• Title/Summary/Keyword: discursive struggle

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"Once You Go Black": Performative Acts of "Blackness" in Contemporary Cinema

  • Chung, Hye Jean
    • English & American cultural studies
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    • v.14 no.1
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    • pp.241-267
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    • 2014
  • Media representations of race have attempted to contain blackness by packaging and commodifying it to reflect and affect preconceptions and prejudices of dominant culture. From the early beginnings of blackface minstrelsy as entertainment form in the $19^{th}$ century, representations of African Americans in popular culture and mainstream media have been closely associated with the notion of performance. The performative nature of racial representations is situated within the discursive struggle over what it meant to be Black, or what it meant to be labeled and portrayed as Black in American culture. This essay discusses four films that contain performances of "blackness" that assemble race and gender in complex configurations: Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000), Girl 6 (Spike Lee, 1996), Big Momma's House (Raja Gosnell, 2000), and White Chicks (Keenen Ivory Wayans, 2004). I explore how the performative nature of "blackness" is emphasized, thematized, and problematized in these films through the physicality of corporeal figures that embody the close link between race and gender identities. Once we are cognizant of the fact that race and gender are fabricated cultural constructs and performative acts, we can recognize that notions of "blackness" and "femininity" are not naturalized or essentialist, but open to recontextualization and revision.

A Critical Study of Media Discourses on 'University Reform' Focused on Major Newspapers' Reports on University Policies of Administrations from 2008 to 2015 (언론의 '대학 개혁' 담론에 대한 비판적 연구 이명박 정권 이후 대학 정책에 대한 주요 신문의 보도를 중심으로)

  • Lee, Oh Hyeon
    • Korean journal of communication and information
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    • v.82
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    • pp.29-72
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    • 2017
  • This study explores the ways that newspapers report the administrations' policies of 'university reform' from February 2008 to December 2015 through critical discourse analysis. As results, Donga-ilbo and Chosun-ilbo produce the discourse that the crisis of universities is so real and dangerous that it brings about the crisis of our nation, and that the current university systems should be changed into neoliberal systems because it is the critical reason of the crisis. Using various discursive strategies, they construct their reports as objective, real and embodying general goods and then successfully build the neoliberal discourse on university reform as commonsensical and natural. They finally acquire the discursive hegemony for university reform. Kyunghyang-shinmun and Hankyoreh-shinmun produce the anti-discourse against that of Donga-ilbo and Chosun-ilbo. However, they can not develop substantial hegemony struggles for the discourse of university reform because of the limitations of their discourse in terms of quantity and quality and the social and press structures overwhelmingly inclined for neo-liberalism.

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Doble Contexts for Reading Manfredo Tafuri's Criticism of Ideology (만프레도 타푸리의 이데올로기 비판 독해를 위한 이중의 문맥)

  • Park, Junghyun
    • Journal of architectural history
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    • v.25 no.2
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    • pp.21-30
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    • 2016
  • Autonomia movement that emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist (operaismo) communism gives historical and discursive context to Manfredo Tafuri's famous criticism of ideology. His thesis on the death of architecture was a radical criticism of Keynesian intervention which was a strategy to cope with the Great Depression. For him, this capitalist development had taken away ideological prefiguration from architecture. At least Tafuri's this early intellectual phase was formed in the wake of magazine Contrapiano and Antonio Negri's influence. Tafuri almost entirely adapted Negri's thought on the importance of capitalist innovation that was uncovered by Keynes, Schumpeter, and Manheim and the periodization in modern history. When we read Tafuri's text with this concrete context, we can avoid being plunged into his abstruseness. On the other hand, 1980's Korea cannot understand Tafuri comprehensibly. 1980's situation to struggle to acquire democracy prescribed only one mode of reception of Tafuri's historiography in Korea. Tafuri's so-called pessimist view point could not satisfy student activists. They want to take intellectual means to sustain student movement and to secure political dynamics of protest. But at the same time they have anxiety to understand tafuri's thesis that they consider ad a critical theory for Korean Architecture. Double contexts of Tafuri's criticism of ideology bring to light to historicize both Tafuri's historiography itself and reception of his text in Korea.

The Discursive Topography in Maker Culture A Critical Discourse Analysis of 'Maker Movement' (메이커 문화를 둘러싼 담론적 지형 메이커 운동(maker movement)에 대한 비판적 담론 분석)

  • Choi, Hyuk Kyoo
    • Korean journal of communication and information
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    • v.82
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    • pp.73-103
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    • 2017
  • With the introduction and expansion of 'maker movement', maker culture captured attention and saw itself as an emerging culture. This study aims to analyze published books, policy report, columns and news articles related to maker culture through the perspective of critical discourse analysis. Maker movement led by the government gives meaning to the maker culture as the force of 'creative economy' that can overcome the economic crisis. Following this meaning making, one-man digital fabrication start-ups have been actively promoted by government policies. In the case of Seoul, it criticizes government led maker movement that only focuses on economy and institutionalizes maker movement by focusing on the maker culture's aspect as 'digital social innovation' that can resolve social problems. In the world of art, it tries to rediscover the value craft, that is, 'creative craftsman'. Moreover, resistance movement that tries to fight against dominant technology structure through constructing 'critical making' was also spotted. Nonetheless, it is rather untimely to definitely find dominant discourse's power effect in reality and sign of rupture in dominant structure as the result of resisting discourse's struggle. Thus, maker movement is the field of struggle where an ongoing clash can be found: between discourse strategy that tries to make maker culture a social or economic asset by combining with dominant power structure, and alternating or resisting practice of signification that focuses on its cultural techno-political potential.

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Situating the Subject within the Global Material Conditions -A Critical Review on the Theorization of Postcolonial Ideas (지구화 시기 주체 구성의 물적 토대 복원을 위한 시론 -포스트식민주의 이론화 과정에 대한 리뷰를 중심으로)

  • Kim, Sumi
    • Korean journal of communication and information
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    • v.70
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    • pp.66-94
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    • 2015
  • Postcolonialism, as a school of thought, has become enormously influential for understanding the recent phenomena of globalization. While rejecting the universalizing categories of the Enlightenment, postcolonialism has called into question the old idea of culture and identity as a transcendent regime of authenticity and purity. It has also celebrated the diasporic experiences that entail porous and hybrid cultural identities as a potential site of struggle and resistance against the dominant cultural and discursive order. It is argued, however, that postcolonial theory's emancipatory claims relating to the diversified global culture tend to be complicit with transnational capitalism that brings about global issues of material as well as cultural injustice. This article, through a thorough review of the ways the postcolonial theoretical framework has been developed and appropriated by main figures in postcolonial scholarship, seeks for a theoretical and critical strategy to grasp the complex conditions of global inequality.

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