Stuart Hall Syllabus

Required Texts:

Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). [N.B.: Buy on-line]

Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).

Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). [Also sold as Between Camps: Nations, Culture and the Allure of Race.]

Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage Publications, 1996).

David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge 1996).

Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

With the exception of the Carby book, all texts are available at the NYU Bookstore. All other texts are available either on Blackboard [Bb] or as an article in an e-journal through Bobst Library [Bobst e-journal].

Schedule of Readings, Assignments, and Screenings

January 25 Introduction to the course and each other
Screening: Race: The Floating Signifier.

February 1 Context and History
Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain.
ASSIGNMENT: Response Paper

February 8 Understanding the Crisis
Hall, “The Meaning of New Times,” in Stuart Hall.
Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in Stuart Hall.
Hall, “For Allon White: Metaphors of Transformation,” in Stuart Hall.
Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed, Stuart Hall et al., (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 184-227. [Bb]
Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1978), 3-28. [Bb]
ASSIGNMENT: Thesis Statement

February 15 Feminist interventions
Charlotte Brunsdon, “A Thief in the Night: Stories of Feminism in the 1970s at CCCS,” in Stuart Hall.
Angela McRobbie, “Looking Back at New Times and Its Critics, Stuart Hall.
Angela McRobbie, “The Politics of Feminist Research: Between Talk, Text and Action.” Feminist Review 12 (1982): 46-57. [Bobst e-journal]
Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17: 4 (Summer 1991): 773-797. [Bobst e-journal]
Women’s Studies Group, “Relations of Production, Relations of Re-Production,” Eds. Ann Gray et al., CCCS Selected Working Paper Volume 2 (London: Routledge, 2007), 464-433. [ebrary]
Hazel V. Carby, “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,” in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, eds. Houston Baker et. al. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 61-86. [Bb]
ASSIGNMENT: Response Paper

February 22 More on Althusser and Gramsci
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus: Notes toward an Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 85-126 (recommended), 95-120 (required). [Bb]
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, eds. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, (London: ElecBook, 1971), 445-449, 506-507, and 558-563. [ebrary]
Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, ed. Unesco, (Paris: Unesco, 1980), 306-345. [Bb]
Hall, “Reflections on ‘Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,’” in Race Critical Theories: Text and Context, eds. Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg, (Malden Ma: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 449-454. [Bb]
Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” in Stuart Hall.
Recommended:
Jennifer Daryl Slack, “The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies,” in Stuart Hall.
ASSIGNMENT: Thesis Statement

March 1 Race and New Identities
Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall.
Hall, “What is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture,” in Stuart Hall.
Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” in Questions of Cultural Identity.
Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,” Framework 36 (1989): 68-82. [Bobst e-journal]
Hall, “Negotiating Caribbean Identities.” New Left Review 209 (1995), 3-14. [Bobst e-journal]
ASSIGNMENT: Response Paper

March 8 Interrogating Identity
Zygmunt Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist—or a Short History of Identity” in Questions of Cultural Identity.
Homi K. Bhabha, “Culture’s In-Between.” in Questions of Cultural Identity.
Lawrence Grossberg, “Identity and Cultural Studies—Is That all There is?” in Questions of Cultural Identity.
Read any other essay from Questions of Cultural Identity that you feel will enrich our class discussion.
ASSIGNMENT: Thesis Statement

March 15 Spring Break

March 22 The Critics
ASSIGNMENT: Class Presentations on the Critics with outline uploaded to Blackboard before class.

March 29 Race and Gender
Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood
ASSIGNMENT: Thesis Statement
The last part of the class is designed for students to discuss possible final project topics.

April 5 Race and Gender 2
Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire
ASSIGNMENT: Response Paper
The last part of the class is designed for students to discuss possible final project topics.

April 12 The Allure of Race
Paul Gilroy, Against Race
ASSIGNMENT: Thesis Statement
The last part of the class is designed for students to discuss possible final project topics.

April 19 The Critics and the Next Generation
Simon Gikandi, “Race and Cosmopolitanism,” American Literary History 14:3 (Fall 2002): 593-615. [Bobst e-journal]
Tavia Nyong’o, “Racial Kitsch and Black Performance,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 15:2 (Fall 2002): 371-393. [Bobst e-journal]
Nyong’o, “Do You Want Queer Theory (or Do You Want the Truth)? Intersections of Punk and Queer in the 1970s,” Radical History Review 100 (Winter 2008): 102-119. [Bobst e-journal]
Nyong’o, “Punk’d Theory.” Social Text 3-4 (2005): 19-34. [Bobst e-journal]
ASSIGNMENT: Response Paper
All students will present their thesis statements and likely bibliographies to the class.


April 26 Race and Sexuality
Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, “De Margin and De Centre,” in Stuart Hall.
TBA

May 3 Final Class
All students will present their final projects to the class.
Papers due on Blackboard.