Andrea Smith- Week 4

 

The great moving nowhere show reading really gets at some of the ideas that I am trying to articulate within my thesis, such as how neoliberalism is similar to conservatism. Within the reading itself, the call compares new labor to ideologies found under Thatcherism. It definitely articulates and gets at Hall's point that while we are seeing change happen, there are other behaviors that are still present that make that change irrelevant (a changing same). A lot of the things mentioned in this piece map onto US neoliberal ideology, which also became the primary ideology (one would say hegemonic), which altered public discourse and political agendas (free markets, limited government, individuality, and freedom. Those became central to political debates and policy making). It shouldn't be entirely surprising to me that the same things were being witnessed across the pond, but I think by Hall explicitly laying it out, we're able to highlight the interconnectedness of global economic trends and political ideologies.

 

Hall claims that we constantly fight for a certain ideology to be seen as the primary or naturalized one. There is definitely something to be said about how political movements and grassroots activism play an extremely important role in transforming and making people question our current naturalized ideology; what else could be done to make these marginalized ideologies become the mainstream naturalized ideology as this seems to be a big missing puzzle in achieving racial equity especially if we see the same ideologies in different countries.

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