Mapping the contradictions and ambiguities in the cultural politics of Canadian identity; The House of Difference opens up new understandings of the operations of tolerance and Western liberalism in a supposedly post-colonial era. Combining an analysis of the construction of national identity in both past and present-day public culture; with interviews with white Canadians; The House of Difference explores how ideas of racial and cultural difference are articulated in colonial and national projects; and in the subjectivities of people who consider themselves mainstream; or simply Canadian-Canadians.
#4464859 in eBooks 2005-06-20 2005-06-20File Name: B000OI0U3A
Review
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Five StarsBy Maria MenichiniIt arrived in great condition. thanks0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. A very Useful OverviewBy Ulrich GdhlerI finished my university studies 35 years ago. Being in early retirement now; I am eager to learn what happened in social sciences while I was earning my bread. Gaeme Turnerrsquo;s Introduction into British Cultural Studies turned out to be a very useful overview of the developments in Cultural Studies from the late 1960s until 2005. Turner is a Professor emeritus at the University of Queensland and a leading figure in Australian Cultural Studies.ldquo;British Cultural Studiesrdquo; comprehends an overview about the major works of Cultural Studies in Britain. Turner summarizes the key works such as Richard Hoggartrsquo;s ldquo;The Uses of Literacyrdquo;; Stuart Hallrsquo;s ldquo;Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourserdquo; and Paul Willis ldquo;Learning to Labourrdquo;. Most of the books mentioned are available on the Web.Cultural Studies starts with a revolt against the elitism of British Literary Studies in the works of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams. It was strongly linked with adult education. Teachers were confronted with pop music and searched for answers. Cultural Studies dealt with pop music and youth culture and the impact of the new medium television. Turner then describes the growing influence first of Western Marxism and then of Structuralism in the 1970s. He presents the debate between Culturalists (E.P. Thompson; Raymond Williams) and Structuralists (Althusser). Cultural Studies has developed around the conflict between individual agency; Marxist economic determinism and Structuralist cultural determinism. The turn to the Gramscian notion of ldquo;hegemonyrdquo; was a sort of compromise between individual agency and determinism.Presenting many interesting works of Cultural Studies; Turner shows a shift of emphasisbull; from high art to popular art; from an elitist definition of culture to culture as the very material of our daily lives; from literature to a broader notion of culture in the 1960sbull; from individual agency to the cultural creation of ldquo;identityrdquo; (Althusserrsquo;s ldquo;Appellationrdquo;) in the 1970sbull; from class and class sub-communities to gender and race in the 1980sbull; From British nationalism to transnational identities and from critique of ideology to ldquo;pleasurerdquo; in the post-modernist 1990s.Turner mentions the political aspects. Stuart Hall and other writers were strongly involved in the analysis of Right-wing Thatcherism and Blairrsquo;s ldquo;New Labourrdquo;. The representation of the political aspects of the history of Cultural Studies although stays a bit cursory.4 of 6 people found the following review helpful. Compulsory for any branch of Cultural StudiesBy Soek-Fang SIMI mark this book as a required text to my students in my Cultural Studies Course.Despite; or rather because of its professed limitation to British Cultural Studies; Turner demonstrates a lot of sensitivity to what is and what is not British Cultural Studies; making any reader immediately aware of how other Cultural Studies traditions may differ. His extremely cogent and clear account takes the reader easily into the heart of Cultural Studies- what quarrels does British Cultural Studies have with other disciplines and what is so unique about its orientation as a discipline?