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Added by: Zoé Grange-MarczakAbstract:
Stuart Hall (1932–2014) was born in British Jamaica, and educated in Oxford. A long-term political activist, especially in anti-racism, he taught at the Open University and was a fellow of the British Academy. He co-created and headed the Creator of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which contributed greatly to the definition and orientation of British cultural studies. In the neoliberal climate of the 1980s, Hall coined the term "Thatcherism", and generally contributed to Marxism as a founder of the New Left Review, developing a Gramsci inspired theory of power and applying textual analysis to the media. He bridged French Theory (Foucault, Derrida) with anglo-saxon race and gender theory. This 1990 paper is one example of Hall as a theorist of the Caribbean experience, diasporas, and more generally of collective cultural identities. Drawing on Senghor and Césaire, he sees in the Caribbean the intersection of several cultural traditions, and argues against an accomplished, transparent understanding of identity, trying to take into account the position of the creator of representations and the situation of discourse on identity. Hall finds two ways of thinking identity: (1) as a collective "true self" which each individual holds within themselves, the essence of which can be studied, and which he finds in Senghor or Césaire ; (2) as a "becoming" rather than a "being" (p. 225-226), in a constant transformation at the intersection of "history, culture and power". This view of identity crosses "the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture", allowing to show how something can be and not be at the same time.
Comment: This is one of Hall's most famous and discussed paper. It elaborates upon other doctrines (Césaire, Senghor, Fanon, Said), tracing their actualization in the last decades of the 20th century, and bridging them with cultural studies. It also allows to explore a specific Jamaican approach to the Caribbean, and touches on the difference between French and British post-colonization.
Hall, Stuart. Cultural Identity and Diaspora
1990, in J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Diference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 222-237.
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