Assignment:-10(B) Name:- Italiya. kinjal.B. Topic:- Type of Cultural studies:-British cultural materialism and Post colonial studies. RollNo:-10 Sem:-II Batch:-2010-11 Summited:-Dr.Barad (sir) Type of Cultural studies:-British cultural materialism and Post colonial studies.

Postcolonial Studies.

The critical analysis of the history, culture, literature,

And modes of discourse that are specific to the former colonies of England, Spain, France, and other European imperial powers. These studies have focused especially on the Third World countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean Islands and South America. Postcolonial studies sometimes encompass Also aspects of British literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries, viewed through a perspective that reveals the extent to which the Social and economic life represented in the literature was tacitly underwritten  By colonial exploitation. Some scholars, however, extend the scope of such Analyses also to the discourse and cultural productions of such countries as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, which achieved independence much Earlier than the Third World countries.

                               An important text in establishing the theory and practice in this recently Developed field of study was Orientalism (1978) by the Palestinian-American Scholar Edward Said, which applied a revised form of Michel Foucault's historicist Critique of discourse (see under new historicism) to analyze what he Called "cultural imperialism." This mode of imperialism imposed its power not by force, but by the effective means of disseminating in subjugated Colonies a Eurocentric discourse that assumed the normality and preeminence Of everything "occidental," correlatively with its representations of the "oriental “As an exotic and inferior other. Since the 1980s, such analysis has been supplemented by other theoretical principles and procedures, including Althusser'sRedefinition of the Marxist theory of ideology and the deconstructive Theory of Derrida. The rapidly expanding field of postcolonial studies, as a result, is not a unified movement with a distinctive methodology? One can, However, identify several central and recurrent issues :( 1) the rejection of the master-narrative of Western imperialism—in which the colonial other is not only subordinated and marginalized,

                           But in effect deleted as a cultural agency—and its replacement by counter-narrative in which the colonial cultures fight their way back into a world history written by Europeans. The influential collection of Essays, the Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989), ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s, stresses what it terms the hybridization of colonial languages and cultures, in which imperialist importations are superimposed on indigenous traditions? It also includes a number of postcolonial counter texts to the

colonial history.(2) An abiding concern with the formation, within Western discursivePractices, of the colonial and postcolonial "subject," as well as of theCategories by means of which this subject conceives itself and perceivesThe world within which it lives and acts. (See subject under poststructuralist.)The subaltern has become a standard way to designateThe colonial subject that has been constructed by European discourseAnd internalized by colonial peoples who employ this discourse;

Rank, and combines The Latin terms for "under" (sub) and "other" (alter).

                                   A recurrent Topic of debate is how, and to what extent, a subaltern subject, writing In a European language, can manage to serve as an agent of resistance against, rather than of compliance with, the very discourse that has created its subordinate identity. See, e.g., Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988), reprinted in The PostcolonialStudies Reader, listed below.(3) A major element in the postcolonial agenda is to disestablish EurocentricNorms of literary and artistic values, and to expand the literary Canon to include colonial and postcolonial writers. In the UnitedStates and Britain, there is an increasingly successful movement to include, in the standard academic curricula, the brilliant and innovativeNovels, poems, and plays by such postcolonial writers in theEnglish language as the Africans Chinua Achebe and Whole Soyinka, The Caribbean islanders V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, and the authorsFrom the Indian subcontinent G. V. Desani and SalmanRushdie.

                         See Homi Bhabha, the Location of Culture (1994); and for a Survey of the large and growing body of literature in English by postcolonial Writers throughout the world, see Martin Coyle and others, Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism (1990), A comprehensive anthology is The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995), Ed.Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (trans., 1966); Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (1990); Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology In Africa (1990); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993).

British Cultural Materialism:-

Cultural studies are referred to as “cultural materialism” in Britain, and it has a long tradition. In the later nineteenth century Matthew Arnold sought to redefine the “givens” of British culture. Edward Burnett’s pioneering anthropological study primitive culture argued 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 and habits acquired by man as a member of society”(1).Claude Levi-Strauss’s influence moved British thinkers to assign “culture” to primitive peoples and then with the work of British scholars like Raymond Williams to attributes culture to the working class as well as the elite. As Williams memorably states: “there are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses”.

                   To appreciate the importance of this revision of “culture” we must situate it within the controlling myth of social and political reality of the British Empire upon which the sun never set an ideology left over the previous century. In modern Britain two trajectories for “culture” developed. This cultural materialism furnished of leftist orientation “critical of the aestheticism, formalism, ant historicism and common among the dominant post war methods of academic literary criticism” Such was the description in the Johns Hopkins guide to literary Theory and criticism.

                   Cultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950 with the work of F.R.Leavis heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold’s analyses of bourgeois culture. Leavisites promoted the “great tradition” of Shakespeare and Milton to improve the moral sensibilities of a wider range of readers than just the elite. Inspired  by Karl Marx, British theorists were also influenced by Gorgy Lukas ,Theodor Adorn, Louis Althusser, Max Horkheimer, MikhilYachting, and Antonio Gramsci.Walter Benjamin attacked fascism by questioning the value of what he called the “aura” of culture. Benjamin helps explain the frightening cultural context for a film such as lenis Rifesta’s trimph of the will (1935) Lukach developed what he called a reflection theory.

                   Cultural materialists also turned to the more humanistic and even spiritual insights of the student of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, Russian formalist bakhtin, especially his amplification of the dialogic from of meaning within narrative and class struggle at once communal and conflictual, individual and social.    

                                          The End