Stuart Hall- From last week. I never posted it.

I was reading through Stuart Hall’s article “The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities” again, and I was struck by two very interesting points. This first was the part where he said “the truth is that most of us had to leave the humanities in order to do serious work in it” (11) He spoke of how, in order to revolutionize the humanities through the field of cultural studies, they could no longer just be interdisciplinary, but instead had to change the methodology when utilizing the different disciplines. “It was never a question of which disciplines would contribute to the development of this field, but of how one could decenter or destabilize a series of interdisciplinary fields” (16). They have to come from the perspective of sociology, anthropology, etc., but instead of seeing how these academic disciplines already contained methodologies and ideas with which to approach culture, they redefined these other fields too. I was thinking about the value of this because I realize, as I take more anthropological courses and engage with these disciplines that a distinctive crossing of academic boundaries is the only way to develop a personal and unique way of thinking on a subject. I think I have realized that instead of looking at how sociology and anthropology serve cultural studies and the humanities, I must instead look at how it is a unique piece, in and of itself, in the composition and understanding of the field.

Even though I have been reading a lot of articles by Hall and other theorists, many of these people have yet to enact a specific situation in which I can fully understand an issue that has been analyzed across different trends. However, in my “Power, Poverty, and Urban Life” class with Ted Lowe, we were given a reading that really struck me. At first, because it was an anthropological study of white poverty from the perspective of a black scholar, but really because he was very aware of his boundary-crossing identity position in the context of this study. He began by discussing his context and said he was going to avoid taking an essentialist stance. In his book, The Color of Class, Kirby Moss realized that he as going to have to constantly be deconstructing notions of identity as he was pursuing his study of white poverty in America. After every chapter of his study, he had a chapter of reflections about how he felt in this context and what he thought he could pull away from in in relation to identity formation and poststructuralist methods of deconstruction. However, I found his approach to be heavily influenced by cultural studies (he even cites key theorist such as Hall in his introduction), which is wonderful because it was an anthropological study and that it what his degree was in. This takes me back to the quote that I used in the beginning about leaving the field of humanities in order to do serious work in it.

The second part that really struck me was when Hall laid out an interesting series of questions that I really felt were in line with the ones that motivate me in my exploration of cultural studies and critical pedagogy. “What are you interested in? What really bugs you about questions of culture and society now? What do you really think is a problem you don’t understand out there in the terrible interconnection between culture and politics? What is it about the way in which… culture is now living through its kind of postcolonial, posthegemonic crisis that really bites into your experience?” (17) Can I answer these questions or even begin to explore them if I spend all of my time in the work of theory in the humanities? I guess this is the problem I am having now. Seeing Kirby Moss engage with the ideas of cultural studies in a different academic discipline is probably a reflection of the influential spread of cultural studies thought, and it seems like in order to make these theories more real I will have to apply them to another area of study also. I have been reading and reading articles about theory, but I think now I want to connect them to critical pedagogy. I want to read Giroux and hooks, but maybe it is time to bridge the gap myself and not just stick to reading the theorist who do it for me. However, I think what will be really important in this context, is also looking at how my position and identity is going to constantly be influencing my approach of cultural studies and critical pedagogy. I want to engage with this in the same was that Kirby Moss does. This is why I think it is so important for me to do this autoethnography, through self-reflection and a slightly fragmented construction, maybe I will be able to better approach the motivating questions above. However, maybe in the same way of his book, I can have an area of interest that guides me. I must have a connecting thread through this autoethnography and I want it to be critical pedagogy. Maybe then I can really practically apply cultural studies and have a greater impact on the humanities.