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New Ethnicities + Digital Story (Thelma)

 In “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” Stuart Hall provides an overview of the many concepts that Gramsci uses in his theoretical work, such as hegemony, social formation, and the idea of the organic intellectual, and shows how these theories can be inflected by the category of race. Hall reminds us of the relevance of articulation when he writes “ideologies are not transformed or changed by replacing one, whole, already-formed conception of the world with another, so much as by ‘renovating and making critical an already existing activity’” (320). I would like to discuss the limitations of (re)articulation: Are there any examples of theoretical frameworks that cannot or should not be rearticulated? 

I am also interested in discussing the idea of decoupling ethnicity from state violence to produce new cultural practices. In “New Ethnicities,” Hall explains “We still have a great deal of work to do to decouple ethnicity, as it functions in the dominant discourse, from its equivalence with nationalism, imperialism, racism and the state, which are points of attachment around which a distinctive British, or, more accurately, English ethnicity have been constructed” (252). What are examples of a successful decoupling of ethnicity from nationalism, imperialism, etc. in contemporary pop culture? (we can also talk about the limitations of Lin Manuel-Miranda's Hamilton, if anyone is down.)

Also, below is the link to my digital story. I actually have two versions of the same story: one version is primarily told through open access video clips and then I started to get paranoid about it and created another video with just free images, haha. 😅 The link below is the original video, but the other version is under the same account. I've also provided recommended readings in the description if you're interested in learning more about premodern critical race studies and the Beowulf poem. 

https://vimeo.com/684851836

Comments

  1. Wow... This story so well articulated and edited. It's very poetic.

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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?