Stuart Hall 2022 Seminar

 

This is the first time in a while that I've gotten to read Stuart Hall's thoughts and not feel as if I was being bludgeoned. I think this was the perfect text for this time in the course, a moment to absorb the thoughts of two people literally conversing and not just via articles. My question for the week deals with hooks and their recounting of their particularly vicious critique of Oprah Winfrey. She said something that was perceived as rather aggressive and violent. Subsequently: Is there a place for incisive, aggressive language in cultural critique? In the era of the demonization of so-called "cancel culture," are we truly seeing an age in which questions or critique must be carefully couched--needless or otherwise?

 I am too interested in the entanglement of black masculinity and black feminism in hooks and Hall's conversation. It seems like a tireless demand that Black women have to choose between race or gender, never just their own needs. The reluctance to engage with feminist thoughts by Black women and men seems to do with an obligation of racial loyalty, and insecurity of masculinity and blackness. I am inspired by Thelma's post about the recent event between Chris Rock, Will Smith and Jada. There are so many questions and intersectional complications to unpack, which I hope we can do in class!!!

 I will keep my intro brief, as I think I will mainly just be echoing my classmates, but what a delicious book! I have really be enjoying reading two great minds converse through "the mundane to the profound" (2). Gilroy mentions in his introduction that "readers...are invited to appreciate the tone and timbre of these interlocked voices in the same spirit with which the participants listened carefully to each other" (x). I was reminded of this early in the reading, through hooks and Hall's mediations on conversation as pedagogy, especially Hall's comments on page 7: "It is as much about rhythm as anything else. If you are living the rest of your life at a certain intensified rhythm, it just doesn't fit the rhythm of conversation. You can't hurry." This seems to be compounded for academic readers by their reflections on how being "paid to talk" or teach in the academy changes the status of talking or teaching. My question then rev...

I don’t know why instructors don’t assign texts like Uncut Funk. I am particularly touched by the reflections around death and dying, and what that meant for hooks and Hall. I agree that conversations, in general, are fluid and organic, as opposed to fancy conferences (5) and this text is an important reminder about how certain scholars don’t quite approach their personal lives with critical rigor. The praxis/theory binary is extremely redundant and dangerous. For instance, Lee Edelman’s No Future sounds like a piece of shit not only because it is exclusive to the white family but also because he is happily married in real life. While I understand the danger of “heavy-handed political correctness” (12) and Evren Savci’s Queer in Translation is a recent intervention on that subject, I am not quite convinced by hooks and Hall’s references. The controversies over the Redemption Song episode and hooks’ remarks on Oprah are very specific and different, as is the criticism over Hall’s use of...

As I've gleaned from other posts so far, Uncut Funk has been a particularly popular read for our class; this strikes me as unsurprising considering the warmth (and intellect) of bell hooks and Stuart Hall shines through every page.  The "fluidity" of conversation, to quote Hall (5), sits in stark contrast to both stuffy, static conference panels and the decentralized "mirage" of digital networks that Gilroy critiques in the book's foreward (ix).  My question for this week asks:  How can we subvert academia's demand to talk at, not with , people and instead "engage knowledge across different kinds of boundaries," as hooks (6) so beautifully puts it?  a. How can we make conference panels more collaborative, more organic, more alive ?  Glenn H 

  Writing in 2014, Gilroy argues that the 1996 conversation took place in a space where ““The US-centric liturgy of generic, internet-friendly   identity-talk   is   entirely   absent. It was not a factor when these dialogues took place. There are no casual invocations here of either privilege or victimage” (xi). How has such modern language substantively changed the conversation? What have we lost through the digital shift?   Hall and hooks both discuss whether universities represent spaces for political conversations (4). hooks recounts that “I remember the lack of spaces of conversation as one of   my deepest disappointments when I arrived at Stanford. Evidently, at one time, they had designated rooms where people could get together to have tea and talk” (4). How much learning and change (should) happen in vs. outside the classroom? What are the limits of formally recognized spaces of knowledge?

  In the beginning of their dialogue, Hall and hooks discuss the tension(s) of the feminist rupture in cultural studies and how it was misunderstood at the beginning of its formation. hooks explains many Black women intellectuals were too intimidated to engage in a feminist critique with their male counterparts because of their shared race. While on the other hand, some Black male intellectuals were reluctant to having their work transformed by feminist thinking. Although both Hall and hooks suggest that the hostility and initial resistance to the feminist rupture has already been forgotten, how do feminist or cultural studies continue to resist Black feminism today?  I am also interested in the idea of the lost father patriarchy and hooks’s theory that Black masculinity is confined to heterosexist paradigms because of its “overwhelming fear of homosexuality” (26). Beyond feminist and queer studies, are there any other theoretical paradigms for examining the expression of Blac...

 I was very interested in the discussion around masculinity, especially when Hall contextualized its roots, arguing that masculinity served as the answer to emasculation during enslavement among formerly enslaved people. Hall also connected the idea of family as the only site of renewal to slavery, stating that the family unit was an act of resistance and the only structure for black people during slavery. How can we contend with both the resistance qualities of masculinity and the family unit and their deployment to alienate/separate/uphold patriarchy?

In my undergraduate work, I accidentally took a graduate philosophy class over Plato’s Theaetetus— a dialogue that examines the nature of knowing. The entire, semester-long course was dedicated to a line-by-line examination of the text to understand Plato’s theory of knowledge. As I was reading Uncut Funk, I experienced nostalgia for that Plato course. Hall and hooks discuss the pedagogy and method of conversation early on in the dialogue, and I found profound connections between their dialogue and Plato’s philosophical dialogues. What I remember most from the course was the intellectual pleasure we got as a class in uncovering truth and understanding in our close reading. Uncut Funk deserves such an analysis, and I can envision graduate seminars of the future taking a line-by-line approach to hooks and Hall. My question/s focus/es on the method of dialogue and public discourse as pedagogy: 1) In what public spaces (if any) do meaningful dialogues like this happen outside of Universiti...

  Oh wow oh wow, this is by far my favorite reading of this semester (in this class but also I think out of all my classes!) and I am very much looking forward to discussing more in class. Towards the end of our reading for this week, hooks and Hall are discussing desire, reproduction, (the art of) dying, and aesthetics (of existence). This dialogue arose from a conversation about text, writing and content/form. In an argument for progressive transformation hooks emphasizes eroticization, play, and pleasure. hooks says “Our imagination is where out strength to resist lies” (46). How do we play with form within our own every day work within the academy and incorporate play and pleasure? Can we? Or do we, like hooks, need to exist inside and outside of it to do so?   Masculinity was also a central topic of the dialogue we read so far. In one of my GWSS classes at Nova we had a week on masculinity studies, reading Brod’s “The Case for Men’s Studies” and Reeser’s Intro of Masculin...

 

  Julien and Mercer, “De Margin and De Centre”  A new demand for Black representation New “aesthetic and cinematic strategies within the Black British independent sector” (454) A rupture in both hegemonic regimes of representation and in form (contesting documentary realism) Because Black films are still marginal and are fewer in number, “each film text is burdened with an inordinate pressure to be ‘representative’ and to act, like a delegate does, as a statement that ‘speaks’ for the black communities as a whole.” Singular voices often speak for many more who are excluded from the systems of production, funding, training, distribution that allow independent films to enter the public sphere “It has become apparent that what is at stake in the debates on ‘black representations is not primarily a dispute over realist or modernist principles, but a broader problematic in cultural politics shaped, as Paul Gilroy suggests, by the tension between representation as a practice of depi...

 Hi everyone! I apologize for my late post; coming back from spring break has been almost more jarring than ever, and it completely slipped my mind last night... I have been thinking through a lot of the work Hall does in "Who Needs Identity?" He wraps up his essay with the following: "...the question, and the theorization, of identity is a matter of considerable political significance, and is only likely to be advanced when both the necessity and the 'impossibility' of identities, and the suturing of the psychic and the discursive in their constitution, are fully and unambiguously acknowledged" (16). I am struggling to understand what exactly this means for us: how can we "fully and unambiguously acknowledge" this suturing of the psychic and discursive? How does the notion of "difference" or "lack" play a role in this suturing and subsequent acknowledgement?

My question focuses, as always, on Blackness: As we are now 55 years removed from Loving v. Virginia and new generations of multi-ethnic Blackfolk grow and develop in a post-Obama America, is "Blackness" an obsolete marker in the USA? What is "Black" now--old or new (and I don't mean Orange)?

 I am intrigued by Hall's connection between identification and articulation. It kind of explains how human nature is always contradictory, because our identities connect historical sites, discursive tensions, and human relations. I want to know how everyone understands their identity formation through the lens of articulation. 

I read “The Local, The Global, & The Return to Ethnicity" with the same look of envy I unconsciously adopt whenever studying a piece of Stuart Hall's writing: how does he always discuss complex topics with such concise sophistication? Anyway, onto the question. Hall's reference to (and development of) Anderson's concept of an imagined community (626) reminded me, of course, of Donald's Trump's pledge to Make America Great Again and Vote Leave's demand to "Take Back Control" during the Brexit referendum. Take back what? From whom? Why? The details, naturally, will be figured out later.   My question asks:  When discursive strategies such as these are weaponized by the right—during elections, referendums, or to drum up support for toxic anti-immigration policies—what tools do those on the left have to counter narratives centered upon invented traditions and foundational myths?  Glenn H 

I wish I had read this week’s pieces earlier. They are so relevant to my research.  However, I am somewhat disappointed with how Hall ends the essay on “who needs ‘identity’?” Having grappled with the relationship between subject, identity, and body (and also self?) I was expecting him to try and answer his answer. I am annoyed that he does not engage with the WOC feminist scholarship at all despite using the last few paragraphs to give token attention to feminism via Butler. Given the time that he is writing this essay, how can Hall ignore the literature produced by the likes of Moraga, Anzaldua, Lorde, Crenshaw, or Collins (even though he engages with Butler)? What does it say about his citational politics? Can identity be understood by only relying on psychoanalysis and a unidimensional understanding of phenomenology?

Stuart hall in “Who Needs Identity” states that identification is “a process of articulation, a suturing, an over-determination not a subsumption. There is always ‘too much’ or ‘too little’ -- an over determination or a lack, but never a proper fit, a totality.” In this understanding of identification, Hall determined that in the process of identifying , a person is differencing in a form that does not completely fit the whole of one’s personhood, but because of the over determination of identification, it serves as an all-encompassing whole that could identify a person as a group of people. In relation to the indication of identification, how does identification control power structures of hegemonic cultures in the complicated relationship of empowering and depowering individuals who are unified?  

  A consistent thread throughout recent readings has been the (dis)advantages of essentializing and defining identities. What is at stake if we embrace that identities are non-logical concepts, perhaps more based on affect and subjectivity than perfectly rational systems? Are identity labels ultimately more important for marginalized communities or hegemonic structures? Julien and Mercer argue that “various ‘marginal’ practices (black British film, for instance) are becoming de-marginalized at a time when ‘centred’ discourses of cultural authority and legitimation […] are becoming increasingly de-centred and destabilized” (453). Is there a connection between the critique of White supremacist hegemony and the deconstruction of racial identities writ large? Is the questioning of the concept of “identity” in part motivated by the push to center the “wrong” identities?

 

In “The Global, the Local, and the Return of Ethnicity,” Hall argues that globalization can both contest and dislocate dominant identities of national culture. He substantiates Anthony McGrew’s definition and explains that globalization is a process that operates on a global scale and cuts “across national boundaries, integrating and connecting communities and organizations in new space-time combinations making the world in reality and in experience more interconnected”(630). How does globalization continue (or fail) to contest these imagined national identities? I am also interested in Ang's question about consenting to a particular identification or subject position. Is there a difference between self-identification or being thrusted (hailed?) into identity categories if these identities still set the same stage for our encounters with people, the nation, the world? It blows my mind how identity, when expressed through language, can both fuel a fire, but also fail to express the ...

Julien and Mercer are concerned with the effect that limited opportunities to make black films has on the ones that do get made. They argue that these films have the burden of becoming representative and the burden of acting as a statement that speaks for black communities. How can we as viewers/consumers of films help dismantle this burden on black films? -Daisy 

  In “The Global, the Local, and the Return of Ethnicity,” there is a quote that reads, “Capital has never allowed its aspirations to be determined by national boundaries” (630), and I thought about this quote when reading the list of companies that have pulled out Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine and global economic sanctions. I won’t pretend to know much about the ins and outs of Russia’s economic structure, nor am I intimately familiar with the complexities of the economic sanctions imposed by the rest of the world which leads me to my question: How have Putin and Russia ignored the evolving landscape of globalization in their attempt to wage a war of maneuver in Ukraine? Or, did Russia simply miscalculate how complicated waging a war of position would be? It seems a country, forged in espionage, well-versed in creating propaganda, would be aware of the potential consequences of waging all-out war in Eastern Europe without—pardon the phrasing—proper messaging. (Ign...

  Phew ok, now that I’m done having an existential crisis about identity (or, really, as Hall talks about, identification) and its “increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions” (4). Basically, the foundation being in constant articulation. ((Is this what Whitman meant by containing multitudes??)). I wonder what it would look like for a subject not to invest in a position (6); could you invest in some but not others? Are we aware of this investment? Or just consenting? I’m just interested in unpacking how something so fragile - an identification that constantly needs to be worked on and upheld through various (re) articulations - can be so hard to destroy. And by destroy here I mean dislodging identification/identities that hail/invest logic’s of oppression like, say, that of nation. Or, as Julien and Mercer propose, can we take up the deconstructive project (453)?

https://youtu.be/LoYPdvEbJCg

I was trying something far too ambitious with this and, thus, it doesn't really work for this assignment. I 'll try something different over/after break, but I put a lot of work into this, so this is what you get for now: [edit: the sound sliders wouldn't work on the initial version, so let's try this one!] https://www.wevideo.com/view/2602309192

 

 Here is the link to my video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wu99-lUNW48qv2muO5EwbSyRKtwUluHF/view?usp=sharing

The file is too big to upload here, so here is the link to view it! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sG5V9vc0_a7o03JYr3v6v7YIkR7VgnyJ/view?usp=sharing 

Is It Week Eight Already? Yikes. Uche Anomnachi/A. Darryl Moton Before We Get Started: How do we feel about what we read this week?  What aspects of the readings sparked particularly visceral reactions?  Has anyone tried the new West African restaurant on Benson where the Iraqi place used to be? Summaries - Hegemony and Separation of Powers Overview -Gramsci spends time here discussing some core principles upon which post-enlightenment parliamentary regimes are founded. His goal being to demonstrate the ways in which liberalism, as Europe’s dominant political ideology of the day, naturally and surreptitiously exercises hegemony. He thinks upon key concepts like the separation of power, the separation of church and state, and the rule of law. Things that we learn in civics classes as the markers of a fair and enlightened democracy. Gramsci makes the case that these measures, despite their supposed enlightenment, act reflexively to influence and coerce people as the situation de...