Black British Cultural Studies

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Black British Cultural Studies

• Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation
  -Hall
• British Cultural Studies and the Pitfalls of
  Identity Gilroy

• By Michelle and Johannah

2
Cultural Identity

• Two Ways of Thinking About Cultural Identity
• One, Shared Culture, A Collective, One True
  Self
• Similarities and Differences
• Identity as a Production
• Authority and Authenticity

3
Michel Foucault

• Power
• Knowledge

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Michel Foucault

• "Perhaps, too, we should abandon a whole
  tradition that allows us to imagine that
  knowledge can exist only where the power
  relations are suspended and that knowledge can
  develop only outside its injunctions, its demands
  and its interests. Perhaps we should abandon the
  belief that power makes mad and that, by the same
  token, the renunciation of power is one of the
  conditions of knowledge. We should admit, rather,
  that power produces knowledge... that power and
  knowledge directly imply one another that there
  is no power relation without the correlative
  constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any
  knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute
  at the same time power relations..../In short, it
  is not the activity of the subject of knowledge
  that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or
  resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the
  processes and struggles that traverse it and of
  which it is made up, that determines the forms
  and possible domains of knowledge."

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A Play on Words Jacques Derrida

• Difference vs. Differance
• Presence Africane
• Presence Europeene
• Presence Americane

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Tyler Perry

• Diary of A Mad Black Woman
• Tyler Perry "Get that Money"
• Tyler Perry "Day in Court"

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Tyler Perry

• Daddys Little Girls
• Gabrielle Union Interview
• Why Did I Get Married
• Movie Trailer

8
British Cultural Studies and the Pitfalls of
Identity Paul Gilroy
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Paul Gilroy

• First holder of Anthony Giddens Professorship in
  Social Theory
• Intellectual background multi-disciplinary
• literature, art, music, cultural history and
  social science.
• Best known for work on racism, nationalism and
  ethnicity and original approach to the history of
  African Diaspora into western hemisphere. 
• Current research projects are
• Study moral economy of blackness in 20th century
  -- concerned with relationship between freedom,
  auto-mobility and citizenship.
• A volume on the social technological dynamics
  of popular music.
• A comparative historical consideration of
  colonial government.
• Work on the politics of race, culture and
  multicultural studies in Britain is a constant
  element in his pieces.

http//www.lse.ac.uk/collections/sociology/whoswho
/gilroy.htm
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The problem with identity

• Identity as a word is both widely abused and
  contested by many disciplines (224)
• Identity is invoked more in political arguments
  than philosophical
• Cultural Identity as a modern source of power
• Cultural politics is both applied to everyday
  identity as a problem as well as to the
  hyper-management identity now undergoes via mass
  communication

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Currency of Identity

• Who Am I?
• Looking inward, away from the chaos actually
  causes a self-scrutiny
• Disembodied I
• Raymond Williams
• Negotiated meanings ambiguities of identity
• Descartes
• Father of Modern Philosophy
• Impurity of culture
• Pure thought never ambiguity

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Connections

• Alan Johnsons Power, Privilege and Difference
• Discussion of privilege and the social
  construction of identity
• Naomi Kleins No Logo
• How the corporate media has profited off of the
  self-scrutiny aspect of creating our identities
• No Logo

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Identity and Race

• Race, The Floating Signifier -- featuring Stuart
  Hall
• Please be advised Strong Offensive language in
  the beginning
• Representation and the Media featuring Stuart
  Hall
• Representation v. Identity?

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Questions?

• Some topics to think about
• Identity
• Cultural identity
• Social construction
• Representations