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)?
In "Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance," Stuart Hall is concerned with complicating Marxist theory's tendency to overgeneralize and universalize its claims that are specifically located within a European history of labor. Questions concerning slavery, coloniality, unfree/forced labor come to the fore and force Marxist theorists to grapple with the need to be specific in their contextualization and historicization of particular moments, ruptures and conjunctures. My questions are as follows: 1. How do we move forward with Marxism while taking into account the component of "unfreedom" when conceptualizing class, labor, and labor power? How does the "proletariat" fail to account for the lived realities of racialized bodies? 2. It seems as though Hall is also saying that race is not all encompassing and also shouldn't be overgeneralized/universalized. In short, labor and race are both always already at work. As a scholar who ce...
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