Tuesday, April 30, 2013

"Diaspora, Utopia, Critique of Capitalism", Paul Gilroy

Gilroy's reading reminded me of our discussions within class about blackness and geography -- thinking through the material relations which produce space and geographies (**how to think of land/geography as more than just an object, abstracting our relationships to land**). Similarly, I think that culture and sonic forms relate to geographies, as cultural objects are produced through material relations and social conditions of possibility. Gilroy, in line which British cultural studies, looks @ diasporic movement as both a process (the moving, the flux of moving bodies) but also a site of cultural production. He writes, "Black British cultures have been created from diverse and contradictory elements apprehended through discontinuous histories. They have been formed in a field of force between the poles of under- and overdevelopment, periphery and centre. Their bi-lingual character expressed these origins and dislocates the languages of sometimes antagonistic politics formations - black and white, slave and slave-holder, class, people, nation, and locality into new meanings" (219). Through this, emergent (sub)cultures should be given attention as cultural objects into themselves, as they speak to particular political moments, circuits of capital, and dynamics between the psychic/material. 

2 comments:

  1. Hey Hardeep!
    I like your connection between black geography and this reading. The author illustrated what Zach told us in roundtables about how space transform bodies and bodies transform space. The concept that we talked about last week-- power being transmitted through space by disengaging from materiality (space is not square footage as that idea of space erases relations that form)-- connects with the author talking about how we must conceive of Britain as a whole differently if we are to look at Black folks in Britain.

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