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Week 8 Questions - Robert

In Hall’s discussion within “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” he begins by returning to the idea of the ‘open horizon.’ Specifically, he advocates for taking theory, paradigms, and interpretive schemes and applying them to new historical conditions, racism in this case. According to Hall, Gramsci practices this type of ‘open’ theory within a broader context of marxism, directing it to new questions and conditions, providing an important method for future theorists. When Hall begins his discussion of racism, he discusses the interrelationship between class and race, saying that many analyses tend to ‘privilege’ either class or race when examining this interrelationship. During this section, I was picking up some major “intersectionality” vibes. Both of my questions relate to these vibes:


“How can we see Hall’s discussion of the complexity of analyzing the interrelationship between class and race as a precursor or ‘open horizon’ for intersectionality as a transformative interpretive scheme in cultural studies?”


“How does intersectionality provide new theories, paradigms, and interpretive schemes for analyzing class, race, and ethnicity, or is it the same old framework with a shiny new package?”

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