Write a coherent essay on culture, power and Cultural Studies.
I(a). Presenting his notion of “mimicry” as “an act of imagination,” Derek Walcott writes: “No, cultures can only be created out of this knowledge of nothing, and in deeper than the superficial, existential sense, we in the Caribbean know all about nothing… We owe the past revenge or nothing, and revenge is uncreative (p. 12).
I(b). Raymond Williams suggests that all cultures possess a specific sense of life — life as lived culture — with a “particular and characteristic colour”; he calls this “the structure of feeling” of an epoch (Turner, p. 46).
I(c). “Ideology is the most important conceptual category in cultural studies … [It] is the very site of struggle” (Turner, pp. 167).
I(d). “We are born into a language, its codes and its meanings. Language is therefore, for Saussure, a social phenomenon” (Hall, p. 34).
I(e). What do you understand by the “desire” for Cultural Studies in the post-colonial context? Refer to a few relevant ideas by Tejaswini Niranjana or Chen Kuan-hsing, as you deem appropriate.
