Dude, Where’s My Reference Point?

Ali,

Er...thanks!

Bina,

The Cheetah scene was hilarious-and another de rigeur buddy/frat movie device, where the two protagonists are so allied, so close, that their intimacy is almost frightening to them-het anxiety for boys trying to gain experience. So it gets joked about in a way that throws them together in a way eerily reminiscent of Melville`s Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby Dick.

Cheetah-more Asian exoticism...

Hush,

Everything is a text with a symbology, subtext, set of reference points... Including that cereal box you stare at in the morning.

thanks!

-S

Samina awesome film review.
Er, just one question, is it worth viewing?

Samina,

Yup, great review but did the movie really deserve it?

Aamir

samina - good to see you sowing the seeds of your unconventional intellect in the barren land of front page. (now that was a mouth full).

by the way, your last name `shahidi` is really nice. all feminine last names that end with an `i` tend to disrupt my regular heart beat. may be it has something to do with my first crush - her last name was hilali.

anyways, your review style is really good. but i do agree with some of the interactors - perhaps the movie itself is not worth this intellect-heavy review.

hope to read more from you. now come back to the unplugged and lets talk about your feminist agenda.

To the people who think that the movie is not worth reviewing and it is just a movie,There is a trend in humour, to reinforce the stereotypes. Another example is, Team America, World Police. If a stereotype is amplified to an absurd degree and made fun off, then it is ok.But normally it is not the case. We South Asian Americans normally have a tendency to ignore racial profiling because we tend to operate in our cliques. Who care and what gives? But think about the children who are born and raised in America. This is a problem that is more acute for them.They dont continue to live in the subcontinent in their psyches and have to assimilate to mainstream America. And it is not as if that America is the most racist country in the world.But racial profiling does exist. And while Americans will be quite prompt in accepting the sins of their grandfathers i.e. slavery etc., not many of them really believe or are aware of the subtle forms of the racial profiling that exist in todays America. And this manifests in incidents like the RJs abusing an Indian call center worker and that idiot tsunami song.
One more point that I want to make is that we South Asians dont have a sense of Asian fraternity.For us Chinese are more alien than the whites and the blacks, when they face the same kinds of issues that we do. It makes sense to actually team up with them and raise issues that they face with the same fervour.
Every voice against racism and stereotyping deserves encouragement. Well done, Samina .

``Harold and Kumar go to Amsterdam!``

Yes!!!! For Harold`s bachelor party coz he proposed to the Latina chick. Awesome idea.

Re: # 20

Samina,

Someone told me the cheetah in the jungle thing has something to do with indian mythology. That`s what I was asking about. But thanks for the theory anyway!!

Yes, the movie is worth watching, if just for the scene where Neil Patrick Harris goes by in the limo doing lines off the stripper`s thigh.

Hilarious!

Samina,

This review reminded me of Iqbal Masud. You probably have not heard of him. He was the second half of a very solid film critic duo during the eighties and early nineties in Western India. The other half, was Khalid Mohammed, who later directed a few movies too...Fiza was his movie. He also wrote the screenplay for Shyam Benegal`s Zubeida. What I am trying to do is underline that these men were extremely erudite film critics.

However, to simplify things, Masud used to interpret Govinda movies within the rubric of erudite academia`s obsessions. But to his advantage, Masud never wore his scholarship of greek tragedies in so heavy a manner that a regular reader of his Indian Express would be turned off. At least it attempted to include 60 percent.

Khalid on the other hand went the other extreme. He found a style that punned and freaked through bad grammerred copy, invented a grid that too many readers were too thrilled about. But, he converted the generation X into a following.

I understand that as a American Pakistani professional in the begining of Y2K these are rather overly arcane information to you. But, I was thrilled with the amount of people writing in to say that ``Was the movie worth the review?``

It might be that you have brought in your erudition to be launched from a pad so small that the review eclipses the movie. That means, you might have to start working on a form that brings in your knowledge, that extremely valuable ingradient, in a manner that no reader is struck with the title of your piece ``Dude, Where’s My Reference Point?``

HN

Samina -

Thanks for this review of this film. I dont think I can put it any better than HN below but...

there are very few critics out there who critique - way too many of them spend their time looking at the production values and glamor-quotient and relating bits of gossip at the very worst end of the spectrum. This one was refreshing because you were talking cinema, not popcorn and is this guy going to be the next Jimi Mistry or whatever (would you want to be the next Jimi Mistry?). In short, I loved reading your review. And the movie was a giggle. Well, maybe two.

i actually liked the movie because it was close to my heart, cuz i`ve had white castle cravings similar to the protagonists..... it`s just sooo good, even though God knows what kind of animal body parts those burgers are made of ...but what i don`t know won`t hurt me, it shouldn`t....

Atif, Subroto, Aamir,

Sure...some of the movie is funny...just disingenious...and why shouldnt we own how we are and not being represented to each other? The huge irony is that the writers and representers of Asian identity are massaging and selling our own biases back to us-and telling us its okay-and that they relate! How many snickers bars does it take to wave that away, grasshopper?

HN,

Thank you for that generous response. Actually, I must give credit to Romair...all those comparisons of me and Ebert....guess it stuck in my head....

Amrita, Bina,

Oh sure, can we get more Indian exotic than a ``cheetah``? Oh look, Kumar`s an sleek and dangerous panther eating and smoking up the farmlands of Central New Jersey....excuse me, thats even a bit too precious for Samina....


thanks for the comments!

Rahul,

I was part of that community Dot Busters resented-only the South Asian Americans that were affected more than my immediate community were working class and business/merchant desi entrepeneurs. What was admirable was how a few managed to organized desis locally and bring these crimes to statewide attention. Generally, the middle class that did live in the suburbs, attended private schools, etc., did not organize in the same manner. I can only speculate on why not.

What I`ve noticed that gets lost in our location of anti Asian and desi racism is the kinds of prejudice we feel perfectly justified in performing. Granted, we are children of colonialism, and I`d hazard Muslim desis are really feeling the brunt of post 911 fall out. But when we are so disconnected from issues of class, our own inability to relate to many of the issues rooted in reality-the myth of the Model Minority, for one.

Wa-hey Samina,

You finally decided to grace us with your writing - I really really enjoyed reading your piece...although as soon as you mentioned `women` a part of my brain went, `Uh oh, I think she`s doing the Trojan.`

Sounds like a funny movie. I`ll check out the DVD when it comes out in UK.

Umer M

so, should i see this movie or shouldn`t i ?......... what is it?........ being a simple minded person i have always taken the cue from ebert and siskel/roeper - two thumbs up, i go see it , two thumbs down, i stay home ....... after reading this review i am not sure what to do - i feel sort of cheated .........

..... as for racism and all that, i don`t know what ms saminasha means by `` hope is that the South Asian and Asian viewership remain less sanguine``......... i don`t know if that means that the movie makes light of racism, or that it is blatantly racist in a mean sort of way ........dumping a chinese geek for a latina hottie is common sense, not racism ............nowadays we have a lot of paranoid progressives who see racism and worse in all kinds of seemingly innocuous speech and art and are going around making demons out of folks like poor lawrence summers and rush limbaugh ......... but sometimes a movie is just a movie ........

........ anyway, i saw napolean dynamite last night with my kids and thoroughly enjoyed it - so what do i know ........

SS,

Beautifully written review of a not so great movie.


Ras

Hamid,

Uh huh. See it. I have a feeling you`ll like this a lot more than the womenfolk in your fam will....

Samina #31
Generally, the middle class that did live in the suburbs, attended private schools, etc., did not organize in the same manner. I can only speculate on why not.
I can offer some reasons.
1. Asians come from hierarchical societies.Even the Chinese confucian socieites are hierarchical. So, to us, the concept of race is not alien and moving around in small cliques is not unnatural to us.Though stereotyping in the west is more on basis of race and less on class
2. Also, personal is not political for most of us.The Asian middle class is largely apolitical even in Asia.They dont see themselves as agents of political and social change.They tend to deal with these things in a personal way.
3. The brown sahibs somehow cant seem to accept the fact that after they have ``arrived``, they have any more ``arriving`` to do. It seems kosher enough to them that they can look down upon the resident desis and play golf with the gora sahib.

Ras,

Thank you. Although I`ve been finding a million errors in this piece ever since its been posted...

Umer, Scout,

Well you two showing up has made it worthwhile....personally, I`d like to be on the scriptwriting team for Umer and Scout Go To Curry In a Hurry....please let me....

Given a choice between the oscar winning ``Lost in translation`` and ``Harold and Kumar``, I`d pick harold and kumar any day of the week....

apologies for this instrusion. would appreciate if you take time to visit the ANAA site, read and sign the petition please. every drop in the the bucket would help. ANAA

hamidm writes ``so, should i see this movie or shouldn`t i ?......... `` Someone else also had the same question.

Now, will someone tell me if I should read this movie review or not? Thank you.

tahmed:

pls. wait for my 7500 word response outlining the pros and cons for seeing this movie...meanwhile please go to the link below and sign the petition

mt t: the letter has been signed, sealed and delivered. Now I assume you will get down to deliver on your part of the deal - namely that 7,500 word review of Saminasha`s review that you promised.

I have started reading saminasha`s review, and will inshallah deliver status reports on where I am on the reading from time to time (you can also follow my progress on my internet website.

Status Report 1: Completed reading first sentence. Am struck by the vivid imagery: ``sprung from the loins of the New Jersey Turnpike``. Am attempting to determine exactly which exit on the turnpike constitutes the loins.

Am reeling from this imagery. Have therefore established base camp at this point. Will make further progress in studying saminasha`s article after appropriate rest and recuperation from this unexpected assault on the senses by this vivid imagery of a turnpike with loins.

A good piece saminasha. Interesting imagery as Tahmed32 put it. However, to quote Dan Quayle (I remembered this reading some of the responses here) ``Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.`` then resisted the temptation since it was not that inarticulate and did not want to insult your liberal sensibilities by quoting Dan.

TAhmed32 43, I though et tu for a moment and then thought this is good for both ``He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument`` would be appropriate ;-() (he/she are interchangeable here)

Saminasha
Well,you made it at the front page.Where I can only see Farzana Versey`s monopoly.When ever I see her name on front page I don`t even bother to open the article,b/c I know it would be waste of time.Better to be on UP ,rather than wasting time in reading FV`s articles.
Today when I saw your name on front page,I couldn`t help to read and then,liked your piece to the extent that I couldn`t wait to ,CONGRATULATE,you on your reality based article.Keep it up.

Tahmed Uncle,

If ``loins`` throws you off, you`d better send for search and rescue...enjoy!

Zeena,

Uh...thanks. And lets leave other writers out of this, yes?


Salim,

How fitting that you and your munha munhoos nicks are on my board. I expect you think you deserve some kind of award for your usual besharami. Well, here it is; and done properly-stick to emoticons-you`ll never know what a real thought or idea is:

``What a waste it is to lose one`s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.``

-- Vice President Dan Quayle winning friends while speaking to the United Negro College Fund, 5/9/89 This gem has been added to Bartlett`s `Familiar Quotations`. (reported in Esquire, 8/92) (reported in the NY Times, 12/9/92)

Now stay off my board.

Saminasha #46 Time to update my Expedition Diary. :-)

Day 2: Food supplies running low. Crew exhausted after reading first sentence of Saminasha`s article. But nevertheless, determined to continue the expedition. Struck with awe upon seeing the magnificent sight of the second sentence of Samina`s article:

`` South Asians have known about New Jersey well enough, particularly the Edison area, and a generation of middle class twenty to forty something Asian Americans continue to make Queens and Brooklyn the Next Move Out of New Jersey.``

Stared at sentence for several minutes, soaking in the depth. South Asians know New Jersey well enough - well enough for what purpose? To be able to find the way from I-295 South (which actually goes North) to entrance to NJ Tpke? And who are these twenty to forty something Asian Americans?

Spent entire day mastering the depths of meaning in second sentence. By late evening the head was spinning.

Set up forward camp at end of second sentence. Crew settled down to rest after exhausting effort. Tomorrow, determined to launch the next stage of the expedition: the dreaded Sentence 4 (where many an intrepid explorer has lost his life).

wowowowo...samina shahidi is actually ol` saminasha ? Didn`t realise that ...good work I think...

further to #47: Day 3, and finally reached the top of the hill (read the article). So in sumary - this is another one of those politically correct (``never mind the facts``) movies that are geared to showing white people as lowlife and black people and asians as noble, smart, sensitive folks. As for the JN tpke, your one sentence says it all: ``the Turnpike delivers a bounty of raccoons, Jesus freaks, nubile wives, runny British college babes, deeply bigoted state troopers, a washed up Anglo American actor who played a wunderkind doc on TV. ``

I must have been on that turnpike a zillion times over the past two decades - never saw a raccoon (not even a dead one) or a jesus freak (alive or resurrected). Never saw any nubile wives or british babes seeking quickies, and the only state trooper i ever needed to talk to was a perfectly polite gentleman.

But dont let me ruin the political correctness of the movie by introducing even a smidgen of reality into it.

Tahmed,

To be quite honest, I did like the device of the turnpike-each exit bringing the driver/protagonist/viewer into a new town and experience is one with a lot of potential. I mean, if we wrote about each set of communities that live off of each exit-that is a kind of spatial history of New Jersey as it develops, right? From Newark to Trenton and all points between shows us how diverse NJ is...

That said, the writers chose to tweak the movie plot by treating it as a satire of the teenage-young adult horror movie genre. Which of course is their choice, and worked well in the overall grid of the movie, plotline/subplots, conflict, etc. I`m not a huge fan of horror movies, but contemporary horror genres do utilize the elements of satire, irony, stereotypes.

I also think the focus on NJ Statetroopers was thought provoking. As you and I well know, NJ Statetroopers have been accused of racial profiling for several years now. As with Dot Busters, the writers did put their finger on another point of racial tension.

-S

Samina: Here`s what I thought....

Movie sucks...not very funny...some parts, asians will identify with..but the part with the jesus freak was stereotypical too...

most of it was over the top...like the cheetah part for example..

I`f I was single, I`d have picked Alien v/s Predator instead of this....or even shark tale...

If you haven`t watched it, don`t waste your money...

Arjun,

What parts did you identify with?

samina I saw this movie in parts with a group of friends (dont ask where the blighters got this pirated dvd from - I didnt). It was boring as hell - you were much to kind in your review. I would have just said it sucks and left it at that. Personally I wouldnt have wasted money, time and energy on the movie.

In short, you wouldnt miss anything if you missed the movie. In fact, you wouldnt even notice that it has happened.

#52 by Saminasha on February 21, 2005 7:45pm PT

If you`re asian, you`re expected to be hard-working and smart...

If you`re asian, your parents expect you to be a doctor..

If you`re a desi, sometimes you wish your name was Tom so you wouldn`t have to go ``A as in apple`` everytime you call for customer service... with the call centers going to India, that may not be a problem for long :)....

Dear Shamina Shahidi:

This movie is SUPPOSED to be funny (and also to make, in the process, a few bucks for those who made it). Nobody is supposed to take it seriously. Reading any more into it makes about as much sense as attempting to deduce the meaning of life from the intricate patterns made by a child`s doodle. (Your writing is good, though.)

Having gotten that out of the way, I have two comments which (don`t say later that I did not warn you) are only tangentially related to the item being reviewed:

1) I am very encouraged by the fact that your peer rating on the interactor`s page is only +1 and yet here you are on the front page! Therefore, you shine as a beacon of hope for many Chowkies, including myself. (In my case, however, I am still trying to figure out if there is a way to eliminate that middle step - actually WRITING an article.)

2) Is ``dude`` a male chauvinistic term? I have associated that term in the past (in my ignorance) with relatively young juveniles (the under 20 crowd). However, I notice that term being used very vigorously by many Chowkees (some of them, I am convinced, are old enough to be grandfathers of the Harolds and the Kumars). Also, is there a female equivalent term to ``dude`` (invariably, DOO-DAH comes to mind).

Cheers, and keep up the good work!

BeeJay,

Good luck with plans!


Cultural Studies

Definition

Cultural studies combines sociology, literary theory, film/video studies, and cultural anthropology to study cultural phenomena in industrial societies. Cultural studies researchers often concentrate on how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of ideology, race, social class, and/or gender.

Cultural studies concerns itself with the meaning and practices of everyday life. Cultural practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television, or eating out) in a given culture. -- http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies [Jul 2004]

Cultural studies developed in the late 20th century, in part through the reintroduction of Marxist thought in sociology, and in part through the articulation of sociology and other academic disciplines such as literary criticism, in order to focus on the analysis of subcultures in capitalist societies. Following the non-anthropological tradition, cultural studies generally focus on the study of consumption goods (such as fashion, art, and literature). Because the 18th and 19th century distinction between ``high`` and ``low`` culture is not appropriate to the mass-produced and mass-marketed consumption goods with which cultural studies is concerned, these scholars refer instead to popular culture. -- http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies

Culture theory [...]
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) [...]
In 1964, Richard Hoggart established the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham. Hoggart was followed by Stuart Hall, Richard Johnson and Jorge Larrain. The CCCS launched the study of subcultures. In 2002 the CCCS was closed. --jahsonic, 2004
Frankfurt - Paris - Birmingham
Perhaps the most influential British approach, dominated by the work of the CCCS, is more properly referred to as cultural studies, since the tendency is to see the mass media, as well as audiences as part of broader social and cultural practices. Unlike the Frankfurt School, whose `critical theorists` tended to celebrate the emancipatory potential of high modernist art and dismiss the products of the culture industries as debased and inauthentic, the British students of culture paid a great deal of attention to the products of `popular culture`, though it should be said that they too were, certainly in the early years, also suspicious of the mass produced products of popular culture, though they were prepared to engage with them, rather than simply dismiss them. Since the British owed much to the French research in semiotics, psychoanalytic theory and social theory, it became common to speak of the Birmingham - Paris axis in cultural studies. --http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/marxuk.html [Jul 2004]
Why Does Contemporary Cultural Studies Now Ignore Youth Culture? [...]
Contemporary cultural studies virtually ignores contemporary dance culture and contemporary dance music. For evidence that this is the case one need only glance at cultural studies’ most comprehensive publication concerning youth culture. Containing 55 essays, Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton’s The Subcultures Reader contains only one essay that deals explicitly with contemporary dance culture (see Gelder and Thornton, 1997). This is at a time when dance culture and dance music appear to have an almost hegemonic grip upon contemporary British youth, with dance culture’s opposition to state regulation and control, and the massive commercial success of dance music, the most significant developments since the rise of youth culture in the 1950s.

One need only look at the statistical evidence to see that this is the case. Social Trends suggest that dance club attendance over a three month period in 1995 was approximately 14 million. In 1996 Mintel Marketing Intelligence stated that 18% of all adults attended a nightclub at least once every three months, with 4% of all adults visiting a nightclub one or more times a week (see Mintel Leisure Intelligence, 1996)1. That makes an average weekend’s attendance (the majority of nightclubs are shut during the week) of over one million, with the Henley Centre, market analysts, estimating that the dance scene is worth £1.8 billion a year (cited in Collin and Godfrey, 1997, p.264), and therefore of a similar size to the newspaper industry. If one compares the amount of time spent by contemporary cultural studies analysing the production, distribution and consumption of newspapers with that spent analysing dance music, then there is practically a void at the heart of the discipline.

Whichever way you look at these statistics, and no matter how flawed the method used to obtain them, we are still left with a massively popular cultural activity that is severely under-represented in academia. To understand why this is the case we need to examine how and why contemporary cultural studies’ interest in youth culture collapsed in the late 1970s. --http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/mccsbort/thesis/ch2.html [Jul 2004]

Text [...]
In the context of cultural studies, the idea of a text not only includes written language, but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of ``culture``. ``Culture`` for a cultural studies researcher not only includes the traditional high arts and popular arts, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies [Jul 2004]
United Kingdom vs United States
Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the field`s inception in the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies often promulgated overtly politically leftist views and criticisms of capitalist mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the ``culture industry`` (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams and Paul Gilroy. -- http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies [Jul 2004]
Culture [...]
What is culture?
Cultural Criticism [...]
Cultural critics and commentators contribute powerfully to the vitality of market art. Critics put artistic consumers in touch with artistic producers, and help us separate the wheat from the chaff. They support the process of taste refinement. Listeners who take a sudden interest in classical music do not have to sort through the entire eighteenth century repertoire, but can listen to Mozart and Haydn. Clement Rosenberg and Harold Greenberg helped the American Abstract Expressionist painters find a public audience and win their way into museums. Pauline Kael directs our attention to the best of recent film. I hope my own commentary - in the form of this book - boosts the interest in contemporary art and music. These forms of professional cultural criticism, all relatively new professions, owe their thanks to capitalist wealth. The modern world can support many thousands of intellectuals who specialize in arguing the merits of artistic products. -- Tyler Cowen [...]
Raymond Williams [...]
Raymond Williams was an early pioneer in the field of ``cultural studies`` -- in fact, he was doing cultural studies before the term was even coined. This excerpt is from an essay Williams wrote in 1958, entitled ``Culture is Ordinary.`` According to one of his editors, Williams here ``forced the first important shift into a new way of thinking about the symbolic dimensions of our lives. Thus, `culture` is wrested from that privileged space of artistic production and specialist knowledge [eg. ``high culture``] , into the lived experience of the everyday`` (Gray and McGuigan 1).
United Kingdom vs United States
Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the field`s inception in the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies often promulgated overtly politically leftist views and criticisms of capitalist mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the ``culture industry`` (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams and Paul Gilroy. -- http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies [Jul 2004]
Cultural Critics and Schools
Frankfurt School, Birmingham School, French Schools
Mark Dery, Camille Paglia, Walter Benjamin, Kodwo Eshun, Steven Shaviro, James Gleick, Dick Hebdige, Simon During

Subculture [...]
Culturele Studies
www.culturelestudies.be

Cultural Studies in Belgium, I found their site while looking for info on Guy Rombouts

Dick Hebdige [...]
Dick Hebdige is a cultural critic and scholar who has written extensively on popular culture and design issues, the anthropology of consumption, and media and critical theory. He has published three books - Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Routledge 1979 [translated into 9 languages]), Cut `n Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (Routledge, 1987) and Hiding In the Light. On Images and Things (Routledge, 1988). He has also published extensively in a wide range of journals including Art & Text, Art Forum, Block, Blueprint, Borderlines, Cultural Studies, London Time Out, New Formations, New Statesman and Society and Ten.8. His current research interests include the place of autobiographical and fiction writing in cultural studies; and issues in contemporary visual art. In addition, he has given a number of mixed-media presentations which set out to integrate an explicitly performative element into the lecture format. Hebdige has taught at universities and arts colleges throughout Western Europe, the United States and Canada. From 1984 till 1992 he was Reader in Communications at the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmithsí College, University of London. He is currently Dean of the School of Critical Studies and Director of the Writing Program at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California. --School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Popular Culture Studies: A Background
``Popular culture studies`` is the scholarly investigation of expressive forms widely disseminated in society. These materials include but are not restricted to products of mass media such as television, film, print, and recording. Thus, popular culture studies may focus on media genres such as situation comedies, film noir, best-selling novels, or rap music. Other, non-mediated aspects of popular culture would include such things as clothing styles, fads, holidays and celebrations, amusement parks, both amateur and professional sports, and so forth. Ideally, the study of these or any other popular materials should be done holistically, viewing them both aesthetically and also within the social and cultural contexts in which the materials are created, disseminated, interpreted, and used. In this way the study of popular culture involves the use of methodologies from both the humanities and the social sciences in the effort to interpret expressive cultural forms, specifically those that are widely disseminated in a group (that is, that are popular) as part of dynamic social intercourse.
Popular culture scholars study these created, expressive and artistic materials as their primary data, much as literary scholars take the novel or the sonnet as their primary data. In this way, popular culture studies is within the tradition of the humanities. However, popular culture studies differs from traditional humanities studies in that it recognizes the existence of alternative systems of aesthetics which guide the creation of popular materials and the evaluation of those materials by an audience. Albert Lord, in his important work The Singer of Tales (1960), identified the ways singers of epics in Eastern Europe learn their art orally and how they compose as they perform. He suggests that these performances and the poems themselves be judged according to the specific goals of the artists and the audiences, and be judged according to an understanding of the problems unique to an oral poet. In other words, oral poetry is a different genre than written poetry. Each has its own aesthetic standards, and it is misguided to judge one by the standards of the other. Popular culture scholars recognize this principle and extend it to the popular arts such as television programs, popular films, popular music, best-selling novels, genre fiction such as mysteries or romances, and so on.

Each medium or genre has an audience that can and does make evaluations according to aesthetic criteria. These criteria are usually unarticulated, but they are no less real because of it. People regularly make choices as to which book to read or movie to see, and just as regularly evaluate the experience: this was a good thriller, this is a great party song. Because these aesthetic criteria are generally unarticulated, it is the task of the researcher to identify them through ethnographic methods such as interviews and participant observation, as well as humanities techniques such as textual analysis. The term ethnography refers to the cultural description of any event or artifact, usually as expressed and perceived by those people who are participants in the event, producers, consumers or users of the artifact, or members of the cultural group in question. After these insider (or native) perceptions and categories are documented, the researcher may undertake the scholarly analysis of the materials as components of a dynamic social and cultural field of behavior. These methods enable the popular culture scholar to situate the discussion of any aspect of popular culture within the larger context of the meanings and values of the society within which it exists; to determine, as Clifford Geertz has suggested, what we need to know in order to make sense of something (1984). In this way, the scholarly discipline of popular culture studies employs methodologies from both the humanities and the social sciences. Social science methodologies enable the popular culture scholar to root an expressive form in its social context and to uncover the aesthetic system upon which it is judged. Humanities approaches provide models for the appreciation of aesthetic forms and enable the scholar to apply theories of genre and make comparative analytical statements. As social science and humanities methodologies are combined in the study of artistic forms of expression that are broadly based in society, scholars can begin to provide an understanding of the social and cultural significance of these artistic forms, and begin to determine the aesthetic, social, commercial, and technological considerations that underlie their creation, distribution, and reception.


The Discipline of Popular Culture
Although the study of popular culture -- expressive forms widely disseminated in society -- has a long history, scholars disagree about the origins of the study of popular culture. This disagreement reflects a more fundamental debate over the essential nature of popular materials themselves. Some scholars, such as Russell Nye (1970) and Herbert Gans (1974), equate the materials of popular culture to the mass media, and therefore maintain that popular culture did not exist prior to the Industrial Revolution, the rise of a large middle-class segment of society, and the concomitant rise of rapid printing. Gans accepts the tripartite model of culture as folk, popular, and elite, describing pre-industrial Europe as largely a folk culture ruled by a small elite group. Other scholars, most notably social historians such as Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie (1979), Natalie Z. Davis (1983), and Peter Burke (1978) use the term ``popular culture`` to refer to the expressive materials of any group, large or small, pre-industrial or post-industrial. By this definition, popular culture scholarship includes work that focuses on pre-industrial expressive forms. Indeed, one might argue that the study of popular culture as a scholarly discipline can be traced back at least as far as the writings of Giambattista Vico, who anticipated today`s cultural studies programs as he attempted to discover the ``principles of humanity`` in his New Science of 1775 (Feldman and Richardson, 1972: 50-61). Whatever their position on these issues, however, scholars agree that the last fifteen to twenty years has seen a significant movement among scholars of all backgrounds toward an awareness of a large body of cultural expression that has fallen outside of most research prior to that time.
In recent years the study of popular culture has become an area of interest in many disciplines. Social and cultural historians, for instance, attempt to recover aspects of everyday life of the past that have frequently been left out of the historical record. In doing so, many historians have focused on popular festivals, carnivals, rituals, and celebrations, such as Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie`s Carnival in Romans (1979); Natalie Zemon Davis`s Culture and Society in Early Modern France; and Robert Darnton`s The Great Cat Massacre (1984).

American studies scholars also are increasingly investigating popular culture. For instance, recent issues of American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association, have featured articles such as George Lipsitz`s, ``Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies`` (42:4, 615-636). Broadly speaking, within the discipline of American studies, research has tended to view popular culture as being coterminous with the mass media.

Popular culture has become increasingly visible in the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology and folklore as well. Anthropologists have been turning to the ethnographic study of contemporary culture for some time; this is especially apparent in the study of popular music (see for instance, Christopher A. Waterman, Juju: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music (1990), or Naomi Ware, ``Popular Music and African Identity in Freetown, Sierra Leone`` in Bruno Nettl, ed., Eight Urban Musical Cultures, 1978). It should be noted that both of these examples are African, which demonstrates that popular culture is not restricted to American materials.

Folklorists often study the popular use of mass culture, as in for instance Angus Gillespie`s book Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike(1990), or in ethnographic studies of movie fans who view a particular film repeatedly (Bacon-Smith 1991). Also, many folklorists research traditional aspects of popular music (Ferris 1977, Titon 1978, Santino 1982).

Even more recently, the rise of cultural studies and contemporary culture theory perspectives is very much centered on popular cultural materials. The emerging field of cultural studies often places popular culture within the perspective of the economic production of culture as set forth in Raymond Williams`s The Sociology of Culture (1982). Todd Gitlin`s study of the television industry, Inside Prime Time (1983), is an example. (See also ``Cultural Studies: Eclectic and Controversial Mix of Research Sparks Growing Movement,`` The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 31, 1990, p. A5) Much of this work is being done in Britain on popular music; an important early effort is sociologist Simon Frith`s Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock `n` Roll, (New York: Pantheon, 1981).

The Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University recognizes the historical and methodological importance of all of the above paradigms for the study of popular culture. The proposed Ph.D. program will provide students with the in-depth study of each of these, as well as provide the critical skills necessary for their scholarly critique, primarily in the two-sequence introductory courses, PCS 597: Methods and Materials and PCS 598: Contemporary Culture Theory. However, the proposed program espouses no single methodological or theoretical point of view. Indeed, the faculty as presently constituted, and as envisioned for the future, is representative of several different but complementary scholarly disciplines. These include literature, history, music, theology, American studies, folklore and folklife, and interpersonal communication. In addition, we intend to add a cultural anthropologist to the faculty to increase our strengths in the popular culture of other nations.

Nevertheless, despite the diversity of disciplinary backgrounds, members of the faculty approach the study of popular culture with certain shared points of view. These include the conviction that materials which are genuinely popular, whether we ourselves approve of or enjoy any particular item or genre, are socially and possibly aesthetically significant. Indeed, the ongoing controversies over censorship, rock music lyrics, and the content of music videos suggest the extent to which people in our society themselves recognize the impact and significance of these and other popular forms. --http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/popc/bkgrnd.html

Books

Cultural Studies - Lawrence Grossberg (Editor), Cary Nelson (Editor), Paula A. Treichler (Editor) [Amazon US] [FR] [DE] [UK]
``Cultural Studies`` is a broadly international collection aiming to help shape research and teaching through the 1990s and beyond. The book investigates contemporary commitments of the field: its historical and intellectual positions, political and scholarly preoccupations, and the kinds of interventions it aims for now and in the future. ``Cultural Studies`` offers a number of specific cultural analyses while simultaneously defining and debating the common body of assumptions, questions and concerns that have helped create the field. Topics addressed include race and minority discourses; ethnicity and post-colonialism; post-modernism; feminism; cultural policy; the place of history in cultural studies; the politics of representation; popular culture; aesthetics; ethics; and technology. At the same time, ``Cultural Studies`` explores such diverse forms of cultural phenomena as rock music, Chicano art, detective novels, African-American writing, architecture, reproductive freedom, ``sati``, Star Trek fandom, and New Age technology. Contributors interrogate their own theoretical and methodological commitments. This book should be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics in the field of cultural studies. --amazon.co.uk
``...the publication of Cultural Studies is an event no serious (or curious) reader can afford to ignore. Make no mistake: in American intellectual life, the ``undisciplines`` of cultural studies will very likely be the single most controversial and contested terrain of the 1990s, and Cultural Studies the most capacious text in the fray.`` -via amazon.com

About the Author
Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler are all well known for their extensive publications on modern culture.

Featuring new essays by such prominent cultural theorists as Tony Bennett, Homi Bhaba, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Constance Penley, Janice Radway, Andrew Ross, and Cornel West, Cultural Studies offers numerous specific cultural analyses while simultaneously defining and debating the common body of assumptions, questions, and concerns that have helped create the field. --Book Description via amazon.com


Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson - Camille Paglia [1 book, Amazon US]
From ancient Egypt through the nineteenth century, Sexual Personae explores the provocative connections between art and pagan ritual; between Emily Dickinson and the Marquis de Sade; between Lord Byron and Elvis Presley. It ultimately challenges the cultural assumptions of both conservatives and traditional liberals. 47 photographs.

Greil Marcus - Lipstick Traces, a Secret History of 20th Century [1 book, Amazon US]
... In the 1989 ‘Lipstick Traces - A Secret History of the Twentieth Century’ Greil Marcus traces a subliminal trajectory where nearly-invisible connections arc across punk, the Situationists of 1968, Dada in 1916, the Enrages of the French Revolution and heretical millenarianism in medieval times. He isn’t describing the direct causal link of past and present but suggesting a more opaque entanglement. “Is history simply a matter of events that leave behind those things that can be weighed and measured - new institutions, new maps, new rulers - or is it also the result of moments that seem to leave nothing behind, nothing but the mystery of spectral connections between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language?....If the language they are speaking, the impulse they are voicing, has it’s own history, might it not tell a very different story from the one we’ve been hearing all our lives?” [...]

The Cultural Studies Reader - Simon During [Amazon US]
The first edition of The Cultural Studies Reader [Simon During] established itself as the leader in the field, providing the ideal introduction to this exciting and influential discipline. This expanded second edition offers a wider selection of essays covering every major cultural studies method and theory, and takes account of recent changes in the field. There are added articles on new areas such as technology and science, globalization, postcolonialism and cultural policy, making The Cultural Studies Reader essential reading for anyone wanting to know how cultural studies developed, where it is now, and its future directions.
Contributors: Ackbar Abbas, Theodor Adorno, Arjun Appadurai, Roland Barthes, Tony Bennett, Lauren Berlant, Homi K. Bhabha, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Rey Chow, James Clifford, Michel de Certeau, Teresa de Lauretis, Richard Dyer, David Forgacs, Michel Foucault, Nancy Fraser, Nicholas Garnham, Stuart Hall, Donna Haraway, Dick Hebdige, bell hooks, Max Horkheimer, Eric Lott, Jean Francois Lyotard, Angela McRobbie, Meaghan Morris, Hamid Naficy, Janice Radway, Andrew Ross, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Edward Soja, Gayatri Spivak, Peter Stallybrass, Carolyn Steedman, Will Straw, Michael Warner, Cornel West, Allon White, Raymond Williams.


Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture: Theories and Methods - John Storey [Amazon US] [FR] [DE] [UK]
I am using ``Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture`` as the primary textbook in an ``Introduction to Popular Culture`` class. Now, on the one hand it is clear John Storey`s book is not written at an introductory level, which would have been a reason for me not to select it for my class. But this volume has two strengths that overcome that particular liability. The first is that Storey looks at six types of cultural texts: Television, Fiction, Films, Magazines & Newspapers, Popular Music, and Consumption (a.k.a. shopping). That pretty much covers everything you would want to look at in an introduction pop culture class so that students can get excited (relatively speaking) about analyzing their favorite television show or CD. The second strength is that each chapter focuses on two or three key concepts/theories. For example, with television Storey looks at Hall`s notions of encoding/decoding television discourse, how television represents the ideology of mass culture, and how there are competing economies of television. So even if the writing level is for the advances student (quality), students being introduced to cultural studies are being presented with only a few concepts to absorb (quantity). Even if he is writing chapters rather than providing essays, each chapter does offer a specific case study (e.g., James Bond novels) that will facilitate student comprehension of the concepts, which they, in turn, should be able to apply in their own papers. Storey does have another volume that is specifically ``An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture,`` but it is structured by theories (culturalism, structuralism, Marxism, etc.). Ideally I would like to be working with a book from Storey that had the structure of the book I am using with the writing style of the other, but clearly you have a choice here as to which way you can go given both your preferences and the level of your course. Storey does a nice job of explicating these concepts without rendering personal judgments, which I think is important when you are trying to get students to actually use such analytical tools. Final note: Storey`s ``Cultural Theory & Popular Culture: A Reader`` is intended as a companion volume for his ``Introduction`` text and not this one. -- Lawrance M. Bernabo for amazon.com

Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals` Abuse of Science - Alan D. Sokal, Jean Bricmont [Amazon US]
In 1996, an article entitled ``Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity`` was published in the cultural studies journal Social Text. Packed with recherché quotations from ``postmodern`` literary theorists and sociologists of science, and bristling with imposing theorems of mathematical physics, the article addressed the cultural and political implications of the theory of quantum gravity. Later, to the embarrassment of the editors, the author revealed that the essay was a hoax, interweaving absurd pronouncements from eminent intellectuals about mathematics and physics with laudatory--but fatuous--prose. [...]

Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) - Dick Hebdige [Amazon US]
NO CULTURAL STUDIES BOOK has been more widely read than Dick Hebdige`s 1979 Subculture: The Meaning of Style, from which this essay is taken. It brought a unique and supple blend of Althusser, Gramsci and semiotics (as propounded by Barthes and the ``Prague School``) to bear on the world of, or at any rate near to, the young British academics and students who first became immersed in cultural studies. That was the world of ``subcultures`` more visible in Britain than anywhere else: teds, skinheads, punks, Bowie-ites, hippies, dreads . . .
``Complex and remarkably lucid, it`s the first book dealing with punk to offer intellectual content. Hebdige is concerned with the UK`s postwar, music-centred, white working-class subcultures, from teddy boys to mods and rockers to skinheads and punks.` --Rolling Stone Magazine [...]


Introducing Cultural Studies - Ziauddin Sardar [Amazon US]
Ziauddin Sardar`s ``Introduction to Cultural Studies`` is nothing more than the title indicates. This lenghty essay merely presents basic concepts that are prevalent in a postmodern discourse between societal values, power relations, and the value placed on cultural ``norms`` given in various communities. Sardar presents the history of Cultural Studies as a discipline, which begins in a social context, but the analysis of which, takes place by various sociologists, philosophers (primarily Freud, Nietzche, and Hegel), and literary minds. Overall, the essay is enlightening as an introduction, a good preface to the discourse(s) one finds in most disciplines today. --amazon.com

Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction - John Storey [Amazon US] [FR] [DE] [UK]
In this third edition of his successful introduction to cultural theory and popular culture, John Storey has extensively revised the text throughout. As before, the book presents a clear and critical survey of competing theoriesof and various approaches to popular culture. In addition to the theories and approaches discussed in the the first two editions, there is a new section issues involved in the on Queer Theory. Four earlier sections have been extended, with new material on Reading Romance, Reading Women¹s Magazines, Feminism as Social Practice, Men¹s Studies and Masculinities. Illustrations have been added. Retaining the accessible approach of the the first two editions, and using relevant and appropriate examples from the texts and practices of popular culture, this new edition is bound to remain a favourite with students and lecturers alike. --amazon.com

Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain (1976) - Stuart Hall [Amazon US] [FR] [DE] [UK]
This book is a must read for students of fashion, subculture, identity, and pop culture. Although the style of writing and some of the conclusions read as somewhat ``old-fashioned``, it was ground-breaking work at the time, one of the first serious scholarly treatments of youth and pop culture. More importantly, many of its arguments are still very relevant and need to be reconsidered in contemporary literature. The collection also discusses many styles which are all but forgotten to a younger audience and the variety British styles in the 60s is an education in itself for people who often think of past decades as having a particular ``look``. Excellent sociological analysis blended with ethnographic description. --A reader from Newfield, amazon.com