Social Movements in American Protest Literature

Social Movements in American Protest Literature

SOCIAL THEORY AND ITS CONCEPTS IN CULTURAL STUDIES

The relation between sociology and cultural Studies has been very intimate. For over 40 years, it has revolved around issues of theory and practice. From the foundational sketch with the sociological discourses of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham in the 1970s up to the “postmodern turn”, various perspectives were instigated to investigate the lives and cultures of people at the margins of society (G. McLennan, 2014). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the approaches of Cultural Studies, deeply-rooted in the tradition of Western philosophy, were undergirded by phenomology, cultural anthropology, structuralism and now critical theory. While Mary Douglas (1921-2007) championed cultural anthropology with the study of rituals, symbolic deviation and social order, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) spareheaded Cultural Studies’ Structualism when he critically investigated the nature of cultural development, the key role of language and perception in discursive articulation in the policing of space and the social relationsgip therein. Eventually, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1975) spotlighted the study of power where the couple Power/Knowledge, he thought, was – and still is – the bedrock of the dynamics of governmentality. The last Cultural Studies’ sketch that interests us is Jurgen Habermas’ Critical theory. Inspired by Marxism, figures such as Max Horkheimer, Theordor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, to name but a few, were the school’s leading names. Unsatisfied with the writings and theories of the Critical Theory figures, Jurgen Habermas was dubbed “theoretician of the student protest movement” in Frankurt in 1964 where he chaired the philosophy and sociology department of the Frankfurt University. In championing the connection between theory and practice, he hoped that a better discursive articulation could eventually impact the views of the other leading figures. Wanting to reconstruct Karl marx’s historical materialism, he eventually promoted the consideration of theories of communication and intersubjectivity when issues of social issues are on the table. In the following chapters, we reconsider the importance of critical social theory to understand societal phenomena. As we are set to study social movements and their claimants, it is perhaps interesting to start off by discussing the topical issue of ‘identity’ and its polyphonic meanings and usage. We are going to review Cultural Studies’ link to Social theory and the multivocality of identity, from Stuart Hall’s dynamic identities (being as well as becoming), to Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid identities in their “times of interregnum”. On the one hand, we excavate African American female writer Nella Larsen’s writings on the issue 20 of self-identity in a male-dominated Jim Crow era – contra a reductionist approach to African American literature in a male-dominated Harlem Renaissance writers -, and on the other, we make the connection between Nella larsen’s complexification of race and class in the late 1920s with contemporary America’s racial formation on which scholars like Omi and Winant, Bonnila-Silva have given interesting insights. The issue of lesbianism that Larsen tried to tactically portay in her novel Passing (1929), has been recently taken up and further complexified by Alexander Keith Bryant’s (2006) analysis of homosexuality and the performativity of black masculinites in the chronotopics of displacement. Eventually, we will turn to a comparative approach between American Studies and Fanon Studies regarding theory and practice. Building on John Beasley-Murray (2010) retheorization of concepts and notions such habit, affect (after Bourdieu and Gilles Deleuze, and Hardt and Negri thoughtprovoking analysis of the “The Multitude” – the constituent power – that rises up against constituted power – the elected elites, we will try to resurrect Frantz Fanon’s theories of a “new humanism” and the setting afoot of a new nam from within the context of postcolonial African societies, doing justice, we hope, of his theories of postcolonial subjecthood and political aspirations mostly unheard of therein. 21 Chapter I: At the Crossroads of American Studies and Postcolonial Studies Social movements and their populist platforms have been the focus of scholarly works, from Latin American Studies to today’s Cultural Studies in the Western academy. There are interesting debates about who are better equipped, Left or Right-wing intellectuals and/or policies makers, to lift the socially downtrodden from the social abyss that neoliberal political regimes alongside transnational/global capitalism are accused of having brought in contemporaries societies. While globalization is still being chewed over, time and again, in and outside the academic walls, there are disagreements on when and where it originated. But opinions from diverse camps tend to argue on the fact that globalization has blurred the notion of time and space, perhaps a conceptual clouding best understood by Roland Robertson’s notion « Glocalization, » (1995: 27), especially the overlapping of economic global consumerism with cultural transnationalism. What is more, the phenomenal informational advances – now called the 2.0 Web new technologies – have provided people, regardless of where they dwell on the globe, with mighty tools to inhabit the muddy waters of globalization. For good or worse, there is a global circulation of ideas, values and worldviews, whose energies and political potentialities escape the control of any state or body of containment. 

Cultural Studies’

Concerns the Question of identity Given the historicity and social constructedness of discourses, actions and intersubjectivity, especially in formerly colonized societies, it is of utmost significance to resound Social Theory in people’s daily routines. Engaging social theory is a truly pleasurable activity. Though they are professional social theorists –mainly academics walled in the Ivory Tower and whose job is to basically sophisticate ideas and concepts for their own pleasure – social theory is equally “something done necessarily and often well by people with no particular professional credential”. Social Theory, says Charles Lemert, is nothing less than the meek questions his a nine-year-old son might ask regarding how his schoolmates act, speak or treat each other. For example, Lemert talks about the “lively and sociologically interesting line of diner table talk” during which his son would ask him questions about the dynamics of the segregated lines of boys and girls who march from the classroom to the lunchroom, with “a code of silence” undergirding the whole performance. “At dinner,” Lemert tells us, his son “reported this exotic practice with the ironic questions, ‘What was this for? Do they think we are going to attack to girls”? he asked. Almost any child has, sometime in their childhood, observed such ritualization of everyday life. With time going by and critical thinking becoming sharper, the down-to-earthness of these questions speak volume about “schools [that} impose arbitrary rules, like walking silently in sex-segregated lines, because they are institutions concerned as much with civil discipline and authority as with learning”(1993: 1). Let us quote at length David Bradley on a slightly different case sutdy, from his novel the Chaneysville Incident, where he explains why it is important to engage Social Theory for understanding public service in a racially segregated Chicago: The key to the understanding of any society lies in the observation and analysis of the insignificant and the mundane. For one of the primary functions of societal institutions is to conceal the basic nature of the society, so that the individuals that make up the power structure can pursue the business of consolidating and increasing their power untroubled by the minor carpings of a dissatisfied peasantry. Societal institutions act as fig leaves for each other’s nakedness … And so, seeking to understand the culture of the history of a people, do not look at the percepts of religions, the form of the government, the curricula of the schools, or the operations of businesses: flush the johns (as quoted in C. Lemert, 1993: 2). There is no guarantee, however, that knowledge of society’s ills will ultimately lead to political actions. The is no correlation whatsoever. This is so because power structures are either concealed from massively ignorant population, or that the powerful and the powerless 23 may “resist talking about them because they are threatening”. In fact, people need time and experience to learn how to put into words the reality they live in and eventually come up with thoroughly articulated concepts about their daily routine. And though social theories “don’t just occur to us, some we never get. Others come in time. Some we have to work to get at. But they are there to be unknow and said”. Some critics, quite questionably, place the origins of professional social theorization sometimes in the past several centuries, in the beginning of the modern era. Some might think of the Enlightenment period in Europe. But according to Lemert, the professionalization of the activity, composed of many specialists of all walks of life, became a popular activity among the intelligentsia in the 19th century. “The development of civil society in the 18th century mostly in Europe (and a few North American) urban centers”, he says, “permitted enough freedom of expression to encourage independent thinking” (1993: 3-4). The Social theory that interests us – because there are so many – is the one that emerged within the field of Marxism and its aftermath. Because the topic(s) of this dissertation is/are deeply related to agency and political organizations, the work and legacy of Antonio Gramsci is of great relevance. Contra the professional social theorists concerned with the sophistication of ideas and concepts for the few in the academic conglomerate, the figure of Antonio Gramsci is every interesting in so many regards. Alongside other figures of the inter and postwar period in Europe, he came up with concepts that provoked a widespread discussion in the humanities and social sciences. Among Gramsci’s debated concepts, we can mention the notion of “uneven development” that invites us to recognize differences, both nationally and transnationally; the “wars of position and maneuver” where cultural elements struggle for visibility onto the social plane of interactions. In addition to these notions, “hegemony” and the role that “organic intellectuals” should play in society is the most relevant for our analysis. In fact, Antonio Gramsci strongly believed that intellectuals bear the common-sense knowledge that hamper the progressist stance of any society. At the same time, nonetheless, they have the counter-hegemonic seeds that can challenge conservatism and the dogma of totalitarian political regimes. While Gramsci’s classical notions helped to create lively and widespread discussions within the field of Cultural Studies – and its politics of location in the Western academy -, scholars of different locations reworked his ideas for the sake of the same ‘politics of location’ and with a great deal of contextualization. For this regards, the Latin American Cultural Studies school is a truly interesting exemplar.  If there is any academic field that stresses the innovative move towards interdisciplinarity, if not « anti-disciplinarily, » to the utmost, it is Cultural Studies (L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler, 1991: 2). As a field of academic research and teaching, Cultural Studies aims to investigate the numerous ways in which « culture, » material as well as symbolic expressions, transforms not only individuals in the micropolitics of everydayness, but also the macropolitical spaces. Academically speaking, Cultural Studies draws from the methods and theories of other disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences such literary criticism, sociology, history and geography, cultural anthropology, communicative studies and economics, to name but a few. The creation, in 1964, of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham by Richard Hoggart heralded the institutional base of the field. Under the directorship of Stuart Hall, another key figure of the field, Cultural Studies headed to new and open research directions, with students conducting pathbreaking ethnographic and popular culture research programs. Althusserian, Lacanian and Gramscian thought have undergirded the center’s major developments in the politics of mass media, popular culture, race and ethnicity. For example, Paul Gilroy, who is one the leading sociologist and race theorist in England, was one of the school’s graduate student. The publications of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literary in 1957, critic and theorist Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society in 1958, and then historian E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working-Class in 1963 kicked off the veritable scholarly debates in British cultural studies. Aimed at deconstructing the metanarratives of the modernist university, wherein elitism and the study of high culture prevailed, this small group of intellectuals strongly believed that “any political project for socialism had to connect with immediate experience or lived ‘culture’ of ordinary people whose actions ought to count in politics” (Lin Chun, 1993: 26). From the publication of these masterpieces, ‘culture and ‘ordinary people’ occupied centerstage in the theorization of politics by intellectuals at the outskirts of established institutions. No longer solely connected to high culture, formal and partisan politics, culture started to be understood as “a whole way of life”, and “a whole way of struggle” (R. Williams, 2011: 54). The 1980s was a pivotal era for Cultural Studies. While it was flourishing, it crossed the Atlantic ocean, which however, travestied, so to speak, much of the rationale of its foundational texts. “As it expanded”, says Jon Beasley-Murray, the Americanization of the field helped its attractiveness to publishers who “put increasing numbers of cultural studies 25 texts, a far cry from the Birmingham Centre’s mimeographed working papers” (2010: 18). Concerning this atlantic voyage of the field to the American academy, Stuart Hall warned of “the dangers of the institutionalization of cultural studies in this highly rarified and enormously elaborated and well-funded professional world of American academic life” (Hall as quoted in J. Beasley-Murray, 2010: 18). The field’s voyage did not terminate in the United States. It has reached far beyond. It has gone global, reaching Australia and most anglophone countries. In terms of academic journals related to the field, the 1990s marked an important momentum which witnessed its internationalization. The existence of the European Journal of Cultural Studies, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, many ones published in Spanish, French, Latin American Cultural Studies are here to showcase the global span of the field. There is even a Journal of African Cultural Studies. Quite surprisingly, the latter journal is housed at Francis and Taylor, a UK-based publishing company. The field emerged in Britain in the late 1950s when a group of leftist intellectuals were set to break away from academic conventions. Despite the many disagreements and debates about Cultural Studies and its deconstructive mode, most agree that it originated in England. In Culture and Society, Raymond Williams draws a historicist analysis of the study of culture as lived experienced, whether individually or collectively, and its relation to society at large. Not only being one of the key founder of Cultural Studies as an academic institution – the second momentum in the history of the field – Raymond Williams goes back to British history and places the emergence of Cultural Studies in the context of the Industrial Revolution in England. In close relation to notions such as « democracy, industry [and] art, » the study of culture, and the critique of industrialization in England, is said to have begun with the criticism of the changing sociopolitical changes in England as seen in the works of Edmund Burke, William Cobbet among other 18th century English thinkers (R. Williams, 1958: 1)