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| 17th and 18th century philosophical and political-economic beginnings of modernity, belief in rationality, science as basis for knowledge (rather than religion and the church); positivism and empiricism theorized; theories on control of nature and society through reason; as “modern thought,” belief in progress |
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| labor theory of value, use value & exchange value, commodity production, commodity fetishism, alienation (or estrangement), materialism vs. idealism, class consciousness, false consciousness, class struggle central to all human history, mode/means/ relations of production, proletariat/bourgeoisie, capitalism recreates itself everywhere |
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| critique of bourgeois family, “overthrow of mother right was the defeat of the female sex,” used theory of social evolution in stages (a universal scheme of progress from “savagery” to “civilization” also in Marx’s writings) |
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| social solidarity, sacred/profane, collective representations (theory of culture), primitive classifications (binary oppositions – proto-structuralism); society creates what the individual could never invent alone, anomie and suicide (caused by prioritizing of the economic sphere under capitalism); believed in reforms to ease inequalities |
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| bureaucracies, wealth/prestige/power, Protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism, three kinds or origins of authority (traditional, rational/legal, and charismatic); authority as legitimate or accepted power, iron cage/rationality |
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| unconscious, oedipal complex, language with its own agenda (slips), childhood and adults, dreams bringing childhood back into present life, hysteria; first theorist to imply that homosexuality is as “normal” as heterosexuality, that femaleness is constructed (rather than biological nature); personal and social repetition as neurotic, traumatic |
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| race, power, double consciousness & the veil, oppression and inequality, pan-Africanism, narrowness of European cultural logics, Reconstruction’s failure to unite through class, because of racism |
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| (in 1898) – historic role of Black women in America, racism and oppression, how being both women and persons of color makes Black women doubly vulnerable & knowing |
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| language made of binary oppositions, arbitrary relationship between signifier & signified, linguistic sign = signifier + signified, language (langage) as system distinguished from language or speech performed (parole |
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| hegemony and resistance, structure and agency, Prison Notebooks |
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| oles, “face work,” and the “presentation of self” in the theatre of everyday life |
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| – father of French structuralism and structuralist anthropology; binary oppositions (from Saussure) and cultural difference (cultures are like languages); culture/nature dichotomy in all myth & ritual, cognition through binaries is universal to humankind |
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| gender & power, inequalities, difference between gender & other inequalities; says gender inequality is not historical, but has always been present and is thereby universal; woman as “other” (active member w/ J-P Sartre of 1960s existentialist movement) |
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| theorist of American middle class white feminism (yet appeals to other women as well); theorized ways in which housewives/mothers “felt something was wrong” |
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| Frankfort School Marxist, conceptualized repressive desublimation (supposed sexual liberation seen as mere capitalist consumption and escapism), |
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| “critical theory” (Marcuse, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Habermas, etc.) culture (and ideology) and the material conditions of production create each other in a dialectical and historical movement (against “vulgar” or economistic Marxism) |
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| systematic non-violent breaking of unjust laws (influenced by writings of Gandhi) |
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| Caribbean poet & playwright, critique of colonialism, defense of African peoples & cultures, defense of revolutionary violence in the colonies |
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| Caribbean psychiatrist working in Algeria during war of independence, theorized internalization of racism, colonialism and resistance, theories of violence and identity; for “decolonization of minds” |
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| habitus, culture constructed in everyday practice, embodiment of culture in everyday life, in our very bodies (unconscious to a great extent, culture becoming second nature) |
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| Marxist (Frankfort School), Black Panther, theorized history of race/class/gender in the American colonies and U.S.; critique racism, class, male dominance, and white feminism |
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| discourse, epistemes, omnipresence of diffuse power (exercised from innumerable points in social relations, even families), knowledge as power; Western science, including institutions of medical and psychological treatment, and education, as regulatory regimes |
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| language and community, crisis in social sciences, need for cross-nation conversation re: rights, justice |
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| inventor of “postmodernism” as a philosophical term, wrote The Postmodern Condition; postmodernity as epoch during which “the [Enlightenment] grand narrative has lost its credibility,” problem of legitimation of knowledge |
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| inventor of deconstruction, critic of logocentrism and phonocentrism (belief in speech before writing, and in language as mere representation (not creator) of “reality” or “essential truth,” impossibility of holding the center of anything—society, culture, personhood, law, the atom, the solar system—for the very definition of a structure depends on outside elements. When we deconstruct or expose the unstated givens in a text we cannot help but employ some of the very problematic elements we are exposing. |
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| subaltern positions, agency & class, critique of “white men saving brown women from brown men” used as ploy during British rule of India |
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| race, gender, and representation in/of popular culture, patriarchial capitalist white supremacy already inscribed in everyone's subjectivity (no need for "internalization"); pop culture commoditizes blackness, femaleness |
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| queer theory, against essentialism, sex and gender as constructed and performed (but not necessarily consciously “chosen”), heteronormativity as historical, not “natural.” She is “permanently troubled by identity categories” serving as regulatory regimes; theorizes how we are made into subjects by the very power we resist (echo Hegel, Althusser, Lacan, Foucault). |
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“Rereads” (reinterprets) Freud with help of Saussure and Jacobson; the subject of the unconscious (our individual subjectivity) is the discourse of the Other; there are three domains of individual subjectivity: (1) the Imaginary (re: the ego, the Other, rivalry and falling in love, etc.),
(2) the Symbolic (social control and “the name of the symbolic father” or the law, the interpretive framework of language itself; and (3) the Real (that which is beyond or underlying language—suffering and ecstasy, all that cannot be represented); the mirror stage as constitutive of an imagined “whole” ego (a very necessary fiction, without which we would be mad). |
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| “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Black lesbian leftist poet), necessity of creating community across identities in order to move towards liberation |
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| Black standpoint feminism: sex, class, race, gender (all sharing ideological ground) as “matrix of domination,” more than sum of its parts, first to write with the voices of all Black women theorists |
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| irony as attitude of postmodern times, shared vocabularies, one’s own “final vocabulary,” against concept of common sense as truth or productive of truth |
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| Students for a Democratic Society |
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| Port Huron Statement (1962), university component of the new left, vs. US in Viet-Nam, working w/ unions and civil rights issues, often “neo-Marxist” |
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| Trinidadian scholar, practically the inventor of cultural studies and particular forms of postmodernism; neo-Marxist; meaning is not given to an event except through representation (so the event does not exist as such before it is represented) |
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| Native American literary scholar and essayist, posits “red roots of white feminism” |
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| "mestizo logic,” Chicana subjectivity, multiple identities, different oppressions in each identity |
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| "Black cultural workers” must “articulate the complexity and diversity of Black practices in the modern and postmodern world” |
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