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American culture and society in chronological, ethnic, and regional perspective

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Lecture One Introduction, basic terms and concepts – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: American culture and society in chronological, ethnic, and regional perspective


1
American culture and society in chronological,
ethnic, and regional perspective
  • Lecture One
  • Introduction, basic terms and concepts

2
WHAT IS CULTURAL STUDIES?
  • A study of culture, or the study of contemporary
    culture
  • Originates in Great Britain in the 1950s
  • Richard Hoggart The Uses of Literacy (1957)
    emphasis on uneqality, as far as money, health
    care, education
  • Raymond Williams The Long Revolution(1961)
    culture cannot be uncoupled from society

3
WHAT IS CULTURAL STUDIES?
  • Hoggart established the Birmingham Centre for
    Contemporary Cultural Studies
  • A move from locally produced cultural forms
    (holidays, dances, attitudes to family) to the
    larger picture, or culture produced from afar
    by the state-- educational system, or by culture
    industrymusic, film, and broadcasting
  • Early 1970s Emphasis on cultures political
    function culture came to be considered a form of
    hegemony

4
HEGEMONY
  • Term is associated with Antonio Gramsci, Italian
    Marxist,(1920s, 1930s)
  • Relations of domination which are not visible as
    such
  • Involves not coercion, but consent on the part of
    the dominated, or the subaltern
  • Forms of hegemony or hegemonic forces alter their
    content as social and cultural conditions change
  • Counter-hegemonic strategies have to be revised

5
CULTURE AS A FORM OF HEGEMONY
  • Culture is not an expression of local communal
    ties, but an apparatus within a large system of
    domination
  • Culture is broken down into discourses, or
    signifying practices
  • Discourse relationship between power and
    language
  • Culture can produce conforming, or docile
    citizens or bodies
  • Coercive practices are developed aiming at the
    manipulation of the human being, his gestures,
    Docile bodies or engedelmes testek result from
    disciplinary practices, separating people in
    space (army, prisons, dormitories,
    etc.)--Foucault

6
LEADING THINKERS
  • Louis Althusser Ideological state apparatus
    political party, religion, education, family
  • Ideology gives us identity, we are subjected to
    ideology, no free agency or free will for human
    consciousness, helps us make sense of the world,
    through it we enter the symbolic order, see
    ourselves mirrored in it,
  • Michel Foucault Discourses are produced
    historically, examined asylums, prisons,
    Episteme regulates the development and
    transformation of knowledge a group of rules of
    what we count as knowledge of the given period

7
A semiotic approach to reading cultural products
  • Signsignifier and signified
  • Polysemy a signifier always has more than one
    meaning
  • Meaning an effect of differences within the
    larger system
  • Meanings are not produced referentially, by
    pointing to specific objects, but by one signs
    difference from another
  • Signs can be substituted for anotherparadigmatica
    l relation Marlboro man--toughness
  • Signs can enter a sequence of other
    signssyntagmatical relation Marlboro
    man-smoking-cancer

8
THEN WHAT IS CULTURAL STUDIES?
  • A discipline interested in hegemony, discourse,
    the distribution of power
  • How groups with the least power develop their own
    readings of cultural products in articulating
    their identity
  • Culture at the interstices, the gaps of power
    relations
  • The cultural construction of race, ethnicity, and
    gender
  • Subject expressive, has agency, shapes his or
    her lifeSelf
  • Object muted, suppressed, deprived of
    agency--Other

9
A RESEARCH TOOL SPACE, SPATIALITY
  • Cultural studies helps us to examine texts from
    the following aspects
  • Spatiality Phenomenological approach
  • Martin Heidegger subject dwells in space
  • Edward Casey body as an organizing force, a link
    between self and the lived place
  • Spatiality Post-Marxist approach
  • Foucault spatiality is a social product,
    determined by power relations
  • Third Space fissure in the dominant
    discourseHomi Bhabha

10
THE THIRD SPACE
  • Third space a hybrid movement of the subject,
    not simply a negation of social space both
    negating and building upon a socio-spatial
    paradigm
  • Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter condemned as
    an adulteress, yet by proudly wearing the letter
    A she reinforces her own identity

11
POST MODERN SPATIALITY THEORIES
  • Non-place places of transition, cannot be
    integrated into any spatial paradigm, expresses
    rootlessness, expresses difference from the
    environment (Marc Augé)
  • Minorities tend to be restricted into non-places
  • Negative space (Nancy D. Munn) prohibited space,
    boundary making resulting from racist tactics of
    space production

12
THE ABJECT
  • Julia KristevaThe Powers of Horror
  • Designates what has been discharged from the
    body, expelled, rendered Other
  • Yet, by discharge and expulsion the identity of
    the Other is established as well

13
LECTURE TWO
  • A cultural studies inspired look at American
    culture

14
WHAT DO ALL THIS HAVE TO DO WITH AMERICAN CULTURE
AND SOCIETY?
  • Contesting national narratives (Native American,
    White, Asian-American, African-American, etc.)
  • American exceptionalism a rooted belief in
    chosenness, mission concept a core element of
    national self-definition, promotion of a
    homogeneous image
  • Counter discourses undermining the privileged
    status of white, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon
    episteme
  • History as a discourse cannot comprehend the
    whole past, thus there are many differing views
    of the past--polysemy

15
HEGEMONY IN AMERICAN CONTEXT
  • The examination of how power works?
  • A continuous debate about power, authority, and
    its meaning
  • American culture is dialogical
  • Dialogism, a term by Mikhail Bakhtin
  • Language, and culture is dialogical interacting
    Self and Other in a constant process of
    intermingling of diverse points of view
  • A continous interplay of culture, history, and
    power

16
CULTURAL IDENTITY
  • Stuart Hall Cultural identity is not a fixed
    concept
  • It is constructed through memory, fantasy,
    narrative, and myth
  • America an assemblage of multiplicity,
    constantly producing new selves and transforming
    old ones

17
PREVIOUS FORMS OF AMERICAN IDENTITY
  • Crevecoeur Grand Alma Mater
  • Lord Bryce Amazing Solvent Power of American
    democracy
  • Gunnar Myrdal American Creed
  • Melting pot v. Salad bowl
  • Parallel cultures
  • Caleidoscope

18
COLONIAL ECOLOGY
  • Environment is not pristine, no unspoiled
    wilderness
  • Indian hunting practices cause a major loss in
    wild species
  • Slash and burn agriculture
  • Transformation of the physical landscape
    introduction of private property, cleared, grazed
    lands are subject to erosion
  • Indian trading practices (trinkets for furs)
    deplete large mammal population

19
SOCIETY IN GENERAL
  • 18th century 3 population growth
  • Rise of large and multi-generational families
  • Scarcity of women
  • Average age of 20-21
  • Greater longevity, lower death rate in Europe
  • Average age 1790, 16

20
VIEWS ON WOMEN
  • Pre-supposed inferiority (weaker vessels)
  • John Winthrop A true wife accounts her
    subjection as her honor and freedom
  • Barred from preaching, holding office, entering
    public schools, making contracts, owning
    propertynegative space
  • Emphasis on family values leads to improvement,
    yet superior aspect of life was masculine and
    eternalthird space or hybridization

21
OVERALL ANALYSIS
  • Inequality gender and economics-based
  • Form of hegemony WASPM
  • Exclusion from discourse Native Americans,
    women, children, slaves
  • Episteme WASPM, ideological state apparati are
    controlled by patriarchy
  • Power at the interstices or gaps scarcity of
    women, Puritan laws and emphasis on family values
    protect them from physical abuse, allow for
    divorce

22
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS WINTHROPS ON CHRISTIAN CHARITY
  • EPISTEME The Bible
  •  
  • SPATIALITY
  • We shall be a city upon a hill, that is we
    construct the given space, the subjects form the
    respective space, we pervade through space
  •  
  • DYNAMICS OF SUBJECT, OBJECT Settlers see
    themselves in Subject position, no mention of
    natives or Others. Except an allusion to being
    seduced to worship other Gods. Yet if straying
    from ruling discourse and episteme we perish, we
    be consumed out of the good land, thus reference
    is made to abject status

23
LECTURE THREE
  • Colonial society and culture

24
SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
  • The rise of nationalism after the end of Hundred
    Years War in 1453
  • European societies remained highly hierarchical
  • A patriarchal system of family governance

25
SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
  • The English Reformation
  • Rejection of Catholic rituals
  • Rejection of established Church hierarchy
  • Salvation can only be achieved by faith

26
ENGLISH BACKGROUND TO PURITANISM
  • A product of Reformation, Renaissance
  • Economics, politics joined hands with theology
  • Puritanism promoting individualism presents a
    challenge to English institutional life

27
EVOLUTION OF MODERN SOCIETY
  • Two stage evolutionary process
  • 1. Dissipation of corporate feudal order into
    unregulated members of society
  • 2. Struggles of individuals to regroup themselves
    into new social commonwealth
  • Puritan revolution of capable middle class
  • Demanding greater freedom of trade
  • English Revolution promotes the development of
    the system of capitalism and that of
    parliamentary government

28
THEOLOGICAL DISPUTES
  • Anglican Absolutist principle of church and
    state, dominated by the feudal spirit of
    corporate unity, stood for Bishop and King,
    divine right
  • Presbyterian elected stewardship supersedes
    divine right, a compromise between aristocracy
    and democracy
  • Independent consciously democratic, one aspect
    Separatists Come out from among them and be ye
    separate (Paul)

29
CALVINISM
  • Total depravity effect of the Fall, sin extended
    to human thinking, emotion, and will
  • Unconditional election God provides knowledge of
    himself only to those whom he was pleased with
  • Limited atonement Christ died for specific
    people with specific sins
  • Irresistible grace All elected by God will come
    to a knowledge of him
  • Perseverance of the Saints The Saints whom God
    glorified remain with him until death

30
A PEOPLES HISTORY
  • The Columbian landfall.
  • First messenger of Western Civilization in the
    Americas
  • Columbus was promised title of the Admiral of the
    Ocean Sea, 10 of the profits, governorship of
    new lands
  • Meets Arawaks, agricultural people living in
    village communes
  • Columbus sends exaggerated reports back to Madrid

31
COLUMBUS AND THE CONQUISTADORS
  • Search for slaves and gold
  • Exhaustion of resources, total control of Indians
  • Unspeakable cruelty
  • Reports by Bartholomeo las Casas History of the
    Indies
  • Endless testimonies prove the mild and pacific
    temperament of the natives. But our work was to
    exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle, and destroy.
    The Admiral so anxious to please the king
    committed irreparable crimes against the Indians

32
HERNANDO CORTÉS
  • Aztec civilization based on the heritage of the
    Mayan, Zapotec, and Toltec cultures
  • Public constructions built by stone tools and
    organized human labor
  • Ritual killings, sacrifices
  • Yet, innocent and naive upon arrival of
    Spaniards bearded white men in armor, riding
    horses were considered the personification of
    Quetzalcoatl, a man-god who died three hundred
    years earlier and promised to return

33
CORTÉZS CONQUEST
  • Obsessed with finding gold
  • March of death from town to town,
  • Cholula massacre
  • Breaks the will of the Aztec people,death of
    Montezuma
  • Same techniques followed by Francisco Pizarro in
    Peru

34
ENGLISH COLONIZATION OF THE NEW WORLD
  • 1585 Richard Grenville lands in Virginia,
    destroys local tribes on the pretext of a stolen
    silver cup
  • 1610 Starving time, settlers join Indians, when
    refused to return and believed to have been
    kidnapped colonists attack Indian settlement
  • Powhatan war 1622-1632 a response to Jamestown
    Massacre

35
Indian wars in new england
  • Indian land was legally in a vacuum. Indians had
    not subdued the land, they had only a natural
    right to it not a civil right--Winthrop
  • Justification from the Bible
  • Psalm 28 Ask of me, and I shall give thee.the
    heaven for thy inheritance and the uttermost
    parts of the earth for thy possession.
  • Romans 132Whosoever resisted the power,
    resisted the ordinance of God and they that
    resist shall receive to themselves damnation

36
PEQUOT WAR
  • 1636 murder of a white trader leads to conflict
  • Punitive expedition
  • Puritans use Cortés tactics, destroying civilian
    population to terrorize people into submission
  • Mystic River Massacre
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