From Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies
“Political Commitment” by Stuart Hall.
While reading the articles for this week, I kept thinking
about how applicable Hall’s analyses could be to this last decade of political struggle
in the United States. In “Political Commitment,” Hall makes the following
statement: “It matters profoundly what the political circumstances are in which
the issues and conflicts arising from the society develop” (96). Based on this
statement, as well as the collection of works we read for the week, I think Hall
was telling us that cultural studies must engage politics, paying
careful attention to the “political circumstances” that influence the
development of various issues and conflicts in society. Though many of us
certainly engage political issues in our research and study, it also seems that
we should all be concerned with how our research intersects with political
matters. Here is the question I have been sitting with this week:
How can we better equip ourselves to appropriately engage
political matters in our work and what are the implications if we do not?
From Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies
“The Great Moving Right Show” by Stuart Hall.
As I mentioned in my above comments, the articles we read
this week were particularly resonant with the political climate in which we currently
find ourselves in the United States. “The Great Moving Right Show” could have
been referring directly to the period after President Obama’s tenure in office
and the rise of Trump and his followers. In this article, Hall states, “The
radical right does not appear out of thin air. It has to be understood in direct
relation to alternative political formations attempting to occupy and command
the same space. It is engaged in a struggle for hegemony, within the dominant
bloc, against both social democracy and the moderate wing of its own party…The
strength of its intervention lies partly in the radicalism of its commitment to
break the mould, not simply to rework the elements of the prevailing ‘philosophies’”
(177). It seems that this is an unending political cycle, in which the
political pendulum swings back and forth, left to right to left, and so on, ad
infinitum. Here is my question:
Cultural studies scholars, like Stuart Hall, were capable of seeing through the fog of political rhetoric and identifying the key factors contributing to the swing toward the radical right. So, what responsibility do cultural studies scholars (or other scholars) have to help lessen the swings to harmful extremes and what would a cultural studies political intervention of this kind entail?
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