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The Coming of “Cultural Studies”
The boundaries between such standard academic disciplines as history, anthropology, and English are becoming increasingly fuzzy, a condition that is moving some professors to start building unfamiliar intellectual bridges. The construction materials range from cannibalism to Madonna, from colonialism to baseball.
April 1993
by Marc Wortman
Students and faculty members who buy their books at the Yale Co-op usually know just where to look for
what they need: Psychology is to the left of the center aisle, Philosophy on
the right, European History toward the back, and Literature against the left
wall. But this past summer, several of the standard headings sprouted an
additional message: “See also: Cultural Theory Section.”
The new
section (which is located just behind the information desk) includes Discipline
and Punish, the late-French philosopher Michel Foucault’s study of
the rise of the penitentiary system; Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of
the Twentieth Century, by Greil Marcus; and Camille Paglia’s best-selling
examination of sexual decadence in art and literature, Sexual Personae. “If we aren’t
sure where to put it,” says a Co-op salesman, “we put it here.”
In fact, most
of the titles could have been shelved under any number of the standard
categories—but that is just the point: Yale, like many of its sister
institutions in this country and abroad, has been probing the boundaries of the
established zones of study and concluded that they need some rearranging. For
want of a more precise term for what is admittedly a messy undertaking, the
emerging field is known as “cultural studies,” and embraces such apparently
disparate areas as technological change, sexuality, the mass media,
colonialism, and ethnic identity. Many of the topics—which at their most
extreme include such issues as self-mutilation, cross-dressing, cyberpunk
novels, Madonna, and the Weather Channel—once seemed beyond the pale of
academic attention, and the highly theoretical attempts to link them are
raising more than a few eyebrows among traditional intellectuals. But the
supporters of cultural studies insist that they are seeking a new overarching
synthesis. “Other than funding,” says J. Michael Holquist, a professor of
comparative literature and head of the Council on Russian and East European
Studies, “it is the major issue at most campuses.”
Even its
advocates, however, tend to define cultural studies by explaining what it is
not. It is not, for instance, what was long referred to loosely as
interdisciplinary studies, which accepted the traditional definitions of what
was appropriate to study within each subject, and focused on relationships
among them. “Cultural studies grew out of a critique of the disciplines,” says
Michael Denning, ’84PhD, a professor of American studies who has written books
on 19th- and 20th-century popular novels and film and teaches courses on
cultural theory. Adds Sara Suleri, a professor of English: “There is no capital
‘c’ to culture. There are many cultures, all of which are telling stories about
themselves and other cultures. It is important to break down the sense
that this is familiar and that is exotic, the distinction between margin and
center.”
Such
sentiments are entirely consistent with the criticism and analysis of the
traditional university culture of “great works” (and academic authority in
general) that have emerged in recent years as fundamental issues in American
higher education. Many attribute their rise at least in part to the increasing
number of women and minorities in the academic establishment and the impact on
the curriculum made by ethnic studies, media and popular culture studies,
feminism, and a host of literary theories as well as what might be called
supradisciplinary approaches found most often in history and anthropology
departments. At its core, cultural studies is about the nature of difference
among identity groups of all sorts. The shared concerns of the newer approaches
have been brought together on what Denning terms the “common ground of issues
about how people create culture at different times and how you define a people. It
should be a global mapping of cultures.”
Drawing such a
map is no easy task, especially in an age of such growing fragmentation among
ethnics, social groups, and nations. “Cultures are things that certain groups
share with other people and by which they mark themselves off from others,”
explains Denning. “Boundaries are crucial.” Culture, adds Holquist, “is about
the negotiation of borders.” And as he points out, negotiating those
intellectual borders is not merely an academic exercise: “In Eastern Europe,
culture is driving the politics. It is the fundamental issue.”
Some scholars
contend that such pressures have existed throughout history. But according to
Denning, the traditional humanities “excluded a large part of humanity. We want
to make visible things that weren’t visible before.” Suleri says that making
other cultures visible tells more of the story than focusing on any one area
alone could do: “It’s impossible to disentangle histories. Strict lines
between East and West are ahistorical.”
A native of
Pakistan who concentrates her research on the colonialization of the Asian
subcontinent, Suleri cites as an example of such entanglement the history of
what the world perceives as English culture. Long considered to be a sort of
patrimonial inheritance as permanent and transcendent as the royal throne, the
academic definition of English culture, according to Suleri, actually arose in
the 19th century outside of England. In a recent book, Suleri argued that the
colonialists in the subcontinent felt that they needed to impose a well-defined
way of life on their colonial subjects. Their definition of that way of
life—particularly its “canon” of great books—migrated with the colonialists
back to Britain, where it was adopted in the universities. Eventually, that
version of high culture made its way overseas to this country.
Earlier forms
of interdisciplinary studies have been a staple of universities—and a source of
friction—almost since the rise of the academic departmental structure in the
late 19th century. At Yale they reached a high point of sorts with the
establishment in the 1930s of the undergraduate major known as History, the
Arts and Letters, which drew on leading faculty members from many departments
to explore the relationships among literature and the arts at selected moments
in European history. That program expired in 1981, but its spirit has been
maintained in individual courses by such current faculty members as Chinese
historian Jonathan Spence, religious historian Jaroslav Pelikan, historian of
the American west Howard Lamar, and literary critic and director of the Whitney
Humanities Center David Bromwich. What is new about the cultural studies
approach is the willingness of its advocates to focus not just on the
similarities, but also on the conflicts among those disciplines.
The approach
has taken root at many universities and departments around the country,
including Harvard, Duke, Princeton, and various branches of the University of
California. At Yale the process has been slower, but courses that could be
included under the cultural studies rubric have now emerged in departments as
apparently disparate as German and anthropology, American studies and
religious studies, art history, political science, and even in the Law School.
The primary
example of the type of work being done is a course called “Problems in Cultural
Criticism,” now in its third year, offered by three professors from three
different departments with three separate geographical region specialties. The
course is jointly taught by Suleri, Holquist, and J. Joseph Errington, an
anthropological linguist who has done extensive field work in Indonesia on the
relationship between bilingualism and nationalism among the large Javanese
minority. “There are no monologues in this class,” says Suleri. “If we
disagree, that is well and good.”
In the
classroom, Suleri, Holquist, and Errington alternate presentations on different
aspects of the development of the idea of culture. The rise and fate of the
nation-state is a central topic in the course. “Nations,” Holquist told a class
last semester in Linsley-Chittenden Hall, “replaced religion during the
Enlightenment as the fable of a people. How does a nation inspire love? It
gives a biography for organizing individual lives.” For its texts, the course
draws upon works including Shakespeare’s Othello, Stevenson’s Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Darwin’s Origin of Species, along with
selections from Thucydides, Malcolm X, films, Subcontinental poetry, and
theories of the formation of cultures and individual identity.
The goal of
the seemingly disjointed approach, says Suleri, is to offer “a comprehensive
survey of what are normally considered lesser areas of study,” including
gender and ethnicity, nationalism, and colonialism as they are embodied in
different groups. The professors acknowledge the problems that might emerge
from their efforts. “Any course that attempts to be multifoci runs the risk of
becoming a grab bag,” says Suleri. “You must be aware of why you juxtapose
different materials.” In hopes of forging links to the existing curriculum,
about a half dozen faculty members are trying to create a cultural
criticism program that would be taught as a companion to existing departmental
majors.
Suleri, for
one, feels that the new academic approach can have some very real practical
advantages for students who will soon be involved in grappling with a chaotic
world. In her view, a course on the theory, history, and intersections of
cultures is “an ideal place to look at the problem of nationhood and
nationality. As the Soviet Union was literally disappearing, our course helped
students understand what was happening because we talked about nations on an
anthropological and historical level.”
As a literary
critic and historian, Geoffrey Hartman, the Karl Young Professor of English and
Comparative Literature and director of the Fortunoff Video Archives for
Holocaust Testimony, also sees cultural studies as a tool for understanding the
present. Hartman teaches a course on the “culture wars” in Germany between the
First and Second World Wars in which he suggests parallels between those
conflicts and the sort of disputes over “family values” and “Americanism"
invoked by presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan and others at last year’s Republican
national convention. “Historically, my course looks at what happens when a
state power gets hold of the idea of culture,” says Hartman. “I’m not saying it
must happen here, but when culture becomes primarily cultural politics, it can
be catastrophic.”
Hartman is
quick to point out that political zealotry can also threaten today’s academy in
no less a fashion than it did in the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s. “The danger
is advocacy teaching,” says Hartman. “If you see your work as restitutive and addressing
a constituency, the discipline is in danger of being lost. The real courage is
to be a critic in relation to a community.” But while courses in cultural
studies frequently focus on the politics of culture, even most of its critics
would argue that Hartman’s concerns about academic integrity, while worthy, are
not yet justified by practice, at least at Yale. “There is an advocacy at some
point,” says Denning, “but the narrower advocacy of ‘Vote for So-and-So’
doesn’t happen here. The easy way to get students not to believe is to try to
persuade them in the classroom.”
“There are few
people at Yale who would treat cultural studies as a subversive act,” concurs
David Apter, the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Comparative Political and
Social Development, who studies political change and cultural formation in
developing countries, especially China. He supports the creation of a formal
cultural studies program at Yale. “I’m a political ethnographer,” he says. “I
have to live with the people I study. I don’t have an ideology about cultural
studies. I use what I can. You have to ask yourself: What do unfamiliar ideas
contribute to your own ideas and how do they help you understand a real
situation?”
To critics who
argue that cultural studies constitutes an attack on academic rigor, its
backers cite its ties to a respected intellectual tradition, one represented
most strongly by British literary and historical scholars and political
thinkers. Among them are such heavyweights as Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson,
who were allied in their scholarship and teaching to the left wing of the
British Labour Party. The study of culture, these thinkers contended, could not
be isolated from politics nor from education itself, which they saw as a
principal embodiment of the relationship between politics and culture.
In American
universities, of course, such connections tend to be harder to make because
scholarship and teaching have long been kept at arm’s length from most of
political life. (Some prominent exceptions were the militarization of campuses
during World War II, the faculty purges of the McCarthy era, and the student
protests during the Vietnam War.) Indeed, when cultural studies arrived on
American campuses, its political emphasis was diffused as part of the move to
integrate literary theory into a wide range of disciplines—especially cultural
anthropology—concerned with how cultures form. And at institutions with
departments of communications, cultural studies was seen as an opportunity for
an expansion of the humanities disciplines into studies of mass culture
industries such as film, television, and advertising.
But if
cultural studies is not having the political impact many feared, it is already
claimed by its supporters to have had a fundamental impact on how fields of
study have traditionally been arranged into such compartments as the
humanities. “We’ve redrawn the boundaries,” says Denning. “The new map is
taking on a different overall project than the humanities had. If the
humanities was a way of thinking about the whole, with its own set of
assumptions and ideology, cultural studies takes the same space and organizes
it very differently.” Errington sees a related effect on the concept of area
studies, made popular in the 1950s. “Area studies was founded on the bipolar,
Cold War division of the world,” he says. “The categories are out of sync with
what is going on—there’s ‘us’ and then there’s the ‘areas’ out there. To think
about the way the humanities should be taught is not obvious when you take
seriously the idea that the other areas no longer relate to us in the way they
once did.” According to Holquist, cultures are structured more like narratives,
tales that people use to situate themselves in their experience of the world.
And those narratives must be continuously rewritten to encompass new facts and
new relationships.
To understand
that process, Holquist says, students should consider “how the once restricted
sense of culture as the development of the mind and refinement of taste has
evolved into the current web of signs that makes seeing the world from a
particular place inevitable.” The most common point of view from which people
understand their place in the modern world is through the nation, but Holquist
points out this is no longer so certain as it once was because of the
globalization of communications, the surge in religious and ethnic
identification, and the rapid rise and fall of nations. “We’re living through
an age when the nation-state can no longer serve the function it was created
for,” he says. Other “places,” such as gender, class, religion, and ethnicity,
have now emerged as cultures in their own right.
Such arguments
might suggest that cultural studies is heading in the same intellectual
direction as multiculturalism, the movement that has caused such turmoil among
defenders of the literary “canon” who feel that standards are being abandoned
in favor of a “politically correct” inclusionism. Holquist acknowledges the
potential for what he describes as “a dangerous relativism that precludes
judgment.” But he and his colleagues insist that they want to avoid simplistic
postures: “We’re not out to deny history and pretend to a parity of cultures,”
says Suleri. “We by no means buy the current discourse of multiculturalism,
which I think is shabby. You can’t construct Rainbow Coalition–style syllabi
and think you’ve made a difference. You must have a historical sense.” Adds
Holquist: “No matter how you reconfigure knowledge, there are always going to
be differences and hierarchies.”
That kind of
talk can only be reassuring to those on the Yale faculty who remain committed
to a basic dose of Western civilization as a fundamental part of a liberal arts
education. That approach was furthered both financially and symbolically two
years ago with the creation of the Bass Program in Western Civilization. Still
in the planning stages, the new program was established through a $20 million
gift from trustee Sid R. Bass, which endowed senior Bass professorships in
various humanities and social science departments whose holders will teach a
year-long sophomore course in Western culture. That course of study will
largely pursue the controversial program of “common studies” that former Dean
of the College Donald Kagan had advocated for all undergraduates but which will
instead be another, albeit intensive, elective. Although Kagan made clear his
desire that students have a more universally shared basis in Western culture,
he acknowledges that reorganizing the curriculum along such lines is not
possible at Yale. “Let a hundred flowers blossom,” says Kagan, who is on leave this
year at the Institute for Advanced Behavioral Study at Stanford University. “We
should teach a course that has value and hope students will agree.”
The chairman
of the Council on West European Studies and head of the Bass program
is Henry Turner, a cultural historian, who expects the course to be “an attempt
to see the record of a great civilization from the beginning to the present in
as much breadth as we can conceive. This is not a cheering section for
Western civilization. It will be warts and all. There will be no attempt to
pretty things up.”
Several of the
faculty in the program engage in their own work in cultural studies. One of
them, Roberto González Echevarría is a leading authority on Latin-American
literature, theory, and culture. Born in Cuba and raised in Florida—where he
played minor league baseball for a stint—his current projects include a book on
Cuban baseball and United States imperialism. He says, “I don’t think the
one thing invalidates the other. I would want students to take the cultural
criticism course after taking the Bass course.”
If scholars
like Turner and González Echevarría are willing to indulge the cultural studies
idea, there are many who are not. A number of those who are skeptical also
pursue more traditionally interdisciplinary work, and fear that a focus on the
intersections among cultures may miss the roadway altogether. “The issue is not
so much the subject of study as it is the approaches,” says Professor of
Comparative Literature and English David Quint, ’71, ’76PhD, a specialist in
Renaissance literary history. “All disciplines should want to borrow from other
disciplines, but to do interdisciplinary studies requires that there actually
be disciplines one can work among and that one recognize that each discipline
has its own approaches and aims.”
Other faculty
members want to ensure that courses that cover popular culture, sexuality,
ethnicity, and other subjects outside the traditional areas of study do not
become loose exercises in ego rather than intellectual investigation. “You want
to guarantee the courses have studies and are not just being what you are,
which is not an academic subject” says Claude Rawson, an English professor who
teaches both traditional literature courses and subjects that fit within the
emerging cultural studies framework. “If cultural studies wants to make itself
a serious subject, it must produce its texts and not just read what a Chicano
wrote yesterday afternoon.”
One of
Rawson’s own courses—on literature and cannibalism—might seem no less far-out
than some of the subjects the cultural studies people are pursuing, but he
feels there is a fundamental difference. He explains that by looking at
descriptions and reactions to cannibalism from Homer to modern popular figures
of speech, it is possible to understand what he terms “cultural reticence,” or
resistance to subjects that are difficult to discuss. “It’s cultural studies,”
he says, “in that I don’t make distinctions between literary texts and
nonliterary texts. But it’s different from taking the fact of ethnicity and
making a discipline of it. I’m interested in cannibalism not because I want to
know how cannibals operate, but because I want to know how noncannibals talk.” Adds
anthropologist William Kelly, who among various aspects of Japanese culture is
currently studying the game of baseball in Japan, which he says explains much
about the structure of Japanese life and about that nation’s complex
relationship to America: “We all share an interest in many forms and
structures of meaning, whether it’s television, a baseball game, or Romantic
poetry. Putting people together may let students see what an anthropologist and
a literary critic might share, but that doesn’t warrant getting rid of English
and anthropology and making them units of cultural studies.”
That is not
likely to happen anytime soon, especially at Yale. “This university has not
been conducive to that sort of thing compared to a number of
other institutions,” says David Apter. “It’s an extremely conservative
place when it comes to the nature of knowledge.” But, he adds provocatively, “so much
happens at the intersections.”  |
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