Jane Eyre with Wide Sargasso Sea and the character of Jane with Antoinette by applying Feminism and postcolonialism.

  Wide Sargasso Sea, her last novel, was published, Jean Rhys (24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was described in The New York Times as the greatest living novelist. Such praise is overstated, but Rhys’s fiction, long overlooked by academic critics, is undergoing a revival spurred by feminist studies. Rhys played a noteworthy role in the French Left Bank literary scene in the 1920’s, and between 1927 and 1939, she published four substantial novels and a number of jewel-like short stories. Although she owes her current reputation in large measure to the rising interest in female writers and feminist themes, her work belongs more properly with the masters of literary impressionism: Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. She began to publish her writing under the encouragement of her intimate friend Ford Madox Ford, and she continued to write in spite of falling out of favor with his circle. As prizes and honors came to her in her old age after the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, it must have given her grim satisfaction to realize that she had attained entirely by her own efforts a position as a writer at least equal to that of her erstwhile friends.

Jean Rhys’s first novel, Quartet, reflects closely her misadventures with Ford Madox Ford. The heroine, Marya Zelli, whose husband is in prison, moves in with the rich and respectable Hugh and Lois Heidler. Hugh becomes Marya’s lover, while Lois punishes her with petty cruelties. The central figure is a woman alone, penniless, exploited, and an outsider. In her next novel, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, the central figure, Julia Martin, breaks off with her rich lover, Mr. Mackenzie, and finds herself financially desperate. Voyage in the Dark tells the story of Anna Morgan, who arrives in England from the West Indies as an innocent young girl, has her first affair as a chorus girl, and descends through a series of shorter and shorter affairs to working for a masseuse. In Good Morning, Midnight, the alcoholic Sasha Jensen, penniless in Paris, remembers episodes from her past which have brought her to this sorry pass. All four of these novels show a female character subject to financial, sexual, and social domination by men and “respectable” society. In all cases, the heroine is passive, but “sentimental.” The reader is interested in her feelings, rather than in her ideas and accomplishments. She is alienated economically from any opportunity to do meaningful and justly rewarding work. She is an alien socially, either from a foreign and despised colonial culture or from a marginally respectable social background. She is literally an alien or foreigner in Paris and London, which are cities of dreadful night for her. What the characters fear most is the final crushing alienation from their true identities, the reduction to some model or type imagined by a foreign man. They all face the choice of becoming someone’s gamine, garçonne, or femme fatale, or of starving to death, and they all struggle against this loss of personal identity. After a silence of more than twenty years, Rhys returned to these same concerns in her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea. While the four early novels are to a large degree autobiographical, Wide Sargasso Sea has a more literary origin, although it, too, reflects details from the author’s personal life.

Wide Sargasso Sea :-

Wide Sargasso Sea requires a familiarity with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). In Brontë’s novel, Jane is prevented from marrying Rochester by the presence of a madwoman in the attic, his insane West Indian wife who finally perishes in the fire which she sets, burning Rochester’s house and blinding him, but clearing the way for Jane to wed him. The madwoman in Jane Eyre is depicted entirely from the exterior. It is natural that the mad West Indian wife, when seen only through the eyes of her English rival and of Rochester, appears completely hideous and depraved. Indeed, when Jane first sees the madwoman in chapter 16 of the novel, she cannot tell whether it is a beast or a human being groveling on all fours. Like a hyena with bloated features, the madwoman attacks Rochester in this episode.

Wide Sargasso Sea is a sympathetic account of the life of Rochester’s mad wife, ranging from her childhood in the West Indies, her Creole and Catholic background, and her courtship and married years with the deceitful Rochester, to her final descent into madness and captivity in England. Clearly, the predicament of the West Indian wife resembles that of Rhys herself in many ways. In order to present the alien wife’s case, she has written a “counter-text,” an extension of Brontë’s novel filling in the “missing” testimony, the issues over which Brontë glosses.

Wide Sargasso Sea consists of two parts. Part 1 is narrated by the girl growing up in Jamaica who is destined to become Rochester’s wife. The Emancipation Act has just been passed (the year of that imperial edict was 1833) and the blacks on the island are passing through a period of so-called apprenticeship which should lead to their complete freedom in 1837. This is a period of racial tension and anxiety for the privileged colonial community. Fear of black violence runs high, and no one knows exactly what will happen to the landholders once the blacks are emancipated. The girlish narrator lives in the interface between the privileged white colonists and the blacks. Although a child of landowners, she is impoverished, clinging to European notions of respectability, and in constant fear. She lives on the crumbling estate of her widowed mother. Her closest associate is Christophine, a Martinique obeah woman, or Voodoo witch. When her mother marries Mr. Mason, the family’s lot improves temporarily, until the blacks revolt, burning their country home, Coulibri, and killing her half-witted brother. She then attends a repressive Catholic school in town, where her kindly colored “cousin” Sandi protects her from more hostile blacks.

Part 2 is narrated by the young Rochester on his honeymoon with his bride to her country home. Wherever appropriate, Rhys follows the details of Brontë’s story. Rochester reveals that his marriage was merely a financial arrangement. After an uneasy period of passion, Rochester’s feelings for his bride begin to cool. He receives a letter of denunciation accusing her of misbehavior with Sandi and revealing that madness runs in the family. To counter Rochester’s growing hostility, the young bride goes to her former companion, the obeah woman Christophine, for a love potion. The nature of the potion is that it can work for one night only. Nevertheless, she administers it to her husband. His love now dead, she is torn from her native land, transported to a cruel and loveless England, and maddeningly confined. Finally, she takes candle in hand to fire Rochester’s house in suicidal destruction.

In Brontë’s novel, the character of the mad wife is strangely blank, a vacant slot in the story. Her presence is essential, and she must be fearfully hateful, so that Jane Eyre has no qualms about taking her place in Rochester’s arms, but the novel tells the reader almost nothing else about her. Rhys fills in this blank, fleshing out the character, making her live on a par with Jane herself. After all, Brontë tells the reader a great deal about Jane’s painful childhood and education; why should Rhys not supply the equivalent information about her dark rival?

It is not unprecedented for a writer to develop a fiction from another writer’s work. For example, T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose (1946) imagines that some of Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians were transported to England, escaped captivity, and established a thriving colony in an abandoned English garden, where they are discovered by an English schoolgirl. Her intrusion into their world is a paradigm of British colonial paternalism, finally overcome by the intelligence and good feeling of the girl. This charming story depends on Swift’s fiction, but the relationship of White’s work to Swift’s is completely different from the relationship of Rhys’s work to Brontë’s. Rhys’s fiction permanently alters one’s understanding of Jane Eyre. Approaching Brontë’s work after Rhys’s, one is compelled to ask such questions as, “Why is Jane so uncritical of Rochester?” and, “How is Jane herself like the madwoman in the attic?” Rhys’s fiction reaches into the past and alters Brontë’s novel.

Rhys’s approach in Wide Sargasso Sea was also influenced by FordMadox Ford and, through Ford, Joseph Conrad. In the autumn of 1924, when Rhys first met Ford, he was writing Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance. Some thirty years earlier, when Joseph Conrad was just beginning his career as a writer, his agent had introduced him to Ford in hopes that they could work in collaboration, since Conrad wrote English (a language he had adopted only as an adult) with great labor. Ford and Conrad produced The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903) as coauthors. During their years of association, Ford had some hand in the production of several works usually considered Conrad’s sole effort, although it has never been clear to what degree Ford participated in the creation of the fiction of Conrad’s middle period. About 1909, after Ford’s disreputable ways had become increasingly offensive to Conrad’s wife, the two men parted ways. Immediately after Conrad’s death in 1924, however, Ford rushed into print his memoir of the famous author. His memoir of Conrad is fictionalized and hardly to be trusted as an account of their association in the 1890’s, but it sheds a great deal of light on what Ford thought about writing fiction in 1924, when he was beginning his powerful Tietjens tetralogy and working for the first time with Rhys. Ford claimed that he and Conrad invented literary impressionism in English. Impressionist fiction characteristically employs limited and unreliable narration, follows a flow of associated ideas leaping freely in time and space, aims to render the impression of a scene vividly so as to make the reader see it as if it were before his eyes, and artfully selects and juxtaposes seemingly unrelated scenes and episodes so that the reader must construct the connections and relationships that make the story intelligible. These are the stylistic features of Rhys’s fiction, as well as of Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).

Art gallery

  Ajanta Exhibition was arranged by Shree Khodidas Parmar Art Foundation at Sardarnagar, Bhavnagar at 24 to 26 September 2021 from 10 am to 8pm

 This was our thinking activity task which was given by Dilip Barad sir, In this, we have to visit the exhibition but who are not at Bhavnagar they also got chance to see all photos of Ajanta Exhibition.

 In this, we can see many pictures are of god and goddess and some are lovemaking picture, in this picture they have tried to portray a culture or tradition of people or thought of painters. we can see the painter has used a necklace and in some of the pictures we can see animals. By that, he is trying to share some historical events. In some of the pictures, buddha is also portrayed.

 We can also see some of the natural elements like flowers, Birds elephants, and two cows are fighting in that we can see the color defense which saw that they both have different types of opponents.

We can see many photos like Syama painting, Apshera with her beautiful dresses and jewelry, Rajkumari Apsara with beauty and then pada pani painting, Sidhartha painting,Gotam   Bhuddh painting, Ajanta's glumes, Indra, we also knew about manushi, then saw raja rani panting they are sharing or sparing love, In one of the pictures we saw queen expiration.

In this picture, we can see one is the lady who is with his small baby ,we can also see the kindness of both and how they both are looking innocent any we can see ho mother is protecting his child we can see mother and son is well dress that shows that they are from good family and how people used to dress up in older times.

 

In this we can see man and women are portrayed which show that they are equal and the are in same space and all are in same position and we can see all have different types of mindset that is the reason we are having clash.

So, this was my experience about pictures and I enjoyed watching this type of picture which is telling about History .

ih

So, I hope u enjoyed it.

Foe

 Q. 1 – How would you differentiate the character of Cruso and Crusoe?.

Robinson is the protagonist and the narrator of the novel. He is individualistic, self-reliant, and adventurous. He continually discounts the good advice and warnings of his parents and others, and boldly seeks to make his own life by going to sea. He is at times overly ambitious and is unable to remain content with a comfortable life . Trapped on his island, he learns to survive all alone and also ends up becoming a devout Christian, repenting for his past sins and gaining a newfound confidence in God and his divine plan of providence. Robinson's extreme individualism is at times heroic, but also leads him to disregard others. While he values the loyal friends he finds over the course of his journeys , he sells Xury into a kind of slavery or indentured servitude and treats Friday as an inferior servant. His self-reliance can also shade into narcissism, reflected in his narration's focus on himself and disregard for others: most of the other characters in the novel don't even get a name. But in spite of any of these faults, Defoe presents Robinson as the novel's intrepid hero, who draws on reserves of ingenuity and bravery to survive incredibly against the whims of nature and fate.

While Friday retains the same name in Foe as in Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe’s name is changed to “Cruso” which marks the first in a series of differences between the character of Cruso(e) in Foe and Robinson Crusoe. The Cruso that Susan describes in the quote is one who is completely disconnected from reality and confused about his own past. When Susan questions Cruso about his history on the island the details in his stories vary wildly each time they are told. When asked if Friday was a child when he came to the island Cruso would sometimes exclaim, “Aye, a child, a mere child”, but other times Cruso would say, “Friday was a cannibal whom he had saved from being roasted” . This uncertainty about events could stem from the fact that in Foe, Cruso is very against keeping written documentation of his days on the island; proclaiming, “Nothing I have forgotten is worth remembering” .

Cruso’s lack of journaling is a stark contrast to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe is much less passive and senile in regards to his own development on the island. Crusoe kept a painfully detailed account of every action he does on the island in a journal he updates daily. In this journal, Crusoe meticulously records every step for all of the tools he crafts, and he writes about his own progress with his newly acquitted relationship with religion. This Robinson Crusoe is much more in tune with his own reality and interested in his own accomplishments than Foe’s Cruso. This is also evident in the number of tools and objects that Robinson Crusoe makes in comparison to Cruso. Robinson Crusoe fills his multiple homes with various types of pots, tables, chairs, fences, and even a canoe. All of these items Crusoe builds are to improve and aide in his growth on the island, and he must be mentally sharp in order to build these items. Cruso in Foe has not put any effort towards building tools, as he only has a bed when Susan arrives at the island, and from the quote, it seems like he may not have the mental capacity to build these tools. Although Cruso does builds many terraces, he exclaims that they are for the future generations and not himself.

One explanation for the difference in mindset and mental stability in the two Robinson Crusoe’s may be that in Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe felt that his island life had more value than Cruso did. Before becoming stranded on the island, religion wasn’t a focus in Robinson Crusoe’s life, and he frequently sinned; such as when he disobeyed his father. After becoming stranded on the island, Crusoe began to read the bible and incorporate God into his daily thoughts and actions. Crusoe expressed deep regret for his sinful past, and often attributed hardships to a lesson from God. This newfound life style gave significant meaning to Crusoe’s daily actions as they represented growth in his faith, and a positive change in character. For Cruso, the island did not lead him to make any significant changes in his character or ideals. Therefore, his daily actions had less significance to him, and when his reality and sense of self began to slip away from him he was not concerned.

Q.2 Friday’s characteristics and persona in Foe and in Robinson Crusoe.

 Foe and Robinson Crusoe is important, but so is acknowledging their different racial identities. Friday in Foe’s work, in standing for the victims of apartheid and slavery, is a black African character ‘he was black, negro, with a head of fuzzy wool’ , whereas Crusoe’s Friday, not standing for those causes, is portrayed as being an anglicised version of a Caribbean man, who ‘had all the sweetness and softness of a European in his countenance’. This implies that Friday was somehow better than the ‘average’ Caribbean tribesman by dint of looking somewhat European, but at the same time, the first language Crusoe taught him was that he was his master. He was an improvement on the average savage, since his appearance was somewhat European, but still his race left him to be the natural servant of Crusoe. This Friday is very much a dramatic device used to portray Crusoe’s development as a religious man; ‘began to instruct him  in the knowledge of the true God’. This allowed Defoe to expand on Crusoe’s earlier mentions of religion, in his conversion, and in the hegemony of the time, caused Crusoe to be seen as a good and moral character, who treated his slave well, and brought him up to be religious . In Coetzee’s work, Friday is allowed to be sullen and unpleasant, easy to see, but hard to like, he is created to be the embodiment of all the oppression experienced by a racial group, to only be able to take in, never to give out ideas or understanding, to be central to a story he can have no part in. The silence of Coetzee’s Friday could also be said to reflect the reader, who, like Friday can only react and respond to situations. Katherine Wagner however argues against this, saying that ‘criticism and silence are mutually exclusive terms’. Coetzee’s Friday can only be silenced, but Defoe’s Friday has no room to criticise, and no part in making decisions for Crusoe, because in that time, a slave wouldn’t have that option at all, Coetzee’s Friday can take no part, being unable to speak. His isolation and treatment as second class is made far more visible by his disability, a device Coetzee used to avoid speaking the black voice, as a privileged white man, whilst still drawing attention to the plight of slaves.

Crusoe, Cruso and Barton were all seen to treat Friday very differently, but all see him as a possession in their own way. Crusoe did this most blatantly, in claiming, naming Friday and instructing him to call him ‘Master’, with Defoe’s Friday being portrayed as making signs of ‘subjection, servitude, and submission’ to Crusoe without even any bidding. This added to the moral message of Robinson Crusoe, because it showed the savage being tamed, and later taught religion. This contrasts strongly with the Cruso created by Coetzee, who was ‘sullen’ in his service, who obeyed Cruso, but did not have the childish excitement or ‘comically expressed pidgin’ portrayed in places by Defoe. Barton also claimed him, despite trying to treat him as an individual ‘if Friday is not mine to set free, whose is he’, and on some level saw him clearly as her property, forgetting that maybe it was not her right to set him free either. 

The representation of Friday in these two texts is vastly different, and one could hardly believe that the two were in fact the same character. With different histories, and different personalities, in fact all both have in common is playing the role of the non-white slave in the text, to serve a literary purpose, in both reflecting the views of wider society towards non-white people, and in showing the development of other characters. This is not to say that either Friday was one-dimensional, in particular Coetzee’s Friday was multi-dimensional and complex, but more that despite the character complexity, despite his being ‘resistant to being interpreted’ , and how central they were, both were created to serve only a purpose.

Q. 3 Who is Protagonist?

Susan, the protagonist of the story, is a British woman who went searching for her lost daughter. After searching for two years, she gives up and tries to return to England, only to be caught in the middle of a mutiny and marooned by the crew of the ship she riding home.

Film Screening Mahesh Dattani’s "The Final Solutions"

1. What is the difference between the movie and the play?

I think there is not much difference between the movie and the play but we can see that movie is not able to capture all the things which is added in the play and I would like to say that yes from watching the movie we can get the storyline but if we want to see the reality or real situation of that time that women were facing at that time or what type of mindset the people were having about Indian people and Muslim people then we should read play. movie has also tried to include all the parts but for good understanding it is important.

2. Does the movie help you to understand the narrative structure of the play?

Yes, I agree that the movie helps you to understand the narrative structure of the play, as we can see in the starting we can see how Daksha is alone and there is no one with whom she can share his feeling or say that what problem she is facing and she is writing a letter because there is no one who can talk with her. then we also knew about Zarine that she is liking to listen to songs then we also saw in the movie that how the crowd behaves with Javed and Bobby and why Ramnik wanted to give the job to that both people.so, the movie is helpful.

3. Do you think the movie is helpful to understand the viewpoints of different characters?

yes, the movie is helpful to understand the viewpoints of different characters because while watching we will see that all person is having different types of options and they all are having a different types of mindsets we can see that movie is helping to know the viewpoint that how their views are somehow match with each other and sometimes they are not agreeing to it

4. If you were the director of the movie, what kind of changes would you make in the movie. Does the movie do justice to the play?

If I am the Director then I would like to make a character growth by not sticking toll rules and regulations. I would make Daksha a character who is brave and who stands for his right and in the starting when Daksha was 15 years old that time she is coy but when she is 54 at that time she is modern and Brave and taking a stand. when Smita is calling Tasneem's parents at that time I would include smita as a modern girl. and I would like to include that when Daksha's first husband dies then she fall in love with Muslim guy and from there here life takes a turn .

Cultural Studies: Media, Power and Truly Educated Person

Cultural Studies: Media, Power and Truly Educated Person

 Radio, television, film, and the other products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality; and of "us" and "them." Media images help shape our view of the world and our deepest values: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media stories provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through the appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture. Media spectacles demonstrate who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and violence, and who is not. They dramatize and legitimate the power of the forces that be and show the powerless that they must stay in their places or be oppressed.

      We are immersed from cradle to grave in a media and consumer society and thus it is important to learn how to understand, interpret, and criticize its meanings and messages. The media are a profound and often misperceived source of cultural pedagogy: They contribute to educating us how to behave and what to think, feel, believe, fear, and desire -- and what not to. The media are forms of pedagogy which teach us how to be men and women. They show us how to dress, look and consume; how to react to members of different social groups; how to be popular and successful and how to avoid failure; and how to conform to the dominant system of norms, values, practices, and institutions. Consequently, the gaining of critical media literacy is an important resource for individuals and citizens in learning how to cope with a seductive cultural environment. Learning how to read, criticize, and resist socio-cultural manipulation can help empower oneself in relation to dominant forms of media and culture. It can enhance individual sovereignty vis-a-vis media culture and give people more power over their cultural environment.

      In this essay, I will discuss the potential contributions of a cultural studies perspective to media critique and literacy. In recent years, cultural studies has emerged as a set of approaches to the study of culture and society. The project was inaugurated by the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies which developed a variety of critical methods for the analysis, interpretation, and criticism of cultural artifacts.[1] Through a set of internal debates, and responding to social struggles and movements of the 1960s and the 1970s, the Birmingham group came to focus on the interplay of representations and ideologies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality in cultural texts, including media culture. They were among the first to study the effects of newspapers, radio, television, film, and other popular cultural forms on audiences. They also focused on how various audiences interpreted and used media culture differently, analyzing the factors that made different audiences respond in contrasting ways to various media texts.

      Through studies of youth subcultures, British cultural studies demonstrated how culture came to constitute distinct forms of identity and group membership. For cultural studies, media culture provides the materials for constructing views of the world, behavior, and even identities. Those who uncritically follow the dictates of media culture tend to "mainstream" themselves, conforming to the dominant fashion, values, and behavior. Yet cultural studies is also interested in how subcultural groups and individuals resist dominant forms of culture and identity, creating their own style and identities. Those who obey ruling dress and fashion codes, behavior, and political ideologies thus produce their identities within mainstream group, as members of specific social groupings (such as white, middle-class conservative Americans). Persons who identify with subcultures, like punk culture, or black nationalist subcultures, look and act differently from those in the mainstream, and thus create oppositional identities, defining themselves against standard models.

       Cultural studies insists that culture must be studied within the social relations and system through which culture is produced and consumed, and that thus study of culture is intimately bound up with the study of society, politics, and economics. Cultural studies shows how media culture articulates the dominant values, political ideologies, and social developments and novelties of the era. It conceives of U.S. culture and society as a contested terrain with various groups and ideologies struggling for dominance (Kellner 1995). Television, film, music, and other popular cultural forms are thus often liberal or conservative, or occasionally express more radical or oppositional views.

      Cultural studies is valuable because it provides some tools that enable one to read and interpret one's culture critically. It also subverts distinctions between "high" and "low" culture by considering a wide continuum of cultural artifacts ranging from novels to television and by refusing to erect any specific cultural hierarchies or canons. Previous approaches to culture tended to be primarily literary and elitist, dismissing media culture as banal, trashy, and not worthy of serious attention. The project of cultural studies, by contrast, avoids cutting the field of culture into high and low, or popular against elite. Such distinctions are difficult to maintain and generally serve as a front for normative aesthetic valuations and, often, a political program (i.e. either dismissing mass culture for high culture, or celebrating what is deemed "popular" while scorning "elitist" high culture).

      Cultural studies allows us to examine and critically scrutinize the whole range of culture without prior prejudices toward one or another sort of cultural text, institution, or practice. It also opens the way toward more differentiated political, rather than aesthetic, valuations of cultural artifacts in which one attempts to distinguish critical and oppositional from conformist and conservative moments in a cultural artifact. For instance, studies of Hollywood film show how key 1960s films promoted the views of radicals and the counterculture and how film in the 1970s was a battleground between liberal and conservative positions; late 1970s films, however, tended toward conservative positions that helped elect Ronald Reagan as president (See Kellner and Ryan, 1988).

      There is an intrinsically critical and political dimension to the project of cultural studies which distinguishes it from objectivist and apolitical academic approaches to the study of culture and society. British cultural studies, for example, analyzed culture historically in the context of its societal origins and effects. It situated culture within a theory of social production and reproduction, specifying the ways that cultural forms served either to further social domination or to enable people to resist and struggle against domination. It analyzed society as a hierarchical and antagonistic set of social relations characterized by the oppression of subordinate class, gender, race, ethnic, and national strata. Employing Gramsci's model of hegemony and counterhegemony, it sought to analyze "hegemonic," or ruling, social and cultural forces of domination and to seek "counterhegemonic" forces of resistance and struggle. The project was aimed at social transformation and attempted to specify forces of domination and resistance in order to aid the process of political struggle and emancipation from oppression and domination.

      For cultural studies, the concept of ideology is of central importance, for dominant ideologies serve to reproduce social relations of domination and subordination.[2] Ideologies of class, for instance, celebrate upper class life and denigrate the working class. Ideologies of gender promote sexist representations of women and ideologies of race utilize racist representations of people of color and various minority groups. Ideologies make inequalities and subordination appear natural and just, and thus induce consent to relations of domination. Contemporary societies are structured by opposing groups who have different political ideologies (liberal, conservative, radical, etc.) and cultural studies specifies what, if any, ideologies are operative in a given cultural artifact (which could involved, of course, the specification of ideological contradictions). In the course of this study, I will provide some examples of how different ideologies are operative in media cultural texts and will accordingly provide examples of ideological analysis and critique.

      Because of its focus on representations of race, gender, and class, and its critique of ideologies that promote various forms of oppression, cultural studies lends itself to a multiculturalist program that demonstrates how culture reproduces certain forms of racism, sexism, and biases against members of subordinate classes, social groups, or alternative life-styles. Multiculturalism affirms the worth of different types of culture and cultural groups, claiming, for instance, that black, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, and lesbian, and other oppressed and marginal voices have their own validity and importance. An insurgent multiculturalism attempts to show how various people's voices and experiences are silenced and omitted from mainstream culture and struggles to aid in the articulation of diverse views, experiences, and cultural forms, from groups excluded from the mainstream. This makes it a target of conservative forces who wish to preserve the existing canons of white male, Euro-centric privilege and thus attack multiculturalism in cultural wars raging from the 1960s to the present over education, the arts, and the limits of free expression.

      Cultural studies thus promotes a multiculturalist politics and media pedagogy that aims to make people sensitive to how relations of power and domination are "encoded" in cultural texts, such as those of television or film. But it also specifies how people can resist the dominant encoded meanings and produce their own critical and alternative readings. Cultural studies can show how media culture manipulates and indoctrinates us, and thus can empower individuals to resist the dominant meanings in media cultural products and to produce their own meanings. It can also point to moments of resistance and criticism within media culture and thus help promote development of more critical consciousness.

      A critical cultural studies -- embodied in many of the articles collected in this reader -- thus develops concepts and analyses that will enable readers to analytically dissect the artifacts of contemporary media culture and to gain power over their cultural environment. By exposing the entire field of culture to knowledgeable scrutiny, cultural studies provides a broad, comprehensive framework to undertake studies of culture, politics, and society for the purposes of individual empowerment and social and political struggle and transformation. In the following pages, I will therefore indicate some of the chief components of the type of cultural studies that I find most useful.

CS and Feminism - Cyberfeminism: Artificial Intelligence and the Unconscious Biases

 CS and Feminism - Cyberfeminism: Artificial Intelligence and the Unconscious Biases :-

Cyberfeminism is a term coined in 1994 by Sadie Plant, director of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick in Britain, to describe the work of feminists interested in theorizing, critiquing, and exploiting the Internet, cyberspace, and new-media technologies in general. The term and movement grew out of “third-wave” feminism, the contemporary feminist movement that follows the “second-wave” feminism of the
1970s, which focused on equal rights for women, and which itself followed the “first-wave” feminism of the early 20th century, which concentrated on woman suffrage. Cyberfeminism has tended to include mostly younger, technologically savvy women, and those from Western, white, middle-class backgrounds. The ranks of cyberfeminists are growing, however, and along with this increase is a growing divergence of ideas about what
constitutes cyberfeminist thought and action. Prior to the advent of cyberfeminism, feminist study of technology tended to examine technological developments as socially and culturally constructed. One major argument was that technology has been
positioned as part of masculine culture something that men are interested in, good at, and therefore engage in more than women. Even though women throughout history have been active in developing new technologies, feminists have argued that technology has still been looked upon as a masculine creation. For example, although women had been involved in the creation and development of the computer, their contributions were
largely marginalized, and their participation often ignored or written out of history. Therefore, feminists such as Judy Wacjman, a professor of sociology at the Australian National University in Canberra, and Cynthia Cockburn, an independent scholar and activist in London, argued that technology needed to be continually interrogated and re-conceptualized, and that women needed to become more active in technological areas as
well.
Also pointing the way for cyberfeminism was the work of Donna Haraway, a professor in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In her groundbreaking essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” she argues for a socialist, feminist cyborg that challenges the singular identities and “grids of control” that work to contain women and other marginalized groups. Haraway agreed that women needed to
become more technologically proficient, better able to engage with the “informatics of domination” and challenge these systems. But Haraway also and importantly argued that women would need to be savvy and politically aware users of these technological systems; simply using them was not enough.
From these beginnings, cyberfeminism began to develop. Plant, an important early proponent, has argued that women are naturally suited to using the Internet, because women and the Internet are similar in nature both, according to Plant, are non-linear, self-replicating systems concerned with making connections. She has argued that although previous feminists have believed computers to be essentially male, we should instead see computers and the Internet as places for women to engage in new forms of work and play where women are
freed from traditional constraints and are able to experiment with identity and gain new avenues for claiming power and authority. Her view of cyberspace is as a welcoming, familiar space for women, where they can and must seize opportunities to advance themselves and to challenge male authority.
Therefore, it is unlikely that readers will find every chap-ter useful for their interests, research or personal, althoughthey are likely to be introduced to cyber worlds about whichthey had not previously been aware. For this reviewer, one ofmany examples was that of BlogHer and Blogalicious, twopopular annual blogging conferences that the author, JessieDaniels , enjoyably describes using her ethno-graphic fieldwork. Readers may find some chapters moreaccessible than others depending on their familiarity with thelanguage of feminist theory, literary theory, and the academicfields of communications and media studies. For that reason,for some readers, the chapter titles may tilt toward theobscure; thus, abstracts or summaries at the beginning of eachchapter would have been helpful guideposts for assisting the reader to locate relevant chapters. Furthermore, the division of the book into three sections was not that beneficial an orga-nization because many chapters had the potential to belong tomore than one division.In fact, it may be a shock to readers accustomed to standard scientific format how engaged the authors are in their cyberfe-minist projects, rather than scientifically detached. All written in the first person, , mostly essays, typically exhibita proud feminist perspective and are often examples of datacollected through participant observation. For example, Lau-ren Angelone  included her blog as one of the fiveshe subjected to critical discourse analysis.

The Culture of Speed and the counter culture of Slow Movement

 The Culture of Speed and the counter culture of Slow :-

 The Culture of Speed :-

The business world is transforming at breakneck speed. Entire industries like print publishing, digital imaging, and entertainment are undergoing radical evolutions, displacing established leaders, and launching new ones. Even once-successful companies like MySpace are burning out just three years into their mature life, demonstrating that if you can’t keep up, you will be marginalized.
All around you new products are emerging that demonstrate the profound impact innovation can have in just a year. Mobile video has gone from a pipe dream to a reality, and smartphones just a year old lack the hardware to take full advantage; chips from Intel that are introduced in January are commodities by December. Telephones that used to be viable for years in the 1950s today are obsolete with two years. A phone capturing a premium upgrade price in January could not be sold a year later.
 The increasing speed of change should not be a surprise; society has for centuries focused on accelerating nearly everything. That fact has long driven the efforts of business functions that directly touch the design, manufacture, sales, and distribution of products, but functions like HR haven’t always responded in kind.
 If you take the “need for speed” seriously, you need to move beyond having isolated “pockets” of speed throughout the organization.  Due to the interdependency of all functions and processes, diverse organizational units need to work in unison.  Finance is out of phase, it can dramatically delay innovations coming from other mission-critical units. Supporting all mission-critical roles in an organization are key roles that can cause just as much damage if staffed inappropriately.  You can’t have the fastest organizational speed in your industry if a single process, silo, or function moves at a lower rate of speed, creating roadblocks and “speed bumps” for the faster moving elements of the organization.
The most effective solution for increased speed across the organization is the development of “a culture of speed.” Just like any other type of corporate culture, a speed culture permeates every department and business process, including hiring, performance evaluation, finance, decision-making, communications, and rewards. In order to maintain speed in a speed culture, every new program, idea, product, process, etc. must be evaluated for its impact on speed, not just when first considered, but continuously post-adoption as well. Most organizations are full of policies and procedures that once made sense but today are nothing more than barriers to speed and productivity.
A “speed culture” is a variant of the more common “performance culture” or “innovation culture.” In a speed culture, you need to add processes, measures, incentives, and even people that have the capability of accelerating existing processes while maintaining the same or higher levels of performance and innovation.

 The counter culture of Slow Movement :-

In a study on twins, it was shown that both direction of political leaning and strength of adherence to ideology would appear to have a genetic root. Other studies also indicate that a familial tendency towards a particular social attitude, and the strength of adherence to that attitude, are heritable. If there is a transmissible component of political psychologies, then historical events which favored the survival and/or reproduction of K-type Competitors or r-type Anticompetitors could be expected to skew the proportions of Competitors vs. Anticompetitors conceived within that period, just as populations can be either r or K-selected. This would
then be expected to alter the general psychology of the affected
generation, relative to it's culture's baseline standards and mores. Under this theory, this effect would also alter the political ideologies of societies more generally.
The counter-culture revolution did exhibit many thematic

influences similar to that which we maintain would accompany an  Anticompetitive, r-selected psychology. They sought a competition-free, commune-like social structure.They denigrated capitalism and economic ambition,through embrace of anti-materialism. They adopted a radical form of sexual promiscuity denigrating of monogamy, and demanding that women provide “free love,” absent any careful fitness-based selection of potential mates.Finally, in an extreme form of out-group tolerance, they allied with a foreign enemy , and protested on this enemy's behalf at the very moment theUnited States was at war with this enemy.There even existed an animus between physically aggressive males who embraced K-type Darwinian Competitions, such as military members and police officers,and members of this “counter-culture,” r-typeAnticompetitive generation.Indeed, so great was this animus that these r-type counterculture Hippies even spit upon returning servicemen, and deridedthem as baby killers.

In the counterculture example, had America been

defeated and occupied by Vietcong forces , the counter-culture revolutionary would have been astonishingly well positioned to seize competitive advantage from their fellow indigenous Competitors, a group for whom they exhibited open animus. While the few remaining K-type Competitors resigned themselves to the oppression of outsiders, theAnticompetitor would have thrived upon the favor they curried with the new occupying force, while benefiting as well from the Anticompetitive environment an occupation would have brought.