The Spectacle of the other-Hall

1. 1.1 Heroes or villains?
   1. race

      Annotations:

      • example 1: back Canadian sprinter, Ben Johnson 就是一个黑人冲刺重点线的封面，文章内容是说兴奋剂类药物过量使用“ The Chemical Olympics” The story suggests that all athletes- black or white- are potentially heroes and villains. But in this image, Ben Johnson personifies this split in a particular way, He is both hero and villain, He encapsulates the two extreme alternatives in one black body.
      1. preferred meaning

         Annotations:

         • There is no one true meaning. Meaning floats. However, attempting to fix it is the work of a representational practice, which intervenes in many potential meanings of an image in an attempt to privilege one.
         1. image and text

            Annotations:

            • Barthes: It is the caption which selects one out of the many possible meanings from the image, and anchors it with words. Hall: Two discourses- the discourses of written language and the discourses of photography- are required to produce and fix the meaning.
      2. binary

         Annotations:

         • People who are in any way significantly different from the majority-them rather than us- are frequently exposed to this binary form of representation. They seem to be represented through sharply opposed, polarized, binary extremes-good/bad, civilized/primitive, ugly/excessively attractive...and they are often required both things at the same time.
   2. sexuality

      Annotations:

      • example 2: 一个英国籍的牙买加黑人Linford Christie破纪录获奖，拿着英国国旗庆祝。
      1. difference speaks

         Annotations:

         • 强调difference signifies.It speaks. 黑人获得了冠军，在采访中有专门的问题，culture identities, where he feels he belongs. Every image is also being read in terms of this broader question of culture belongingness and difference. 
      2. negative publicity

         Annotations:

         • tabloid press.小报上面有关他的各种玩笑。照片上穿着紧身短裤，探讨他生殖器的大小和形状什么的。
         1. Fanon

            Annotations:

            • Fanon: white people seem to be obsessed with the sexuality of black  people. It is the subject of widespread fantasy, which fixates the black man at the level of the genitals. One is no longer aware of the Negro, but only of a penis. 
   3. gender

      Annotations:

      • example 3: 一个美国黑人女短跑运动员比赛场景照片。 example 4: example 1里面那个服用兴奋剂的男运动员穿着红色高跟鞋为一家轮胎公司拍的广告。
      1. inter-textuality

         Annotations:

         • This accumulation of meanings across different texts, where one image refers to another, or has its meaning altered by being read in the context of other images, is called inter-textuality.
         1. explanation

            Annotations:

            • 具体解释两个例子： 例3，context by her husband “someone says my wife looked like a man", her sister "somebody says mu sister looked like  a gorilla" 文章中出现这样的表示，影响对于性别的认识和表征。 例4：作者认为这个广告的亮点就在于两种性别的模糊和视觉冲击。强调difference。之所以能产生这种效果，是因为inter-textuality，读者与之前的男子汉气概的肌肉运动员的形象形成对比和互文的理解。
2. 1.2 Why does "difference" matter?
   1. 1.Saussure: meaning could not exist without difference

      Annotations:

      • Meaning depends on the difference between opposites. for example, black and white, day and night. 
      1. negative

         Annotations:

         • Hall: binary oppositions are also open to the charge of being reductionist and over-simplified- swallowing up all distinctions on their rather rigid two-part structure. Derrida: there are very few neutral binary oppositions. One pole of the binary, he argues, is usually the dominant one...there is always a relation of power between the poles of the binary opposition.
   2. 2. Bakhtin: meaning is constructed through a dialogue

      Annotations:

      • Bakhtin: meaning does not belong to any the speaker. It arises in the give-and-take between different speakers. Meaning is fundamentally dialogic. Everything we say and mean is modified by the interaction and interplay with another person.Meaning arises through the difference between the participants in any dialogue.
      1. negative

         Annotations:

         • There is negative side. Meaning cannot be fixed and that one group can never be completely in charge of meaning. 如果英国人在殖民统治其他国之前，是不是无法认定自己是英国人，因为没有交流，也没有产生difference？
   3. 3.Gay, Hall(anthropological): difference is the basis of symbolic order

      Annotations:

      • Hall: Culture depends on giving things meaning by assigning them to different positions within a classificatory system.   Douglas: social groups impose meaning on their world by ordering and organizing things into classificatory systems. Binary oppositions are crucial for all classification.   
      1. negative

         Annotations:

         • Douglas: what really disturbs cultural order is when things turn up in the wrong category; or when things fail to fit any category. (mercury) Babcock: symbolic boundaries are central to all culture. Making difference leads us to close ranks, shore up culture and to stigmatize and expel anything which is defined as impure, abnormal. 
   4. 4. psychoabalytic: The other is fundamental to constitution of the self

      Annotations:

      • 讲述了三种哲学家的观点，重点是：the role of other in subjective development. Subjectivity can only arise and a sense of self be formed through the symbolic and unconscious relations which the young child forges with a significant other which is outside itself.
      1. Freud

         Annotations:

         • Oedipus complex 对性别的认知过程
         1. negative

            Annotations:

            • 1.psychoanalytic认为there is no such a thing as a given, stable inner core to the self or identity.We are never fully unified as subjects. 我们的主体性在与other的不确定的相互交往中实现，那么我们总是在某种程度上不完整的，always lack 2. This troubling split or division within subjectivity can never be fully healed. Some indeed see this as one of the main sources of neurosis in adults.
      2. Lacan

         Annotations:

         • Child has no sense of itself as a subject separate from its mother until it sees itself in a mirror.
      3. Klein

         Annotations:

         • Young child copes with this problem of a lack of a stable self by splitting its unconscious image of and identification with the Mother into its good and bad parts, internalizing some aspects, and projecting others on to the outside world. 

Annotations:

• 主要讲述了历史上的三个时期，when the west encountered black people.

1. 2.1 commodity racism

   Annotations:

   • 19世纪，殖民统治时期。 我的理解是，英国国力不断增强，向外殖民扩张，在国内的商品上展示出来，通过广告塑造和强化了种族的不同（英国是帝国的，厉害的） The progress of the great white explorer-adventures and the encounters with the black African exotic was charted, recorded and depicted in maps and drawings, etchings and the news photography. McClintock: the Victorian middle-class home became a space for the display of imperial spectacle and the reinvention of race, while the colonies-in particular Africa-became a theater for exhibiting the Victorican cult of domesticity and the reinvention of gender.
   1. history

      Annotations:

      • 在开始之前，作者回顾了一下以前的事： Middle ages， 欧洲人对非洲的认识十分模糊，mysterious place, but often positive,因为毕竟有个什么科普特教会，还有什么埃塞俄比亚的祭祀约翰传说，我也不知道具体是啥，中世纪的肖像中还有黑人圣徒。 后来，黑人的形象就变坏了。黑人被认为是圣经中Ham的后人，诅咒永远成为仆人的仆人。 启蒙运动时期，欧洲人从原始向文明进化了，但是非洲人没有，于是被认为是 monkey tribe。黑格尔也说非洲no movement or development to exhibit. 再后来，19世纪，殖民统治，非洲被认为是被历史抛弃的，荒芜的地带，全部都是食人族，巫医还有什么托钵僧（不知道是什么僧）的地方。
      1. soap

         Annotations:

         • Pears Soap had the power to wash black skin white as well as being capable of washing off the soot, grime and dirt of the industrial slums and their inhabitants at home, while at the same time keeping the imperial body clean and pure in the racially polluted contact zones out t there in the Empire.
2. 2.2 meanwhile, down to the planatation

   Annotations:

   • 16C, plantation slavery and its aftermath.
   1. binary opposition

      Annotations:

      • 当时对于种族的认知存在两分法，civilization (white) and savagery(black); white-intellectual development-culture; black-instinctual-nature; 以及由此引出的purity-pollution
      1. culture/narure

         Annotations:

         • 与简单的二分法还有不同： Among whites, culture was opposed to Nature, Among blacks, it was assumed, culture coincided with Nature. Whereas whites developed culture to subdue and overcome Nature, for blacks, Culture and Nature were interchangeable. Green: As the position and status of the inferior races become increasingly to be regarded as fixed, so socio-cultural differences came to be regarded as dependent upon hereditary characteristics. 从黑人与白人的外表的不同，自然而然的区分种族上的不同和高低。 Hall: the body became the discursive site through which much of this racialized knowledge was produced and circulated.
   2. scientific racism

      Annotations:

      • contrary to Biblical evidence, black/whites had been created at different times "polugenesis" 多元发生说 
3. 2.3 signifying racial difference
   1. the subordinate status &the innate laziness
      1. naturalization

         Annotations:

         • the practice of reducing the cultures of black people to nature, or naturalizing difference. it is therefore a representational strategy designed to fix difference, and thus secure it forever, to secure discursive or ideological closure. White的目的就是强化nature而不是culture，将这种difference自然化，认为其是本质的，与生俱来的，以维持统治的合理化。
   2. innate primitivism

      Annotations:

      • simplicity and lack of culture, genetically incapable of civilized refinements.
      1. naturalization
         1. stereotype

            Annotations:

            • reduced to a few essentials, fixed in Nature by a few, simplified characteristics.

1. resisit

   Annotations:

   • these racial stereotypes are always been contested. They emphasizing not difference, but a common humanity. example: anti-slavery movement led to the abolition of British slavery in 1834the Civil War
   1. However?

      Annotations:

      • 1. The extreme racialization of the imagery has been modified; but a sentimentalized version of the stereotyping remained active in the discourse of anti-slavery. 2. After Civil War, racial segregation,is this stereotypical representation gradually disappear?
      1. too optimistic: American cinema

         Annotations:

         • 作者认为并没有逐渐消失。举例美国电影。 Bogle： 研究了一系列美国电影，得出了5种常出现的形象，如保姆，悲剧的黑白混血儿等，仍然是底层的，悲剧的，简单粗暴的形象。
         1. Griffiths：The birth of the nation (1915)

            Annotations:

            • 这个人的这部电影，which introduced these black types to the cinema was one of the most extraordinary and influential movies of all times. the story of the birth of the American nation-identifying the nation's salvation with the birth of the Ku Klux Klan. (电影具体内容作者没有讲，不知道为什么）
         2. segregated cinema
         3. change
            1. Paul Robeson

               Annotations:

               • 一个著名的非洲folk musician，在1960s受到了白人和黑人的崇拜。 Dyer：Black and white discourses on blackness seem to be valuing the same thing-spontaneity, emotion, naturalness-yet giving them a different implication.
               1. ambivalences

                  Annotations:

                  • 在一些形象中是 male heroes of black culture, 在其他的又是 the stereotypes of the white imagination. 这个演员说，“我们黑人跟他们白人不一样，我们有更深刻的emotion，而且我们习惯更直接的表达我们的情感，emotional intensity" 作者说, this sentiment embodied in several of his films, gave his performances a vibrant emotional intensity. But also played directly into the black/white, emotion/intellect, nature/culture binary oppositions of racial stereotyping.
                  1. atavism 返祖现象

                     Annotations:

                     • Dyer：means a return to or recovery of qualities that have been carried in the blood from generation to generation. 在这个例子中，folk给人一种 genuine feel for the traditions of black people, capturing what was thought to be the essence of the Negro spirituals. 黑人白人感受不同，同一首歌，黑人听得是”我们要解放和自由“，白人感觉到的是”他们在受折磨，很伤心“
            2. Sidney Poitier

               Annotations:

               • Sidney Poitier:  an extremely talented black actor, whose roles cast him as a hero for an integrationist age,  though largely from a white liberal perspective. Bogle 认为之所以他能够脱颖而出，是因为符合了白人的审美需求，良好习惯，标准英语，礼貌，受教育等。
            3. after that

               Annotations:

               • 1960s之后，又有Civil Right movement，种族隔离的结束，挑战了这样的种族刻板印象。 1980S，1990S年代，在各种社会变化和大背景之下，blacks entered the American cinema mainstream as independently,然后又涌现出了很多优秀的演员。

1. 4.1 Representation, difference and power
   1. symbolic power

      Annotations:

      • power here not only in terms of economic exploitation and physical coercion, but in a broader cultural or symbolic terms, including the power to represent someone or something in a certain way. Stereotyping is a key element in this exercise of symbolic violence.
   2. Said: Orientalism

      Annotations:

      • definition: " the discourse by which European culture was able to manage- and even produce- the orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively during the post-Englitenment period"
      1. Foucault's power knowledge

         Annotations:

         • parallels: A discourse produces, through different practices of representation (scholarship, exhibition, painting,etc.),a form of racialized knowledge of the Other (Orientalism) deeply implicated in the operations of power (imperialism).
   3. power: Gramsci & Foucault
      1. difference

         Annotations:

         • Gramsci: stressed between classes Foucault: always refused to identify any specific subject or subject-group as the source of power, which , he said, operates at a local, tactical level.
      2. similarities

         Annotations:

         • 1. power also seduces, solicits, induces , wins consent. it includes the dominant ans the dominated within its circuits.(不仅是由上到下的强制，压迫） 2. power not only constrains and prevents, it also productive. It produces new discourse, new kinds of knowledge, new objects of knowledge, shapes new practices and institutions. 3. power is to be found everywhere. Power circulates.
         1. circularity of power

            Annotations:

            • this concept is especially important in the context of representation, The argument is that everyone- the powerful and the powerless- is caught up, though not on equal terms, in power's circulation, No one-neither its apparent victims nor agents- can stand wholly outside its field of operation.
            1. example

               Annotations:

               • how black masculinity is represented within a recialized regime of representation. Mercer and Julien:The cycle between reality and representation makes the ideological fictions of racism empirically true- or rather, there is the struggle over the definition, understanding and construction of meanings around black masculinity within the dominant regime of truth.  (黑人一般被认为是否定其男子汉气质的，认为他们只是四肢发达，性功能强，被控制的，依附的。现实中年轻的黑人被贴上抢劫者，暴乱者的标签，但基于原有的representation，他们被认为只是对自己卑微地位的一种暴力反抗，又回到了被控制的形象，加强了这种representation。
               1. paradoxical and logic

                  Annotations:

                  • this may seem paradoxical, bit it does have its own logic.  1. A conscious and overt level and  2. an  unconscious or suppressed level. The former often serves as a displaces cover for the latter. the problem  is that blacks are trapped by the binary structures of the stereotype, which is split between two extreme opposites- and are obliged to shuttle endlessly between them, sometimes being represented as both of them at the same time.
                  1. fantasy and real

                     Annotations:

                     • What is visually produced, by the practices of representation, is only half of the story, the other half- the deeper maning-lies in what is not being said, but is being fantasized, what is implied but cannot be shown. 例子：黑人是children（表层），super man，better endowed than white，sexuality insatiable（fantasy）当黑人主动展示出反表层意义的形象，作为反抗stereotype，事实上加强了深层的意义的stereotype。（在两个层次里面的stereotype中来回摆动）
2. 4.2 power and fantasy
   1. infantilization

      Annotations:

      • this is a common representational strategy for both man and woman( boy and girl)  blacks respond to this infantilization by adopting a sort of caricature-in-reverse of the hyper-masculinity and super-sexuality, aggressive-masculine style.  But this only served to confirm the fantasy amongst whites of their ungovernable and excessive sexual nature. (Wallace)
   2. ambivalence
3. 4.3 Fetishism and disavowal
   1. example: Sarah Baartman

      Annotations:

      • 一个从小被当做野兽养大的女子，后来回归正常人类生活，被当做异类和物品的研究对象。她被大家关注和研究，因为十分丰满的臀部。（Gilman）
      1. Hall的点评

         Annotations:

         • 1. note the preoccupation -one could say the obsession- with marking difference. (pathologized归于病态的 difference,与普通女人不一样，the Other) 2. observe her reduction to Nature, the signifier of which was her body. （被当做text一样证明和解读） 3.She became "known", represented and observed through a series of polarized, binary oppositions. Primitive not civilized. (拿她跟野兽作对比，说她是猿猴之类的，she was reduced to her body and her body was reduced to her sexual organs) 4.She was subjected to an extreme form of reductionism- a strategy often applied to the representation of woman's bodies, of whatever race. especially in pronography. (did not exist as a person,but a slooection of sextual parts, she was fetishized-turned into an object.
   2. fetishism
      1. displacement

         Annotations:

         • 代替，就是我们简单的理解。阳具是禁忌的，要找其他物品来替代。 以及Sarah的例子，sexual objects 用臀部来代替女性生殖器。
      2. disavowal

         Annotations:

         • disavowal is a strategy by means of which a powerful fascination or desire is both indulged and at the same time denied, It is where what as been tabooed nevertheless manages to find a displaced form of representation.  (two contradictory beliefs) (例子，Freud对于孩子对母亲性别的理解，Hall 提到critique，male-centred）
      3. definition

         Annotations:

         • Fetishism involves the substitution of an object for some dangerous and powerful but forbidden force. Fetishism on representation borrows from all the meanings from above.
         1. anthropology

            Annotations:

            • In anthropology, it refers to the way the powerful and dangerous spirit of a god can be displayed on to an object, which becomes charged with the spiritual power of that for which it is a substitute,
         2. Marx

            Annotations:

            • In Marx's notion of "commodity fetishism", the living labor of the labor has been displayed and disappears into things-the commodities which workers produce but have to buy back as though they belonged to someone else. **living labor：活劳动，指物质资料生产过程中脑力和体力的小号过程
         3. psychoanalysis

            Annotations:

            • In psychoanalysis, fetishism is described as the substitute for the absent phallus.
      4. cover story

         Annotations:

         • Fetishism is a strategy for having both ways, for both representing and not representing the tabooed, dangerous or forbidden object of pleasure and desire. provides us what Mercer called alibi.辩解，托词。 就是说具有两面性，一方面用其他物品代替了禁忌的东西，但同时又激发你去看那些禁忌的部分。Sarah的例子，以探寻科学之谜，寻求真相的名义，窥阴，窥私。
         1. licenses voyeurism

            Annotations:

            • Freud, scopophilia 观看癖，激发性欲
4. Stereotyping

   Annotations:

   • here we examine four further aspects: a. the construction of otherness and exclusion b.stereotyping and power c. the role of fantasy d. fetishism
   1. 对比

      Annotations:

      • 1. stereotyping reduces, essentialize, naturalizes and fixes difference. 2. stereotyping deploys a strategy of splitting. its practice of closure and exclusion, fixed boundaries, and excludes everything which is not belong. (also is part of the maintenance of social and symbolic order)3.stereotyping tends to occur where there are gross inequalities of power. ("ethnocentrism" 民族优越感，a violent hierarchy rather than a peaceful coexistence, Foucault "power/knowledge" sort of game,Gramsci, hegemony)
5. typing

   Annotations:

   • Dyer: without the use of types, it would be difficult, if not possible, to make sense of the world. Type: "a type is any simple,vivid,memorable, easily grasped and widely recognized characterization in which a few traits are foregrounded and change or development is kept to a minimum."  Alfred: Typifications.

1. 5.1 reversing the sterotypes
   1. black films

      Annotations:

      • 1960-1970开始，黑人电影出现了繁荣，反stereotype的形象，剧情中反抗白人，叛逆的，不顺从的，就演什么黑社会老大啊，还有那种屌屌的角色，跟警察对着干啊什么的，也被看做”revenge film".
      1. stereotypical other

         Annotations:

         • Escaping the grip of one stereotypical extreme may simply mean being trapped in its stereotypical other.  It is certainly a welcome change, but it has not unlocked what Mercer and Julien call the complex dialectics of power and subordination through which black male identities have been historically and culturally constructed. 我的理解是，这种counter-stereotype的力量是一种进步，但是并没能撼动历史和文化过程中对于黑人形象的建构。黑人以前的形象是懦弱的，胆小的，顺从的，傻的，但是现在这种电影里面是一种叛逆的，复仇的，就像古惑仔一样，但同时又是残暴的，与毒品相连的，犯罪的，就这种感觉吧。
2. 5.2 positive and negative images
   1. black is beautiful

      Annotations:

      • 这里作者举了一些图片的例子，挑战stereotype中的reductionism， 用positive替代negative，如女性参与公众生活，男性在家带孩子；一个广告中采用多国小孩，体现hybridity。
      1. problem

         Annotations:

         • positive/negative strategy increases the diversity of ways in which being black is represented, but does not necessarily displace the negative.
3. 5.3 Through the eye of representation

   Annotations:

   • the third counter-strategy locates itself within the complexities and ambivalences of representation itself, and tries to contest it from within. it is more concerned with the forms of racial representation than with introducing a new content.
   1. body

      Annotations:

      • this strategy positively takes the body as the principle site of its representational strategies, attempting to make the stereotypes work against themselves. However this strategy makes elaborate play with looking, hoping by its very attention, to make it strange,-that is, to de-familiarize it, and so make explicit what is often hidden-its erotic dimensions,
      1. example

         Annotations:

         • 哎，因为例子内容在附录里，所以没有读到。但是只看分析又确实没有太看明白。只好把结论摘录如下： it becomes necessary to reverse the reading of racial fetishism, not as a repetition of racist fantasies but as a de-constructive strategy, which begins to lay bare the psychic and social relations of ambivalence at play in cultural representations of race and sexuality.
         1. 作者总结

            Annotations:

            • 上述的这些问题和理解都没有固定的答案，因为其实根本也没有答案，也是醉了。they are a matter of interpretation and judgement,但the complexity and ambivalence of representation as a practice是可以肯定的。
4. trans-coding

   Annotations:

   • trans-coding: taking an existing meaning ans re-appropriating it for new meanings.