Reading against Feeling: The Structure of Feeling, Practical Criticism, and Stuart Hall's Migrant Study

Abstract: Ritland identifies "feeling" and "study" as opposing concepts in the work of British-Jamaican cultural studies founder Stuart Hall. Where "feeling" for cultural theorists like Raymond Williams represented the incorporation of human agents' affective experiences into "culture," Hall found this social model dissatisfying for its elision of the difference between real-world determination and agents' subjective experiences of those worldly conditions. Hall thus forwarded a situated hermeneutics that Ritland calls "migrant study." By referring back to the literary pedagogical approach "practical criticism," Hall was able to insist on a distinction between determination and interpretation to open up opportunities for anticolonial resistance. This model of interpretation is grounded in a version of subaltern agency that views the "text" as an object available to critique through the colonial migrant's very condition of determination.