Ugh, what a book! I already cannot wait to return to this delicious conversation between two incredible minds. I am going to stick with the theme of "conversation," as it is again what has struck me throughout this half of the book (probably because it is what they wrap up on, so to speak). hooks states that she wants to close their conversation by "talking about where is the place of love in all this" (119). Hall responds: "...love is many things. It is also a conversation, the right kind of conversation. It is also a pleasure in the fullest giving birth to conversation. It has something to do with the nature of the inventiveness...that somehow can get lost, and its boundaries dissolve as something new arises which is neither one nor the other, but a space in between" (120). This blurred form is what I am interested in, as they continue to discuss the form of jazz and improvisation in line with the conversation. How can we hold space for these forms of conversation when we so often get into the routine of academic discussions? Furthermore, in a time when going "back to the couch" and our personal lives are so intertwined with our politics, how can we hold space for the kind of self-reflexivity and vulnerable discussion of experiences that Hall and hooks demonstrate throughout their conversation?
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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