Cultural Materialism

Cultural materialism as a literary critical practice—this article will not address its anthropological namesake—is a Marxist-inspired and mostly British approach to in particular Shakespeare and early modern English literature that emerged and became prominent in the 1980s. Its emphasis on the historical and material conditions of the production and reception of texts has remained influential, even if its political commitment and interventionist purposes have largely been abandoned and increasingly ignored. While certain of its formulations would seem to echo Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, or other thinkers of the period, the main influence is the British literary and cultural critic Raymond Williams, and his re-theorization, following Antonio Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony, of the orthodox Marxist binary of base and superstructure. For Williams, who coined the term “cultural materialism,” culture is neither a mere reflection of that base nor wholly independent of it. This does not rule out intentional human practice, but rejects the idealist position in seeing that practice as inseparable from specific historical conditions. Still, with culture not wholly determined by an economic base, it plays its own role in the construction and/or reproduction of the social totality, and inevitably becomes the site of ideological struggle. Next to the dominant, hegemonic cultural formation we will thus find declining, residual formations and nascent, emergent ones. Cultural materialism focused on the ideological forces at work in Shakespeare (and early modern literature more generally), in Shakespeare studies, and in contemporary re-stagings and representations—in for instance secondary education and advertising—of Shakespeare and/or his work. Rejecting humanist beliefs in transcendent, ahistorical, truth and in an essential human nature, cultural materialists insisted on historicization and argued that Shakespeare—and the study of literature in general—had been hijacked by a conservative humanist ideology that presented itself as timeless and “natural” and perhaps unwittingly colluded with a profoundly unjust and rapacious social order. One of cultural materialism’s main interests was social stratification and the way in which the dominant social order sought (and seeks) to legitimize itself—for instance through the construction of socially marginalized groups as “other,” a practice that led to an early interest in issues of gender and race, and would substantially contribute to the rise of queer studies. Inspired by its belief that ideological hegemony is never absolute and that all ideology at some point contradicts itself, cultural materialism reads texts for signs of subversion and political dissidence, arriving at often provocative interpretations whose ulterior purpose was to serve as interventions in current political debates.