Page 171 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

complex and adequate in their formal expression of content than those of popular
culture. Popular culture is accused of standardization and a levelling down that
encourages, and indeed demands, conformity.
148 However, the criteria that are used to police the boundaries of’ ‘good works’ are,
from the standpoint of cultural studies, derived from an institutionalized and class-
based hierarchy of cultural tastes. Equally, the argument that draws a contrast
between popular culture and an authentic non-commodity culture cannot be
sustained since there is no longer, and probably never was, any authentic folk
culture against which to measure the ‘inauthentic’ character of commodity culture.
While contemporary popular culture is primarily a commercially produced one,
many writers in cultural studies have argued that audiences make their own
meanings with the texts of a commodity culture. That is, readers or audiences of
cultural texts bring to bear their own cultural competencies and discursive resources
to the consumption of commodities. Thus, popular culture can be regarded as the
meanings and practices produced by popular audiences at the moment of
consumption. This argument reverses the traditional question of ‘how does the
culture industry turn people into commodities that serve its interests?’ in favour of
exploring how people turn the products of industry into their popular culture
serving their interests.
Cultural studies understands popular culture to be an arena of consent and
resistance in the struggle over cultural meanings. In this sense, cultural studies holds
a political conception of popular culture as a site for the struggle over significance;
that is, an arena where cultural hegemony is secured or challenged. Understood in
this way, judgements about popular culture are not concerned with questions of
cultural or aesthetic value per se, but concern issues of classification and power.

Links Aesthetics, carnivalesque, commodification, cultural politics, culture, hegemony,
ideology

Postcolonial theory A critical theory that explores the condition of postcoloniality,
that is, colonial relations and their aftermath. The term ‘postcolonial’ might be
understood to refer only to a time period since the colonization processes of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, within cultural studies it is
commonly taken also to include the colonial discourse itself. Thus, the concept
‘postcolonial’ alludes to the world both during and after European colonization and
as such postcolonial theory explores the discursive condition of postcoloniality.
That is, the way colonial relations and their aftermath have been constituted
through representation. Postcolonial theory explores postcolonial discourses and
their subject positions in relation to the themes of race, nation, subjectivity, power,
subalterns, hybridity and creolization. The two key concerns of postcolonial theory
are those of domination–subordination and hybridity–creolization.
Questions of domination and subordination surface most directly through
colonial military control and the structured subordination of racialized groups. In
more cultural terms, questions arise about the denigration and subordination of
‘native’ culture by colonial and imperial powers along with the relationship