An Unnecessary Divide

The self-proclaimed ‘Tiger Mom,’ Amy Chua, came into collective consciousness in 2011 when the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from her book The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother under the headline: “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” Her latest book, The Triple Threat: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, written with her husband Jed Rubenfeld, has caught national attention once again as it attempts to define who is successful and why.

Defining ‘success’ can be difficult, to say the least. But it seems that Chua’s newest book, as well as her first one, unconsciously (or consciously?) drives an unnecessary feeling of distance and opposition among communities, further strengthening the perception of ‘difference’ in various cultural groups. Since matters surrounding taste and class were assigned to be discussed this week, I thought I’d share this story from NPR’s Code Switch: “’Tiger Mother’Author Spells Out 3 Traits That Drive Success In The U.S.”

The interview features the couple speaking on behalf of their provocative new book, which attempts to explain why not just Asians (like Chua) and also seven other groups—including Jews (like Rubenfeld), Mormons, Indians, Iranians, Nigerians, Lebanese, Cubans—are superior when it comes to succeeding in America. In the book, Chua and Rubenfeld claim that certain cultural groups thrive because they all possess three specific traits: a superiority complex, insecurity, and impulse control—validating the perception that certain minority groups are culturally ‘better.’

On its own, the book conflates race with culture, which is problematic in itself. It’s an issue that has, over the years, become insidiously commonplace as new strains of ethnic, racial, and cultural reductivism has crept in and out of American public discourse. It has, unfortunately, become relatively ‘normal’ for different groups (and individuals such as Chua and Rubenfeld) to tout cultural superiority and to see themselves as ‘model minorities.’ But when does cultural pride cross the line into racism?

This is what bothered me about Chua and Rubenfeld’s book. Who’s to say, exactly, what entails “success?” Not them, nor anyone else for that matter. Perceptions of taste, class, success, etc. are, of course, a ‘manifested preference,’ as Pierre Bourdieu writes in “The Aesthetic Sense As The Sense of Distinction”—“one manifestation of the system of dispositions produced by the social conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence when they take the paradoxical form of the greatest freedom conceivable, at a given moment, with respect to the constraints of economic necessity.” Hence, taste can be seen as “the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference” and, according to Bourdieu, “is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes.” (p. 205). 

In many ways, I feel that Chua and Rubenfeld’s book further complicates the racial (and economic) disparity that continues to exist in this country—that ‘barrier between the classes’ that Bourdieu speaks of. Typically, what makes people so uncomfortable with disparity isn’t so much that it exists, but how and why it does. The Triple Threat seems to attribute the how and the why to none other than culture. The couple rattles off in the book about the socioeconomic successes of specific cultural groups, providing evidence here and there about how “certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall.” However, in their attempt to “decry stereotyping,” the book, as a whole, only seems to reinforce (and reproduce) cultural stereotypes.

America has no doubt taken great pains throughout history to shed one of its most ‘distasteful’ ignorances: the belief that human beings of different skin tones, belief systems, and cultural backgrounds have nothing in common with one another. Our greatest hope is to one day create a nation where all varieties of people can identify themselves with each other without the presence of strong social “barriers.” Over the years, there’s obviously been an increased diversity in the American distribution of power as well as in the voices that carry the American conversation-- but it is still an ongoing tug of war that pits more diverse and tolerant individuals against those who are unwilling to give up on the status quo.

Bourdieu claims that matters of taste can both unite and separate, uniting “all those who are the product of similar conditions while distinguishing them from all others” (p. 205). In more ways than one, books like Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mom and The Triple Package seem only to spread thoughts that can negatively influence social relations and dynamics between people-- creating, in the end, even more disparity than there was before. For a book written supposedly by ‘intellectuals’ (both authors are influential Yale law professors), it, in my mind, succeeds far too much in antagonizing and dividing communities, instead of attempting to do the complete opposite: uniting them.

PBS and Diversity

For this weeks’ PBS assignment, I watched three programs that dealt with diversity in some respect: Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, America in Primetime: IndependentWoman and Pioneers of Television:Funny Ladies.

Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes is filmed by lifelong hip hop enthusiast, Byron James. The one hour documentary features interviews and commentary on the disturbing trend of violence, misogyny and homophobia rampant in hip hop music. Similar to 1968 show, Black Journal, but in a completely different arena, James "blends a discussion of black economic empowerment with a critique of white normative assumptions about beauty and consumer preferences" (Perlman 2011). 

James’ findings focus largely on the performance of the behavior perpetuated in many mainstream TV shows and films that equate masculinity, regardless of race, with violence and the treatment of women as sex objects. As Imogen Tyler points out in her article on chavs and the appropriation of “black American popular culture through their clothing, music, and forms of speech,” James makes the same connection between American working class men and the enjoyment of hip hop culture (Tyler 2008). Hip-hop, like the chavs is a way for people to perform a societal role of power when they have little actual power due to racism or classism.

Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes tackles consumer culture as well. The commercial viability of hip hop from the golden age (cited by the program as 1987-1992), switched from confronting issues of white patriarchy to current themes of hypermasculinity. White corporate men in suits discovered that violence, sexualized women and attacks against the LGBT community sells. Those are now the dominant themes required to break into selling hip hop records.

Both other programs I viewed featured women in TV, whether comedians or their characters. Pioneers of Television: Funny Ladies featured a few comedians of color, such as Jackie “Moms” Mabley. If the recent Saturday Night Live debacle surrounding the casting of Sasheer Zamata is any indication, women of color often are overlooked in this arena. Similarly, America in Primetime: Independent Woman featured characters of color, Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi), Christina Yang (Sandra Oh) and comments about diversity from Grey’s Anatomy show runner, Shonda Rhimes.

While perhaps public broadcasting has an elitist reputation, what was striking about all three of these programs is the focus on diversity. Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes and the two programs featuring TV women openly discuss the cultural issues indicative of traditionally marginalized people, especially women and people of color. From this small sampling, and Amanda's discussion about early childhood programming on PBS, it seems that PBS makes a great effort to include diversity in their programming.

PBS, NPR and Honey Boo Boo

This week my PBS viewings included Art21: Balance, Makers: Women Who Make America Part One: Awakening and Global Voices: Not Another World, in conjunction with NPR coverage of the Olympics, Italian drug raids in Brooklyn, concerns about over the counter painkillers, and male vs. women enrollment statistics in Obamacare. Art 21: Balance, spoke particularly to my creative interests, showcasing various artists who ventured out into desolate dessert grounds to perfect their modern line and symmetry techniques, Makers: Women Who Make America documented the post-1950 early feminist/Women’s Movement during which women secured their rights apart from domesticity as equal members of the workplace and the scripted drama Global Voices: Not Another World explored the intimate conversations of a Middle Eastern group of female family members as they discussed the cultural expectations and prospects of marriage for the youngest female member of the family, Lama. I found that Art21: Balance related most closely to Bordieu’s “The Aesthetic Sense as the Sense of Distinction” and that Makers: Women Who Make America Part One and Global Voices: Not Another World communicated the messages explored through Tyler’s “Chav Mum Chav Scum” and Holohan’s “We’re A Normal Family: Representing The Mundane in Channel 4’s The Family.”

In watching Art 21: Balance I observed each artist at work, their paints and easels in hand as they sat within their landscape environments and commented on their aesthetic preferences, allowing me to explore questions after reading Bordieu’s “The Aesthetic Sense as the Sense of Distinction,” of what distinguishes the artist from all others, if there is a real technique in understanding art or if artistic interpretation become a matter of taste, if understanding art signifies taste, and if artists become privileged and distinguished from other social groups in their choosing to make aestheticized objects as a means of economic stability. In viewing Makers: Women Who Make America Part One: Awakening and Global Voices: Not Another World I recognized issues prevalent within both the articles for this week and our viewing of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo: Season Three Episode Three as well as our earlier discussions on The Ali G Show and whether Sasha Baron Cohen’s depiction of a “white trash” gangster was warranted for his appropriation or to be labeled as comedically offensive.

The feminist framework set in Makers: Women Who Make America proved to counter the vilified opinions of those who in Tyler’s “Chav Mum Chav Scum” defined chav women through negative “urban dictionary” jargon and developed caricature-like representations of the chav woman in the news and in entertainment as Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard. Cohen’s Ali G character very much appeared to me as a male version of Vicky Pollard, and these two fabricated characters that were created to mock or even mark a lower-class member of English society through inducing laughter forced me to question to what extent and for what purpose. In “Chav Mum Chav Scum” Tyler writes, “Laughter is often at the expense of another, and when we laugh we effectively fix the other, as the object of comedy. Laughter moves us both literally and figuratively we are averted, moved away from the thing, the object or figure we laugh at. In the case of laughter at those of a lower class, laugher is boundary forming. It creates distance between them and us, asserting moral judgments and a superior class position” (25). As both The Ali G Show and Little Britain have come to represent a genre of televised comedy in the UK, we are left to question whether both shows function to parody society’s stereotyping of such figures or if they in fact join in the stereotyping of these figures. Although not a documentary or reality program, PBS’s Global Voices: Not Another World addressed the demonstration of family interactions, specifically among women, which brought me to my interpretation of Honey Boo Boo and its relation to Holohan’s “We’re A Very Normal Family.” Although Global Voices: Not Another World represents a Middle Eastern family in a cultural and socially relevant context as they discuss the impending cultural importance of marriage for the youngest female character, Honey Boo Boo showcases what could be termed as an American “redneck” family in their most intimate and unfiltered states, not necessarily addressing social issues of importance in each episode, but repetitively bringing attention to the representation of the family as a spectacle. In her article Holohan writes, “What was private and not, therefore, for public display- namely intimate family life- has now become the subject of everyday television. It is the very explosion of the family which has enabled this spectacularization of the family to take place” (28). I found that Honey Boo Boo developed a parodied image of a family through the use of repetition, the exhaustion of the vulgar or inappropriate behaviors of each character and the mockery of the characters in their responses. In one particular scene, Pumpkin is being interviewed about the meaning of an RV, during which she mispronounces and incorrectly defines what a recreational vehicle is. Her words are subtitled and the show deliberately points out her wrongness, accompanying her words with an awkward pause and goofy music to blatantly point out her lack of knowledge. I believe that the show is very much like The Ali G Show and Little Britain in their portrayal of the chav archetype, developing a parody of a Southern family as a class and taste that is to be distinguished from and consumed by its viewers.

Public Broadcasting, Mass Culture and Class

While exploring the current current programs and archives of NPR and PBS, I was stuck by the similarities between their programs and the programs aired by Turkish public broadcasters when I was a child. Possibly modeled after BBC 2, which provided more “highbrow” programming, TRT 2 and TRT 3 offered alternatives to mainstream programming of TRT 1 and the non-state funded channels that followed. Foreign films and series, classical music concerts and documentaries were among the usual content. The radio counterparts mirrored a similar strategy.

Since public broadcasting services are created to serve without the pressures of profit-making, they provide people with access to certain cultural products, which lack the mass appeal required for commercial purposes. In that way, they contribute to representation of minority tastes. It is interesting to see how these coincide with “highbrow” tastes in the global context. The intricate relationship between class and taste has manifested itself in patronage of arts since the ancient times. J. Paul Getty's decision to open a museum is not that different from the Medici family's support of art during Renaissance. However, public broadcasting is not created to simply serve the highest echelons. It targets a bigger group of people, who share the tastes of the richest yet lack the means to improve circulation and access. This group is different than the masses and public broadcasting provides what profit driven mass media cannot to provide.

It is now impossible to ignore the effects of digitalization on public broadcasting. Digital technologies have enabled users to create and circulate content more easily so people are less dependent on public broadcasting services to access the content neglected by commercial broadcasters. Media companies have also started to explore niche markets more bravely as can be observed via cable TV's transformation in the last fifteen years that showed us “It's not TV, it's HBO!”

Still, popularity is accepted as an impediment for quality by many while mass culture (and popular culture) is associated with consumerism and reproduction of consent. Informing and educating with “thought-provoking” content appears to be the alternative championed by the defenders of high culture. Jeremy's post depicts how that type of content can become an exercise of “othering” via representation.

Nevertheless, reducing public broadcasting to elitism is not fair. All tastes deserve representation and instead of criticizing public broadcasting content for favoring biases of the upper (and upper middle) classes, it is necessary to think about ways to overcome the problems entailed. 180 Days: A Year Inside an American High School I watched on PBS travels at the borders of a similar ethnographic attempt to capture the problems of a Washington D.C. high school with predominantly African-American student body, yet manages to point out to the structural problems rather than merely reproducing stereotypes. Perlman's article on Black Journal underlines this complex nature of the politics of public broadcasting and its potential to create a counterpublic.

However, a counterpublic, by definition, implies participation and engagement. Like a public, a counterpublic is different than “the masses” that lack mobilization skills and activism. Therefore, accusations of elitism directed at the public broadcasting services are further complicated by the theories of democratic participation.

Here comes PBS and NPR Boo Boo

This week’s look at class and taste has been an interesting and at times nauseating look at media. I watched about four programs from PBS and listened to some NPR programs particularly the hourly news summaries. These contrasted drastically from the episode and clips of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, which was in many ways hard to watch. From PBS I watched about three shows from NOVA, (one on alien planets, another on super storms and preparedness, and the third on the minds of serial killers) as well as a program from FRONTLINE (an Inside Look at North Korea). I was extremely aware that the videos I chose to watch readily aligned with my interests (from astronomy to meteorology and psychology to international relations). Although there were times during these programs that to me some of the strategies for discussing these topics felt reductive, I still walked away feeling like I had learned something (even if some of the programs were not consistently entertaining/visually captivating). The educational programs offered by PBS definitely held their own in terms of both tasteful and classy media; in comparison to Honey Boo Boo, which is clearly missing elements of either category. I am reluctant to make any remark feigning surprise at the popularity of Honey Boo Boo because I personally know people who never miss an episode (but I will posit the question: what would it be like to be the “smart” one in a family like that?). I think while it is nice to draw these distinctions in the sand regarding what is classy media and what is trashy, it is not enough to explain an audience’s viewing habits or control them.

However, listening to NPR proved to be a struggle and as I continue to listen to it while writing this post I can’t help but laugh by the story on American Chinese food restaurants in China (that’s right folks, westerners in China miss American style Chinese food). Although NPR may appeal to a certain class it isn’t always as tasteful as one might come to expect (from my own perspective it has always been catering to people of a certain “standing” which did not necessarily include nor appeal to me). There is something in the way that the topics are discussed or presented that I consider to be divisive and ultimately alienate me as a participant in the program.

PBS and early childhood

For this weeks assignment I decided to focus on children's programming in PBS. I watched the shows Dinosaur Train (http://pbskids.org/dinosaurtrain/), Peg+Cat (http://pbskids.org/peg/), and Maya and Miguel (http://pbskids.org/mayaandmiguel/flash.html).

The three shows focus in different educational topics. The first one focused on the geological topics, like how a drought happens and how it can affect the environment. The principal characters are a family of flying dinosaurs with 3 winged kids and one T-rex adopted son. As an educational show for toddlers it's very well developed. The sketches are short, and the repetition of the terminology is age-appropriate, and at the end of the sketch a real-human professor explains in simple words the scientific process dealt with in that episode.

Peg+Cat is a show focused on math. With simple visuals and a short story to contain the concepts, a girl and her cat do simple math exercises.

Finally, Maya and Miguel is a show that deals with broader everyday life topics. It is the story of two latino siblings, Maya and Miguel and their friends. The show is framed in a double language system, so the characters speak both Spanish and English. The interesting part of this show is that the friends are from different races and backgrounds. There is the African- American boy, the White boy with a physical disabillity, an Asian girl, and another Latino girl. Besides, all the characters are able to speak certain amount of Spanish.

After watching these shows it is very comforting to see that diversity is being portrayed in early education shows. Different types of families, diversity within the friend's group, etc. Although stereotypes of race and gender are still exemplified, what is a girl's game and what is a boy's game or typical Latino vocabulary stereotypes, for example; the shows cover in good amount what inclusion is and they do it in a very natural way, without making a big deal out of, which in my opinion normalizes diversity instead of making it an uncommon situation.

From a public diplomacy perspective, PBS has been a major representative of American values and government initiatives throughout the world. On of its most successful campaigns through the years has been Sesame Street and what is know as Muppet Diplomacy.

With Sesame Street, the United States has been able to promote American values in different areas of the world, adapting the characters and topics to the hosting culture. Another benefit for the American government is that they can be accepted in countries that might not be very fond of American policies, but since they do not relate Sesame Street to the government, it's an "undercover" way of approaching the population.

Finally, Sesame Street has done a big effort in adapting the topics to the host country, touching on issues that affect the society and in consequence the childhood in that area. For example, in India they focus on the importance of staying in school, specially for girls; in South Africa they introduced the first HIV/AIDS muppet to teach about the virus; in Northern Ireland they focus on religious tolerance and diversity; in Mexico they focus in healthy eating habits and childhood obesity.

For more information on Muppet Diplomacy: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/publications/perspectives/CPDPerspectives_P2_2011.pdf

Honey Boo Boo’s Misrepresented Normalcy

Having grown up in a rural, working-class community, I found the tone of Honey Boo Boo to be one of blatant prejudice rather than harmless fun. After watching the season two premiere, “Mo' Butter, Mo' Better,”* I was most fascinated by the way the show frames its subjects as disgusting and grotesque figures, when in reality, they not that far from being a normal American family.

There is no denying that the Thompsons are poor and somewhat ignorant. Despite my determination to consider the family objectively, I was thrown off by June’s inability to remember the second half of the phrase “Do as I say, not as I do.”

But these facts are not inherently damnable, despite the show’s concerted effort to highlight and exploit any activity or statement that falls outside the middle-class respectability (hard work, thrift, sobriety, modesty, and so forth). Indeed, according to the Bourdieu's chart, “Mo’ Butter, Mo’ Better” deliberately centers the episode around elements that are least appealing to middle-class aestheticism.  The family guts a pig killed by traffic, the equivalent of a trip to a butcher’s stall. A fifteen-year-old mother is shown, having been a pregnant woman (also at the bottom of Bourdieu’s chart) until the end of the previous season. The wrestling among the siblings is essentially a “tramp’s quarrel,” and their trip to a violent wrestling match involves the display of several wounded men.

While the producers were obviously not using Bourdieu’s chart as a rubric for the episode, they do attempt to vilify the family in several obvious ways. The kids create a “redneck Slip-n-Slide” with butter (something I would have loved to attempt in my own childhood), while accompanied by a thumping score including blatting tubas, which sonically insists on the idiocy of the children’s actions. At the beginning of another scene, the camera zooms in on empty plastic bottle lying in a muddy puddle before panning to family’s home, implicitly associating the family with trash. And apparently, TLC released scratch and sniff cards to coincide with this episode, reducing the family to producers of smelly objects.

What is most frustrating, for me at least, is that I don’t believe that the viewing public is inherently disposed to recoil from such scenes. While the hillbilly may be the American equivalent of the UK’s “chav” figure, it is not as uniformly despised. Americans take pride in the working man, the average Joe who shows up in an ad for the Ford F150, or who stops by the bar for a beer in Cheers. Winter’s Bone (2010) takes a very similar situation to Honey Boo Boo – a poor family with little education in a rural community scraping to get by – and treats it with dignity.

I therefore think the most disturbing aspect of Honey Boo Boo is not the shenanigans of its subjects, but the deliberate discrimination on the part of the production team and TLC. It is the framing of the show as "bad taste" that makes it so, not the family itself.

*Sorry that this is a different episode than the one Emily gave us; I wrote most of this before Emily posted it, so I figured it’d be a waste to toss what I had. 

The Amish: Shunned

For this week’s posting, I’d like to focus on The Amish: Shunned an American Experience documentary that I watched through the PBS iPad app. Shunned presents an extreme example of the logic through which cultures use judgments of taste to uphold and reinforce their cultural values and to separate insiders from outsiders. Telling the stories of several people who chose to leave the closed Amish lifestyle, the documentary details the process of Amish cultural ostracism against those who will not adhere to the church’s strict regulations. This institutionalized ostracism has two functions. The first is to make the transgressor realize the depth of their fall in hopes that they will repent and rejoin the fold as a reformed citizen. The second is to limit what the community sees as the threat of cultural contamination from “the dominant American culture.”

Shunned is clearly filmed from an outsider’s perspective, sympathizing most with those who have severed ties to the Amish way of life, so it inevitably is guilty of the same judgmental logic as its Amish subjects. In antagonistically presenting Amish shunning as a problem that afflicts the stability of the family the film quite obviously normalizes and reinforces the lifestyle outside the Amish community. Still, the presentation of this test case, which sits at the borderline of our culture, is instructive. As Bordieu observes, aesthetics are tightly entwined with notions of lifestyle, and Amish shunning offers an example of a practice that literalizes and ritualizes the feelings of disgust that Tyler discusses in her article or that the majority of us likely feel while watching Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (e.g. Amish cannot take objects from the hands of the shunned, whom they describe as “dirty”). Taste is something at once deeply affective and deeply conservative, and I do wonder if there is a way to reclaim it wholly in the name of difference without preserving its preservationalist tendencies (subcultural formations such as camp suggest that there might be, but I am still a bit skeptical).

So, even though the documentary presents the Amish people as “outsiders,” the anxieties that are outlined in Shunned, relayed by the Amish interviewees (who remain off-camera), feel all too familiar. As outlined in Holohan’s article, the stability of the family has been called into question, even within dominant culture, as “romantic notions of ‘forever’ have been lost in an era of equal rights, cohabitation, separation, divorce and step-families, as people attempt to take ownership of their own life stories” (31). The need to view “correct” depictions of normality (and, by proxy, see others living “correct” lives) is rooted in a sense of tradition that is not reflective of social conditions yet somehow contributive to the ways we choose to live. So, while Shunned presents its subject matter as an outside case, in its observations that taste forges citizenship and in its conception of bad taste as a form of threat it strikes me as a mirror reflection of our own anxieties and cultural behavior.

You can watch The Amish: Shunned online here:  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/shunned/

NBC and the Problematic Portrayal of the Russian Olympic Games

            In light of last week’s discussion of Russian portrayal in the media, I watched this year’s Olympic Opening Ceremony through a remarkably different lens.  Earlier in the day, before NBC’s airing, I heard on the radio that there were technical difficulties in the ceremony (the ring failing to open properly) that Russian television replaced with prerecorded segments of the show.  This news repeated online as well as on TV, as if the media were trying to say that Russian television was doing some grave injustice to the local people by not showing the ceremony in actuality.  This, I thought, was unfair – the show is, after all, on a tape delay for a reason, and if footage existed of the special effect as it was supposed to happen, the television producers were within their rights to air it. 

            This was on my mind as I watched the American coverage of the exact same ceremony.  Given the time difference between Sochi and New York, NBC had plenty of time to alter its footage any way it wanted.  And, apparently, it did – entire numbers and segments of important speeches were cut in totality from the ceremony.  I don’t know enough about Putin’s politics to comment on them in any depth, but it seems that Russia is trying to portray itself in a very particular way through this moment in the world spotlight.  The Los Angeles local news aired post-ceremony a segment that was cut from the broadcast – the Russian police choir singing Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” with great humor and talent.  That brief segment was vastly more interesting than the entirety of the ceremony as it aired on NBC, which made me wonder how else NBC was influencing audience perception of the games through its broadcast. 

            Today, an article surfaced on Huffington Post (here) that outlined some other elements of the original ceremony that were carefully subtracted from American broadcasts by NBC.  While I doubt that the American media actively works to cast Russia in a negative light, the Cold War perspective of the “communist enemy” pervades here as a kind of default.  The media plays on stereotypes that have existed in this country since the end of World War II of a relatively unknown foreign enemy, partly because this is what Americans have come to expect, and partly because journalists and broadcasters themselves expect the same thing.  They see what they want to see. 

As a final note, the Russian athletes themselves are perhaps most able to affect change in this stalemate of American ideology.  A brief interview with the Russian figure skating team is posted below, and while the aggressively patriotic (and pro-Putin) language comes off somewhat false, it serves as a positive moment in NBC’s otherwise problematic coverage of the Russian Olympic games. 

R.I.P. Stuart Hall

Here's a link to NPR's obituary of Stuart Hall, who died today in London.

The article includes the trailer for a new documentary about the late professor, entitled 'The Stuart Hall Project', which premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival.