Culture/Knowledge/Power: Cluster C Theoretical Foundation ...



The Cultural Politics of Difference

Fall 2007

Annenberg School for Communication

Graduate Seminar

Professor Herman Gray Phone: 213 274- 2000

Office: 324E ASC hgray@usc.edu

Office hours: Wednesday 10-12noon

Course Description

This seminar privileges the role of culture (e.g. representation, cultural production, cultural practices and intellectual knowledge) in formulations about institutional arrangements, distribution of resources and the constitution of the subject. Our aim is to take account of the impact of the cultural turn and the turn to difference in understanding relations of power, struggles over meaning, struggles for representation in studies of race, media, and culture. We will examine the genealogy, debates, and salience of categories like nationalism, identity, difference, subjectivity, and authenticity especially as they bear on quests to create new identifications and alignments or efforts to protect and extend existing alignments and identifications organized around forms of belonging and identity. Within the discourse of black cultural politics we will trace the rise of these key tropes and consider whether or not we have politically and analytically exhausted their productive capacities.

Overview of Sessions

1. House keeping and Organization

2. Subjection

3. Subjects

4. Modernity and Difference

5. The Cultural Turn I: Poststructuralism and Postmodernism

6. The Cultural Turn II: Cultural Studies

7. Diaspora, Exile, Hybridity, and the Postcolonial

8. The Cultural Politics of Difference

9. Neoliberalism and Globalization

10. Authenticity and Sincerity

11. Solidarities

12. Representation

13. Hyper visibility

14. Cultural Politics

15. Futures

16. Wrap-up

Required Texts

The following books are available at any bookstore or online. Where indicated required readings will be available electronically via library reserve. Where only citations are listed please access journal articles electronically.

John Jackson. Real Black

David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

Roderick A. Ferguson. Aberrations in Black (Minnesota)

Saidiya Hartman. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in

Nineteenth-Century America (Race and American Culture) (Oxford) 1997

Patricia Hill-Collins. Black Sexual Politics

Paul Gilroy. Post Colonial Melancholia (Harvard)

Tommie Shelby. We Who are Darker (Harvard)

Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth Lindeborg. Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago) 1996

Course Requirements ande Evaluation

Each student is expected to organize and lead a seminar discussion based on the assigned readings or post weekly summaries of the key issues and provocations covered in the readings. In conjunction with the seminar presentation and discussion, student in charge of presentations will prepare and circulate a 3-5 paper summary/review of the key ideas covered in the presentation. Students will also be required to complete: A) a two (2) page paper proposal (due at the sixth meeting); B) a 20 page course paper is due at the end of the semester.

SCHEDULE

Week 1 House Keeping and Organization

Modernity, Difference and the Production of Race

Week 2 Subjection

Saidiya Hartman Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in

Nineteenth-Century America (Race and American Culture) (Oxford) 1997

Week 3 Subjects

Roderick A. Ferguson. Aberrations in Black (Minnesota) 2000

Ronald Radano. “Telling Stories, Telling Lies” pp.1-49 and “Resonances of

Racial Absence” pp 49-105 in his Lying Up the Nation (Chicago) 2003. (R)

Recommended

Roderick A. Ferguson. “Of Our Normative Strivings African American Studies and the Histories of Sexuality” Social Text.

Jon Cruz Cultures on the Margins (Princeton) 1999

Week 4 Modernity and Race:

Stuart Hall “Introduction” pp. 3-19 in his Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (eds) David Held, Don Hubert, Stuart Hall (Blackwell) 2000. (R)

_________ “Race, Articulation, Societies Structured in Dominance” pp. 16-61 in Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth Lindeborg (eds) Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago) 1996

_________ “ Gramsci’s Relevance for the study of Race and Ethnicity” in David

and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues (Routledge) 1996

Michael Brown et.al “Race Preferences and Race Privileges” pp 1-34 and “Of Fish Out of Water” pp. 34-65 in Brown et. al (Eds) White-Washing Race: The Myth of A Color-Blind Society (California) 2003. (R)

Recommended

David Goldberg “The State of Race Theory” and Stating the Difference” in his The Racial State (Blackwell) 2002

Brown et. al (Eds) White-Washing Race: The Myth of A Color-Blind Society (California) 2003

The Cultural Turn

Week 5 Cultural Studies I: Marxism , Postmodernism and Poststructuralism

Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees” pp. 25-47 and “On Postmodernism and Articulation in Cultural Studies” pp. 131-151 both of which are from D. Morley and K. Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routledge) 1996

Hall, Stuart “Who needs identity” pp.1-18 in S. Hall and Paul du Gay (Editors) Questions of Cultural Identity (Sage) 1996 (R)

Lawrence Grossberg “History, Politics and Postmodernism” pp 151 from D. Morley and K. Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routledge) 1996

Dick Hebdige “Postmodernism and the Other Side” pp. 174from D. Morley and K. Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routledge) 1996

David Morley “EurAm” pp. 326 from D. Morley and K. Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routledge) 1996

Kuan-Hsing Chen “Post-marxism” pp 309-325 in D. Morley and K. Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routledge) 1996

Recommended

Raymond Williams “Culture” in his Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford) 1977

Frederic Jameson “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” New Left Review. Vol. 146 (July-August 1984) pp. 53-92

Week 6 Cultural studies II

Stuart Hall “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies” from D. Morley and K. Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1996); also in Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth Lindeborg. Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago) 1996

Charlotte Brunsdon “A Thief in the Night: Stories of Feminism in the 1970s at CCCS” in D. Morley and K. Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routledge) 1996

Kobena Mercer “Welcome to the Jungle: Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Politics” pp 259-309 in his Welcome to the Jungle (Routledge) (R)

Kuan-Hsing Chen “The Formation of a Disporic Intellectual” pp 484-504 in D. Morley and K. Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routledge) 1996

Week 7 Diaspora, Exile, Hybridity, and the Postcolonial:

Stuart Hall “New Ethnicities” in Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth Lindeborg Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago) 1996

Paul Gilroy “It Ain’t Where You’re From, It’s Where You’re At: The Dialects of

Diaspora Identification” 120-146 and “Whose Millennium is This? Blackness:

Premodern, Postmodern, Anti-modern” pp. 153-166 in his Small Acts (Serpent’s Tail) 1993 (R)

Paul Gilroy “Diaspora and the Detours of Identity” pp. 299-347 in Kathryn Woodward (ed) Identity and Difference (Sage) 2002 (R)

Homi Bhabba “The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism” pp 87-107 in Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth Lindeborg Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago) 1996a

Recommended:

Paul Gilroy The Black Atlantic (Harvard) 1993

James Clifford “Traveling Cultures” in his Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Harvard)

Week 8 Cultural politics of difference

Stuart Hall “What is this black in Black Popular Culture” pp. 465-476 in D. Morley and K. Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routledge) 1996

__________ “Minimal Selves” in Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth Lindeborg Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago) 1996a

Cornel West “The cultural politics of difference” pp. 19-39 in Out There: Marginalizations

and Contemporary Cultures, (ed) Russell Ferguson et. al (MIT) 1990 (R)

Hazel Carby. “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of

Sisterhood” in Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth Lindeborg Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago) 1996

Kimberley Crenshaw “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color” in Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller and Thomas (Eds.) Critical

Race Theory: The Key Writings That Informed the Movement (The New Press, 1995) (R)

Recommended

Patricia Hill-Collins Black Feminist Thought (Routledge) 2000

Barbara Smith Home Girls: a Black Feminist Anthology (Kitchen Table Press) 1983

Angela Davis. Women, Race, and Class (1983)

Robin Kelley “This Battlefield Called Life: Black Feminist Dream” in his

Freedom Dreams (Beacon) 2002

Villarejo, Amy. “Tarrying with the normative: Queer theory and black history” Social Text. Vol 23, Nos. 3 and 4. (Winter 2005): 69-84

Kobena Mercer “1968” Periodizing Politics and Identity pp. 287-309 in his

Welcome to the Jungle (Routledge) 1994

Chela Sandoval “US Third World Feminism: Differential Social Movement I” in her

Methodology of the Oppressed (Minnesota) 2000

Proposals for Seminar Papers Due

Week 9 Neo-liberalism, Global Assemblages, and Difference

Hall, Stuart “The local and the global: globalization and ethnicity” pp. 173-188 in A. McClintock, A. Mufti and E. Shohat (Editors) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) 1997 (R)

Pieterse, Jan Nederveen (2004) “Neoliberal Empire” Theory, Culture, & Society Vol. 21(3): 119-140

Jacqui Alexander “Transnationalism, Sexuality and the State: Modernity’s Traditions at the

Height of Empire” in her Pedagogies of Crossing (Duke) 2005 (R)

Sassen, Saskia (2000) “Spatialities and temporalities of the global: elements for a theorization” Public Culture. Vol. 12, No.1 (Winter): 215-233

Kuan-Hsing Chen “Cultural Studies and the Politics of Internationalization” in D. Morley and K. Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routledge) 1996

Recognition, Representation and Politics

Week 10 Identity: Authenticity, Sincerity and Practice

John Jackson Real Black (Chicago) 2005

Guthrie P. Ramsey “Discipling the Music: On History, Memory, and Contemporary Theories” pp. 1-17 in his Race Music. Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (California) 2003 (R)

Week 11 Solidarities

Tommie Shelby We Who are Darker (Harvard) 2005

Week 12 Representation

Kobena Mercer “Black Art and the Burden of Representation” pp. 233-259 in his Welcome to The Jungle (Routledge)

Stuart Hall “The Work of Representation” Pp 1-13 in his Cultural Representation and Signifying Practice (Sage 2003) (R)

Darnell Hunt “Making Sense of Blackness on Television” pp. 1-25 in his Channeling Blackness (Oxford) 2005 (R)

Recommended

Michelle Wallace Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (Verso) 1990

Stuart Hall “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” in Darnell Hunt (ed)

Channeling Blackness (Oxford) 2005

H. Baker, S. Best, and R.H. Lindeborg “Introduction: Representing Blackness, Representing Britain: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Knowledge” in Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth Lindeborg Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago) 1996

Robert Crusz “Black Cinema, Film Theory, and Dependent Knowledge” in Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth Lindeborg Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago) 1996

Week 13 Hyper visibility

Hill Collin Black Sexual Politics (Routledge) 2004

Week 14 Memory

Paul Gilroy Post Colonial Melancholia (Harvard) 2005

Week 15 Seminar Roundtable: Reports on works in progress

Week 16 Possibilities and Wrap-up

Nathaniel Mackey “Introduction: Door Peep” pp. 3-21, “Canto Moro” pp 181-

199, and “Paracritical Hinge” Pp 207-228 all in his Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (Wisconsin) 2005 (R)

Robin Kelley “Keeping it (Su)real: Dreams of the Marvelous” pp. 157-195 in his Freedom Dreams (Beacon) 2002 (R)

Stuart Hall “Allon White and the politics of transgression” in D. Morley and K. Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routledge) 1996

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