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- THE SPECTACLE OF THE 'OTHER' Stuart Hall Contents 1 INTRODUCTION 225 1.1 Heroes or villains? 226 1.2 Why does 'difference' matter? 234 2 RACIALIZING THE 'OTHER 239 2.1 Commodity racism: empire and the domestic world 239.
- Girl don’t be a girl -don’t be a girl don’t be a girl don’t be a girl -don’t be a girl don’t be a girl don’t be a girl don’t be a girl don’t be a.
- Download full-text PDF Download full-text PDF Read full-text. Hall, “The Spectacle of the Other,” 225–79. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism.
Hall outlines four arguments about difference which have something to say about how we perceive and relate to difference.
1. The linguistic argument (made by Ferdinand de Saussure) that difference is central to making sense of things. We make sense of 'white' by comparing it to 'black', of 'male' by comparing it with 'female' and so on. Yet, this way of thinking emphasizes the opposites - there is a range of grays in between black and white. One may choose to see how black turns gradually into white; or one may choose to see black versus white. I'm talking about colors; but one can easily talk about race, ethnicity, gender in the same way.
2. The dialogic argument (made by Mikhail Bakhtin) that difference is central to understanding and communication, because we communicate and make sense of things in a dialogue with another person. It is by participating in this dialogue and by confronting the different ideas we have that we make sense of things. So, difference is seen here as central to understanding.
3. The anthropological argument (made by DuGay and Hall; Mary Douglas) that each culture gives meaning by classifying things. Classification means emphasizing the difference; better said: when you classify something, there is a principle according to which you decide it is different or similar - so it has to go into this class of things (e.g. chairs) or the other (e.g. dogs). The idea here is that difference is created by those principles of classifications (those things which you highlight as central to defining a chair versus a dog). Though it make look like those principles are 'natural', 'logical' and 'immutable', they are in fact social conventions (heavy to swallow, but i won't go into details here).
4. The psychoanalytical argument (made by Sigmund Freud) that the 'Other' - different from Self - is central to how we form our identities. Psychologists and psychoanalysts like to point out how, as children, we come to understand ourselves as different from the others in a painful way (e.g. we throw things on the floor and they don't come up to us and thus we form a sense of the Self as different from the world). Furthermore, for Freud, this process of defining the Self from the Other has - yeah, i know, big surprise - a sexual dimension. The drill is well-known: Oedipian complexes for men and identification with mothers for women etc. etc.
I found these insights really interesting: they do influence the general framework through which we come to think of difference - whether racial, gendered or simply the difference between a chair and a dog...
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The People of the State of California v. Hall or People v.Hall, 4 Cal. 399, was an appealed murder case in the 1850s in which the California Supreme Court established that Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants had no rights to testify against white citizens. The opinion was delivered in 1854 by Chief Justice Hugh Murray with the concurrence of Justice Solomon Heydenfeldt.
Stuart Hall Spectacle Of The Other Pdf
* Stuart Hall (1997) 'The Spectacle of the 'Other',' in Stuart Hall (Ed.) Representations. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage and The Open University, pp. 223-279Photo credits: KaCey97007
Why are popular representations so drawn upon?
Where did popular figures and stereotypes come from?
How do we class ‘otherness’?
What is ‘other’?
Society Of The Spectacle
These are all questions we should be asking ourselves.
Henrietta Lidchi looked at the Ethnographic museum (a national museum in Budapest, Hungary) and their project on “The West” from other cultures depict how the west live, racial and ethnic differences being prominent.
These stereotypes typically have been found to come form commercial adverting and magazine illustrations since the late nineteenth century beginning with the competitive world of modern day bodily aesthetics.
In “The chemical Olympics” magazine, a lead story was based on “Drug taking in athletes” specifically talking about Ben Johnson, when he used drugs to enhance his performance. Looking at the picture above before you knew that information, you could say it’s message is; ‘A triumphant moment for Johnson’ however when you know its also captioned ‘heros and villians’, it changes the meaning. When you are more informed, it could suggest that no matter what colour or race you are, everyone is susceptible to being a villain OR hero.
At a devotive level the image is “a picture of the 100 metres race”, however on a connotative level or sub theme being the drug story is ‘race’ and ‘difference’. Having these 2 meanings gives the magazine the choice with what to play on, giving the image a ‘preferred meaning’.
Roland Barths (1977) argues that when you caption an image, the words are stuck with it. The discourse of the words and discourse of the image produce a ‘fixed’ meaning. Barths would specifically talk about the image of Johnson and call it a ‘meta-message’ or myth about race, colour and otherness because of what I have spoken about above with duel meaning.
Similarly Linford Christie won the 100 meters as well, while on the British team. Some where racial to him, arguing he was not British. In answer to this, he explained he was born in Jamaica and lived there until he was seven when he moved to live in the UK. He was a British citizen 27 years before he won the medal. Just because he was not ‘white’ do not mean he should be ‘othered’ by our western society.
Why does ‘difference’ matter?
It is something that is both necessary and dangerous. Without it ‘meaning’ would not exist, however it is far to easy for us to compare, which can digress to a negative. “we can only construct meaning through dialogue with “other” explains Mikhal Bakhtin.