Author / skjandrews

by skjandrews

Association for Cultural Studies Virtual Lecture Series

ACS Virtual Lecture Series talk by Sean Johnson Andrews (Columbia College Chicago), titled ‘The Rearticulation of Hegemonic Safe Space: Emotional Subjects, Hashtag Activism, and The Revolt of the Disinterpellated’, September 22nd, 2022.

https://archive.org/details/andrews-rearticulation-of-hegemonic-safe-space

This talk draws from a longer work in progress, which develops a theoretical framework of subjectivity in an attempt to better conceptualize the waves of online social movements that have transformed U.S. cultural politics over the last decade: #BLM, #MeToo, #MarchForOurLives, not to mention the rise of the #altright and others. By putting James Martell’s recent work on “misinterpellation,” which builds off of Althusser’s original notion of “interpellation,” in conversation with Judith Butler, José Esteban Muñoz, Karen and Barbara Fields, and Stuart Hall, this framework synthesizes key elements of Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, and Cultural Studies, to better highlight the function of trauma and repression in the contemporary social formation, the way our “denotative casting” implies the subjectivities and identities we are forced to perform, and the way that contemporary social movements are attempting to rearticulate what I am calling “hegemonic safe space.” Hegemonic safe space captures the emotional and affective dimensions of the very political and social fact that a straight, white, cis-gendered male like the speaker is not only especially insulated from the everyday triggers and traumas of this society, but that insulation effectively relies upon the unearned labors of deference on the part of those “disinterpellated” into non-preferred categories of subjectivity. On the other hand, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò points out, the “Elite Capture” of identity politics – and their sometimes superficial weaponization on social media – make simply inverting this deference a strategic error. The talk will end by considering several emergent strategies in light of this framework. As we rearticulate hegemonic safe space we must support the care to repair the traumas that have been central to its operation, but also find the elements of shared oppression and solidarity that will make these efforts sustainable.

by skjandrews

My early research on Cultural Appropriation in the “Trick Mirror” of the internet

This is a presentation I gave with my colleague Robert Hanserd in the peak of the Zoom mediated pandemic. Robert’s presentation is based on his own research into the history of Ghana and the transatlantic slave trade – and was in part a critical response to the 1619 project’s contention that the first slaves arrived in the U.S. on that date. My presentation takes us all the way to the almost-present day, looking at the concept of Cultural Appropriation and the change in its meaning and significance in the era of social media. I ultimately use Moby’s album Play as both an index of these changes and a case study in how difficult it is to nail down what is actually “Authentic.”

“The Trick Mirror of Authenticity: Identity, Myth, and the Politics of Cultural Appropriation.”
Humanities, History, and Social Sciences Colloquium, Columbia College Chicago, October 12,
2020.

by skjandrews

Hello

Welcome to the website. It feels kind of pretentious to use my name as the URL for this, but it seems like the common practice now, at least for the “Official” website. I have three or four blogs I’ve written on before, where you can find some of my other, earlier attempts at maintaining an internet presence.

There may have been an earlier page on livejournal or some other site, but the first blog I maintained regularly is http://overlynuanced.blogspot.com/. I began it in 2004 so there are likely a good many posts about the Iraq war and the George W. Bush presidency.

I began http://onculturalproperty.blogspot.com/ later that year to begin following the concept of cultural property, especially in relation to Intellectual Property Rights, which later became my dissertation topic. I also frequently posted about pirating software – especially around torrenting sites and the emergent philosophy of Internet piracy.

These became less important as I was actually writing the dissertation and beginning my tenure track position at Columbia College Chicago. I didn’t return to blogging frequently until I was awarded an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship and took two years leave of absence to work with the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE). There I worked with prominent education and technology practitioners and theorists – and librarians, who frequently sit at that intersection.  I started and maintained http://breakingculture.tumblr.com/ to catalog my writing on these topics.

This was also at the beginning of the (most recent) crisis in U.S. higher education – one that continues unabated – and at the height of the MOOC craze and the hegemonic narrative of disruptive innovation. But also marked the emergence of the Occupy movement and move of the pirate community into books, with library.nu (also known as Gigipedia, the archive of which is probably Incorporated into contemporary pirate book sites) and Aaarg beginning to spread theoretical and education materials far outside of official channels. In addition to my Tumblr above, I was privileged to write and think through some of these issues with my then-NITLE-colleague Bryan Alexander, who continues to be an important resource for thinking through the changes in U.S. Education and how they related to changes in media technology, political economy, and the role of educators and intellectuals in our current conjuncture.

I look forward to whatever role this space can play in the continuation of these conversations.