By Jamal.

L
 CULTURE
The pioneer English Anthropologist Edward B. Tylor in his book, Primitive Culture, published in 1871.
Tylor states that culture is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals,
custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."

History
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.

 Cultural theorists doubt that social science can find useful answers to important questions about
media influence.
 Cultural Studies is influenced by a Marxist interpretation of society, which is suspicious of any
analysis that ignores power relationships.
 Cultural Studies is more than interpretation. It seeks to change things.
 It wants to empower people who are on the margins of society
 Words and other signs have no intrinsic meaning.
 Words do not have meanings. People construct meanings
 Meanings are constructed and imparted through communication and culture--through discourse.
Culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings.
 For Hall. we must examine the sources of discourse:
 People with power get to draw arbitrary lines between things (e.g.. normal and abnormal):
 The production of knowledge is always located within the vectors of time, space and social power.
 Chris Barker argues that purposes of cultural studies are analytic, pedagogic and political.
 Cultural studies is a body of theory generated by thinkers who regard the production of theoretical
knowledge as a political practice.
 The key concepts for cultural studies are those of text. Ideology and hegemony.
 Cultural studies expose power relationships and examine how these relationships influence and
shape cultural practices.
 Cultural studies’s objective is to examine culture in all its complex forms and analyze the social
political within which it manifests itself.
 Cultural Studies can be understood as a language-game that revolves around the theoretical terms.
 Stuart Hall has described cultural studies as a discursive formation. That is a cluster (or formation) of
ideas, images and practices, which provide ways of talking about forms of knowledge.
 Cultural Studies can be understood as an interdisplinary or post displinary field of inquiry that
explores the production and inculcation of culture maps of meaning.
 It brings into view and coheres around key concepts and ideas that include: culture, discourse,
ideology, identity, popular culture, power. Representation, text...
 The central strand of cultural studies is the exploration of culture as constitued by the meanings and
representations generated by human signifving practices
 Cultural Studies is a body of theory generated by thinkers who regard the production of theoretical
knowledge as a poltical practice. The relations of culture and power are examined.
 The tools of cultural studies are words and concepts...
 The core issue of cultural studies is the interpretation of meaning. And it involves issues of evidence.

Broadly speaking, the tributaries of cultural studies are:

 Ethnography Philosophy of language

 Post-Marxism
 Psychoanalysis Feminism
 Political Economy
 Poststructuralism
 Marxism
 Postcolonial theory
 Pragmatism
 Textual Analysis
 Communication
 Communication
COMMUNICATION

 From a cultural studies perspective, communication is concerned with production, consumption and
exchange of meaning.
 The concept of culture is based on the notions of 'maps of meanings and 'shared meanings.
 Meanings are not simply 'out there' waiting to be found and exchanged, rather. they are generated
through the organization of signs, most notably those of language.
 Cultural studies has a strong intrest in semiotics (the study of signs). discourse and the philosophy of
language.
 The study of communiction within cultural studies has taken place at the levels of:
 Production (Political Economy)
 Text (Semiotics. Discourse Analysis)
 Reception (Consumption)

CONSTRUCTIONISM

 A generic name given to theories that stress the culturally and historically specific creation of
meaningful categories and phenomena
 This in contrast to theories that appeal to universal and biological explanations for objects and
events
 For example the body, which is commonly held to be a simple biological given of nature, is
understood by constructionism to be also an outcome of the forces of culture.
 In this context. Identity is not a universal entity but a culturally specific discursive construction.
Indeed, even sexual identity is not thought to be a reflection of a natural state of being but rather is
a matter of representation
 Language makes rather than finds and representation does not picture' the world but constitutes it.
 CONSUMPTION

 In the context of cultural studies is centred on the generation of meanings in the process of
consumptions
 Commodities carry embedded ideological meanings that serve the interests of capitalism and which
are taken on board by consumers through the very act of consumption.
 Consumption-oriented cultural studies argues that while the production of popular music, film,
television and fashion is in the hands of transnational capitalist corporations, meanings are
produced altered and managed at the level of consumption.
 Culture industries work hard to force people consume mass culture.

CONVERGENCE

 The Concept of convergence, that is the coming together or joining of previously discrete items, has
taken out a particular set of meanings during the 1990s in the context of changes within the
communications industries and their related technologies.
 One use of the concept of convergence refers to the breaking down of barriers between
technologies that had once been separate
 The convergence has been enabled by digital technology that organizes information electronically
into bytes or discrete bundles of information that can be compressed during transmission and
decompressed on arrival. This enables more information to travel down by any given conduit (be
that cable, satellite or terrestrial signals) at greater speed over larger distances.

CONVERSATION

 The notion of conversation has two dimensions that are of significance to cultural studies: namely,
"conversation analysis as a methodology for exploring cultural categories and the 'conversation as a
metaphor for understanding culture.
 Conversation analysis emerged from a domain called ethnomethodology that has been concerned
with the ethnomethods or local folk' understanding that people deploy to construct and maintain
social and cultural life.
 The conversation analysis explores how identity is achieved in the everyday flow of ordinary talk.
 The metaphor of 'culture as a conversation grasps the dynamic and language oriented character of
culture and allows us to consider the formation of meaning and culture as formed in the joint action
of social relationship.

COUNTERCULTURE

 The idea of a counter culture refers to the values, beliefs and attitudes, that is, the culture of
minority group that is in opposition to the mainstram culture.
 A counterculture is articulate and self-conscious in its opposition to the values of the governing
culture in a way that distinguishes it from a subculture.
 The term is particularly associated with the cultural and political movements and formations of the
1960s and early 1970s in the United States and Britain, from whence the concept emerged.
 CRITICAL THEORY
It is Marxist approaches that directly concentrate on reflective assessment and critique of society and
culture to contest power structures. It started with the work of the 'Frankfurt School', a research
institute that began its work in Germany in 1923 but later transferred to the United States. It is a mixture
of Marxism. Critical philosophy and psychoanalysis was drawn upon to present a critique of the capitalist
social order and of the 'culture industry in particular.

CULTURAL CAPITAL

According to Bourdieu, cultural capital acts as social relation within a system of exchange that includes
the accumulated cultural knowledge that confers power and status. In sociology, cultural capital includes
the social assets (Educational backgrounds. dress style, speech style...) that enhance social
mobility/movement in a stratified community. Bourdieu portrays cultural capital as an individual's
knowledge and intellectual skills that support him/her to gain a higher social-status in society.

CULTURAL IMPERIALISMM

In anthropology, sociology, and ethics, the imposition by one usually politically or economically
dominant community of various aspects of its own culture onto another nondominant community. The
fact of the culture of a large and powerful country organization, Etc. having a great influence on another
less powerful country. It is said to involve the domination of one culture by another and is usually
thought of as set of processes involving the ascendancy of one nation and/or the global domination of
consumer capitalism.

CULTURAL MATERIALISM

Cultural materialism is perspectives for analyzing human societies. It incorporates ideas from one of the
major anthropological Marxism cultural evolution and cultural ecology. It contends that the physical
world impacts and sets constraints on human behavior.

Cultural materialists seek to draw attention to the processes being employed by contemporary power
structures, such as the church. The state or the academy, to disseminate ideology, To do this, they
explore a text's historical context and its political implications. And then through close textual analysis
note the dominant hegemonic position. They identify possibilities for the rejection and or subversion of
that position.

CULTURAL POLICY

Cultural policy is the government actions, laws and programs that regulate, protect, encourage and
financially (or otherwise) support activities related to the arts and creative sectors, such as painting,
sculpture, music, dance, literature, and filmmaking, among others and culture, which may involve
activities related to language, heritage and diversity.

Cultural policy is concerned with the regulation and management of culture and in particular with the
administration of those institutions those produce and govern the form and content of cultural products.
This would include organizations like Arts council in the UK. The Federal Communications Commission
INUSA, museums, government departments of education, arts, culture, media, sport...

CULTURAL POLITICS

Cultural politics is about the power to name, and thus legitimate, objects and events including both
common sense and official versions of the social and cultural world. It can be understood in terms of the
ability to represent the world and to make particular descriptions 'stick All forms of cultural
representation are intrinsically 'political' because they are bound up with the power that enables some
kinds of knowledge and identities to exist while denying it to others.

The term cultural politics refers to the way that culture-including people's attitudes, opinions, beliefs
and perspectives, as well as the media and arts-shape society and political opinion, and gives rise to
social, economic and legal realities.

CULTURAL POPULISM

The assumption central to cultural studies that popular culture isvaluable and worthy. Cultural Populism
claims that the true people are the native members of the nation-state. And Outsiders can include
immigrants, criminals’ ethnic and religious minorities, and cosmopolitan elites.

Populism is mostly regarded as an ideology which presents "the people" as a morally good force and
contrasts them against "the elite who are portrayed as corrupt and self-serving

The increased 'postmodernization' of culture was said to have itself collapsed the high-low division.

CULTURAL STUDIES

Cultural studies are an inter-discursive space, which substance and methods are constituted from the
collaboration of disciplines around the topic of culture. There are no fixed boundaries in the study. Its
strength lies in its openness so that it may transform and grow there are three main models of research
in Cultural Studies:

1. Production-based studies: involves the process and struggle over the production of cultural items.
2. Text-based studies: investigates the forms of cultural products.
3. Studies of lived cultures: concerned with how experience is presented Cultural studies is an area
of activity that grows from interaction and collaboration to produce issues and themes that are
new and challenging

CULTURE INDUSTRY/ INDUSTRIES

Culture industry is a term coined by German critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Max
Horkheimer (1895-1973), who argued in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, that
popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods - through film, radio and
magazines- to manipulate the masses into passivity: the easy pleasures available through consumption
of popular culture make people docile and satisfied, no matter how difficult their economic
circumstances
 DECONSTRUCTION

A method of critical analysis of philosophical and literary language, which emphasizes the internal
workings of language and conceptual systems. The relational quality of meaning, and the assumptions
implicit in forms of expression. The term deconstruction refers to approaches to understanding the
relationship between text and meaning. An approach to the reading of literary and philosophical texts
that casts doubt upon the possibility of finding in them a definitive meaning, and traces instead the
multiplication (or 'dissemination) of possible meanings.

The concept is associated with work of Derrida and his undoing' of the binaries of Western philosophy as
well as its extension into the fields of literature:

a) Focuses on contradictions in art.

b) Unravels binaries - shows they are unstable.
c) Explores unintended meanings in metaphors.
d) Explores instabilities in language.

INTRODUCTION TO ORIENTALISM/OCCIDENTALISM

"Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between
"the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident." Thus, a very large mass of writers, among whom are
poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted
the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels,
social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny, and
so on."1

"A term pertaining to the Orient as discovered, recorded, described, defined, imagined, produced and, in a
sense, 'invented' by Europe and the 'West. As far as literature is concerned it refers to the discourse by the
'West about the East, which comprises a vast corpus of texts - literary sociological, scientific, historical,
linguistic/philological, political, anthropological and topographical - which has been accumulating since the
Renaissance and particularly since the r 8th c. and to which there is no counterpart in the East about the'
West. (...) It also refers to the attitudes of the 'West towards the East; to the Occident (the outsiders)
looking in/on/at the Orient - in fact 'watching' the East and endeavoring to explain and interpret it."

"Orientalism is a set of Western discourses of power that have constructed an Orient - have Orientalized
the Orient- in ways that depend on and reproduce the positional superiority and hegemony of the West.
(...) Orientalism is argued to be a system of representations that brought the Orient into Western
learning"s

"Occidentaliśm is a new tield of study, which tells history of the various Muslim intellectuals who have,
historically, challenged the Western way of life. Occidentalism is a view of the Occident in non-Western
literature and a subject that investigates the internal workings of Western civilization. Occidentalism is a
discourse producing stylized images and essentialised representations of the West. Occidentalism has
become the focus of renowned and sustained academic interest, spawning ever increasing new literature
written both inside and outside the West”

"Occidentalism falls into the very human tendency to practice symbolic geography. It reveals the way we
identify and define ourselves by locating ourselves spatially and temporally, by drawing the boundaries of
discursively constructed social spaces we imagine ourselves to be in,"5

DECONSTRUCTING COLONIAL/ORIENTALIST LANGUAGE IN SOME WESTERN TEXTS

"The bows of the luxury cruise ship African Queen were cleaving the waters of the warm Mediterranean en
route for Tangiers. Her upper decks were ablaze with lights, laughter, music and happy voices spiraled
noisily aloft, then were hushed - swallowed into the surrounding darkness of the tropical night (...) I'll see
you,' he challenged casually in the vernacular familiar to card-playing addicts...." Gnd formol

"She knew there were two hundred miles of Rif Mountains stretching eastwards to the Algerian border and
that the whole of the area they were to travel contained barely half a dozen towns of any importance, but
she was not prepared for the beauty that was gradually unfolded as they travelled along the road towards
Tetouan." Lonce o name, no

"The Rif are primitive in their passions, but every woman taken by them as a wife is counted fortunate in
acquiring a faithful and devoted mate. (...) Demonstrating a perfect obedience? Prostrating herself
submissively before her husband in such a way as to have no will of her own? If that is Rif’s justice then you
can keep it, senor. I prefer the more emancipated outlook of Western civilization."

"I wanted to write a novel using as backdrop the traditional daily life of Fez, because it was a medieval city
functioning in the twentieth century (....) I intended to describe Fez as it existed at the moment of writing
about it, but even as I started to write, events that could not be ignored had begun to occur there."

"The Moroccans were backward onlookers standing on the sidelines of the parade of progress, they must
be exhorted to join, if necessary pulled by force into the march."

"And that was what Stenham saw, too; to him the boy was a perfect symbol of human backwardness”

"I smiled at him, and looked pleasantly, and beckoned to him to come still nearer, at length he came close
to me, and then he kneeled down again, kissed the ground, and laid his head upon the ground, and taking
me by the foot, set my foot upon his head; this it seems was in token of swearing to be my slave for ever
(...) in a little time I began to speak to him, and teach him to speak to me; and first, I made him know his
name should be Friday, which was the day I saved his life (...) I likewise taught him to say Master, and then
let him know, that was to be my name."

DECONSTRUCTING OCCIDENTALIST LANGUAGE IN TAYEB SALIH'S SEASON OF MIGRATION

TO THE VILINGANIST MUSTAPHA SPEED NORTH
"You Mr. Sa'eed, are the best example of the fact that our civilizing mission in Africa is of no avail. After all
the efforts we have made to educate you, it's as if you'd come out of the jungle for the first time."

"Susan called him: "You are Musapha, my master and my lord.....I am Susan, your slave girl."2
"I seduced her with gifts and honeyed words, and an unfaltering way of seeing things as they really
are...She entered my bedroom a chaste virgin and when she left it she was carrying the germs of self-
destruction within her."3

"The ships at first sailed down the Nile carrying guns not bread, and the railways were originally set up to
transport troops; the schools were started so as to teach us how to say "yes" in their language. They
imported to us the germ of the greatest European violence...Yes my dear sirs, I came as an invader into
your very homes; a drop of the poison which you have injected into the veins PA of history."