F. Cultures in Conflict

A Story Looks at Cultural Change

人社 101 級 9753022 宋妍

Everyday Use: for your grandmama

Blend a multicultural view with a new historical view.

Represents an array of cultures and subcultures – some dominant ,some lost or denied ,all in some sort of conflict.

A story of cultures in conflict.

Everyday Use: for your grandmama

Dee, a culture quite different from what she left behind when she went to college.

Polaroid ,automobile VS. quilts ,snuff

Traditional culture VS. an emerging consciousness that African Americans are not necessarily destined to share-cropping or subsistence living.

Everyday Use: for your grandmama

Dee has gotten an education.

Dee has attached herself to a subculture within that new world of African Americans.

Break the past of economic ,social ,and psychological hardship.

Seek to reconnect with African roots.

Everyday Use: for your grandmama

Hair style: stand straight up like the wool on a sheep.

Name:

Dee represents the past ,the oppressive culture of the dominant majority

→ Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo

Everyday Use: for your grandmama

Two items in Dee’s words in new historical terms:

Names

Dee’s rejoinder to her mother is the oppressiveness of the socioeconomics of their world.

Everyday Use: for your grandmama

Mother seems not too eager to participate in the shift from agrarian to an industrial-commercial.

Dee is clearly eager for it. (Polaroid)

Dee is also trying to hold on to a bit of the old culture ,even as she converts its objective symbols to ”something artistic”

Everyday Use: for your grandmama

Not directly or indirectly ,but allusions to the dominant or majority culture.

The dominant culture was little interested in educating the blacks: “After second grade,” the mother says, “the school was closed down. Don’t ask me why: in 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now.

IV. Limitations of Cultural Studies

Cultural studies can at times seem merely an intellectual smorgasbord in which the critic blithely combines artful helpings of texts and objects and then “finds” deep connections between them, without adequately researching what a culture means or how cultures have interacted.

IV. Limitations of Cultural Studies

Cultural studies practitioners know a lot of interesting things and possess the intellectual ability to play them off interestingly against each other, but they sometimes lack adequate knowledge of the “deep play” of meanings or “thick description” of a culture.

IV. Limitations of Cultural Studies

Cultural studies as “about whatever is happening at the moment, rather than about a body of texts created in the past. ’Happening’ topics, generally speaking, are the mass media themselves.”