A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO CULTURAL STUDIES

Course No: LCS 101 Credits: 5 Timings: Tue, Thu 11 1 Venue: Room 35 Instructors: Madhava Prasad & Satish Poduval Course Schedule for Weeks I-IX WEEK I: INTRODUCTION a. Scope of the course, requirements, evaluation procedures, etc.; the LCS stream. Assigned task: personal statementwhat do you understand by culture? (1 - 2 pages) Assigned reading: Raymond Williams: "Culture" b. Discussion: What is culture? What does it mean to study it? Assigned reading: Judith Williamson: "Family, Education, Photography" WEEK II: "REALITY IS DISCURSIVE" a. Relation between language and reality; signification and the "real" Discussion: Judith Williamson: "Family, Education, Photography," Assigned task: Bring a sample of literary discourse to the next class (with comments) Assigned reading: Roland Barthes: "Dominici, or the Triumph of Literature" and "The Kitchen of Meaning" b. Discussion of samples brought by students Additional discussion: Henri Cartier-Bressons photograph: "The Moneychanger" G. K. Chestertons short story: "The Invisible Man" Assigned reading task: Tapati Guha-Thakurta: "Visualizing the Nation" WEEK III: VISUAL CULTURE AND VISUAL DISCOURSES a. Discussion: Tapati Guha-Thakurta: "Visualizing the Nation" Assigned task: Bring pictures (photos, ads, paintings, etc.) showing representations

b. Discussion: Visual texts brought by students Assigned task: Visual text for analysis Assigned reading: Dandins story: "The Hermit and the Courtesan" WEEK IV: WHAT/WHO IS A "SUBJECT"? a. Discussion: Dandins story: "The Hermit and the Courtesan" Assigned reading: Emile Benveniste: Extracts from Problems in General Linguistics b. Discussion: Emile Benveniste: Extracts from Problems in General Linguistics Assigned reading: Raymond Williams: "A Hundred Years of Culture and Anarchy" WEEK V: CULTURAL STUDIESBEGINNINGS a) Discussion: Raymond Williams: "A Hundred Years of Culture and Anarchy" Assigned reading: Sherlock Holmes story c. Discussion: Sherlock Holmes story Assigned reading: Andreas Huyssen: "The Hidden Dialectic" WEEK VI: CULTURAL STUDIES AND MASS CULTURE / POPULAR CULTURE a. Discussion: Andreas Huyssen: "The Hidden Dialectic" Assigned reading: Raymond Williams: "Hegemony" b. Discussion: Raymond Williams: "Hegemony" Assigned reading: Stuart Hall: "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms" WEEK VII: IDEOLOGY AND HEGEMONY a. Discussion: Stuart Hall: "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms" Assigned Reading: Ananda Coomaraswamy: Extract from Art and Swadeshi David Lelyveld: "Upon the Subdominant" b. Discussion: What could Cultural Studies initiatives be in India? WEEK VIII: CULTURAL STUDIES IN INDIA a. Discussion: Problem of high / folk cultural image of India b. Discussion: Challenges to the nationalist paradigm

WEEK IX: CULTURAL STUDIES IN INDIA (continued) WEEK X: STUDYING CULTURE IN INDIA a. Problem of high / folk cultural image of India; Challenges to the nationalist paradigm Assigned reading: Madhava Prasad, "South Asian Studies, Culture" b. Discussion: Madhava Prasad, "South Asian Studies, Culture" Assigned reading: Edward Said, "Introduction," Orientalism WEEK XI: COLONIALISM / ORIENTALISM a. Discussion: Edward Said, "Introduction," Orientalism b. Student Presentations: Orientalism as a discursive formation Malik Alloula, Excerpts from The Colonial Harem Bernard Cohn, "Law and the Colonial State in India" Kate Teltscher, "Sir William and the Pandits" Lata Mani, "Contentious Traditions" Gauri Viswanathan, "The Origins of English Literary Studies in Colonial India" Assigned reading: Partha Chatterjee, "Nationalism as a Problem in the History of Political Ideas," Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? WEEK XII: NATIONALISM / POSTCOLONIALISM a. Discussion: Partha Chatterjee, "Nationalism as a Problem in the History of Political Ideas" b. Student Presentations: The problem of anti-/post-colonial nationalism Rabindranath Tagore, "Nationalism in the West" Ernest Renan, "Nations and Nationalism" (?) Lenin, "The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination" Benedict Anderson, "Cultural Roots" Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man" Assigned reading: Pierre Bourdieu, Excerpts from Distinction WEEK XIII: IDENTITY

a. Discussion: Pierre Bourdieu, Excerpts from Distinction b) Student Presentations: Identity, Individuality, Subjectivity Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition" Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Alain Corbin, "The Secret of the Individual" Michel Foucault, "The Incitement to Discourse" Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power" Assigned reading: MN Srinivas, "Mobility in the Caste System" WEEK XIV: CASTE AND DEMOCRACY a. Discussion: MN Srinivas, "Mobility in the Caste System" b. Student Presentations: Social Reform and Democratic Revolution Jotirao Phule, "Introduction," Slavery BR Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste EV Ramaswami Periyar, "Why Brahmins Hate Reservations" Louis Dumont, "Hierarchy, Status and Power: The Caste System and its Implications" Dipankar Gupta, "Continuous Hierarchies and Discrete Castes" Satish Deshpande, "Caste Inequalities in India Today" Pradip Kumar Bose, "Mobility and Conflict: Social Roots of Caste Violence in Bihar" Gopal Guru, "The Politics of Names" (?) Assigned reading: Judith Butler, Excerpts from Gender Trouble WEEK XV: GENDER AND SEXUALITY a. Discussion: Judith Butler, Excerpts from Gender Trouble b. Student Presentations: Contemporary Dimensions of Sexuality Cora Kaplan, "Wild nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism" Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana, "Notes Towards a Contemporary Theory of Gender" R. Srivatsan, "The Woman in the Advertisement"

Sharmila Rege, "The Hegemonic Appropriation of Sexuality: The Case of Lavani Performers of Maharashtra" Mary E. John, "Globalisation, Sexuality and the Visual Field" Michel Foucault, "Right of Death and Power over Life" Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto" Assigned reading: Kwame Antony Appiah, "The Postcolonial and the Postmodern" WEEK XVI: MASS CULTURE / CONSUMER CULTURE a. Kwame Antony Appiah, "The Postcolonial and the Postmodern" b. Student Presentations: Culture and Modernization Karl Marx, "The Fetishism of Commodities" Marshall Berman, "All That is Solid melts into Air: Marx, Modernism and Modernization" Theodor Adorno, "The Schema of Mass Culture" Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Frederic Jameson, "Third World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capitalism"

WEEK XVII: FINAL ASSIGNMENT