Michael De Anda Muñiz Week 4: Cultural Studies

            I find these readings’ comfort with fluidity, change, partiality, and instability extremely useful. Ever since I read “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance” by Stuart Hall, articulation has been a concept I want to incorporate into my own work. Clifford (2001) and Diaz and Kauanui (2001) shared my affinity for articulation. For example, Clifford (2001) shows that articulation allows us to reject essentialist, historically frozen definitions of indigeneity and recognize how the diversity of cultures and histories can all be included in the concept of indigeneity. Additionally, Hall (1994) is able to define diaspora experience “not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity” (p. 481-2).

Articulation’s ability to get around a reductionist analysis is extremely helpful. Gender, race, ethnicity, and culture are all concepts with reductionist tendencies. Individuals often use these concepts to identify, or with the presumption of, some kind of fixed, universal essence. Articulation provides us with the tools to understand race, gender, ethnicity, and culture as constantly in flux and interconnected with each other and other “categories”. For example, in an article I wrote based on my master’s research that is under review, I needed articulation to help me understand how racial and class meanings become so connected that an analysis cannot separate the two analytic categories. When I tried to write just about race then just about class, my analysis felt weak. The meanings my participants made could not be reduced simply to racial identities or class backgrounds. When I attempted to do this in my analysis, too many contradictions went unexplained. Once I viewed class and race as articulated, then I felt like I had a stronger analysis that more accurately understood participants’ meaning making. Articulation allows us to account for the fluidity and transformations of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and culture’s social meanings.

Additionally, Abu-Lughod’s (1991) call to write against culture, specifically her discussion of halfies, positionality, and partiality, connect with articulation’s shift of our analytic framework. I particularly feel like I can identify with the halfies, not because I am “mixed-race” but due to my educational position. She claims that halfies must deal with the partial nature of the observer and the picture presented. Feminists and halfies can easily be accused of only getting part of the picture due to their own biases, while white men are the archetypical objective scholar. I see this in teaching, as well. Feminists instructors and instructors of color are assumed to be biased if they discuss racism or sexism. Abu-Lughod points out that objectivity is false, because even “outsiders” occupy a position in the larger historical structure. We are all a part of the social world we research within, regardless of how others identify us. What I take from this discussion is a comfort with incompleteness. I even go so far to be suspicious of any claims of totality. Using articulation, we are able to provide an analysis that can deal with difference, partiality, and contradictions. From internal processes of individuals to macro-level structural processes, contradictions, transformations, and diversity constantly exist. Using old, isolated analytic frameworks of static, distinct, and essential cultures, races, genders, etc. do not provide us the tools that this week’s readings do.