An overview of American Multiculturalism in cultural studies

Topic:  An Overview of American Multiculturalism in Cultural studies....

Paper Name: Cultural Studies

Paper no: 8

Name: Bhatt Urvi

Roll no: 32

Submitted to: department of English maharaja krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar university  

·       The Beginning of the word Culture:

       ‘Culture’ comes from ‘cultura’ and ‘colore’. It’s meaning is ‘to cultivate’. By the 19^th century in Europe it’s meaning was different. It meant the habits, customs and tastes of the upper classes.

·       What is culture?

“Culture is the full range of a learned human behavior. Culture includes arts, beliefs, customs, inventions, language, technology and traditions.” 

“The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively is culture.”

“ The quality in a person or society that arises from a concern for what is regarded as excellent in arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits etc means Culture.”

                         ‘Culture’ is the mode that generates meanings and  ideas. This ‘mode’ is a negotion over which meanings are valid meanings governed by power relations. Elite culture controls meanings because it control the term of the debate. Nonelite views on life and art are rejected as ‘tasteless’, ‘useless’ or even stupid by the elite. The meaning is that certain components of culture get more visibility and significance.

·       Cultural Studies:

                          Cultural studies designates a cross-disciplinary enterprise for analyzing the conditions that affects the production, reception and cultural significance of all type of institutions, practices, and products, among these, literature is accounted as merely, one of many forms  of cultural ‘signifying practices’.

                          A prominent endeavor in cultural studies is to subvert the distinctions in traditional criticism between “high literature” and “high art” and what were considered the lower forms that appeal to a much larger body of consumers cultural studies pay less attention to work in the established literary canon than to popular fiction best-selling romances, journalism, and advertising, together with other arts that have mass apeal such as, cartoon comics, Film, T.V. ‘soap operas’ and rock and rap music. Radical exponents of cultural studies subordinate literary studies and criticism to political activism, they orient their writings and teaching towards the explict end of reforming existing power structures and relations, which they consider to be dominated by a privileged gender, race or class. many cultural studies are devoted to the analysis and interpretation of objects and social practices outside the other arts. The tone of early vision of cultural studies was set by students of the British New Left, especially Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams. Cultural studies adapts methods of analysis from various disciples: Media studies, Cultural anthropology, discourse analysis, Popular culture studies and audience studies. Cultural studies says that one cannot ‘read’ culture artifacts only within the aesthetic realm.

·       The types of cultural studies:

                 There are five types of cultural studies:

A)   British culture Materialism

B)    New Historicism

C)    American Multiculturalism

D)   Post-modernism and popular culture

E)    Post colonial studies

A) British culture Materialism:

              It is also known as ‘ Cultural Materialism’ in Britain. In late 19^th century, Matthew Arnold redefined the ‘givens’ of British culture. Edward Burnett Taylor’s ‘primitive culture’ argues that :

“culture or civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is a complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities.”

                       Williams memorably states:

                                “There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses”

                                         In modern Britain two trajectories for “culture” developed one led back to past and the feudal hierarchies that ordered community in past here, culture acted in its sacred function as preserver utopia that would annual the distinction between labor and leisure classes and make transformation of status, not fixity, the norms.

                                        Cultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950s with the work of F.R.Leavis, heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold’s analysis of bourgeois culture. Leavis sought to use the educational system to distribute literary knowledge and appreciation more widely,Leavisites promots the “Great tradition” of Shakespeare and Milton to improve the moral sensibilities of a wider range of readers than just the elite.Ironically the threat to their project was mass culture.

B)  New Historicism:

                   Laputa-“ the whore”.what did Jonathan swift mean when he gave that name to the flying island in the third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels? It is a question that has tantalized readers since the 18^th century.The science fiction aspect f that island still amuses us,but why”the whore”?there may be an answer and as we will show later,new historicism is the right approach to answer  this question.

                  New historicism/old historicism: Says Porter,saw history as”world views magisterially unfolding as a series of tableaux in a film called progress” ,as though all Elizabethans,for example,held views in common.The new historicism rejects this periodization of history in favour of ordering history only through the interplay of forms of power.

C)  American multiculturalism:

                  It is about American culture ,America has many cultures:

·       African American writers

·       Latina/0 writers

·       American Indian Literatures

·       Asian American writers

D) Post- modernism  and Popular culture:

               Postmodernism celebrates the very act of dismembering tradition.It question radicalism.There are four main types of popular culture.They are:

1 -Production analysis

2-Textual analysis      

3-Audience analysis         Popular Culture

4-Historical analysis

                      Modernist literature rejected the Victorian aesthetic of prescriptive morality and using new techniques drawn from psychology, experimented with point of view, time space and stream of consciousness writing.

·       Post-colonial studies:

                             Post colonialism refers to a historical phase undergone by Third world countries after the decline of colonialism. Said’s concept of oriental was an important touchstone to post colonial studies, as he described the stereotypical discourse about the East as constructed by the West. Said sharply critiques the Western image of the oriental. Frantz Fanon, a French Caribbean Marxist, drew upon his own horrific experiences French Algeria to deconstruct emerging national regimes. Homi K. Bhabha’s post colonial theory involves with poststructuralist ideas of identity and indeterminacy, defining post colonial identities as shifting, hybrid construction.

                               Among the most important figures in post colonial feminism is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who examines the effects of political independence upon “Subaltern” or sub proletarian women in the Third World.

                               Now I explain American Multiculturalism in detail…………

                 

·       American Multiculturalism:

                                In 1965 the Watts race riots drew worldwide  attention. The civil Rights Act has passed in 1964. There were murders and other atrocities attended the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, President Johnson Signed voting rights act. The Black Panther party come to existence, All African American students in the South attended segregated schools and discrimination was still illegal in many states, ‘race’ problem was challenged.

                                   In the new century, if interracial trends continue, Americans will be puzzled by race distinctions from the past since children of multiracial backgrounds may be the norm rather than the exception. And given the huge influx of Mexican Americans into the United States over the last fifty years, immigration pattern indicate that by the year 2050 Anglo-Americans will no longer be the majority, nor English necessarily the most widely spoken language.

                                    “Every American should understand Mexico from the point of view of the observer of the conquest and of the history before the conquest… No American should graduate from college without a framework of knowledge that includes at least some construct of Asian history, of Latin-American history of African history.’’

1.   African American writers :-

                            In ‘Shadow and Act’[1964] novelist Ralph Evison argues that “any viable theory of Negro American culture obligates us to fashion a more adequate theory of American culture as a whole”.

                             American arts, fashion, music and so much besides is based upon African American culture from Oprah to Usher. African American writing displays a ‘double consciousness’, as W.E.B. Eilison requested Black writers to have faith in their own experiences and definitions of reality. It seems as if they did so. Toni Morison’s ‘Bluest Eye’, Gwendolin Brooks’s ‘We Real Cool’ and many others wrote about their culture and their efforts of long struggle.

                    “Black people had before they knew there was such a thing as art”

-         Ellison                                                                                                                              

                                              Hurston, Hughes, Countee Cullen were the center of literary life and black culture. African American writing continued to enter the main stream with the protest novels of the 1940s. The 1960s brought Black power and the Black Arts Movement. There was struggle between Black and White literature.

2.   Latina/o writers :-

                         They are Mexican American. This term indicates a broad sense of ethnicity among Spanish-Speaking and most influential group of Latina/o ethnicities in the United States.

                                              The history of the indigenous cultures of the new world is punctuated by Indian Nations, European countries, especially Spain, Portugal, France and England then by the United states. Mexican American literature was the combination of Spanish art and their culture. They create new Folk culture and literature. According to Juan Flores and George Yudice:

“The search for ‘America’ the inclusive multicultural society of the continent, has to do with nothing less than the imaginative those of remapping and renaming in the service not only of Lalinos but of all climates.”

3.   American Indian Literature:-

                             For American Indians, stories are a source of strength in the face of centuries of silencing by Euro-Americans. A term ‘Native American’ is preferred by most academics and many tribal, members, who find the term ‘Indian’ a misnomer and stereotype- as in “cowboys and Indians” or “Indian giver” that helped whites wrest the sentiment away from indigenous people. Their  identities are Tribal.

                                 Traditional literature was and is oral, because the Indian tribes did not have written languages, European newcomers assumed they had no literature. In fact American Indians were the creator of the first American literature, Traditional Indian literature is not especially accessible for the average reader, and it is not easy to translate from Cherokee into English. Their myth and stories are designed to perpetuate their heritage and instruct young, Cure illness ensure victor in battle or ‘Secure fertile’ fields. It is practical literature.

                                      The American authors are Samson Occam, William Apess, Yellow Bird   [ John Rollin Ridge], Simon Pokagon, Sra Winnemucca Hopkins,  McNickle and Mourning Dove. These writer dealt with native rights the duplicities of U.S. government and military leaders creation myths, trickster humor and tribute constancy.

4.   Asian American writers:-

                                                              Asian American literature is written by people of Asian descent in the United states. Asian immigrates were denied citizenship as late as the 1950s, Edward Said wrote ‘oriental’s’ Asian American writers include Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Polynesian and many other people of Asia, the pacific. These cultures present a bewildering array of languages, religions, social structures and skin color, and hence the category is even more broad and artificial than Latina/o or American Indian.

                                                             Asian American literature can be said to have begun around the turn of the twentieth century. Increasing attention in Asian American studies has been focused on writers from Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines including. Asian American writing is quiet among Americans as well as other countries.

                        America has multiculturalism Bernard Bell reviews some primary features of American writing and compares value systems :

“Traditional white American values emanate from a providential vision of history and of Euro-Americans as a chosen people a vision that sanctions their individual and collective freedom in the pursuit of profit, and happiness Radical freedom Protestantism, constitutional democracy and industrial capitalism are the white American trinity of values”                             

v  Conclusion:-

                              American Multiculturalism has worldwide attention. It is a mixture of all the cultures of the world. It deals with racial problems. It deals with modern literature too. America has people from all over the world. The folk and traditional American culture is interesting. The work of American writer discussed Modernity, Myth, Slavery and many other problems. Basically American literature was not written but it was an oral form as American and Indian literature. After the colonial settlement it started to be written.