Cultural Studies for Troubling Times: A Multimodal Introduction to British and American Cultures

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Did you ever wonder how Irish people ended up on Barbados? Or how Black Detroit danced to Kraftwerk? Or why there are no statues of women on Trafalgar Square? And what all this has to do with the economy and politics of culture?

In the form of eleven short texts accompanied by eleven educational videos, this multimodal e-book introduces basic terms and central theoretical approaches within Cultural Studies to students from various disciplines, but even more so to everyone interested in questions of cultural identity, media materialities, representation, popular culture and cultural memory. Additionally, we provide a first insight into the cultural history of the anglophone world. Each chapter also contains a selected bibliography for further reading. This publication aims to enable its readers to understand the culture we live just a little bit better, and to transform it.

Contents

Introduction

► 1 Why Cultural Studies?

► 2 What is Culture?

► 3 Signs & Meaning

► 4 Media & Materiality

► 5 Subjects & Identities

► 6 How to Study Culture

► 7 Representation & Cultural Memory

► 8 Guy Fawkes & the Tudors

► 9 Ireland & the Colonies

► 10 Cowboys & the American West

► 11 King Kunta & the Black Atlantic

Rearticulating Cultural Studies for Troubling Times

Cultural Studies for Troubling Times

#culturewars #identitypolitics #woke #transgender #blacklivesmatter #badbunny #fridaysforfuture #culturalappropriation #reservationdogs #class #taylorswift #cancelculture #trump #fossilfuel #chatGPT #settlercolonialism #metoo #altright #marvel #culturalmemory #hactivism #sexeducation #culturalmarxism #diversity #gender #race #media #heartstoppers #complicity #affect #criticalracestudies #tippingpoints

Culture is a contested terrain – that is the starting point of Cultural Studies. Social media, it appears, is the field where such contestations are most visible today. Streaming series are attacked for miseducating teenagers and promoting homosexuality; others are celebrated for representing authentic trans lives and Indigenous people. Some people only follow accounts that praise the culture they love; others retreat to message boards where they attack everything that feels different. Some are criticized for an insensitive joke; others rally behind those that feel hurt. Dissenters are condemned, solidarity is demanded, outrage multiplied, indignation expressed, anxiety provoked. All too often, the memes, tweets and hashtags that dominate social media leave little room for dialogue; words become weapons rather than tools, deployed to terminate rather than facilitate debate.

The things that are talked about on social media are real, despite the excesses and distortions. The oppression of Indigenous people is real, as are the exclusionary practices against trans folks and other minoritized groups. The destruction of nature is real, as much as the erosion of democracy and the proliferation of violence. The discrepancies of wealth are real, as are the food banks and Help-to-Heat schemes. Unfortunately, such realities won’t be stopped by a hashtag or a post. There are real destructive forces at work, and a growing number of people identifies the central force behind these devastations as capitalism. Capital’s need for energy and drive for profit demand cheap oil, cheap labor and cheap food, and its fierce resolve seems to conquer everyone and everything that stands in its way. That much is probably true, although it has to be said that the so-called ‘real existing socialisms’ of the twentieth century did not fare much better when it comes to the protection of nature, the nursing of democracy and the prevention of violence. The more pressing question is: if we see all this, if we know all this, why are we unable to do anything about it? Why can’t we change our ways, why can’t we come together? What’s going on, and what can be done?

Cultural Studies has been engaging with questions of power and the promise of the popular for at least half a century. It has criticized media representations that constrict and silence minoritized groups and it has celebrated music and films that speak with voices not heard in the mainstream before. It has developed a vocabulary to discuss the possibilities and restrictions of popular media and it has provided theories of how cultures facilitate inclusion and exclusion. It has provided case studies of how cultures are formed by the historical conditions from which they emerge, and of how culture participates in constituting the worlds we live in. It has examined how culture upholds the status quo and how it enables transformation. Most of all, Cultural Studies has analyzed culture not as a flight of fancy, but as a way of making sense of, and challenging the reality we live in.

Cultural Studies emerged in recognizable form when Stuart Hall, a Jamaican-born sociologist, encountered American popular culture in 1960s Britain. Ever since, Hall worked tirelessly to conjoin the political project of the left with the affective energies of music, photography and film. Cultural Studies, then, can be seen as an attempt to attune politics to the desires and anxieties, the dreams and fears articulated in popular culture. Unfortunately, the new right, from Thatcher and Reagan to Trump and Johnson, seems to have been much more successful in (pretending to be) listening to the people than anyone on the left. It is in response to these forces that it appears about time to Make Cultural Studies Great Again: to recognize the imaginaries and the passions expressed in popular culture that have to be the foundation of any political project – and to work through them collaboratively.

This book wants to share the tools of Cultural Studies with everyone seeking to engage with the manifold contradictions of contemporary culture. In the form of eleven short texts accompanied by eleven videos, this multimodal publication introduces basic terms and central theoretical approaches not only to students from all disciplines, but to everyone interested in questions of cultural identity, mass and social media, representation and cultural memory. Our goal is to enable readers to understand the culture they live in just that little bit better, and to provide a basis for participating in an exchange that is understanding and caring rather than aloof and dismissive.

The first unit engages with the pivotal question of Why Cultural Studies? Why, in a world of multiple crises, in a world of war and climate destruction, a world full of poverty and violence, why should anyone be interested in words and images, in books and films, in music and media? Because to analyze certain things about the constitutive and political nature of representation itself, about its complexities, about the effects of language, about textuality as a site of life and death is essential to our struggles: culture is central to determining who is worthy of a good education and who is granted access to an efficient health system; culture (among other factors) determines who values nutritious food and who has to suffer most from environmental hazards, warfare and dangerous workplaces. Those are the things cultural studies can address.

The second unit discusses and defines what culture is, and can be. Cultural Studies uses the word culture in two ways: to mean a whole way of life and to mean the arts and learning. While other disciplines might focus on one or the other of these aspects, Cultural Studies insists on both, and on the significance of their conjunction. Cultural Studies investigates precisely how a way of living and its creative articulations, how art and society are intertwined and interacting; it analyses how we form culture and how culture forms us. In order to understand this constitutive nature of culture, we have to understand how the formations of culture are writing themselves into the land, creating social geographies and material conditions of living that in turn form those who inherit and inhabit them. Cultural Studies defies the usual separation of culture, politics and economy, but instead explores its intricate intra-relations. Only if we can grasp such relations, we can understand the politics behind the statue of General Lee in Charlottesville, USA, and the cultural geographies that contributed to the disaster of Grenfell Tower in London, UK.

The third unit explains how we make sense of the world through culture, how culture classifies and distinguishes events and objects. More specifically, it addresses the production of meaning, and the power relations that are at play here: Which meanings are shared within society, and by which groups? What other, counter meanings are circulating? What meanings are contested? How does the struggle between different sets of meanings reflect the play of power and the resistance to power in society? Most importantly, such struggles in the ‘symbolic world’ are not seen as mere forms of shadowboxing; they take place because they have real-life consequences, because they define the relations to our conditions of existence and the possibilities of changing these. To define what it means to be an ‘American’, for example, determines the policies of a given time: it defines whose jobs will be subsidized, and whose will be laid off, whose roads will be repaired and whose not, whose children will be taken away and whose not.

How media communicate culture is the subject of unit four. Here, we are specifically interested in the material forms used to share meaning; because media materialize meaning, they insert it into a technological, economic and political grid. For Cultural Studies, mediation is therefore a process in which real determining factors set limits and exert pressures on who can communicate what. Communication is understood here as a practical material activity influenced by social, economic and political circumstances and the power structures inherent in these. What a book means to a reader, for example, is not only determined by the author, but by a whole network of editor-booksellers, retailers, educators, librarians, organizers of reading rooms, administrators of provincial academies, etc.

The question of how humans relate to meaning and media is examined in unit five and linked to questions of cultural identity. In contemporary culture, it is popular media that provide people with preformed frameworks of meaning or ways of making sense of our social experience, with value systems by which to orient ourselves toward the events of our everyday lives, and that teach us to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate pleasures. Cultural Studies is particularly interested in how consumers of media relate to the preformed frameworks of meaning they are confronted with, and what subject positions they create for themselves on this basis. It is in relation to what is deemed legitimate and what illegitimate that processes of identification and dis-identification become the basis for political action. A politics that recognizes different cultural identities understands that a single Black mother has different needs than a white family father of two or a young woman living in a multi-generational household: they need different working hours and different structures of care, as well as different forms of ‘industrial action’.

Unit six asks how Cultural Studies’ understanding of meaning, media and identity can help us to study culture. As the smallest unit of investigation, Cultural Studies suggests ‘articulations’. These are linkages that connect specific meanings, things, persons or activities as if the two (or more) were indeed one: as if women were bound to do unpaid housework, as if heterosexuality was indeed a natural fix, as if the unemployed were actually lazy. Cultural Studies is especially interested in the circumstances under which such connections can be forged and maintained by particular actors. These circumstances are defined by the ‘conjuncture’, the particular but contradictory historical conditions within which cultural practices take place. Only if we understand specific formations as being forged under specific conditions, these formations open up to change.

Unit seven introduces representation and cultural memory as central concepts for understanding the creation of images of who we are (or want to be) and of what we think of others. Representation is understood here as a productive, constitutive force, rather than an act of mechanically reproducing something already existing. Cultural Studies asks how representations contribute to the constitution of an event, person or thing: which terms, images and stereotypes are employed to represent something, which qualities, values and social roles are ascribed to the represented, which narratives, stories – and fantasies – are woven around them? Cultural memory, then, is a form of representing the past in order to create an understanding of bygone eras and events that serves the desires of the present. Based on such understanding, we can now ask: what future do the people of England imagine, when they mourn the death of the Queen?

The final four chapters of this introductory course aim to provide a first insight into the cultural history of the Anglophone world, not in the sense of a succession of artworks, but as a process of remembering, and forgetting, and thereby creating cultural traditions. Such history is important for students of the Anglophone world, but relevant for many others, too. Politically, economically and ideologically, the legacies of the British Empire and the USA continue to reverberate around the world; legal frameworks, economic formations and technological infrastructures with global reach and impact often have very specific historical origins. Only if we understand the circumstances in which we now find ourselves, if we understand how these circumstances arose and what forces are sustaining them, only then can we define what forces are available to us to change them. Only if we challenge the past, we can liberate the future.

Unit eight presents early modern Britain as a time which saw a major redistribution of people, land and wealth inside and outside Britain, which started the process of converting a largely subsistence-based agriculture into a surplus-oriented and wage-based economy, and which set the foundations for the exploitation of people and the extraction of resources under colonial regimes. A celebratory cultural memory consequently stabilizes economic, political and ideological forms like a centralized state, a merely representative democracy and a capitalist economy, as well as racialized and gendered forms of domination, and not at least, the exploitation of nature.

Unite nine takes Ireland as a case study of how political violence and cultural legitimization enable a colonizer’s accumulation of land and labor. The so-called ‘plantation’ scheme of the 17th century resulted in a massive transfer of property from Irish to English ownership. Renting the land to the dispossessed previous owners was guaranteeing a stable income to colonizers – but not before the land was extensively plundered: The most spectacular profits were derived from the felling and processing of timber, which found a ready market in England, the Netherlands, and further afield. While the Irish population would eventually develop a cultural nationalism that allowed them to fight British occupation, the Irish landscape never recovered from the draining of natural resources under colonialism. Whether a re-united Ireland of the future can reverse such environmental destruction is one of the central political questions in contemporary Ireland.

Across the Atlantic, the violence that settler colonialists meted out against the Indigenous population was similarly motivated by a hunger for land and resources. Unit ten shows how the American dream of freedom and of the absence of domination was not only premised on violence, but also undermined by the mute compulsions of a capitalist economy. Instead of giving home to family farms and independent cowboys, the West came to be populated by ranch hands in desperate need of unionization. And although the popular myths of the frontier and the cowboy have little foundation in reality, the idea that the future has to be ushered in through acts of disruptive violence enjoys unbroken prominence in popular American culture.

Unit eleven presents the slave trade that brought millions from