Skip to main content

Welcome!!

Dear Colleagues, Thank you for taking this journey with me! This site is the digital repository for your discussion questions, assingments, and course multimedia. About the Course: Our course will explore the scholarship of Stuart Hall. In so doing, we will also examine the theories, methods, and history of cultural studies. The course focuses on the major areas of Hall’s work: Marxist thought and the political economy, diasporas and globalization, cultural production and popular culture, film and cinema studies, race, ethnicity, identity, and differánce. It will also cover key theorists that influenced Stuart Hall (e.g., Marx, Foucault, Fanon, Gramsci, and Althusser) and contemporary scholars in cultural studies that have made use of Hall’s writings and theories in their own work. Finally, we will consider the role of theory in everyday life and the critical role of public intellectuals. This English graduate course is cross-listed with the African American Studies Program, the American Studies department, and it counts toward the graduate certificate in African American Studies and the graduate certificate in Public Digital Humanities.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

On Journals and Prose

My two questions from this week have emerged from the Judith Butler piece, A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back , both centered around the journal, Philosophy and Literature —which Butler describes as the self-proclaimed “arbiter of good prose.”  I agree with Butler’s staunch defense of questioning common sense and provoking “new ways of looking at a familiar world”, and was reminded of David Harvey’s quote in the introduction to his Companion to Marx’s Capital : “Real learning always entails a struggle to understand the unknown.”   Butler describes Philosophy and Literature as a “culturally conservative academic journal” which naturally led me down a longer-than-anticipated visit to the journal's website . I was greeted with a video presented by the Philosophy and Literature’s editor Garry L. Hagberg, who rails against the “jargon infested” work that litters the journal’s field, locating Philosophy and Literature in clear opposition to such bothersome clutter.  However, Hagberg...

Week 6 Discussion Qs

 Hall brings up the concept of interpellation as applied to social formations. (p 335) How is interpellation related to articulation? How are the two different, if at all? Must the two be discussed together? I have more difficulty conceptualizing interpellation than I do articulation. If we are to take up Hall's warning not to study racism as a set of "historically specific racisms" (336) nor as something with a "universal structure" (337). What balance can we strike today between these two approaches in our current historical moment? Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has written that certain forms of modern racism have been impacted by the prevalent ideology of "colorblindness." Are we still in this moment or are new specificities arising?

Corrine's Op Ed

       Although the Grammy’s “rebranded” their “urban” music award in 2020 after being taken to task by Tyler, the Creator for using the term to cover all black artists, regardless of their chosen genre, its lingering presence can still be felt in the new “Progressive R&B” award that has taken its place. Where Tyler, the Creator and other artists argued for more diverse genres that allow for broader categorizations for “people who look like [him],” the Grammy’s simply tucked one category into the other, reflecting how “urban” and R&B are both intrinsically linked and coded to the Grammy’s board as “black music.” This neat folding away of urban back into R&B seems to be unhelpful at best and reductive at worst, and has serious repercussions for us all, artist or otherwise: the pigeonholing of black art/ ists into essentialized categories allows for only a few forms of blackness to be legitimated through the Grammy system, but it also reflects the rigid bo...