Department of Spanish and Portuguese

This course will explore the idea and the concept of cultural studies both as it took shape in Great Britain in the early 1960s (the “Birmingham School”) and as it has since been adopted and transformed in other latitudes and by various area studies fields (the United States, Latin America, etc.). Cultural studies concerns itself with how culture shapes social spaces while inquiring into how cultural production relates to power, ideology, politics, and the formation of historical consciousness. By the same token, its critical practice expands the semiotic tradition of textual analysis beyond print medium and high literature. While the influence of Marxist thought on this tradition is very clear, cultural studies is—as its name would suggest—resolutely opposed to orthodox Marxism’s insistence that economic relations constitute the foundation of all social organization (and hence too the starting point for any possibility of substantive or radical change). By inviting in concerns about race and racism, gender and sexuality, coloniality and empire, the Birmingham School of the mid 1960s showed to itself to be an early avatar of interdisciplinarity—or even antidisciplinarity. Beginning in the last decades of the 20^th century, the “globalization” of cultural studies has helped to bring new concerns to bear on the interrogation of culture and its relation to power. We will delve into some of the “classics” of cultural studies by Richard Hogart, Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, together with works from the Marxist tradition (Marx and Engels, Gramsci, Lukács, Althusser), media studies, as well as more contemporary reflections on race, coloniality, gender and sexuality. 

HISP-S 695     #28617     4:20P-6:50P        M         BH 123        Prof. Patrick Dove

Note: Jointly listed with CULS-C 601 Introduction to Cultural Studies