Literatura Inglesa

Aula 5 WhAT IS BLACk In BLACk pOpULAR CULTURE A TExT By STUART hALL META Illustrating how the the text What is black in black popular culture can serve as na antidote against na essentialis conception of race and ethnicity OBJETIVO Understading how essentioalism can perpetuate certain conservative conceptions Raising students awareness about the complex questionof ethnicity and race in contemporary society pRERREQUISITO Familiaridade com os períodos formativos da literatura norteamericana Conceitoschave da Teoria da Literatura e da história literária Noções de história dos Estados Unidos Luiz Eduardo Oliveira José Augusto Batista dos Santos 74 Literatura de Língua Inglesa V IntroductIon Stuart McPhail Hall 19322014 was a Jamaicanborn cultural theo rist political activist and Marxist sociologist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1951 until his death in 2014 Along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams he was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies In the 1950s Hall was one of the founders of the influential New Left Review At Hoggarts invitation he joined the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964 He took over from Hoggart as acting director of the Centre in 1968 becoming its director in 1972 a position he kept until 1979 While at the Centre Hall is credited with playing a role in expanding the scope of cultural studies to deal with race and gender and with helping to incorporate new ideas derived from the work of French theorists like Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes Hall left the centre in 1979 to become a professor of sociology at the Open University in England He became President of the British Sociologi cal Association in 1995 remaining in the post until 1997 He retired from the Open University in 1997 and became a professor emeritus The British newspaper The Observer called him one of the countrys leading cultural theorists Hall was also involved in the Black Arts Movement In this class we are going to read and interpret one of his famous articles What is black in black popular culture in order to learn how to avoid some essentialist conceptions of race and ethnicity with which its impossible to think about the question once we studied in the previous class Civil Rights Movement and learned how it was important for the af firmative cultural politics which took place decades later Fonte httpswwwindependentcouk newsobituariesprofessorstuarthallsoci ologistandpioneerinthefieldofcultural studieswhoseworkexplored9120126html 75 WHAT IS BLACK IN BLACK POPULAR CULTURE Aula 5 Herbert Richard Hoggart 19182014 was a British academic whose career covered the fields of sociology English literature and cultural studies with emphasis on British popular culture Fonte httpswwwgoldacukhonorandsrichardhoggart PaulMichel Foucault 19261984 generally known as Michel Foucault was a French philosopher historian of ideas social theorist and literary critic Fonte httpsenwikipediaorg wikiMichelFoucault Raymond Henry Williams 19211988 was a Welsh Marxist theorist academic novelist and critic He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture His writings on politics culture the mass media and literature made a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts Some 750000 copies of his books have sold in UK editions alone and there are many translations available His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural stud ies and the cultural materialist approach Fonte httpsenwikipediaorgwiki RaymondWilliams 76 Literatura de Língua Inglesa V Cornel Ronald West 1953 is an American philosopher political activist social critic author and public intellectual The son of a Baptist minister West focuses on the role of race gender and class in American soci ety and the means by which people act and react to their radical conditionedness A radical democrat and democratic socialist West draws intellectual contributions from multiple traditions including Christianity the black church Marxism neopragmatism and transcendentalism Among his most in fluential books are Race Matters 1994 and Democracy Matters 2004 Fonte httpsenwikipediaorgwikiCor nelWest Roland Gérard Barthes 19151980 was a French literary theorist philosopher linguist critic and semiotician Barthes ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of many schools of theory including structuralism semiotics social theory design theory anthropology and post structuralism Fonte httpsenwikipediaorgwiki RolandBarthes desenvolvImento In his essay What Is This Black in Black Popular Culture published in 1992 in a collection of essays entitled Black popular culture Stuart Hall argues that each historical moment has a different view of what is the meaning of black and of black culture In order to give his readers a context of the moment during which he was writing that is the beginning of the 1990s Hall quotes Cornel Wests article The New Cultural Politics of Difference which can give us according to the author a genealogy of the preset situation of black culture According to Cornel in the article mentioned above this moment has three general coordinates The displacement of European models of high culture The emergence of the United States as a world power and conse quently as the center of global cultural production and circulation The decolonization of the Third World culturally marked by the emergence of the decolonized sensibilities 77 WHAT IS BLACK IN BLACK POPULAR CULTURE Aula 5 To those coordinates Hall adds some qualifications First he mentions the ambiguities of the shift from Europe to America in the twentieth cen tury and Americas ambivalent relationship to European high culture and its own ethnic hierarchies Differently from Europe which did not recognized until recently any ethnicity of its own America has always had a series of ethnicities and its cultural politics is defined by the construction of ethnic hierarchies The author says that silenced and unacknowledged Ameri can popular culture itself has always contained within it black American popular vernacular traditions The second qualification refers to what the author calls the period of cultural globalization which was in progress during the time he was writing and the third qualification is related to an ambivalent fascination with difference sexual difference cultural dif ference racial difference and ethnic difference Quoting Hal Foster Hall argues that the rupture of primitivism managed by modernism became a postmodern event becoming the difference that may not make a difference This according to the author is what marks the ambiguous appearance of ethnicity in the so called global postmodernism Nevertheless cultural life especially in the West has been transformed in our lifetimes by the voicing of the margins Although it remains peripheral to the broader mainstream marginality has never been in such evidence as it is now And it is above all the result of the cultural politics of difference as well as of the struggles it implied the production of new identities and the appearance of new subjects on the political and cultural stage The author emphasizes that it is true not only for racial issues but also for other marginalized ethnicities and for feminism and the gay and lesbian movement Thus the most important thing is the struggle over cultural hegemony The highpopular culture distinction is what the global postmodern is displacing As the term itself suggests cultural hegemony is not about pure victory or domination but about shifting the balance of power in the relations of culture Harold Foss Hal Foster 1955 is an American art critic and historian He was educated at Princeton University Columbia University and the City University of New York He taught at Cornell University from 1991 to 1997 and has been on the faculty at Princeton since 1997 In 1998 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship Fonte httpsenwikipediaorgwiki HalFosterartcritic 78 Literatura de Língua Inglesa V Thus cultural strategies can make a difference and this is the main point of the article Although the spaces won for difference were few they are very carefully policed and regulated But the author recognizes that there is always a price of incorporation to be paid when the cutting edge of difference and transgression is blunted into spectacularization because as he explains what replaces invisibility is a kind of regulated and segregated visibility One thing is very important to notice and to this Hall calls our attention if on the one hand the global postmodern represents an ambiguous open ing to difference and to the margins making a certain kind of decentering of the Western narrative it is matched on the other hand by the backlash the aggressive resistance to difference the attempt to restore the traditional canon of Western civilization the attacks on multiculturalism the return to grand narratives of history language and literature which are according to the author the three great supporting pillars of national identity and national culture the defense of ethnic absolutism and of a cultural racism that has marked the Thatcher and the Reagan eras the eighties and the new xenophobias or neonazism which are present everywhere in Europe and the Americas It is not as the author insists a matter of cultural dia lectics It is necessary from this point of view to deconstruct the popular cleaning it from any innocent view The reason why popular culture has always been counterpoised to elite or high culture being a site of alternative traditions is because it has its base in the experiences pleasures memories and traditions of the people and has connections with local aspirations and tragedies of ordinary folks It is what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the vulgar the popular the informal the underside the grotesque That is why according to Hall the dominant tradition suspect they are about to be overtaken by the carnivalesque as Bakhtin puts it Thus Hall comes to the conclusion that the role of the popular in popular culture is to fix the authenticity of popular forms rooting them in the experiences of popular communities from which they draw their strength Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin 18951975 was a Russian philosopher literary critic semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory ethics and the philosophy of language His writings on a variety of subjects inspired scholars working in a number of different traditions Marxism semiotics structuralism religious criticism and in disciplines as diverse as literary criticism history philosophy sociology anthropology and psychology Although Bakhtin was active in the debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s his distinctive position did not become well known until he was rediscovered by Russian scholars in the 1960s Fonte httpsenwikipediaorgwikiMikhailBakhtin 79 WHAT IS BLACK IN BLACK POPULAR CULTURE Aula 5 Thus popular culture has become the dominant form of global culture as well as of power and capital It is the space of homogenization for it stereotypes and processes the material it draws in order to control the narratives and representations Black popular culture likewise is bound to be contradictory It can never be simplified or explained in terms of simple binary oppositions such as high and low resistance and incorporation authentic and unauthentic experiential and formal etc Nevertheless this deformed incorporated and unauthentic forms black people and black com munities are represented in popular culture can make us see the experiences that stand behind them through its musicality orality and inflections toward the vernacular and the local Not to mention its production of counternar ratives and its metaphorical use of the musical vocabulary The author argues that although there are deep questions of cultural transmission and inheritance as well as complex relations between African origins and the consequences of the diaspora he will not analyze these problems because the cultural mainstream is the only performative space we had left That is the reason why we cannot talk about black popular culture nowadays without mentioning the processes of selective appropria tion incorporation and rearticulation of European ideologies cultures and institutions Thus strictly speaking there is no pure form of black popular culture It is always the product of the negotiations of dominant and subordinate positions as well as of the subterranean strategies of recoding and transcod ing That is why they are always impure or hybridized from a vernacular base Black popular culture from this perspective is not the recovery of a lost dialogue from the past but it is formed from adaptations molded to the mixed contradictory hybrid spaces It is this mark of difference that is carried by the signifier black in the term black popular culture It has come to signify the black community where these traditions were kept and whose struggles survive in the persistence of the historical experience of black people in the diaspora as well as in the counternarratives which are struggling to be heard Hall quotes Paul Gilroy who said that blacks in the British diaspora must refuse the binary black or British because the or remains the sight of constant contestation when the aim of the struggle must be instead to replace the or with the possibility of an and From this perspec tive you can be black and British Essentialism decidedly naturalizes and dehistoricizes difference mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural or genetic Thus when the signifier black is apart from its his torical cultural and political context and inserted in a biological and racial category we tend to valorize the kind of racism we are trying to deconstruct 80 Literatura de Língua Inglesa V Hall gives us a very clear example of how essentialism in ethnic ques tions can reinforce conservative and even oppressive conditions when black men living their counteridentities as black masculinities replay those fantasies of black masculinities in the theaters of popular culture they are reproducing masculine identities that are oppressive to women That is because dominant ethnicities are always underpinned by a particular sexual economy and class identity The author ends his argumentation with two points In the first he wants to remind us that popular culture commodified and stereotyped as it is is not arena where we find who we really are or the truth of our ancestral experience On the contrary it is a mythic arena as if it were a theater of popular desires and fantasies In other words it is the place where we dis cover ourselves where we are imagined and represented to the audiences and to ourselves In the second he reminds us about the importance of the structuring of cultural space in terms of high and low and the threat of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque According to Hall the carnivalesque is not simply an upturning of oppositional frameworks but a crosscut which Bakhtin calls the dialogic The article ends with an account of what is involved in understanding popular culture in a dialogic rather than in an oppositional way from The Politics and Poetics of Transgression by Stallybrass and White 1986 p 5 A recurrent pattern emerges the top attempts to reject and eliminate the bottom for reasons of prestige and status only to discover not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon the lowOther But also that the top includes that low symbolically as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life The result is a mobile conflictual fusion of power fear and Paul Gilroy 1956 is a British historian writer and academic who is Professor of American and English Literature at Kings College London Fonte httpsenwikipediaorgwikiPaulGilroy 81 WHAT IS BLACK IN BLACK POPULAR CULTURE Aula 5 desire in the construction of subjectivity a psychological dependence upon precisely those others which are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level It is for this reason that what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central conclusIon The race issue in Brazil is a very complex question First of all it is not a consequence of three centuries of slavery but a historical manifesta tion of prejudice which is common among people of different ethnicity something always forgotten by the defenders of the supposed melting pot of Brazilian culture An example can be given with the case of a black person or mulatto who reaches a certain social rank When this occurs his or her racial or ethnical condition is omitted but not only because of a cynic and disguised prejudice but also because of what Gilberto Freyre calls race ascendancy that is Brazilian society never rejects its succeeded black members but accepts them only in terms of their social importance what makes them change not only from one class to another but also from one race to another Thats the reason why the racial condition of writers like Gonçalves Dias or Machado de Assis is always omitted But the social acceptance of blacks who succeed in fields dominated by the whites like the political intellectual or scientific fields differently from pop music or football is not guaranteed because if they fail they become black again resumo Halls main idea in the article we studied in this clas is that a dialogic approach is a better strategy than an essentialist one in relation to black popular culture It means that race is merely a historical category rather than a biological one Hall argues that although achievements of cultural struggles may be limited they are real He points out that in a cultural hegemony there is never a pure win or loss but some positions have been won to achieve better outcomes for marginal groups His interest therefore is in cultural strategies that can make a difference and shift the dispositions of power 82 Literatura de Língua Inglesa V actIvIty comment Esta atividade tem por finalidade principal fazer você construa uma síntese dos principais conteúdos desta quinta Aula em sua resposta de modo a compreender criticamente os argumentos do célebre intelectual jamaicano neste artigo referêncIas Based on the article we read in this class how can you explian with your own words the dangers of having an essentialist conception of race and ethnicity atIvIdades Foster Hal 1985 recodings art spectacle and cultural politics Port Townsend Washington Bay Press Hall Stuart 1988 new ethnicities Kobena Mercer ed Black Film British Cinema ICA Hall Stuart 1992 what is black in black popular culture stuart hall critical dialogues in cultural studies Ed David Morley and KuanHsing Chen London and New York Routledge 1996 468478 Document 7 London Institute of Contemporary Arts 1990 states of desire Interview with Isaac Julien Transition 13 hooks bell Stallybrass Peter and Allon White 1986 the politics and poetics of transgression Ithaca Cornell University Press West Cornel 1990 the new cultural politics of difference Rus sell Ferguson et al eds Out There Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures Cambridge MIT Press in association with the New Museum of Contemporary Art An essentialist conception of race and ethnicity is dangerous because it reduces cultural and social identities to biological or natural characteristics ignoring the historical political and cultural contexts that shape them Stuart Hall argues that race is not a biological category but a historical and social construct By adopting an essentialist view we risk naturalizing differences that are in fact the products of complex historical and cultural processes This approach can reinforce stereotypes and prejudices perpetuating inequalities and oppression For example by treating blackness as a fixed and immutable essence we may end up reproducing oppressive identities such as black masculinities that oppress women Moreover essentialism can lead to the exclusion and marginalization of groups that do not fit into these rigid categories making the struggle for equality and social justice more difficult In contrast a dialogical approach as proposed by Hall recognizes the fluidity and hybridization of cultural identities It allows us to understand race and ethnicity as products of ongoing negotiations between different power positions which opens space for transformation and resistance Instead of fixing identities into essentialist categories this approach values diversity and the complexity of human experiences promoting a more just and inclusive understanding of cultural differences