Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

NAME: Theodoros Pelekanidis

MATRIKELNUMMER: 578770

BA ENGLISCH
MODUL 3: CULTURAL STUDIES
MAP WS 2020/21 (1. Prüfungstermin)
Wählen Sie zur Beantwortung eine Vorlesung und ein Seminar aus.
BITTE VERGESSEN SIE NICHT, DEN NAMEN DES DOZENTEN DES VON IHNEN
BESUCHTEN SEMINARS ZU KENNZEICHNEN BZW: DEUTLICH AUF IHREM ESSAY ZU
VERMERKEN.

1. Lecture: British Cultural History (Lieske)

1. The wars of the Roses were a series of civil wars in 15th century England. They were
fought between the Royal Houses of Lancaster and York, which had roses are their
emblems, thus the name. None of the houses won the war and it was the House of Tudor
that, in the end, ruled for the next century.
2. The concept “the kingdom of Christ is inside the soul” symbolizes the turn to
individualism that was taken by the Puritans as a general criticism against the
dominance of Catholicism and its respective social and political mentality. We can
observe it in many moments during the development of the English liberal society and
its transformation into a capitalist economy. For example, by making the soul and its
pureness a criterion of one’s “goodness”, this concept meant that, as long as someone
was good in his (or her, in rare cases) business, they were on the right side, the side of
god.
3. During the 16th century, it was Spain that dominated Europe politically and militarily,
mainly due to the exploitation of its New World (American) colonies. At the end of the
century, other powers, like England started to question this dominance and Spain’s
naval superiority. The Spanish Armada was a large fleet (130 ships) that was sent
against England to invade it, but the final outcome of the operation was indecisive,
therefore establishing England as a candidate for European dominance.
4. During the English Civil war (1642-1651), there was a need for an army that would be
both supportive of the new political and religious ideas against the old ruling order and
be able to move as a disciplined unit across the whole of the country. The New Model
Army can be characterized as the first professional army and its activities can be
regarded as crucial for the establishment of the dictatorial rule of Oliver Cromwell
during the Commonwealth.
5. The Diggers were a group of rebels in the mid-17th century, incorporating the ideas of
Protestantism and social equality in their more radical forms. As the English society
was turning its back in the medieval order and created new forms of organization on all
levels, the Diggers can be seen as the people who supported the more radical
implications of these new ideas, compared, for example, with modern-day anarchists.
6. The Commonwealth was the political structure that was formed between 1649 and 1660
on the British Isles. It was an announced Republic that quickly, in 1653, dissolved into
a military dictatorship with Oliver Cromwell as the “Lord Protector”. It is also known
as the period of the Interregnum.
7. The notion of lex civilis can be regarded as one of the fundamental notions of modern
liberal society. It introduces the idea of common reason that should rule in a society and
dictate its decisions. As, according to Hobbes, society cannot be based on the right of
the most powerful individual, the concept of civil law allows societies to introduce a
sort of an “artificial reason”, that has the last word on different matters of conflict.
8. The Tories were a British political party that was founded at the end of the 17th century
(around 1670) and existed till the 19th. In general, the Tories were conservative,
supporting in their proposed (or implemented) policies the old ruling aristocracy. Their
political opponents, the Whigs, were mainly supporters of the new mercantile class that
has started to acquire power during this period.
9. The Bill of Rights was a Law of 1689 that is a fundamental part of the unwritten British
constitution. It symbolized the turn of British politics after the turbulent years of the
Civil wars and revolutions. It gave more powers to the Parliament and is regarded as
the beginning of the British Constitutional (Parliamentary) Monarchy.
10. By the term utilitarianism is meant a series of ethical theories that focus on the utility
of human actions as a means to achieve happiness and well-being. Jeremy Bentham is
considered the founder of utilitarianism. It has been a major concept that promoted the
 new social and political ideas arising through the rise of capitalism and liberal
democracy throughout the 18th century.
11. In his work “Reflections on the Revolution in France”, Edmund Burke used this
metaphor as a subtle criticism to the events of the French revolution. Liberty is for the
moment hidden behind a “wild gas”, and only when the air is cleared will
contemporaries of the French revolution be able to judge what the revolution meant for
the liberty of the French people.
12. The Reform Act of 1832 is regarded as one of the major legal and political compromises
in the life of the British State. As capitalism was consolidating and England (the British
Empire) was securing its dominant position in world politics with great expenses,
resistance grew from big parts of the population. The Reform Act gave additional rights,
the right to vote for example, to some groups of people, mostly representatives of the
newly formed middle class.
13. The Great Exhibition or Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 was an international
exhibition that took place in 1851 in Hyde Park, London. It was one of the first major
trade exhibitions that showed the influence of European colonialist nations in the world
and symbolized the unprecedented industrial progress of the period. Notions such as
“Orientalism” or exotic consumerism (and consumerism in general) have been
connected to such exhibitions.
14. The chartist movement was a worker’s political movement in 19th century England. It
mostly called for the more active political representation of the working classes in the
political life of the country through universal male suffrage and is one of the first
important moments in the evolution of the working class movements in the 18th and 19th
centuries. Apart from the right to vote, they demanded vote by Secret Ballot, payment
of the Members of Parliament, equal electoral districts, and other measures against
corruption that were actually implemented during the next years.
 7. Seminar: Introduction to British Cultural Studies and Cultural History (Haschemi Yekani)

“According to Stuart Hall there are two phases in Black post-war politics in Britain. Describe and
explain the differences between the two phases and how they affect our understanding of representation.
Provide one suitable example from British culture that was NOT covered in Hall’s text or in class (a text,
film, image, monument …) to substantiate your argument and discuss in detail how that artefact contributes
to an understanding of what Hall calls “new ethnicities”.”

Answer:

In his chapter “New Ethnicities”,1 Stuart Hall distinguishes two phases of Black politics in
British culture. In the way I understand it, his goal is to mainly focus and discuss the latter and
more mature one, differentiating it from the more simplified phase during which the notion of a
general “black” identity was dominant. It is important to note in the beginning, that Hall neither
sees the two phases in comparison nor as the latter substituting the former. He analyzes them as
parts of a common process where one gradually displaces the other.
The first phase of the process has created the idea of a common “black experience” as
differentiation from its white and culturally dominant equivalent. In this sense, in this phase, the
different experiences of people coming from different historical, geographical, cultural, political,
etc. backgrounds are identified under one common label, “black”. These people are considered as
parts of the social sphere in a negative way, as the counterexamples of the “normal” white-
dominated sphere.
This changes in the second phase, where the integration of these people into the
multicultural modern societies and their role in the sociopolitical discourse transforms them from
objects to subjects. In the words of the author, “what is at issue here is the recognition of the
extraordinary diversity […] which compose the category “black”.2 While previously the former
colonial subjects needed to be categorized as a single unit to become a matter of consideration, in
the second phase described by Hall they need to also be analyzed under the prism of their different
backgrounds, to be understood as functional parts of social and cultural categories. This process is
complicated and this is also recognized by the author itself, but in it, we can also observe the ideas
of intersectionality, where the “black object” is no more part of a romantic representation, where
he or she is always part of a victimization process, but acts like a human being with all the attributes
of a social and cultural subject (race, gender, class, etc.).3
 Hall’s idea of the new ethnicities summarizes this analysis of the two phases. While under
“ethnicity”, most people would understand a dominant notion of race (a White Englishman, for
example) which was “doomed to survive […] only by marginalizing, dispossessing, displacing,
and forgetting other ethnicities”,4 the “new ethnicities” also include groups, such as the “blacks”,
that used to be marginalized, etc. by the previously dominant race. Although, of course, Hall does
not imply here that an absolute “race” equality has been achieved, he shows the unfolding of this
process.
A characteristic example of the realization of this process is the African and Caribbean War
Memorial in Brixton, London, inaugurated (also quite characteristically) in 2017. It commemorates
the victims of the First and Second World Wars who served under the British Flag but were not
explicitly mentioned in other memorials of the war effort or were forgotten as being parts of
common British ethnicity, represented almost exclusively by examples of traditional White British
men. By unveiling a separate monument for these former colonial subjects who were called to fight
for the British Empire, alongside servicemen (and women) from India, Australia, New Zealand,
etc. shows the new role that is given to previously marginalized ethnic groups. It is important to
mention here that the term “African and Caribbean” also does not make explicit the differentiation
between the different cultural heritages of those people both before and after colonialism (millions
of Africans from many different cultures were solved as slaves to work in Caribbean plantations),
but at least it mentions the particularity of their participation of the war and transforms them into a
separate important factor in the final victory of the British Empire.
This legitimation of their separate memory is a process that is taking place in the Western
World in the last decades and is a signal of both guilt and gratitude from the side of the former
colonial nations to the ethnicities that have been exploited during the course of the 15th- to 20th
century, maybe even symbolizing a hope of the annulment of imperialistic and post-colonial
exploitation in the 21st.

1
Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-
Hsing Chen, Routledge, 1996, pp. 441-449.
2
Hall, 443.
3
Hall, 445-446.
4
Hall, 447.