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Week 8 Question- Corrine

 Something I have been thinking about after these readings is the issue of abstraction. Hall, in working through Gramsci's writing, discusses how scholars have critiqued his arguments as "too concrete," too on-the-ground to be helpful for analysis outside of that particular issue (this was something I thought about as I read Gramsci's essays for this week as well- they are so historically situated, so firmly rooted in the specific instance he writes about). Hall then, in all his genius, reveals just how we can abstract Gramsci's ideas to theorize on issues like race and ethnicity, two topics that Gramsci has been critiqued for not grappling with deeply (whether he actually does this or not is, here, besides the point). 

I have a few questions that stem out of this reading of Gramsci: first, how can we both utilize Hall's abstraction of Gramsci and make sure that the scholarship we create, if not abstract in-and-of itself, can be abstracted to a "higher" level? Second, how can we abstract Hall's claims about black cultural politics and the politics of representation to discuss other notions of race and ethnicity we see occurring in contemporary society? 

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