“Historical changes that threaten the natural and social order generate oppositions and confrontations that can dissolve a community” (p. 24).
Néstor García Canclini
Paula's class: May 2005 Archives
go ahead, fill in the blank!
I wrote my opening paragraph today! (Don't they say getting started is the hardest part?)
At least it's a rainy day in Budapest, so I'm not (too) tempted to be outdoors goofing off instead.
Jan Blommeart is an Africanist, ethnographer, and synergistic critical discourse analyst. Taking the terms in reverse:
Discourse – “language in society”, not just language use but also the sum of communicative acts, and these acts situated in context.
Critical – the performance of analyses that “expose and critique existing wrongs in one’s society – analyses that should be ‘brought home’” (4).
Synergistic – drawing from multiple sources, e.g., Hymes, Fairclough, Bauman, Bernstein, Bourdieu, Wallerstein, Bahktin, Foucault, Habermas, Hall, Hanks, Scollon. He particularly notes Norman Fairclough, British Cultural Studies (the Birmingham School), and French poststructuralism (23).
Ethnography – “an approach in which the analysis of small phenomena is set against an analysis of big phenomena . . . and both . . . can only be understood in terms of one another” (16).
An Africanist perspective: “in the age of globalization, it is worth having a look at materials from the peripheries of the world system” (20).
The central problem of this approach is to locate the relationship between a text (the microsocial) and its context (the macrosocial).
Here's a great site on Atlanticism, mentioned as an ideological competitor with pan-Europeanism.
I'm psyched by the articles I'm assigned, but also by the piece by Susan Strange (our version is from The Global Transformations Reader).
If you didn't read this as an argument for how to think about the conference we're trying to organize (!) let me say a few words about social metonymy! :-)
