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WEEK 8 Discussion Handout

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

  1. 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 demands.

With the separation of church and state, he does this by demonstrating the fragility of the boundary between these two nominally juxtaposed institutions.


One of the most important points that Gramsci makes here is that, upon enacting revolutionary change, superstructural elements such as the State, cannot be left to germinate on their own due to the impulse of these institutions towards “Taylorisation”. 


-The Concept of Passive Revolution

  1. Overview

-Passive Revolution exists as long as those within the resistance movement have some understanding of the endgame is and the inertia/popular support to get there. 


  1. War Of Position vs. War of Maneuver

-Gramsci uses the Italian Risorgimento to pose the question of whether passive revolution is tied to the “war of position,” “war of maneuver,” both, or none. He positions Camillo di Cavour as the representation of the former and Giuseppe Mazzini as the latter; while each was equally important to Italian independence, Mazzini’s inability to understand a definitive position and political presence resulted in the supremacy of Cavour and the Piedmonts when a unified Italy came into being. Gramsci criticizes Mazzini for failing to crystallize a dynamic position in opposition to the state.


  1. Leaders in mass movement

-Gramsci here talks about how, despite the fact that many revolutionary forces come into existence accidentally, most causes ultimately end up commandeered by existing “traditional, organic forces” (298). He references the French Revolution and the [first] World War here. “The absence among the radical-popular forces of any awareness of the role of the other side prevented them from being fully aware of their own role either; hence from weighing in the final balance of forces in proportion to their effective power onf intervention; and hence from determining a more advanced result, on more progressive and modern lines.” (298)



-Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity

  1. Overview

-Hall refers here to the limitation of Gramsci’s ideas commonly cited by leftist scholars studying in Gramsci’s shadow. This common understanding is that Gramsci’s theories are best/only applied to mid-century Europe, to describe the terrain of political, economic, and cultural hegemony. Hall explores this tension, ultimately deciding that Gramsci’s theories do have some limited relevance to how we understand racism and race. Hall’s main reason for this case connects to Gramsci “Hegemony and Separation of Powers” in that Gramsci explores social relations of production, not simply the economic. Hall joins Gramsci in rejecting the full embrace of economic determinism. In the case of ‘crisises’ specifically, Hall takes steps to demonstrate the influence of superstructural determinants on the exact shape and dimensions of any given crisis.


Hall interjects his analysis of Gramsci’s usefulness to the analysis of race towards the end in 8 key points

  1. Periodization of race tracks well onto Gramsci’s periodization of his own work

  2. The relative unevenness of the application of economic theory to the lives of people living in different contexts

  3. Non-class-reductionist approaches to racial analysis

  4. Non-homogenous understandings of class makeup

  5. Non-correspondence between economic, political, and ideological domains of hegemony which scramble attempts to counter them

  6. The State as an institution which perpetuates racism in ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ ways

  7. Culture as a key battleground for hegemony because of its political and ideological influences

  8. Ideology as a potential method for explaining pervasive racisms like “working-class racism”


-New Ethnicities

I. Overview

-The concept of representation and what it means for a nominally “black” marginalized group(within the British context including those of African and Asian descent) to be “represented” in socio-cultural and political spaces.


II. Construction of blackness formed as result of two discrete cultural “moments”

-The first moment refers to when “black” was termed as a means to unite the marginalized under a specific battle-of-the-day—or, as he puts it, “a way of referencing the common experience of racism and marginalization” (442).

-Blackness becomes “hegemonic” over other identities.

-marginalized Blacks found their strength in those fields, and ultimately were able to transform the primary forms of representation—music, style, literary, visual, and cinematic art, influencing their depictions from the fetishized, negatively figured “object” to the nuanced, deeper, positive depictions created by Black “subjects.”

Hall brings up the function of Black creators to “contest the marginality” of Black Britons—to push aside stereotypical notions of Otherness and instead incorporate their experience into British Experience writ large.

-The “new” moment is the new Black representation. Hall finds it problematic because, the simple definition as Blackfolk represented in culture is not without merits, the means through which said representation appears is just as important.

- “the end of the essential black subject;” the danger of “representation” as simply the presence of marginalized folks isn’t enough, and that a cultural shift was finally starting to take place in the 1980s in which Blacks and Black culture were enough of a part of British pop culture that the artistic significance of their contributions began to take precedence over the mere inclusion

-shift in definition of Blackness: “What is at issue here is the recognition of the extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social experiences, and cultural identities which compose the category ‘black;’ that is, the recognition that ’black is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed trans-cultural or transcendental racial categories and which therefore has no guarantees in nature.” (444)

-As Blackness becomes more nuanced, so must views and critiques of Black art. “films are not necessarily good because black people make them,” (445), but also that the recognition of that nuance involves understanding that the Black experience is constantly in articulation with issues of class, ethnicity, nationality, sex, gender, and other categories of marginalization.

Mentions four films—Territories, Passion of Remembrance, My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid

III. Difference and Contestation

-Blackness-as-Subject and Blackness-as-Object are still both complicated and intersectional.

-The “epistemic violence” of whiteness is ambivalent about identification and desire. If racism is the creation of an inferior/marginalized Other, then anti-racism has been positioned as merely a reversal/inversion of said concepts.

-However, since said Others are essentially bicultural (Black and British), they also have to contend with the Fanonian “white mask.”

-Hall also mentions Mapplethorpe fetishizing Blackness through the white gaze as a means of conveying how Black politics has huge blind spots relative to gender and sexuality; “black radical politics has frequently been stabilized around particular conceptions of black masculinity” [presumably cis-heteronormativity and misogyny].

-Ethnicity—Hall considers it “in the form of a culturally constructed sense of Englishness and a particularly closed, exclusive and regressive form of English national identity, is one of the core characteristics of British racism” (447). Within the context of Blackness, ethnicity takes the place of nature or some kind of specific, definitive guarantee (/legacy/social positioning) as that which constructs identity.

-representation in culture is only because representations take place within paradigms of a larger historical context.

-to use “ethnicity” as a means of repudiating racism does not mean the concept is as benign or concrete as is advertised; thus, the term will have to be reclaimed from colonizers much in the same way “black” is.

-Hall proposes new conception of ethnicity that illuminates difference and requires the “construction of new ethnic identities” (448), which decouples ethnicity from nationalism, racism, and the construction of barriers.

-With Blackness (and ethnicity by extension) as a diaspora experience, one must view Black British people as both Black and British. Subsequently, Black British films must be viewed with both contexts in consideration now (contemporaneous to the essay) more than before.


Vocabulary

  • Representation (Hall, New Ethnicities, p.444) 

  • Ethnicity (Hall, New Ethnicities, pp. 447-448)

  • War of position (Gramsci, The Concept of Passive Revolution

  • War of maneuver (Gramsci, The Concept of Passive Revolution)

  • Civil Society (Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebook p.506)

  • Political Society (Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebook p.506)

  • Teleology (Hall, Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity p.423)



Discussion Questions

  1. Is Passive Revolution as depicted by Gramsci a feasible means of social change in 21st-century society?

  2. How (if at all) are we seeing new forms of Hegemony manifest in an increasingly globalized, digital age? What apparatuses currently work on us in the same manner as state apparatuses?

  3. How could race or ethnicity be “grounded in nature?” Does Hall’s depiction of ethnicity minimize or expand the ever-shifting ethno-cultural makeup of the Global North?

  4. Dr. Whaley has done an excellent job of selecting pieces that are in conversation with one another. How does Hall understand and participate in critiques of Gramsci? How does he use and build on Gramsci as well?

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