ENCODING REALITY INTO FICTION/ DECODING FICTION AS REALITY: POSTMODERN HISTORIOGRAPHY AS CRITICAL THEORY

This paper is intended as a brief critical review of three interrelated, fairly similar critical theories, born out the necessity of looking into cultural forms and products with a view to finding the politics at work therein. While American New Historicism is more historically oriented, British Cultural Materialism, with its more obvious influence from Marxism, Postcolonialism and other theories which place the margin at their centre, seems to be more in tune with contemporaneity, and so is the area of Cultural Studies, with its emphasis on cultural representations. It is advocated here that contemporary fiction cannot be fully separated from other textual forms, which are considered here historiographic (not historical) because of their nature of texts produced subjectively, within a certain political, social and cultural context, irrespective of their assumed scientific objectivity. Literature, it is further argued, has become a discourse-oriented endeavour with an active participation, an idea supported in the present study by making reference to several critical and polemic writings by Salman Rushdie, which, in a topsyturvy, postmodernist manner, are foregrounded before, and not after the literature review proper.

Insights Into Physical Activity Adoption in Diabetes Patients: When Cultural Materialism Met the Transtheoretical Model

Background Although physical activity (PA) is a key behaviour for preventing and controlling diabetes (T2DM), low adoption-adherence continues to impair patient progress. Importantly, for many patients, intentional PA may have never been central to their wider cultural context. Therefore, progress in behaviour change may be more about collective than individual processes. The aim of this study was to identify barriers to undertake and maintain PA overtime and describe the relationship and the influence between these barriers in T2D patients’ real-life. Methods Twenty-two T2D patients contributed either to focus groups (n = 5) or to semi-structured interviews (n = 4). We explored adoption-adherence using an established behaviour change model (Transtheoretical) and an anthropological research method (Cultural Materialism) throughout a qualitative analysis. Results Findings suggested patients responded to PA promoted through medicalised services, using two basic, yet inter-related, social processes. To consider adopting PA a Basic Social Psychological Process was used. In contrast, patients willing to sustain PA focused on prominent ‘infrastructural’ barriers, using a Basic Social Structural Process. Conclusion This interpretation simplifies in two processes the change of behaviour related to PA. At the same time, defines the barriers’ relationship between the different levels and the influence that each level has in patients’ real-life. These insights support using phased, ecological frameworks to design and promote PA to patients with T2D, so they maintain changes over time.

Cultura é comum

Tradução do artigo “Culture Is Ordinary”.Publicado no Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, n. 6, p. 8 - 15, 2008.

A Critical Review of Ideological Trends in the Study of Zambian Literature in English

Two ideologically divergent schools of thought have emerged in the study of Zambian literature in English. The first one rooted in imperialist doctrines emerged in the early 1980s and continues to influence many studies on Zambian literature to this day. The second one with a clear object of the renaissance of world literatures like that of Zambia is recent. It begun towards the end of the second decade of the 2000s and challenges the first one. This paper gives a critical discussion of studies that constitute and mark these two trends. It is a desktop research that employs the documental analysis informed by the historical cultural materialism theory. It concludes that the imperialist school of thought overlook and impoverish our understanding of the wider ideological and political context in which Zambian literature in English has and is evolving and the world literary scene on which we encounter it. Then, the renaissance school of thought does not just remedy this ideological problem but creates an opportunity for us to study Zambian literature in English as a distinct local realist tradition that is organically developing and in transition.

Shakespeare Against Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism in the World of Globalisation

Critics belonging to cultural materialism consider that Shakespeare’s work has its own political dimension by demystifying specific forms of power. The paper deals with the way Shakespeare’s three great tragedies reveal how the authoritarian power could function through terror based on violence and dictatorship, and the abuse of that power in the world of globalisation.

Introduction

The introduction distinguishes between emancipation and abolition to mount a critique of liberalism. It argues that the slave as a value-form survives within racial capitalism after 1865. Critically examining the usual periodization of U.S. slavery and slavery’s supposed containment within the U.S. South, the introduction posits cultural materialism as the methodology necessary to grasp the enduring vestiges of slavery as a national institution.