Lit Crit Report

Ampayon, Butuan City 8600, Philippines
CULTURAL
URL: www.carsu.edu.ph
STUDIES
Eslier, Kathleen Mae
Perodes, Ivy Jean
Solera, Gretchen
What is Cultural Studies?
Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960-s,
Cultural Studies is an academic discipline which
combines political economy, communication,
sociology, social theory, literary theory, media
theory, film studies, cultural anthropology,
philosophy, art history/ criticism etc. to study cultural
phenomena in various societies. Cultural Studies
researches often focus on how a particular
phenomenon relates matters of ideology, nationality,
ethnicity, social class and gender.
What is Cultural Studies?
The works of Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart
with the Birmingham Centre, later expanded through
the writings of David Morley, Tony Bennett and
others. Cultural Studies is interested in the process
by which power relations organize cultural artifacts
(food habits, music, cinema, sport events etc.). It
looks at popular culture and everyday life, which
had hitherto been dismissed as “inferior” and
unworthy of academic study.
Cultural Studies’ approaches:
1. transcend the confines of a particular discipline such

as literary criticism or history
2. are politically engaged
3. reject the distinction between “high” and “low” art or

“elite” and “popular” culture
4. analyze not only the cultural works but also the means
of production.
Cultural Studies believes that we cannot “read”
cultural artifacts only within the aesthetic realm,
rather they must be studied within the social and
material perspectives; i.e., a novel must be read not
only within the generic conventions and history of
the novel, but also in terms of the publishing
industry and its profit, its reviewers, its academic
field of criticism, the politics of awards and the hype
of publicity machinery that sells the book.
Cultural Studies views everyday life as fragmented,
multiple, where meanings are hybridized and contested; i.e.,
identities that were more or less homogeneous in terms of
ethnicities and patterns of consumption, are now completely
hybrid, especially in the metropolis.
With the globalization of urban spaces, local cultures are

linked to global economies, markets and needs, and hence
any study of contemporary culture has to examine the role of
a non-local market/ money which requires a postcolonial
awareness of the exploitative relationship between the First
World and the Third World even today.
Cultural Studies is interested in lifestyle because
lifestyle is :
• is about everyday life

• defines identity
• influences social relations
• bestows meaning and value to artifacts in a culture.
Mall Culture
Mall is a space of display where
goods are displayed for
maximum visual display in such
a fashion that they are attractive
enough to instill desire.
Spectacle, attention- holding
and desire are central elements
of shopping experience in the
mall. Hence, the mall emerges
primarily as a site of gazing and
secondarily as a site of
shopping.
Mall Culture
Further, “the mall is a hyperreal, ahistorical,
secure, postmodern-secular, uniform space of
escape that takes the streets of the city into itself in a
tightly controlled environment where time, weather,
season do not matter where the “natural” is made
through artificial lighting and horticulture, and
ensuring that this public space resembles the city but
offers more security and choice.”
Media Culture
Media studies and its role in the
construction of cultural values,
circulation of symbolic values, and its
production of desire are central to
Cultural Studies today. Cultural
Studies of the media begins with the
assumption that media culture is
political and ideological, and it
reproduces existing social values,
oppression and inequalities. Media
culture clearly reflects the multiple
sides of contemporary debates and
problems.
Media Culture
In Cultural Studies, media culture is studied through an analysis of
popular media culture like films, TV serials, advertisements etc.- as
Cultural Studies believes in the power of the popular cultural forms as tools
of ideological and political power.
Cultural Studies of popular media culture involves an analysis of

the forms of representation, such as film; the political ideology of these
representations; an examination of the financial sources/sponsors of these
representations (propaganda advertisements by Coke after the report on
pesticides in Coca Cola); an examination of the roles played by other
objects / people in the propagating ideology (Amir Khan in the Coca Cola
ad, after patriotic films like Lagaan, Mangal Pandey and Rang de Basanti).
Media Culture
Cultural Studies also analyzes whether the
medium (say, film), presents an oppressive/unequal
nature of institutions, like family, education etc. or
glorifies them; the possible resistance to such
oppressive ideologies; the audience’s response to
such representation and the economic benefits and
the beneficiaries of such representations.
Stuart Hall
Stuart Hall (1932-2014) was
one of the most prominent
and influential scholars and
public intellectuals of his
generation. He was a prolific
writer and speaker and a
public voice for critical
intelligence and social justice
who appeared widely on
British television and radio.
Stuart Hall
A memoir by Stuart Hall Familiar
Stranger: A Life between Two Islands
(Allen Lane/ Duke University Press
and Penguin), and a collection of
Stuart Hall’s political essays Selected
Political Writings. The Great Moving
Right Show and other essays
(Lawrence and Wishart) were
published in 2017.
Cultural Studies 1983:
A theoretical History
The publication of Cultural Studies 1983 is a
touchstone event in the history of Cultural
Studies and a testament to Stuart Hall's
unparalleled contributions. The eight
foundational lectures Hall delivered at the
University of Illinois in 1983 introduced North
American audiences to a thinker and discipline
that would shift the course of critical
scholarship. Unavailable until now, these
lectures present Hall's original engagements
with the theoretical positions that contributed
to the formation of Cultural Studies.
Book Review by Jennifer Daryl
Slack and Lawrence Grossberg,
Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History, edited
by Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg, is
a posthumous collection of lectures given by
innovative cultural theorist Stuart Hall to students at
the University of Illinois in 1983. The collection is
inspiring and comprehensive, covering, for example,
the birth of Cultural Studies, Marxist structuralism and
Hall’s crucial post-Gramscian work on hegemony.
Book Review
• Hall guides the reader through approaching cultural
analysis: ‘one must begin by describing the existing
terrain of theoretical discourse […] initially some
synthesis has to be made’. Cultural Studies must
also be understood in terms of institutionalization:
universities, funding projects and cultural centers
shape the discipline.
Book Review
• Hall’s collection of lectures is persuasive,
galvanizing and feels both timeless and timely,
despite its posthumous status. The volume deals
with the importance of long-term political struggle:
‘rather than reserving the notion of class struggle
only for the moment of the barricades, we need to
see resistance as the continual practices of working
on the cultural domain and opening up cultural
possibilities.’ He acknowledges that this is ‘perhaps
not the most glamorous political work, but it is the
work we need to do’.
8 KEY CONCEPTS OF
CULTURAL STUDIES
Key Concepts:
1. Signifying Practices
2. Representation
3. Materialism and non-reductionism
4. Articulation
Key Concepts
4.Articulation
5.Power
6.Popular Culture
7.Texts and Readers
8.Subjectivity and Identity

References:
• Book Review: Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History by Stuart Hall (edited by
Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg). (2017, March 13). LSE Review of Books.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/03/13/book-review-cultural-studies-
1983-a-theoretical-history-by-stuart-hall-edited-by-jennifer-daryl-slack-and-lawrence-
grossberg/
• Hall, S. (2017). Cultural Studies 1983. A Theoretical History. Openedition.org.

http://journals.openedition.org/lectures/21869
• NASRULLAH MAMBROL. (2016, November 23). Cultural Studies. Literary Theory
and Criticism . https://literariness.org/2016/11/23/cultural-studies/
• Summary Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice | WorldSupporter Summaries and
Study Notes. (2022). Worldsupporter.org.
https://www.worldsupporter.org/en/chapter/76431-summary-cultural-studies-theory-
and-
practice?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR2dbcFBWuA3MheTyaxWLdqFotLydSTf-
kZ166KKo8jvJbm2tuQgN0fQdvE_aem_ASSjcAfsDs3QqPzi4MLWt2F9WUMgMXWhI3
XcCVN8fyIsznt0jy6txLmgKnSlc7aJUxeQlkO-5tJIZ1oc_yvvHb_p

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Ampayon, Butuan City 8600, Philippines

1. transcend the confines of a particular discipline such

2. are politically engaged

3. reject the distinction between “high” and “low” art or

With the globalization of urban spaces, local cultures are

• is about everyday life

Cultural Studies of popular media culture involves an analysis of

3. Materialism and non-reductionism

7.Texts and Readers

8.Subjectivity and Identity

• Hall, S. (2017). Cultural Studies 1983. A Theoretical History. Openedition.org.

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