoodization of Indian cinema: Cultural nationalism in a global

Thompson, E. P. (1991). Introduction: Custom and culture. In E. P. Thompson (Ed.), Customs in

Tomlinson, J. (1991). Cultural imperialism: A critical introduction. London, UK: Continuum.

Williams, R. (2003). Adorno on popular culture. London, UK: Routledge.

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