Culture, Context, and Composition

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What values, what distinctions, what assumptions are at work in these truths? IOW, reflect on what constitutes (what beliefs, what “ideologies,” make up) the specific society that practices these meanings (of black and white) as if they are givens?

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How can we read those ‘truths’ not simply as givens, as obvious and natural, but as meanings that are produced “in a specific society” and according to “the ways in which that society talks and thinks about itself and its experience”?

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What are the “obvious” and “natural” beliefs or associations (i.e. so-called truths) at work in the definitions of “black” and “white” read by Malcolm X in the scene we watched?

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Here’s a quote from Belsey: “[...I]t is argued that what seems obvious and natural is not necessarily so, but that on the contrary the ‘obvious’ and the ‘natural’ are not given  but produced in a specific society by the ways in which that society talks and thinks about itself and its experience” (3).
To answer the [...]

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Trust me that this is the most accessible intro to structuralist and poststructuralist theory available. Saussure was a structuralist, and most of the big names in continental philosophy since him are poststructuralists (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze,  etc, etc). She’s basically introducing you to the lit theory and philosophy that has been championed for the last few [...]

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