Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1997 10:23:53 -0800 (PST)
From: James Ralph Westfall <jwest-AT-ea.oac.uci.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: The Agency of the Sign


On Wed, 19 Nov 1997, Howard Hastings wrote:
> 
> Now I have a question:
> 
> In The Location of Culture, in his chapter on "The Postcolonial and the
> Postmodern: the Question of Agency,"   Homi Bhabha argues that "Culture is
> translational" because "spatial histories of displacement ... make the
> question of how culture signifies,or what is signified by CULTURE, a
> rather complex issue."  Further he says
> 
>     It becomes crucial to distinguish between the semblance and similitude
>     of symbols across diverse cultural experiences--literature, art, music
>     ritual, life, death--and the social specificity of each of these
>     productions of meaning as they circulate as signs within specific
>     contextual locations and social systems of value. (172)
> 
   Movies

	The Roosevelt, Renaissance, Gem, Alhambra:
	Harlem laughing in all the wrong places
	    at the crocodile tears
	    of crocodile art
	    that you know
	    in your heart
	    is crocodile:

		(Hollywood
		laughs at me,
		black--
		so I laugh 
		back.)

--Langston Hughes, from "Montage of a Dream Deferred"



     --- from list phillitcrit-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---