Cultural
Identity and Diaspora
-
Stuart Hall
Essay
About
the Author:
Stuart
Hall (3 February 1932 – 10 February 2014) was a Jamaican-born
British Marxist sociologist, cultural
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 power, institutions 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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