Reading Hall and Brubaker

Thus we channelled a regular class into our good old reading club, without missing a beat! Did anyone knew it happened? But oh yes, it did! ;)

So, yes, we are back in our reading club, and the themes of our reading this time around is 'Identity'
The first reading of Stuart Hall's Who Needs 'Identity?' happened on Thursday 11 am at the Lecture Hall without much fanfare. The next reading is on Monday, 11th April, 2011. The essay is by Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper and is titled, Beyond "Identity". More on the essays and the authors below.

Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall is a Jamaican-born, Oxford-educated cultural theorist and one of the founding members of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (now, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies).  Hall's work covers issues of hegemony and cultural studies, taking a post-Gramscian stance. He regards language-use as operating within a framework of power, institutions and politics/economics. This view presents people as producers and consumers of culture at the same time.

Read more on Hall and his works here.

Rogers Brubaker

Rogers Brubaker is a sociologist who taught at UCLA from 1991. Rogers Brubaker has written widely on social theory, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and ethnicity.
You can contact him at brubaker@soc.ucla.edu  (No!)
Read more on Rogers Brubaker here and here.

The essay is co-written by historian Frederick Cooper, who specializes in colonialization, decolonialization and African history. Cooper received his Ph.D from Yale University in 1974 and is currently professor of history at New York University.

Who Needs 'Identity'?

 Though written as an introduction to a book, Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay, the essay began to take a life of its own, anthologized in critical readers of cultural studies as well as identity.

The essay tries to recover Identity from its present day redundancy. Essentialized identities of the Cartesian metaphysics are now looked down upon and advanced theories of postmodernism renders Identity as a superfluous category. So then, he asks, Who Needs Identity?

Hall tries to create a history of this concept through cultural theory. He links Althusser, Lacan, Foucault and finally, Butler to weave a new idiom to speak about identities and its relevance to present day social analysis. On its way, Hall also brilliantly summarises these theoreticians's works, helping the readers adjust to his new history. 

Read the essay (PDF)

Beyond "Identity"

Brubaker's and Cooper's essay features in Rogers Brubaker's book, Ethinicity Without Groups (2004), where he has critically engaged prevailing analytical stances in the study of ethnicity and nationalism and sought to develop alternative analytical resources. 
Brubaker and Cooper also starts from the same premise as Hall, but goes on to radically different conclusions. While, for Hall, there is some hope in salvaging the lost pride of identity, Brubaker and Cooper couldn't be persudaded to think of identity as indispensable. They suggest a new idiom to talk about issues that are usually cloaked under the umbrella term identity, making it a very contradictory concept, deprived of any actual content.
Read the essay (PDF)

So, there we have it, two essays, and yes, please club, read the essays and come to the CCL department at 11 am, on Monday. The Reading Club, is full on!

You might have noticed that we have gone for a image-heavy post this time. Very much inspired by Jananie's (yes!) wonderful photo+painting blog Of kills, quills and pills. 

New Year, New Resolutions!

It's been sometime, ne?

Yeah, I don't even remember when the last post was (figure of speech). But here we are, in a new year. Well, we are one month done, but still a new year!

Let us read! We shall provide online copies of materials for each week and we are going to READ them and post comments on them and meet as well, whenever possible. :)

And for the first session we are reading J. L. Austin's first lecture from How to Do Things with Words

This is one of the essays which are oft-quoted, but seldom read.

But many of us will remember this quote and its performative significance.

'I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth' as uttered when smashing the bottle against the stem.

And thus,

What are we to call a sentence or an utterance of this type? I propose to call it a performative sentence or a performative utterance, or, for short, 'a performative.'

Now that the context is laid out, let's start with...

J. L. Austin was born in Lancaster and educated at Oxford, where he became a professor of philosophy following several years of service in British intelligence during World War II. Although greatly admired as a teacher, Austin published little of his philosophical work during his brief lifetime. Students gathered his papers and lectures in books that were published posthumously, including Philosophical Papers (1961) and Sense and Sensibilia (1962). Austin

In "A Plea for Excuses" (1956), Austin explained and illustrated his method of approaching philosophical issues by first Austin patiently analyzing the subtleties of ordinary language. In How to Do Things with Words (1961), the transcription of Austin's James lectures at Harvard, application of this method distinguishes between what we say, what we mean when we say it, and what we accomplish by saying it, or between speech acts involving locution, illocution (or "performative utterance"), and perlocution.

So now, on to the essay itself...
Click to View

More?
Read about his Lectures, or, if you are feeling adventurous,read the whole of the lectures.

Notes on the Reading Club
"You changed everything!" Yes, some arbitrary decisions, I hope will provoke some reactions.
A complete re-design is what you least expected, I am sure! But it was much-needed is what I believe. The question remains however: what is the re-design you had in mind? Comments welcome!

We will be showing films as a reading club. We are a reading club which shows movies. Cool enough, right? ;)

natter, chatter ... 'Talk to her'

Reading group's inbox flooded with run-on discussions on Pedro Almodovar's Spanish movie 'Talk to her'(2002). As informed earlier, Sowmya initiated an argument, in the form of a questionnaire, raising some vital doubts on reading/understanding this movie. Barath responded, though there are clues that indicate Benigno is gay as well as bisexual, it wouldn't have stopped him 'loving'/'raping' Alicia. This, he reasoned, might have been due to Benigno's back ground. He also maintained that Marcos "couldn't have 'raped' Alicia". He agreed with Sowmya's observation that 'when could have Marcos possibly raped Alicia?'.

Lenny brought the 'auteur' into account. Though, he concurred Benigno must have 'raped' Alicia, he questioned the motive of the director. He doubted whether the director wanted the audience to read things in a certain way. He discussed man's 'gaze', visual narrative, constructed 'feminity' and 'effeminity' and alternate sexuality. He concluded the author might have 'naturally' wanted the audience to imagine a relationship between Marcos and Alicia.

Jananie (after a long gap) contributed some significant points, thereby making the discussion vivid. She notified Almodovar was a gay and indicated a certain pattern in his movies -( All About My Mother, The Bad Education, Talk To Her, Volver). They were: a. sympathetic representation of non-straight men vs possible 'villainisation' of straight men.

b.sexual ambiguity of the male characters and their typification.

c. The focus on alternative/ambiguous sexuality contributes to the perception of alternative sexuality and/as disease in contemporary society.

She interrogated whether the assumed 'rape' is rape at all. She also added that most of his movies have a dearth of lesbian characters and the 'straight' women who appear are victimized by men.

Bipin was annoyed by the 'language' used by the participants and the constructed ways of 'reading' the movie. He urged for alternative readings. He considered the movie to be a thriller. He recounted that as he came out of the hall he was completely confused as to know who the 'culprit' was. However, he agreed that through the 'silent movie' the director conveyed the 'unsaid said' as to who could have been the culprit i.e Benigno. On the other hand, he also believed the movie is ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations.

Lenny built upon Jananie's contribution/suggestion. He augmented that sexuality and disease in this movie could be seen in the context of larger social frameworks and institutions such as religion and law, family and state, hospital and prison. He considered this movie also talks about the (in)capability of expressing feelings and emotions, and alternative forms of expression other than 'talking'. He noted that 'rape' and 'making love' were ambiguous terms to describe the alleged act/crime.

what a discussion we've had ... hope there's more to natter and chatter...