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Week 6: Racist ideologies, Cultural Studies, & Culture Wars

I usually get exhausted half-way through 40+ page academic articles, but getting through "Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance" felt SO rewarding. Stuart Hall carefully untangles the limitations of economic and sociological theoretical frameworks and insists on linking & theorizing economic, historical, social, ideological, and of course, racial structures through the process of articulation. Toward the end of the piece, Hall writes “The ideologies of racism remain contradictory structures, which can function both as the vehicles for the imposition of dominant ideologies, and as the elementary forms for the cultures of resistance” (241). I am interested in the latter part of this statement: How do ideologies of racism also create cultures of resistance? What does this resistance look like? What conditions and structures cause different non-Black ethnic groups to weaponize racist ideologies for their own benefit? 


On the institutionalization of cultural studies, Slack writes “as cultural studies becomes more ‘domesticated,’ that is, as it becomes a more institutionally acceptable academic practice, the ‘problem’ of articulation will be cast more as a theoretical, methodological and epistemological one than a political and strategic one (127). This sentiment also echoes that of Stuart Hall’s, where instead of perceiving cultural studies as a critical, deconstructive project, it is seen as “one more paradigm”(“On Postmodernism and Articulation” 59). What do you all see as the current concerns of theory & theorizing in the field of cultural studies? What conditions in academia lead to theory losing its political imperative? (Here, I am also thinking about how critical race theory and/or abolitionist thought are subject to being metaphorized, treated as an ornament or career booster in the academy😐).

P.S.: What do you all make of the "culture wars"? Is there really such a thing as two (maybe multiple) competing ideologies or one ideology rearticulated to serve a different purpose (Biden-Harris's intersectional imperialism, for one)?

Thelma

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