Franco - Compare/contrast

This text answers the question: What is cultural studies? Or at least it tries to. I found the answer to be perfect for a student of English studies; the answer is ambiguous. Cultural studies differ depending on which culture you are looking at. It is flexible, overlapping, and intangible. In Britain, the study of culture was born out of resistance. In the U.S., birthed from a critique of popular and mass culture. In Latin America, a sibling of Postmodernism, debated by social scientists.

A few interesting points of difference:

While Britain’s students of culture began in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which separated itself from the elite academy, cultural studies in the United States are an strictly academic endeavor. Franco notes the two extremes for study in the United States school system: commodity and theory. He notes that at one end we have the ‘sales pitch,’ when “teachers try to slant their courses in ways that will attract students, so that under the rubric of cultural studies something like entertainment creeps into the curriculum” (217). The other extreme is to disconnect from it altogether and theorize about it without recognizing the power struggles involved. The latter of these optioins is especially disheartening, since, as Franco notes, the United States has a special way of taking on “a local aspect in an environment in which the media are proactive in the constitution of identities so that assumptions about generalized Latinos, Hispanos, blacks, women, Native Americans, and queers must be challenged constantly” (217).

Another interesting note is that of the three particular cultures Franco discusses, each one has a link to technology and mass media. In Britain the CCCS “examined lifestyles – clothing, rituals, and behavior that created maps of meaning or social texts and bonded their members. ‘Not only did they negotiate with or oppose the dominant culture, but in many ways they actively appropriated and transformed (and thus subverted) dominant meanings” (212). In the United States, Walter Benjamin “underscored the increasing domination of images through advertisement, signs, photography, and cinema” (215). In Latin America modernization and mass culture transformed the public: “under the influence of new technologies and the media, literacy was no longer the one path to culture and responsible citizenship” (218). To top all of that off, the idea of “worlding,” or “an international popular culture” (219), highlights the reality that “technology allows for distant consumption of serially produced goods” (220). It is common to hear that technology has made the world a much smaller place, connecting countries in ways impossible by geography, but what is at stake in that connection? Nelly Richard questions how describing “social change ‘without ever questioning the disruptive effect of such change on the very language itself’” is a downfall of critical studies in the academy (221).

Franco’s text leaves me with more quandaries that I started with. The salad bowl or the melting pot? Consumerism as negative or opportunistic? Do cultural studies enlighten us to the different cultures, or are we slanted in our studies thereof?