Cultural studies Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Cultural studies - Essay Example Despite this shift Bengalis, be it Hindu or Muslims did share a greater cultural similarity than what superficial boundaries failed to erase. The irony behind this cultural similarity between East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and West Bengal explains the complete disadvantage of categorizing literature or cultural studies within nationalistic homogenizing forces. If nationalization or neo-imperialism or globalization is seen as cultural homogenization, then cultural fragmentation and intercultural conflict or issues of ethnocide are also serious issues that haunt us with World War II memories. But are the poles of cultural studies thus stretched between these two stereotypes Aren't we approaching greater possibilities of cultural exchanges and the exciting new cultural hybridity that do not threaten cultural purity, but add new and socio-economic, spiritual and discursive voices to the present zeitgeist of our age by virtue of which we remain unique to our historical time travel The essay " 'Indian Literature': Notes Towards the Definition of a Category", posits the argument that cultural and linguistic exclusivity of various languages and their corresponding literatures are weak at encouraging actual overlapping translations between themselves and the cultural context, where they developed or grew through continuous interaction and affecting their linguistic differences. Thus knowledge of "Indian Literature"(however controversial the term is) is being generated in the medium of English, since the rare combination of, say, a Punjabi folklore (in a Punjabi local dialect or even major language) being integrated into Bengali literature by another Bengali author who has quite a deft hand at understanding that specific sub-division of Punjabi language or culture. Thus in spite of bridging the cultural gap between varied cultures in India, it only creates a chasm with its linguistic function due to inherent symbolic gaps or meanings gathered or generated by its id eological or discursive order or burden. Again, this lead to the very question of information and its readers, since, the finer points of intercultural translation are no necessary to a class of people who are literate, dependent on the print media for preservation of culture that cannot but precipitate the words and ideological, spiritual and social practices of the Subalterns in their complex standing. Thus gap between the vocabularies of the petit bourgeoisie and the general or popular is great. But, I would like to question the use of the term "popular" by the author, since popular culture has come to reflect the taste and vocabularies of the bourgeoisie classes and the subalterns are hardly presented in such cultural representations. Indian Literature is either categorized in its ancient period of literary production or under a generic name that does not always add to the production of a unified literary indigenous history where all exist independently unaware of another cultur e or their mutual linguistic interdependence. Textual exchanges are scarce. With chronological imposition on Indian History that do not let history thrive under the vast confusion of overlapped and interrelated periods despite gaps in time or space, Indian Literature has become a sharp Enlightenment induced linear, teleological product of "Universal History" and have forgotten to voice its histories and metanarratives under the troubling demands of multiculturalism, gaps in vernacular exchange realized not until the beginning of post-colonial cultural studies,