Task: Read three texts that are recent in origin and which encapsulate some of the debates that are currently occurring within the field of cultural and critical studies and extract the key points of debate from each text
Here goes my summary discussion of Brar & Sharma. I’m fascinated by CRT and Black Cultural Studies but I found this quite a challenging read and struggle to summarise this as anything more than part genealogy and part problem statement. This was easier to read after seeing the topics of Hall and the Birmingham CCCS described in the introductory video on Cultural Studies.
The title of Brar and Sharma’s reading doesn’t immediately seem aligned with their abstract. The title asks question “what is the “Black” in Black Studies” while the abstract sets out to explain the influence of ‘US Black Critical Thought’ on race discourse in the UK arts and higher education. I found the conclusion to be more accurate where it states the article was “an initial attempt in the process of tracing this complex genealogy” of the historical relationship between Black British Cultural Studies and US Black Critical Thought.
The article discusses how Hall and Black British Cultural Studies (as established in Birmingham university in the 70s) was an influential interlocutor with US Black Critical Thought. British influence appears to have waned with the departure of Hall and UK academical restructuring, in particular the loss of the polytechnics which were incubators for UK Black critical thought. Subsequently critical thought broke off from the development of Black culture and was assimilated into (and diluted by) Sociology. This meant that since the 90s the development of US Black Critical Thought has been missing a British dialogue partner and resulted in, eventually, US critical thought becoming the major influence on discourse in the UK. As a result, the authors argue there has been a “tendency to emphasise anti-racism and cultural identity as the singular horizon for thinking race in Britain, and thus theory left relatively untouched by new British intellectuals of colour”.
There was one key point I picked up on which addressed the question in the title [What is the “Black”?] which references modern academics’ reading of Frantz Fanon:
“For them, blackness is exclusively tied to the Middle Passage and the slave trade, and as such it does not travel. The black is the sole unit for the paradigm (as opposed to experience) of blackness, because what it concentrates are historical modes of dispossession and alienation that amount to social death.”
I feel that quote warrants a longer debate.
Edit | Tutor feedback: it is a long piece that is score settling in certain ways — opposed to Afropessimism. Plenty more to discuss on that. I used it as an example of the geographical reach of theory ad questions of hegemony.
