Cultural Politics Quotes

In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes or art that is detached from or independent of politics.

To me, politics is culture. I became a journalist, and later a filmmaker, to get to know my new country and my volatile place in it as a gay, undocumented Filipino-American.

I'm not naive. All politics is about identity, right? Neighborhood politics, cultural politics, issue politics. It's not as though I don't get that. It's just - it has to be, I think, tempered in a way that is for our overall advancement and not to our detriment or obliteration. When I say 'our,' I don't mean just communities of color.

It's hard to talk about politics in a Hollywood world.

Political conservatives need to recognize that multicultural politics is converging with leftist politics, and not only on 'social issues' like same-sex marriage. Our Constitution is also on the chopping block, and if you don't see that, you haven't been paying attention.

[American] liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say.

But what I'm very interested in, whether it's writing, whether it's hosting a show, whether it's cooking food, I'm just into the discussions of identity, culture and the politics of culture.

First, I was opposed to gay marriage because it seemed like one more way that gays were wanting to assimilate. When I realized the Christian right was so opposed to it, as well as tyrannical governments in Africa and Russia, I thought, 'It must be a good thing to fight for.'

Art has often been and continues to be considered transcendent. I see this as misguided and, in fact, a way of subverting the powerful voice art can be in global discussions about politics, economics, society, culture, religion and international relations.

I grew up with so much of the identity of being Muslim and being Arab tied around politics.

Where neoliberalism thrives is in having done something that we haven't seen before. There is a merging of culture, politics, and power under neoliberalism that's unprecedented. They control the cultural apparatuses. And what I mean by "cultural apparatuses" is all those institutions that are about the production of knowledge, values, dispositions, and subjectivities. They control them.

As a gay man, I think the role of culture is central to how you change politics - culture is politics.

Culture does matter, but politics can change culture.

We call it taco politics. They [U. S. Gobvernment officials] come to us, speaking Spanish, offering Hispanic rhetoric. But they're not really getting down to specifics of the problems we have.

When the arts become a political football, they lose.

Halloween is woke, and there's nothing we can do about it.

If we don't believe in moral absolutes and then we get into a cultural-political debate, how are we going to win?

I could not think higher of Governor Palin. She is a force of nature and has inspired a generation of women to really get actively involved in politics and, more importantly, take their culture back and take their country back.

Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it.

The artificial separation of politics and culture is nowhere more pronounced than in the discourse of foreign policy and international affairs.

Culture and politics were inseparable [in the Sixties], which gave a soundtrack to political awareness and activism.

I'm deeply stressed as a filmmaker, and I know I'm not alone. The censorship crisis, the moral policing, the politics of it has most of us on edge. I'm scared to use certain words: like, if I use 'Bombay,' will there be a problem?

Photography can still be used to champion activism and change. I believe this, even while standing in the cool winds of postmodernism... Postmodernism looked radical, but it wasn't. As a movement it was profoundly liberal and became a victim of itself. Precisely at this historical moment, when multicultural democracy is the order of the day, photography can be used as a powerful weapon toward instituting political and cultural change. I for one will continue to work toward this end.

I'm a novelist, a critic, an essayist - I tend to see politics as a subset of cultures rather than the other way around. It's a human enterprise, a tool or a technology revealing our collective inner self.

In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.