CMS 320 Cultural Resistance

This course analyzes the ways in which diverse cultural practices have been used or understood as political weapons, as attempts to intervene in the historical world. The course will introduce students to a number of approaches - both theoretical and practical, through readings of source texts and analysis of specific case studies - which have investigated the possibility of cultural practice being used as a tool of conflict, dissent, affirmation of identity, and resistance. One of the areas of inquiry will be an investigation of how, in advanced capitalist societies, social and political struggle necessarily happens through an engagement with dominant culture and media forms rather than in spite of them; the course will therefore concentrate on those cultural practices that, although not apparently political in content and aim, can nonetheless be used in politically productive ways. Emphasis will be placed on popular and mass culture artifacts and on the ways in which 'style' is used by 'sub-cultures' and other social identities in both national and global contexts.