The Contradictions of Fair Hope

I really want to see this documentary! The Contradictions of Fair Hope

Here's a podcast with S. Epatha Merkerson talking about the doc.

A couple of juicy quotes from Imani Perry’s More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York: NYU Press, 2011).

Doctors choose which tests to order, juries choose whom to convict, producers choose which news stories to run, studio executives choose which projects to greenlight, teachers decide which kids go into accelerated classrooms and which go to special education, social workers choose who stays with their families and who doesn’t, restaurateurs choose to exploit cheap labor and hire undocumented people who cannot risk complaining when they are cheated and abused.  Choices, choices, Choices.  Chances are the individuals making these decisions would not identify themselves as bigots even though we can see the racial preferences embedded in their choices.  Many are likely to be people who identify themselves as victims of discrimination themselves.  This story about the inequality encountered in the life journey and the data that I have cited is offered as evidence that there are cumulative patterns to be found in the choices that individuals make, patterns that are often not readily identifiable if one looks at the actionsor beliefs of an individual but that emerge when one looks at how many individuals choose to act in the same way (p. 37).

In academia, we often talk about structural or institutional racism versus personal racism.  This distinction takes on several different manifestations.  One is the idea that, even as personal racism has subsided, structural or institutional racism is sustained.  What is often meant is that resource gaps and information gaps and institutional policies account for inequality of opportunity.  The problem with the discourse around structural racism is that it codifies the stasis of inequality in such a way that it appears impossible to challenge it without revolution or at the very least, massive reform.  The discourse of structural racism in my mind has lost much of its usefulness.  It absolves responsibility and dampens activism…We [should] deliberately shift our attention from thinking about personal versus institutional racism to focusing on how the accumulation of practices of inequality—engaged in by professionals, average citizens, and residents, as well as by groups acting in a common interest—translates to large-scale institutional, social, economic, and political inequalities.  If we are to make that shift, with the ultimate goal of changing the practices of inequality, we must investigate how we learn to ‘be that way’ and how to ‘be different’ (p. 42).

Maids and Madams

This discussion of The Help, has gotten me really interested in a comparison between domestic servants and race in the US and South Africa.  First, I turned to Zanele Muholi’s work on what she calls domesticated labor.  This first photo is from her "'Massa' and Mina(h)" project.  Thanks to Ellen for helping me find these.

For her interesting statement on the project, click here.

And one of our favorites:

From interview-with-zanele-muholi/

For an extra delight, see this blog piece on Zanele’s work by the brilliant Columbia University professor Hlonipha Mokoena from the Africa is a Country blog: http://africasacountry.com/2010/12/06/anybody-can-be-a-maid/

I also asked my South African friend, Jabu Pereira, if she had seen the film.  She had many insights about the problem of having the film set from the white woman’s viewpoint that echoed many of our concerns over here. 

Then we turned to the experience of seeing the film in a largely white audience.  She said that she was one of three black people in the theater.  The white folks were quiet both throughout the film and when it was over.  They didn’t even laugh at the things that were meant to be obviously funny.  She said that she and her friends were cracking up but noticed how uncomfortable the rest of the people were.  They must have thought: "Has this happened to me?  Have I thought I was eating a delicious pie when I was eating s**t?"  What I thought was over-the-top humor really hit home for some people.  Who knew?

The audience Ellen and I were in was also largely white.  The black people seemed very moved by The Help and were not ready to leave when it ended.  We both noticed, however, that the white people laughed really loudly at any of the humor and they cleared out of the room quickly at the end.  But Elle and I had different interpretations of their laughter.  I thought they experienced the humor as a kind of comic relief that allowed them to escape from the tensions of the movie and dis-identify with the white racists.  Ellen, on the other hand, felt that the laughter had a darker origin—most white people’s custom of laughing at black people’s ‘antics’ on screen. 

Again, what I find most interesting are the contrasts.  If I were starting out in my career, I’d love to do a historical study that compares domestic workers, race and class in the US and SA.  There are so many similarities that the differences would illuminate so much in each culture.

I wanted to love the film, The Iron Lady.    I knew that Merle Streep would be superb as Maggie Thatcher.  She was spectacular; and I rarely use that word.  Unfortunately, her great performance makes the film more problematic than had a lesser actor played the Prime Minister.  Streep makes Thatcher adorable and lovable.  Through at least half if not more of the movie, one wonders how the opposition to her atrocious policies would ultimately be presented.  In brief decontextualized snippets, we see riots, rebellions, terrorism, and liberal opposition to her policies. 

Then, most distressingly, the Falklands War was presented as a triumph for Thatcher.  There was a sight intimation that the war was a disaster for a weakened economy and no hint that it was a nationalist cover for the Iron Lady’s shameful policy of sacrificing the poor and working class for the benefit of what we now call the 1%.   Any hope that the movie would explain the fury behind the opposition to her vanished.  We learn more about the impact of her hard work on her family life than we do of her policies’ impact on the poor and working class.  We learn virtually nothing about Britain’s decline as an empire.  Indeed, the ‘triumph’ in the Falklands made it seem as if Thatcher had restored the empire.  Now, there’s a fantasy for you.  

I suspect that the focus on what it means for a powerful woman to age will appeal to many of my fellow baby boomers.  That’s a hard narrative to resist.  And, if we know nothing about the increasing divide between the wealthy and the poor and the displacement of the British international supremacy with the American empire, the Thatcher story is simply about a bourgeois and narrow feminist triumph over a male dominated institution.  And, as the coopted feminist narrative goes these days, the real cost of her achievements were to her children and husband. 

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.

STUART HALL: RACE & NEW IDENTITIES

This semester (Spring 2011), I'm teaching a new graduate seminar on Stuart Hall and people he has influenced. I'd love some feedback on my reading list. Any advice? Thoughts? Additions? Subtractions?

Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain
Hall et. al., Policing the Crisis
Chen and Morley, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies
Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood
Stephens, Black Empire
Gilroy, Against Race

We'll also read essays by Hall, Tavia Nyong'o, Kobena Mercer, Isaac Julien, Angela McRobbie, and a few others. I'm particularly interested in critiques of Hall and cultural studies. Any suggestions?