Stuart Hall 2022 Seminar

  Queerness in India

  https://vimeo.com/695272441

 Hi everyone! Looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow to talk through these readings. Something that struck me in these readings was how easily something like cultural studies (which is supposed to be provisional and non-universal, for the most part) becomes broken down into binaries that posit one position or the other rather than a more flexible understanding. For example, du Gay (and other scholars we've read) explores how the political economy and the cultural economy are set against one another, which is why Hall's call to understand the economic as cultural is so necessary, and Stratton and Ang explore how cultural studies itself became set up as largely national vs. the global, or maybe rather a larger emphasis was placed on the national.  My question in all of this is: While we know it can be helpful to be able to abstract our scholarship to larger issues, can it ever be helpful to think in universal terms or binaries? These readings (and the tenets of cultural stud...

 I am interested in the same western-centric and colonial power dynamic in the field of cultural studies as every other academic discipline. As US-trained scholars, what do we mean when we say "international" and "global"? What does it even mean to "decolonize" cultural studies?

 Hi everyone, I can't believe this is our last post for the semester! Paul du Gay explores the discourse of economy and economic management in the context of economic globalization alongside national economic securitization. Understanding globalization as a form of common sense, du Gay insists on a distinction between what was once a rhetorical logic of homoeconomicus to its contemporary iteration of entrepreneurial self/man. (119-120) I wan to posit a question on method, how do we come to name a new constitutive formation? To me, both of these sound oddly similar. From my understanding, entrepreneurial man is coded to be in constant making of the self (attempting to erase the "losers" of capitalism as always self making; i.e. unemployment), one whose status is perpetuated by the convergence of state and market logics. So while I think I follow where there is distinction, how do we become perceptive to the complexity of the contemporary moment without flattening distincti...

I can't believe this is our final blog post of the semester! How time flies.  My question for this week is:  What "tentative pathways" (242) does Kobena Mercer draw between Stuart Hall's scattered writings on diaspora in A Sociography of Diaspora, and how can the additional voices and scholars that Mercer puts in conversation with Hall's work help us better appreciate the nuances of diaspora as a term?  a. Is Hall's theorization of diaspora interrupted, supported, or developed by Mercer?  Glenn H

While reading this week, the quote from Dipesh Chakrabarty in “On the Impossibility of a Global Cultural Studies: British Cultural Studies in an International Frame  “ really struck me as the conversation about the Centre of cultural studies has been framed in. It read, “the real problem may be that the genre in which “histories” are being invented for cultural studies often leads people into positing a single origin for their practice—something which those same people would never do in any other context.” I would offer up the contradictory nature of cultural studies, providing a hegemonic and dominant reading. The reading continues by positioning Stuart Hall as the founder and potential spokesperson for this dominant but diasporic lens of cultural studies. Hall later recalls these myths about the origin of Cultural Studies and his positionality as a cultural studies subject. I find it quite complicated to situate cultural studies in its international context without fully a...

I found it a bit weird that Jon Stratton and Ien Ang seem to agree with Graeme Turner’s reading of British Cultural Studies as “a form of intellectual neo-colonialism” (384) but spend very little time unpacking Taiwanese Cultural studies and terms like “subaltern” or “postcolonial.” How can an entire country be representative of the “subaltern”? How can only former colonies represent the“diaspora”?  I will also take this opportunity to ask a question that is bothering me for some time. What does institutionalization mean? If cultural studies emerged as a result of conversations between people in academia, isn’t institutionalization a predictable fallout?

This is a very zoned in question that isn’t the central argument Stratton and Ang are making, but I wanted to unpack their description of the cultural studies book as monstrous. I understand their use of it, but it seems like such a specific word to use. On page 363 they write: “What we have here is more than a simple western hegemony; what we have is a new American hegemony in an English-speaking cultural studies (which speaks to their main argument). I think I am wondering about the tension between not being an “average academic book” as monstrous and cultural studies as an ‘international venture’ as monstrous. Should we desire the not typical, average academic (bringing it all the way back to Giroux) while interrogating the ‘international’ venture?   Also, just a lighthearted question, I was wondering if people wanted to share what they’re walking away with/thinking about as the semester ends :-)  

  The State of War and the State of Hybridization - Nestor Garcia Canclini What is the patrimony of humanity (or cultural heritage) in an age of globalization? Canclini explores this question and examines the tension between globalization and interculturality, starting with two narratives of global homogenization:  The first narrative proposes “globalization as a process of world integration, in which ethnic and national differences would dissolve” (ex: Yukinory Yanagi’s sand flags and migrating ants metaphor- the dissolution of borders, nationalisms, imperialisms, and markers of identity. (39)  The second narrative (primarily disseminated in the political field) recognizes the complexity of globalization and encounters between the West and East, yet it reduces these confrontations to “wars between cultures,” (ex: Gulf War interpreted by Arabs as the West against Islam and the tension between Catholics and Muslims in former Yugoslavia). Canclini explains that not all cult...

 In the Mercer piece for this week, I was intrigued by the question of normative hybridization and how it relates to difference. From what I gathered, Mercer is proposing that we've reached a point where difference is no longer "subversive" in itself, and "sameness" has begun to "disrupt[] social perceptions of symbolic categories and classificatory systems." (241) This semi-linear framework seems to perpetuate a cycle where eventually we'll get back to a place where difference is again emphasized, after "sameness" becomes the norm. If we agree with Mercer about this cycle, then what period are we in right now? Or is there any going back to "sameness" as the norm once difference has been asserted?

 

       Although the Grammy’s “rebranded” their “urban” music award in 2020 after being taken to task by Tyler, the Creator for using the term to cover all black artists, regardless of their chosen genre, its lingering presence can still be felt in the new “Progressive R&B” award that has taken its place. Where Tyler, the Creator and other artists argued for more diverse genres that allow for broader categorizations for “people who look like [him],” the Grammy’s simply tucked one category into the other, reflecting how “urban” and R&B are both intrinsically linked and coded to the Grammy’s board as “black music.” This neat folding away of urban back into R&B seems to be unhelpful at best and reductive at worst, and has serious repercussions for us all, artist or otherwise: the pigeonholing of black art/ ists into essentialized categories allows for only a few forms of blackness to be legitimated through the Grammy system, but it also reflects the rigid bo...