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Week 5

 What are the differences between Gramsci’s concept of the “organic intellectual” and Hall’s “public pedagogy?”  


On the topic of the diasporic intellectual, Kuan-Hsing Chen mentions that “Some of the

diasporic intellectuals I know of have exercised their power, for better or

worse, back home, but you have not. And some of them are trying to move

back, in whatever way. So, in that sense, you are very peculiar” (503). Although Hall felt some reconnection with the Carribean through the Black diasporic population in Britain, he insists that cultural identity is not fixed but “comes out of very specific historical formations, out of very specific histories and cultural repertoires of enunciation, that it can constitute a ‘positionality’, which we call, provisionally, identity” (503). Individuals can negotiate, rearticulate, recontextualize their different identities, but how does this rearticulation work at an institutional-level?  


Thelma

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2/2 Discussion Questions

Althusser makes a point that ISAs operate as "unified" under the ruling ideology. To what extent are certain ISAs unified if they are "the site of class struggle" playing out, holding the potential for "ruptures" (to use Hall's phrase) with dominant ideologies? Here, I am thinking about the University of Iowa's COVID policies and how its rules are practiced and applied in many different ways throughout campus, as administrative burdens and scale make it difficult to oversee large numbers of employees. More generally, as junior scholars, grad students, and/or individuals doing cultural studies work, does it make more sense for us to do deep and nuanced readings of theorists such as Marx and Althusser in our work, or to cite others who have expanded these traditions over the years?

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?