Samika

Neville 'kamau' Crawford HIDDEN WOUNDS (1994) More. . .

Cultural Identity Politics of

and Diaspora -- Difference --
Hall Rutherford

"Cultural Identity
and Diaspora"
Hall, Stuart.

In Williams, Patrick &

Laura Chrisman
eds. Colonial Discourse
& Postcolonial Theory:
A Reader. Harvester
Whaeatsheaf, 1993. ---
The following quotes
are made according to
this version.
and Identity:
Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1990.

Major Argument: There are two kinds of identity, identity as being

(which offers a sense of unity and commonality) and identity as
becoming (or a process of identification, which shows the
discontinuity in our identity formation.) Hall uses the Caribbean
identities, including his own, to explain how the first one is necessary,
but the second one is truer to their/our postcolonial conditions. To
explain the process of identity formation, Hall uses Derrida's theory
differance 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. Finally, he defines the
Caribbean identity as disapora identity.

artistic examples: 1) Armet Francis photographs the peoples of the Black

Triangle

2) THE MIDDLE PASSAGE TOM FEELINGS "When I am asked who I

am, I say, I am an African who was born in America. Both answers connect
me specifically with my past and present ... therefore I bring to my art a
quality which is rooted in the culture of Africa ... and expanded by the
experience of being in America." (source)
Starting Questions:

1) How is identity defined by Stuart Hall? What has identity to do with

subject position? Why is it both being and becoming? Does he show
preference for one or the other? How does he use and revise Derrida idea of
differance?

2) How does Hall describe the hybridity of Caribbean identity as a mixture of

the African, European and American identity? Can we relate it to Taiwanese'
hybrid identity?

3) How does Hall define diaspora identity? Do we share this sense of

identity? How is it related to Brah's way of discussing diaspora as a
theoretical concept (in terms of home/homeland, border, location and
diaspora space)?

1. identity as oneness
p. 393 "This oneness, underlying all the other, more superficial differences,
is the truth, the essence, of "Caribbeanness', of black experience. . . .
We should not, for a moment, underestimate or neglect the importance of the
act of imaginative rediscovery which this conception of a rediscovered,
essential identity entails."

[Hall acknowledges the importance of this sense of identity, but he also

emphasizes its fictive nature.]

2. identity as discontinuous points of identification

p. 394 "We cannot speak for very long, with any exactness, about 'one
experience, one identity,' without acknowledging its other side--the ruptures
and discontinuities which constitute, precisely, the Caribbean's
'uniqueness.'"

 Cultural identities...Far from being eternally fixed in some

essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous 'play' of history,
culture and power.
 Identities are the names we give the the different ways 1) we are
positioned by, and 2) position ourselves within the narratives of the
past.

A. [the first kind of otherness: self-othering] 394-95 [otherness as an inner

compulsion]
'the colonial experience'--Not only, in Said's 'Orientalist' sense, were we
constructed as different and other within the categories of knowledge of the
West by those regimes. They had the power to make us see and
experience ourselves as 'Other." . . . It is one thing to position a subject or set
of peoples as the Other fo a dominant discourse. It is quite another thing to
subject them to that 'knowledge,' not only as a matter of imposed will and
domination, byt the power of inner compulsion and subjective con-formation
to the norm. ...

This inner expropriation of cultural idenitty cripples and deforms. If its

silences are not resisted, they produce, in Fanon's vivid phrase, 'individuals
without an anchor, without horizon, colourless, stateless, rootless--a race of
angels'

p. 395--

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.

B. [the second kind of otherness: creolization; racial mixture; differences

within the different islands]
...We might think of black Caribbean identities as 'framed' by two axes or
vectors, simultaneously operative: the vector of similarity and
continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture. ...thought of in terms
of the dialogic relationship between these two axes. The one gives us some
grounding in, some continuity with, the past. The second reminds us that
what we share is precisely the experience of a profound discontinuity: the
people dragged into slavery, transportation, colonisation migration, came
predominantly from Africa--and when that supply ended, it was temporarily
refreshed by indentured labour from the Asian subcontinent.

p. 395
The third kind of otherness -- otherness to different metropolitan
centers.

To return to the Caribbean after any long absence is to experience again the
shock of the 'doubleness' of similarity and difference.

3. Derrida's differance is used to explain cultural difference.

p. 397 ". . . if signfication depends upon the endless repositioning of its
differential terms, meaning, in any specific instance, depends on the
contingent and arbitrary stop -- the necessary and temporary 'break' in the
infinite semiosis of language. This does not detract from the original
insight. It only threatens to do so if we mistake this 'cut' of identity--
this positioning, which makes meaning possible-- as a natrual and permanent,
rather than an arbitrary and contingent 'ending'--whereas I understand every
such position as 'strategic' and arbitrary, in the sense that there is no
permanent equivalence between the particular sentence we close, and its true
meaning, as such.

4. The three traces in Caribbean Identity

Caribbean identity--diaspora

 Presence/absence Africaine or the site of the repressed: the unspoken

unspeakable presence

[Hall's own experience of re-discovering 'Africa' and his being 'black' in

1970's.]

 Presence Europeenne [about exclusion, imposition and expropriation

of colonial discourse]

p. 400

What Frantz Fanon reminds us, in Black Skin, White Mask, is

how this power has become a constitutive element in our own
identities. ...

This 'look,' from--so to speak-- the place of the Other, fixes

us, not only in its violence, hostility and aggression, but
in the ambivalence of its desire. This brings us face to face,
not simply with the dominating European presence as the site
or 'scene' of integration where those other presences which it
had actively disaggregated were recomposed--...but as the
site of a profound splitting and doubling--what Homi Bhabha
has called 'the ambivalent identifications of the racist
world...the 'otherness' of the self inscribed in the perverse
palimpsest of colonial identity.
 Presence Americaine

The Third, 'New World" presence is not so much power, as

 ground, place, territory. It is a juncture-point where the
many cultural tributaries meet, the 'empty' land (the
European colonisers emptied it) where strangers from everry
otherr part of the globe collided.

p. 401 The 'new world' presence--America...--is therefore

itself the beginning of diaspora, of diversity, of hybridity and
difference, what makes Afro-Caribbean people already
people of a diaspora. I use this term here metaphorically, not
literally: diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes
whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred
homeland to which they must al all cost return, even if it
means pushing other people into the sea. This is the old, the
imperializing, the hegemonising, form of 'ethnicity'. ...

5. p. 401-402 The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not

by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeniety and
diversity; by a conception of 'identity' which lives with and through, not
despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are
constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through
transformation and difference.

Neville 'kamau' Crawford RESIST (1985)

diaspora aesthetic p. 236

'Across a whole range of cultural forms there is a 'syncretic' dynamic which

critically appropriates elements from the master-codes of the dominant
culture and 'creolises' them, disarticulating given signs and re-articulating
their symbolic meaning. The subversive force of this hybridizing
tendency is most apparent at the level of language itself where creoles,
patois and black English decentre, destablise and carnivalise the linguistic
domination of 'English'--the nation-language of master-discourse--through
strategic inflections, re-accentuations and other performative moves in
semantic, syntactic and lexical codes.
¡@

Jonathan Rutherford "A Place Called Home: Identity and the Culture
Politics of Difference" 9-27 from Identity: Community, Culture,
Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1990.

p. 19

Gramsci described this articulation as 'the starting point of critical

elaboration': it is the consciousness of what one really is, and in 'knowing
thyself' as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an
infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory'. Identity marks the
conjuncture of our past with the social, cultural and economic relations
we live within. 'Each invididual is the synthesis not only of existing
relations but of the history of these relations. He is a precis of the
past.' ...

This politics of articulation eschews all forms of fixity and essentialism;

social, political and class formations do not exist a priori, they are a product
of articulation. Stuart Hall has termed this the politics of 'no necessary or
essential corespondence of anything with anything' and it marks a significant
break with a Marxism that has assumed an underlying totality to social
relations.

politics of difference

The cultural politics of difference means living with incommensurability

through new ethical and democratic frameworks, within a culture that
bothrecognises difference and is commited to resolving its antagomisms.
¡@

politics of articulation--S. Hall

p. 107 It seems to me that it is possible to think aobut the nature of new

political identities, which isn't founded on the notion of some absolute
integral self and which clearly can't arise from some fully closed narrative of
the self. A politics which accepts the 'no necessary or essential
correspondence of anything with anything, and there has ....