The Idea of Resistance and Political Protest:
● When we first think about political protest, what comes to mind?
○ Attempts to change to laws or legislation
○ Organised political movements
○ Public protests
○ Petitions, marches
● However, we can look at political protest in terms of:
○ Cultural resistance
○ Everyday people
● Why look at cultural resistance?
○ Overt political protest is uncommon. When it occurs, it often results in a backlash.
○ Even if overt political protest does results in changes in legislation, it won’t necessarily change public
opinion.
○ Culture is what influences people’s hearts, minds and opinions. This is the site of popular change.
Key idea: the political, personal and cultural are always intertwined

• The idea of culture as a site of political struggle for Ghost Town see below)
• The the theory of hegemony – Gramsci

cultural hegemony functions by framing ideologies of the dominant social group as the only legitimate
ideology.

Key Concepts:
● Cultural resistance
● Cultural hegemony
● Subcultural theory

LYRICS- Instead of ‘nigga’ they use the word ‘criminal’

Black bodies being lost in the American dream

Slavery’s still alive, check Amendment 13

Postcolonialism

 Looking at identity and representation through the lens of Empire and Colonialism. ‘The Shadow of Slavery’

Challenges the assumption of a universal claim towards what constitutes ‘good reading’ and ‘good literature’.

Orientalism

The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism

Edward Said asked if ‘imperialism was principally economic‘ and looked to answer that question by highlighting ‘the privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience’. He argues that Orientalism is “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident’

-Tends to rely on a binary opposition between the West and the East that most of times is misleading and destructive.

Jacques Lacan ‘the other’

He was a psychoanalyst and a philosopher. The idea that we cannot actually see ourselves as whole, we use a reflection to understand who we are / who we are not. He proposed that in infancy this first recognition occurs when we see ourselves in a mirror.