Stuart Hall 2022 Seminar

  https://www.wevideo.com/view/2597407724

Here is my digital story,  Queerness in India

 I am interested in unpacking Gramsci's theorization of the relations of forces. It gives me a physics vibe of Karen Barad's entanglement that matters never disappear, they always exchange positions, disappear, and reappear. How do these "relations of force" contribute to "unstable balance"? And how do social forces retain their hegemonic powers throughout different time periods?

As always, it was a real pleasure to read Stuart Hall's elegant, measured prose this week.  Reading New Ethnicities , I was struck by Hall's willingness to own his mistakes—"I got the mode of address wrong too!"  (448, 449)—which underlines his desire to engage in political discourse (in this case, the 'politics of criticism') in a personable manner that often escapes more rigid, dogmatic theorists.  My first question relates to this observation and asks:  Have you read any other theorists who provide the same intimate self-reflectiveness that Hall offers his readers?   a. Does humility matter in academia? If so, why?  My second question is inspired by the final pages of  Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and asks:  How can Gramsci's writing on the contradictory nature of subordinated ideologies help us understand how, and why, racism still endures in organizations that "in the abstract, ought to be dedicated to anti-ra...

 In 'New Ethncities' Hall's central aim seems to be to decouple ethnicity from nationalism (or violent nationalism?). Usually,  nationalism is seen as a product of modernity, even though ethnonationalism can also be pre-modern. In that context, can we think of nationalism as violent per se? While Frantz Fanon emphasizes the role of violence in anti-colonial nationalism, shouldn't I distinguish it from colonialist nationalism? How can Hall's understanding of ethnicity be relevant to indigenous communities fighting against settler colonization and for self-determination? Given how Nazism is deeply connected with Mussolini's fascist model, why does Hall feel the need to clarify that Gramsci's work is relevant to conversations on race? Did the Holocaust become deracialized by the time Hall wrote the essay in 1986? 

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 transfo...

 Something I have been thinking about after these readings is the issue of abstraction. Hall, in working through Gramsci's writing, discusses how scholars have critiqued his arguments as "too concrete," too on-the-ground to be helpful for analysis outside of that particular issue (this was something I thought about as I read Gramsci's essays for this week as well- they are so historically situated, so firmly rooted in the specific instance he writes about). Hall then, in all his genius, reveals just how we can abstract Gramsci's ideas to theorize on issues like race and ethnicity, two topics that Gramsci has been critiqued for not grappling with deeply (whether he actually does this or not is, here, besides the point).  I have a few questions that stem out of this reading of Gramsci: first, how can we both utilize Hall's abstraction of Gramsci and make sure that the scholarship we create, if not abstract in-and-of itself, can be abstracted to a "higher...