Skip to main content

Corrine's Cutting Couch Conversations

 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?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Journals and Prose

My two questions from this week have emerged from the Judith Butler piece, A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back , both centered around the journal, Philosophy and Literature —which Butler describes as the self-proclaimed “arbiter of good prose.”  I agree with Butler’s staunch defense of questioning common sense and provoking “new ways of looking at a familiar world”, and was reminded of David Harvey’s quote in the introduction to his Companion to Marx’s Capital : “Real learning always entails a struggle to understand the unknown.”   Butler describes Philosophy and Literature as a “culturally conservative academic journal” which naturally led me down a longer-than-anticipated visit to the journal's website . I was greeted with a video presented by the Philosophy and Literature’s editor Garry L. Hagberg, who rails against the “jargon infested” work that litters the journal’s field, locating Philosophy and Literature in clear opposition to such bothersome clutter.  However, Hagberg...
Post a Comment
Read more

Articulation_by_Abby Escatel

 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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 5

  What are the differences between Gramsci’s concept of the “organic intellectual” and Hall’s “public pedagogy?”   On the topic of the diasporic intellectual, Kuan-Hsing Chen mentions that “Some of the diasporic intellectuals I know of have exercised their power, for better or worse, back home, but you have not. And some of them are trying to move back, in whatever way. So, in that sense, you are very peculiar” (503). Although Hall felt some reconnection with the Carribean through the Black diasporic population in Britain, he insists that cultural identity is not fixed but “comes out of very specific historical formations, out of very specific histories and cultural repertoires of enunciation, that it can constitute a ‘positionality’, which we call, provisionally, identity” (503). Individuals can negotiate, rearticulate, recontextualize their different identities, but how does this rearticulation work at an institutional-level?   Thelma
Post a Comment
Read more