“Cultural Identity and Diaspora”Stuart Hall

Hall_diaspora 2“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” by Stuart HallSara Sun & Kate LiuThesis: Caribbean identity is a “production, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.” (p.51).Identity can be defined in terms of sameness, and difference. More specifically, difference (in the sense of diffrance) is always there within any apparently similar identities; though temporary fixity (cut, break or positioning) is needed in the process of identification, “there is always something left over.” (55) From this perspective, the three presences of Caribbean identities can be problematized: African not as origin but always mediated, European, not external but internally fragmenting and constituting, always already creolized, and American, as both silences, diaspora and hybridity. I. Two Views on Identity: A. the first view: Culture identity is “shared culture, a sort of collective one true self, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed selves. Our culture identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes” (p.51)Example: photos about people of the Black Triangle, in Africa, the Caribbean, the USA and the UK (taken by Armet Francis )p. 52 It creates “an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation.” p. 53 creates some ground in continuity, while the second reminds us of our experience of profound discontinuity. B. the second view: Culture identities focus on “significant difference,” which constitute not what we are, but what we become. 1. Colonial experienceone of self-Othering, inner expropriation; “individuals without an anchor, without horizon, colourless, stateless, rootless” (Fanon 1963 176). 2. “Cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning.” (p.53)Example: Caribbean identities (“ islanders to their mainland”), but 1. the Africans are from different tribes with different folk religions; 2. they are in the “mutually excluding categories”. (p.54); e.g. Martinique vs. French vs. Jamaican. II. Difference and diffrance1. “diffrance” (Jacques Derida): to “differ” and “defer” “Meaning is able to slide.” The determined meaning and fixed boundaries are challenged.2. Identity position is “strategic” and “arbitrary”.(54)3. There is always something left over. III. The three presences in the Caribbean Identities: 3. “Presenc Africaine”: “the site of the repressed” i) It suggests the “unspoken, unspeakable presence in Carribbean culture”. (p.55)ii) Always mediated. E.g. Reggae and the culture of Rastafarianism; iii) Not a home to go back to; “Africa” has been “ deferred as a spiritual, cultural and political metaphor”. (Said: “imaginative geography and history”) (p.56)4. “Presence Europeenne”:i) the “extrinsic” and external power of exclusion; ii) It is “a constitutive element in identities”. It causes what Homi Bhabha called the “ambivalent identification of the racist world”. Identities are reconstructed and reformed.iii) Always creolized. 5. “Presence Americanine”: i) the “New-World” presence, “the beginning of diaspora, diversity, hybridity, and difference”ii) It is “a juncture point”, where “the creolisations and assimilations and syncretisms were negotiated”. (57)* Diaspora: “the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of identity which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity”It contains an “overwhelming nostalgia for list origins”. (Lacans imaginary) (p.58)6. the dislocation of modern society (Ernesto Laclau)2. Identities are essential and contingent.