Orientalism : Edward Said. Link between culture, imperial power and colonialism. “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism”. creating ‘an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness‘.
V. G. Kiernan : ‘an economic system like a nation or a religion, lives not by bread alone, but by beliefs, visions, daydreams as well, and these may be no less vital to it for being erroneous’.
Jacques Lacan : exploring ‘The Other’ as a way of exploring ourselves.
Louis Althusser : ISA’s & the notion of ‘Interpellation, Ideological state apparatus is a theoretical concept developed by French philosopher Louis Althusser which is used to describe the way in which structures of civic society education, culture, the arts, the family, religion, bureaucracy, administration etc serve to structure the ideological perspectives of society, which in turn form our individual subject identity.
Frantz Fanon : In terms of post-colonialism, we can look at The Wretched of the Earth (1961), by Frantz Fanon, which for many (Barry, 2017, McLeod 2000 etc) is a key text in the development and ancestry of postcolonial criticism. As an early critical thinker of post-colonialism, Frantz Fanon took an active role, proposing the first step required for ‘colonialised’ people to reclaim their own past by finding a voice and an identity.
Antonio Gramsci – Hegemony. Tug of war for power. Chance to reclaim. Gramsci raises the concept of Hegemony to illustrate how certain cultural forms predominate over others, which means that certain ideas are more influential than others.
Paul Gilroy : Is insistent that ‘we must become interested in how the literary and cultural as well as governmental dynamics of the country have responded to that process of change and what it can tell us about the place of racism in contemporary political culture.’
Syncretism, double consciousness & hybridisation
mechanisms for understanding cross-cultural identities.
Double consciousness. Cultural polyvalency.
- Q1: Where can you identify ‘hybridity’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘cultural polyvalency’ in this music video?
- Q2: How does this text apply to Fanon’s 3 phase plan of action?
- Q3: How is the audience called / addressed / hailed (interpellation)? Use examples from both the lyrics and the visual grammar (shot, edit, mise-en-scene) to show how audiences are drawn into a specific subject position / ideological framework?
- Q1: How can you apply the concept of Orientalism to Common’s Letter to the Free?
- Q2: Can you apply Fanon’s 3 phase plan of action to this music video?
- Q3: How is the audience called / addressed / hailed (interpellated)? Use examples from both the lyrics and the visual grammar (shot, edit, mise-en-scene) to show how audiences are drawn into a specific subject position / ideological framework?