Cultural Studies:
North American and East Asian Perspectives

Korakuen campus, spring/autumn, Saturday 6:30~8:00

More than thirty years have passed since the formation of the first Department of Cultural Studies. The field emerged in Europe from within the insights and accomplishments of cultural anthropology. From the beginning, however, cultural studies has distinguished itself from anthropology, in part by drawing its theoretical and practical models from an eclectic range of disciplines, philosophy, history, literary and media studies, and linguistics, among them. By the 1980s cultural studies had become established and further systematized in North America, and by the beginning of the twenty-first century the field increasingly has been recognized as an independent and interdisciplinary province of social and cultural inquiry, with a definable body of theory and practice, in Europe, the Americas, South and East Asia, and elsewhere.

These special lectures will be based upon an interpretation of cultural studies that posits the field as an investigation of the content and process of cultural change. The courses will focus particularly on the position of cultural studies in two important regions, North America and East Asia. In Special Lectures I, in the spring term, we shall focus on theoretical constructions that have been of importance to the field of cultural studies in these regions. In Special Lectures II, in the autumn term, we shall apply these constructions to a series of specific case studies of the process of cultural change.

Each term will focus upon six topics, noted below, each of which may occupy more than one class session. From among these topics, students will be invited to choose an area of particular focus related to their own interests and engagements, and to offer to the course an account of their engagement with the topic. In each term the course will be addressed by outside speakers who are either investigators of the theoretical field of cultural studies or practitioners of the process of cultural change.

Special Lectures I: The Theory of Cultural Studies

Students will recognize the major theoretical constructs that have contributed to the development and practice of the field of cultural studies.

Topics:

1. What is cultural studies?
2. What is culture?
3. Culture as a field for empowerment
4. Culture as a field for interaction with otherness
5. Culture as a field penetrated by and penetrating other social fields
6. Cultural studies and cultural policy

Special Lectures II: Case Studies

Students will recognize ways that the theoretical constructs of cultural studies may be put to use in specific analyses of the nature of cultural change, and in the process of cultural change itself.

Topics:

1. Culture and identity (national, ethnic, racial, gendered)
2. Culture and the production of knowledge
3. Culture and education
4. The culturalization of nature
5. Culture and the evolution of politics
6. Culture and religion

Texts:

Suggested reading:

S. Fuchs. 2001. Against Essentialism: A Theory of Culture and Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP.

L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler, eds. 1991. Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.

C. Nelson and D. Gaonkar, eds. 1996. Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.

Supplemental reading will depend upon particular students’ particular interests, but may include, for example:

A. Appadurai. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.

A. Dirlik, ed. 1993. What is in a Rim? Boulder: Westview.

M. Miyoshi. 1994. Off Center. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP.

J. Wang. 1996. High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China. Berkeley: U of California P.

R. Wilson and A. Dirlik, eds. 1995. Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production. Durham: Duke UP.

Articles noted in D. Ewick, 2003, ‘Toward a Classified Bibliography of Not One Thing: Cross-Disciplinary Cultural Studies in English-Language Journals’.