Cultural Experiences - Essay Example

Cultural experiences are not just a political contest, but also an assemblage of ideologies and practices, social economic or historical that is beyond the confines of language and demarcated national boundaries. One of the best examples may be drawn from the fierce nostalgia that characters in Amitav Ghosh's novel "The Shadow Lines" (1988) experience, with their constant fight against the Diasporic detachment with Dhaka, when a crude border drawn with the 1947 Bengal Partition made Hindus leave East Bengal for good. Despite this shift Bengalis, be it Hindu or Muslims did share a greater cultural similarity than what superficial boundaries failed to erase. The irony behind this cultural similarity between East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and West Bengal explains the complete disadvantage of categorizing literature or cultural studies within nationalistic homogenizing forces. If nationalization or neo-imperialism or globalization is seen as cultural homogenization, then cultural fragmentation and intercultural conflict or issues of ethnocide are also serious issues that haunt us with World War II memories. But are the poles of cultural studies thus stretched between these two stereotypes Aren't we approaching greater possibilities of cultural exchanges and the exciting new cultural hybridity that do not threaten cultural purity, but add new and socio-economic, spiritual and discursive voices to the present zeitgeist of our age by virtue of which we remain unique to our historical time travel The essay " 'Indian Literature': Notes Towards the Definition of a Category", posits the argument that cultural and linguistic exclusivity of various languages and their corresponding literatures are weak at encouraging actual overlapping translations between themselves and the cultural context, where they developed or grew through continuous interaction and affecting their linguistic differences. Thus knowledge of "Indian Literature"(however controversial the term is) is being generated in the medium of English, since the rare combination of, say, a Punjabi folklore (in a Punjabi local dialect or even major language) being integrated into Bengali literature by another Bengali author who has quite a deft hand at understanding that specific sub-division of Punjabi language or culture. Thus in spite of bridging the cultural gap between varied cultures in India, it only creates a chasm with its linguistic function due to inherent symbolic gaps or meanings gathered or generated by its ideological or discursive order or burden. Again, this lead to the very question of information and its readers, since, the finer points of intercultural translation are no necessary to a class of people who are literate, dependent on the print media for preservation of culture that cannot but precipitate the words and ideological, spiritual and social practices of the Subalterns in their complex standing. Thus gap between the vocabularies of the petit bourgeoisie and the general or popular is great. But, I would like to question the use of the term "popular" by the author, since popular culture has come to reflect the taste and vocabularies of the bourgeoisie classes and the subalterns are hardly presented in such cultural representations. Indian Literature is either categorized in its ancient period of literary production or under a generic name that does not always add to the production of a unified literary indigenous history where all exist independently unaware of another culture or their mutual linguistic interdependence. Textual exchanges are scarce. With chronological imposition on Indian History that do not let history thrive under the vast confusion of overlapped and interrelated periods despite gaps in time or space, Indian Literature has become a sharp Enlightenment induced linear, teleological product of "Universal History" and have forgotten to voice its histories and metanarratives under the troubling demands of multiculturalism, gaps in vernacular exchange realized not until the beginning of post-colonial cultural studies, consciousness of colonial literary burden or anxiety of influence, fundamentalist literary propagation and most importantly by local academic and market/support bureaucracy. Cultural Studies thus seeks to erase or encourage interdisciplinary scholarship for the formation of that approximately quality Indian Literature that has demands in every field or subject, from science to calligraphy. Culture Studies in the post-colonial scenario is thus extremely important as a critique or opposition force that can voice the simple social, economic and political factors that influence literary trends and the means and demands for producing them within fictive or non-fictive dilemmas. Thus English literature in India must only exist as a field of comparative study against the backdrop to indigenous literatures and languages and thus dissolve in its dominant discursive practice. Cultural Studies is urging history or histories to begin re-telling, displacing and most importantly, to begin their own history of the post-colonial territories. The interdisciplinary logic of cultural studies makes possible an alternative mode of comparative institutionalization, such that Stuart Hall mentions as a mere positive process, from the dangers of "codification." On one level, what a cultural studies program institutionalizes is its own skepticism toward institutionalization as a discipline. But it also engenders various possibilities of understanding post-colonial cultural practices in a manner that is not reflexive, but more dedicated to practice and exercise of its assumptions. There are constant attempt to find answers and understand from various perspective that give way to new meanings and raise subplots to agendas considered already deconstructed. It simply means that raising various options are a good way of erasing dominant stereotypes. Umberto Eco uses the term 'aberrant decoding' to refer to a text which has been decoded by means of a different code from that used to encode it (Eco 1965).1 Cultural Studies go beyond the possibility of repeated analysis of cultural interpretations by encoding and decoding and thereby proving the capillary like hand of power and institutional agenda hidden behind various cultural motifs and practices. Rather it raises possibilities of adding more meaning to cultures by aberrant encoding or finally adding more narratives to cultural experiences, which actually raises it to a level of spiritual understanding and the need for the same. Phaswane Mpe's novel "Welcome to our Hillbrow " explores man's continuous tendency to see our individual lives as an unfolding story configured by a linear temporal sequence (Virginia Woolf wouldn't like this thing much!). Kearney says, 'Every human existence is a life in search of a narrative' and 'narrativity is what marks, organizes and clarifies temporal experience' (2002: 129)2. Through the story of Refilwe (and through her response to Refentse's short story), Mpe shows that power of fiction to change people's lives. Ricoeur3 says, that reading is 'a way of living in the fictive universe of the work' (1991: 27): 'The sense or the significance of a narrative stems from the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the reader' (1991: 26) - and this intersection can produce profound effects within the cultural consciousness of the reader: 'the narrative's capacity to transfigure the experience' into 'a horizon of possible experience' (1991: 26) between the narrator's meta-commentary and a means of understanding the world opened up by immediate understanding of what the narrator tells the reader. Mpe's novel successfully combines fictional innovation and experimentation with social responsibility, which speaks for itself, like the act of post-colonial cultural study. The novel suggests that by entering the world of storytelling, whether as writer or reader, narrator or auditor, one may be better able to contemplate the 'painful and complex realities'4 integrated beyond and within institutionalization of cultural representation. Thus the replacement of literary studies by the larger objectives of Cultural Studies is more helpful in terms of political relocation of cultural texts and thereby not suffering the direct exploitations of an academic practice that cannot critique itself beyond certain disciplinary regions, out of necessity or interest. Does culture studies pose a threat to post-colonial English pedagogy This is one of the bigger challenges posed by Cultural Studies where multilingual operations are more encouraged and use of dominant language itself becomes an object of study on power play and the embedded politics that the texts may or may not carry to reveal new dynamics of operation within a post-hegemonic society represented by english-educated elites or dominant ethnic groups who influence English response from these Bourgeoisie or english spoken author representing his/her marginalized position (Say Taslima Nasrin, feminist, anti-Islamic writer in Bengali, globally translated to represent the oppositional voice of a Muslim patriarchal community who is voiceless in their own representation in English language. But can cultural Studies succeed in addressing the importance generally given to academic specialization in English Literature Imaginary coherence maybe at best addressed and awareness may be raised. The foremost has already been done in the field of a possibility of an Indian Literature in English or disturbing categorizations like "African Literature" as opposed to categories like European Literature. Thus the use of the term" exotic hybrids" by Derek Walcott in pp.56 of the essay "The Muse of History" is a good term to begin questioning why Cultural Studies in post-colonial context help reduce the essential forces behind the formation of neo-imperialistic groups of writers who emerge out of a particular objective of constantly locating their degenerative political position within colonial and post-colonial history so as to appear more interested in voicing these irregularities other than attempting to contribute to the transmission of knowledge and history of the past or present indigenous literature and thereby erasing the gap in cultural communication within the post-colonial subjects and texts (only mediated by English representations so far that only tend to distort decolonization further). The attempt to propagate such literature even in exile is only to enter a different history that has place for the indigenous history and only in its reverse and never in its original representation. Derek Walcott reiterates another important fact of the second and third generation post-colonial generation in exile, who perform the same 19thcentury injustice towards their own motherland by presenting an ignorant fascination towards it especially with their longing for the savage drums and social languages that are only clouded in mystery and therefore exotic romance. The popular literature, films and other media help produce this enchantment since they are the serious products of the metropolitans where they have grownup to understand themselves in that cultural space. The experience of a shared imagination is thus crucial in understanding the injustice of colonial inheritance. Thus, "cultural studies supposes a pedagogy in which students are at least as fully in control of much of the subject matter as are the teachers. This isn't the end of teacherly authority, but it does transform the learning process by challenging teachers to redefine what it is that they do in a classroom, and by involving students - in a quite orthodox Socratic manner - in the understanding and analysis of what they already know. In neither of these respects is cultural studies the enemy of literary studies; the two perhaps work best when they coexist in tension and exchange; but literary studies will not survive if it is taught as a form of religion" (Frow, J. Last Para).5 Hence, Cultural Studies is being implemented along with Literary Theories to question opportunistic disciplines so as to reduce the all powerful effect of a single discipline and the dependence of literary students on such single scholastic success of their discipline and thus come out of the comfort of the discursive isolation of their discipline and question their own positioning in contributing to the greater impact and practice of post-colonial dispossession. Cultural Studies thus questions the effective use of translated indigenous literature or English literature in the post-colonial context that is used effectively for a future goal or just for the fact of earning scholastic and disciplinary recognition. This egocentricism of the English Department and Comparative Literature Department are variously studied to affect a new enquiry into own cultural process and its multiple representations (do not confuse it with the words, 'right representation' since there isn't any or there cannot be any, and all cultural behaviors or representations are equally important in their ideological complexity). Thus cultural studies collapses hierarchy and does not flatten out cultural pluralism in it's solitary standing but treat it as a complex consciousness of other forces, like history, economy and individual behavior. But are intellectual propagation are reflective of this diversity Is indigenous post-colonial english literature o indigenous literature reflecting the complex working of the pre-colonial, post-colonial and interdisciplinary demands of a culture that is being represented by a very powerful language which was used to dominate it in the first place. Thus intellectual authority and intellectual progress of the masses too are questioned by cultural studies and juxtaposed against the intellectual deficiencies of current disciplinary practices in realizing this huge gap while taking upon themselves the sole task of dispossessing post-colonial English Literature from its influence and central positioning in the West by counter narratives written and expressed through an indigenous/transnational English-educated author who seeks to represent his colonial experience in a totality that can only pre-dispose a postcolonial reader or publisher or critique or literary department or literary theory to categorize indigenous Literature (be it written or oral) as a phenomena that exists not from the time of their civilization but since the time of national independence. Post-colonial English literature too has become canonized with authors like Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe or Naipaul becoming the voices of post-colonial displacement. But Cultural Studies joins forces with textual media analysis to find out the lost voice of the Subalterns and give a new voice to anthropology that is beyond the scope of a reflexive practice. Thus within the varying dimensions of a particular historical frame, it tries to understand how everything is connected to everything else, nothing more and nothing less. Thus it is a kind of a subversive and disruptive history as well and tries to place post-colonial inheritance into a clearer and self-critiquing perspective and almost bordering towards a dangerous motive to create closed narratives of cultural dominance and authenticity (in its various complexity, microcosmic and detailed differences, of course) until a complete cultural justice is done. Politically it thus seeks to erase the force of imaginary communities or the spirit of false or imaginary nationalism that gives way to such hideous categories like African Literature or Indian Literature that only serve to complicate delicate matters of favoring diversity and losing cultural differences to the crushing linear forces of History. It questions the whole idea of post-colonial intellectuals who cannot locate it anymore into the structural identity of the Third Worlds order and thus only experience it as a discursive practice. Regrouping intellectuals under the elite transnational group of postcolonial is ineffectual in what it claims to subvert. Also, Cultural Studies have the optimistic analysis of the transformative capacity of post-colonial cultural strategies on global cultures. Thus it has been recognized as a kind of a global culture too. Incase of post-colonial hyphenated grounded experiences that is politically determinant of an experience located in time, structure and ideological background. Ironically it disturbs the notion of a spatial and temporal history that exists beyond the immediate category of an Eurocentric "world history" that displaces its identity to the faded existence of them in the realm of the "Other"6 The fine balance between resistance and transformation in revolutionary or dispossessing activity opposition is inevitable, if not necessary. But the hazards and risks of the appropriation of the modes and sensibilities of representation (forced or spontaneous) along with the forced entry into the discursive network and dominance of culture is another way of reverting political history and also fighting for political power plays. Thus interpolation used to reveal the cultural frictions between colonizing culture and the scene of colonization itself by numerous metanarratives in english is an attempt to disrupt colonial history and not to construct a 'new' history of our own, but to add it to the age old continuum of indigenous histories as well (diverse, chaotic, incoherent to all, and full of gaps). Thus post-colonial Cultural Studies also try to locate the acknowledgement of this marginalizing force of Western Discourses and the present social, political, economical consciousness that it raises in various cultural contexts that carry this post-colonial burden. Interestingly post-colonial discourses of resistance and Cultural Studies share this aspect of intervention to question existing modes and methods of cultural representation. Discursive transformation examined in the context of creative discourses has particular engagement with the term language and thereby, meaning. Thus comes the very important aspect of the possibility of transformation of language itself to represent cultural inflections and thus partially personalizing it to the maximum effect. Again Cultural studies goes to that additional length of understanding reader's preferential or spontaneous understanding of a different cultural imagination being communicated by a language that is familiar but not quite the same anymore. Thus this new cultural reality and identity becomes to be analyzed in Cultural Studies thus helping the investigation into the psychological peculiarities not only of the colonizer but also of the colonized subjects, in their various pronouncement of cultural, geographical and historical existence and location, within the text. The questions of authorial intentions are also raised and their validity measured by post-colonial cultural workers. The modern intrigue that post-colonial cultural workers have brought into historical study, also help address the present crisis of Globalization. Post-colonial cultural workers also raise important question about the interrelation between Globalization and the socio-political identity of the post-colonial entity within the context of the nation and it's political ideologies. Does the implication behind the idea of the notion of the State and its idea of inheritance signify anything at all How does post-colonial nations deal with the ideas of "modernity" within its cultural contexts What does modernity consists of And is modernity opposed to post-colonial idea and representation of culture Thus it represents a symbolic boundary that may shape or threaten political forces and thus are important for constant evaluation in their state of emergence and dialogic transformation. Thus it brings to the fore a nascent, abstract and relativistic perception or enquiry into practice, which endanger lived biographical experience and the constraints of forceful historical structures. The concept of cultural mapping and intersectionality will help understand the dynamic process of cultural transformation amounting to discursive representation in post-colonial urban society and the movement of the white-man across geographical borders. Also Cultural workers question post-colonial discourses of their subject positions (male, female) and their privileged position and class for determining and representing the personal or national culture (at the microcosmic or macrocosmic level). The embeddedness of their texts' latent functionalities too is new dimensions called forth by cultural studies. The interface of post-colonial cultural studies addresses issues that are in constant flux and their domain of enquiry is always to generate this disruption not independently but to complete the cultural subversion by critiquing it. Works Cited 1. Bayoumi and Rubin. The Edward Said Reader. Edited by Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin. New York: Vintage Books, 2000 2. Eco, Umberto (1965): 'Towards a Semiotic Enquiry into the Television Message', In Corner & Hawthorn (Eds.) (1980), pp. 131-50 3. Frow, John. See http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/emuse/culture/frow.html for "John Frow who responds to Simon During" in essay "Literature, Culture, Mirrors" 4. Kearney, Richard. 2002. On Stories. Thinking in Action. London: Routledge. 5. Mpe, Phaswane. 2001 Welcome to our Hillbrow. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, pp 59. Also see, Gray, Stephen. 1985. 'Third World Meets First World: The Theme of 'Jim Comes to Joburg' in South African English Fiction.' Kunapipi 7(1): 61-80. 6. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. 'Life in Quest of Narrative.' On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation. Ed. David Wood. London: Routledge. Read More