Skip to main content

Week 5 Discussion (Corrine)

 1) I thoroughly enjoyed working through Giroux's theorization of Hall's "public pedagogy." I am interested in many aspects of this article, but I want to focus in particular on Giroux's discussion around representations specifically. They write that "representations can be understood for the ways in which they shape and bear witness to the ethical dilemmas that animate broader debates within the dominant culture" and that "the implications of this argument suggest a cultural politics that investigates how popular texts are articulated within structures of affect and meaning mediated by networks of power and domination bound to the specific historical, social and economic conditions of their production" (355). As a media studies scholar, I often find that studies of representation sometimes skim the surface of deeper cultural issues (or even turn into the cultural scholarship that Hall negatively describes when he discusses textual analyses of The Sopranos). How can our studies of representation make sure to keep these networks of power and domination and the more "behind-the-scenes" aspects of constructing a representation in mind to stay away from the pitfall of creating "rubbish masquerading as cultural studies"?

2) I'm also invested in the theme of hope I see in, especially the Giroux reading, but really all the readings for this week (and most of Hall's readings, in general). How can we utilize hope in our pedagogical and political practices? Is hope a useful tool for the cultural issues Hall, and by extension, we are engaged in?

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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?
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more