Saturday, January 18, 2025

Cultural Identity and Diaspora (Stuart Hall)

 

Cultural Identity and Diaspora

-        Stuart Hall

Essay

About the Author:

Stuart Hall (3 February 1932 – 10 February 2014) was a Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologistcultural theorist, and political activist. Hall — along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams — was one of the founding figures of the school of thought known as British Cultural Studies or the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. In the 1950s Hall was a founder of the influential journal New Left Review. Hall's work covers issues of hegemony and cultural studies, taking a post-Gramscian stance. He regards language-use as operating within a framework of powerinstitutions and politics/economics. This view presents people as producers and consumers of culture at the same time. For Hall, culture was not something to simply appreciate or study, but a "critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled".

Introduction:

Stuart Hall beings his discussion on Cultural Identity and Diaspora with a discussion on the emerging new cinema in the Caribbean which is known as Third Cinema. This new form of cinema is considered as the visual representation of the Afro-Caribbean subjects- “blacks” of the diasporas of the west- the new post colonial subjects. Using this discussion as a starting point Hall addresses the issues of identity, cultural practices, and cultural production.

Discussion:

There is a new cinema emerging in the Caribbean known as the Third Cinema. It is considered as the visual representation of the Afro-Caribbean in the post colonial context. In this visual medium “Blacks” are represented as the new postcolonial subjects. In the context of cultural identity hall questions regarding the identity of this emerging new subjects. From where does he speak? Very often identity is represented as a finished product. Hall argues that instead of considering cultural identity as a finished product we should think of it a production which is never complete and is always in process.

He discusses two ways of reflecting on cultural identity. Firstly, identity understood as a collective, shared history among individuals affiliated by race or ethnicity that is considered to be fixed or stable. According to this understanding our cultural identity reflects the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us as “one people.” This is known as the oneness of cultural identity, beneath the shifting divisions and changes of our actual history. From the perspective of the Caribbean’s this would be the Caribbeanness of the black experience. This is the identity the Black diaspora must discover. This understanding did play a crucial role in the Negritude movements. It was a creative mode of representing the true identity of the marginalised people. Indeed this act of rediscovery has played crucial role in the emergence of many of the important social movements of our time like feminist, ani-colonial and anti-racist.

Stuart Hall also explores a second form of cultural identity that exist among the Caribbean, this is an identity understood as unstable, metamorphic, and even contradictory which signifies an identity marked by multiple points of similarities as well as differences. This cultural identity refers to “what they really are”, or rather “what they have become.” Without understanding this new identity one cannot speak of Caribbean identity as “one identity or on experience.” There are ruptures and discontinuities that constitute the Caribbean’s uniqueness. Based on this second understanding of identity as an unstable Hall discusses Caribbean cultural identity as one of heterogeneous composites. It is this second notion of identity that offers a proper understanding of the traumatic character of the colonial experience of the Caribbean people.

To explain the process of identity formation, Hall uses Derrida's theory ‘difference’ as support, and Hall sees the temporary positioning of identity as "strategic" and arbitrary. He then uses the three presences--African, European, and American--in the Caribbean to illustrate the idea of "traces" in our identity. A Caribbean experiences three kinds of cultural identities. Firstly, the cultural identity of the Africans which is considered as site of the repressed, secondly, the cultural identity of the Europeans which is the site of the colonialist, and thirdly, the cultural identity of the Americans which is a new world- a site of cultural confrontation. Thus, the presence of these three cultural identities offers the possibility of creolization. Finally, he defines the Caribbean identity as diaspora identity.

Conclusion:

In his 1996 essay 'Cultural Identity and Diaspora', the theorist Stuart Hall argued that cultural identity is not only a matter a 'being' but of 'becoming', From Hall's perspective, identities undergo constant transformation, transcending time and space. Thus, diaspora communities represent and maintain a culture different from those of the countries within which they are located, often retaining strong ties with their country and culture of origin and with other communities of the same origin in order to preserve that culture.

 

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