Stuart Hall's Cultural Identity and Diaspora
Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3304 Notes 12B
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STUART HALL “CULTURAL IDENTITY AND DIASPORA” (1993) Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: a Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams and Chrisman. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. 392-401. In this essay, Hall considers the nature of the “black subject” (392) who is represented by “film and other forms of visual representation of the Afro-Caribbean (and Asian) ‘blacks’ of the diasporas of the West” (392). “Who is this emergent, new subject of the cinema? From where does he/she speak?” (392). Referring to the seminal work of Émile Benveniste (signalled by the gesture towards “enunication” [392]), he contends that what recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we speak, so to say ‘in our own name’, of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place. (392) Hall’s thesis is that rather than thinking of identity as an “already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent” (392), we should think instead of “identity as a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (392). Hall points out that there are two principal ways of thinking about (cultural) identity. The traditional model views identity in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. . . . This ‘oneness’, underlying all the other, more superficial differences, is the truth, the essence of ‘Caribbeanness’, of the black experience. It is this identity which a Caribbean or black diaspora must discover, excavate, bring to light and express. . . . (393) Hall acknowledges that the “rediscovery of this identity is often the object of what Frantz Fanon once
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STUART HALL “CULTURAL IDENTITY AND DIASPORA” (1993) Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: a Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams and Chrisman. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. 392-401. In this essay, Hall considers the nature of the “black subject” (392) who is represented by “film and other forms of visual representation of the Afro-Caribbean (and Asian) ‘blacks’ of the diasporas of the West” (392). “Who is this emergent, new subject of the cinema? From where does he/she speak?” (392). Referring to the seminal work of Émile Benveniste (signalled by the gesture towards “enunication” [392]), he contends that what recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we speak, so to say ‘in our own name’, of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place. (392) Hall’s thesis is that rather than thinking of identity as an “already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent” (392), we should think instead of “identity as a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (392). Hall points out that there are two principal ways of thinking about (cultural) identity. The traditional model views identity in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. . . . This ‘oneness’, underlying all the other, more superficial differences, is the truth, the essence of ‘Caribbeanness’, of the black experience. It is this identity which a Caribbean or black diaspora must discover, excavate, bring to light and express. . . . (393) Hall acknowledges that the “rediscovery of this identity is often the object of what Frantz Fanon once