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Culture

Cultural Theory

In the field of cultural studies in particular (and in the degree program of North American studies in general) you will often be confronted with complex theoretical texts. When reading such a text, don't be worried if you don't "get it" straightaway. Just read and re-read it carefully, look up any words you don't know, and try to translate what you think the author might mean into your own words.

Assignment

Click on the box below for quotations by two influential thinkers in the field of cultural studies. Read the selected quotations carefully and answer the questions by ticking the appropriate circle.

Quotations by Stuart Hall and Gayatri Spivak

Stuart Hall: "I come back to the deadly seriousness of intellectual work. I come back to the distinctions between intellectual work and academic work: they overlap, they abut with one another, they feed off one another, the one provides you with a means to do the other. [...] I come back to theory and politics, the politics of theory. Not theory as the will to truth, but theory as a set of contested, localized, conjunctural knowledges, which have to be debated in a dialogical way. But also a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make a difference, in which it would have some effect." (Stuart Hall, 1993, Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies, in The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, New York: Routledge, pp. 108-9)

Gayatri Spivak: "The point is to negotiate between the national, the global, and the historical as well as the contemporary diasporic. We must anthropologize the West and study the various cultural systems of Africa, Asia, Asia Pacific and the Americas as if peopled by historical agents. [...] Let us learn and teach how to distinguish between 'internal colonization' - the patterns of exploitation and domination of disenfranchised groups within the United States - and the various different heritages or operations of colonization in the rest of world. The United States is certainly a multiracial culture, but its parochial multicultural debates, however animated, are not a picture of globality. Thus we must negotiate between nationalism (uni- and multicultural) and globality." (Gayatri Spivak, 1993, "The Question of Cultural Studies", in The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, New York: Routledge, pp. 186-7)

What does Stuart Hall mean by the term "the politics of theory"?

Debates about cultural theory within political institutions.

A political theory that explains everything.

Cultural theory as the production of specific knowledges that potentially enable politically meaningful interventions in the world.

Hall does not envisage cultural theory as leading to some kind of universal truth, but as "a set of contested, localized, conjunctural knowledges, which have to be debated in a dialogical way". What's more, for him theory ought to be linked to political practice.

What does Spivak suggest cultural studies ought to do?

To study culture across national and global levels, while attending to historical and current cross-cultural movements.

To judge other cultures by our own cultural standards.

To analyse particular national cultures.

"The point is to negotiate between the national, the global, and the historical as well as the contemporary diasporic."

What does Spivak's term "internal colonization" mean in the context of the United States?

The fact that parts of North America used to be European colonies.

The ongoing colonization of the United States by immigrants.

The historical and current oppression of powerless groups in the United States.

"Let us learn and teach how to distinguish between 'internal colonization' - the patterns of exploitation and domination of disenfranchised groups within the United States - and the various different heritages or operations of colonization in the rest of world."

Please click on the for feedback to each answer.