ABSTRACT
As we saw in the preceding chapter, the production of identities is at least partly achieved through the circulation of images and texts that promote or reject particular subject positions. Gramsci was himself interested in the role of representation in producing a worldview, though his critical insights were largely limited to literature rather than the prominent forms of mass entertainment of his era such as film and dance music. Here we shall concern ourselves with mainstream fictional representations, looking at the ways in which they negotiate with spectators, offering symbolic concessions to subaltern groups. Negotiation, however, is not the only strategy open to texts within the struggle for hegemony. Other texts attempt to reach into the culture of subalterns in order to fashion an image of the dominant bloc as speaking in the name of, or making common cause with, those it rules. Still others fashion their resistance at a textual level, offering symbolic resolutions to problems that are intractable in everyday life.
