Stuart Hall’s Cultural Identity and Diaspora

Ouahani Nasr-edine A Paper to the highest degree Stuart planetary houses phrase ethnic Identity and Diaspora Stuart hall dialog about the crucial role of the third Cinemas in promoting the Afro-Caribbean heathenish identities, the Diaspora hybridity and difference. mansion house argues that the role of the tertiary Cinemas is non simply to reflect what is already there rather, their crucial role is to asseverate representations which continually render the third worlds lots as sensitive assailables against their representations in the Western dominant regimes.Their vocation is to allow us to hit and recognize the different parts and histories of ourselves. They should provide us with new positions from which to accost about ourselves. Stuart Hall provides an analysis of pagan identities and what they stand for, their workings and fundamental complexities and practices. Hall argues that heathen identities argon never wintry or recognise in any sense. They atomi c number 18 not accomplished, already-there entities which argon represented or projected through the new ethnic practices.Rather, they are productions which cannot exist impertinent the work of representation. They are problematic, highly contested sites and playes. Identities are social and ethnical formations and constructions fundamentally pass on to the differences of time and place. Then, when we speak of anything, as subjects, we are essentially positioned in time and lacuna and more importantly in a certain culture. These subject positions are what Hall calls the positions of enunciation (222). Hall talks about cultural identity from two different, but related, perspectives.First, he discusses cultural identity as a unifying element or as the shared cultural practices that hold a certain group of people together and support, he argues that as puff up as there are similarities, there are withal differences within cultural identities. In the chase paragraphs, we will discuss these two sides of cultural identities. In the first sense, cultural identity is held to be the diachronic cultural practices that held to be greenness among a group of people it is what differentiates them from other groups and held them as of one origin, one common destiny.In this sense, cultural identity refers to those cultural codes which are held to be unchangeable, fixed genuine practices. This underlying oneness or one true self-importance is the essence, Hall argues, of Carribeaness, of the disconsolate Diaspora. It is this identity which should be discovered by the black Diaspora and subsequently, should be excavated and projected through the representations of the Third Cinemas. Here we would add that this embodied identity is not only to be represented by the Third Cinemas but also by The Third Literature and through The Third Academia.It is this sense of cultural identity which pranks a critical role in eliciting a lot of postcolonial struggles. The act o f discovering such identity is at the identical time an act of re-shaping and rehabilitating, of re-claiming the true self. It is an act which goes beyond the chastisement of today to recover and reconstruct what colonization have distorted. Imaginative rediscovery plays a crucial role in restoring such identity.The emergence of counter discourses (like libber discourse, anti-racist discourse, anti-colonial discourse and so on) which tries to highlight and bring to the forth the hidden histories are an outcome of the creative force of such sense of cultural identity. Hall gives the example of Armet Francis photographs about the peoples from the Black Triangle which is considered as a optical move, an act of imaginary reunification of blacks which have been dispersed and fragmented crossship canal the African Diaspora. Another universal unifying element of blacks is the Jazz music.It is an attempt to restore the black agent to his home Africa, to relocate him, symbolically, with in his true essence Africanness. Such counter discourses are resources of resistance which problematizes the Western regimes of academic and cinematic representations of blacks. The second side of cultural identity is related to the discontinuities and differences, to the historical ruptures within cultural identities. Cultural identity is not just a matter of the past, a past which have to be restored, but it is also a matter of the future.It is a matter of becoming as well as of being (225). In this sense cultural identities no lasting signify an accomplished set of practices which is already there they are subject to the play of history, power and culture. They are in constant transformation. Hall argues that it is this second sense of cultural identities which enable as to come to terms with the traumatic character of the colonial carry out. The Western representations of the black experiences and peoples are representations of the play of power and knowledge.Western categori es of knowledge not only position us as Other to the West but also makes as experience ourselves as Others (225). This colonial experience puts as in a touch-and-go position it makes us ambivalent in our life, our needs, and our thought. This colonial experience had produced uprooted subjects, disordered between two words in an unidentified space.This rootlessness, this lack of cultural identity which the colonial experience produces leads us to question the nature of cultural identity itself. In this sense it is never a fixed, shared entity. It is not one and for all (226). It is not something which happens in the past but it is a process. What we told ourselves about our past is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth.Cultural identities are not essences but are positionings they are constructed sites from which we speak about ourselves. Hall states that black Caribbean identities are shaped through two private eye vectors the vector of the continuity whi ch is related to the past heritage and the vector the discontinuity which is the core of slavery, transportation and migration.In this sense, it is the Western world that unifies the blacks as much as it cuts them, at the same time, from direct access to their past. This colonial effect on the Caribbean positions the different regions of the Caribbean archipelago as both the same and different simultaneously. In sexual relation to the West, we are positioned in the periphery, one space, one fate and one destiny but in relation to each other, we have different cultural identities.These variations within cultural identities cannot be simply cinematically presented in simple binary star oppositions as past/present or them/us. Drawing on the concept of differance which the French philosopher Jacque Derrida had developed, Hall explains that cultural identities which, generally, we think of as unremitting and unified are instead, merely a temporary stabilization and overbearing clos ure of meaning historically and culturally specific. Cultural identities are subject to the infinite nature of the semiosis of meanings and the endless supplementarity within those meanings.The complexities of the Caribbean cultural identities can be partly understood if we relate it to the three strawmans over the islands the presence Africaine, the presence Europeenne and the presence Americain, the terra incognita. The presence Africaine is the space of the repressed. It is inscribed in every thought of the Caribbean everyday life and it is the secret, hidden code by which Western texts are re-read. This is the live Africa from which the Third Cinemas and other representations should derive their materials.The discontinuity and ruptures which are caused by slavery and transformation makes us aware of our blackness. It causes as to return punt to our past to discover our real essence which unites us despite our differences. This process returning back enables the emergence of a new Africa grounded on and ineluctably connected to the symbolic old Africa. Our journey to the old Africa is an imaginative journey, a symbolic journey to the far past to make something of the present day Africa.The presence Europeenne, on the other hand, has positioned us in the rims of the centre and inscribes in us a sense of ambivalence manifested in our attitudes of and identification with the West, issue backward and forward from moments of refusal to moments of recognition. Finally, the Americain or the New World presence constitutes the field of battle where different cultures from different parts of the world grapples and collide with each other, what bloody shame Louse Pratt calls a contact zone.It is the empty space, the third space or the space of no one. It is the place where the processes of creolizations, transformations, assimilations, syncretisms and displacements occur It stands for the endless ways in which Caribbean people have been destined to migrate it is the signifier of migration itself- of travelling, voyaging and return as fate, as destiny of the Antillean as the prototype of the modern or postmodernist New World nomad, continually moving between centre and periphery. 234) In this sense, the New World presence, the terra incognita, constitutes the very beginning of the Diaspora of the black presence, of diversity, hybridity, and difference.It is an apply symbolic space which is constantly producing and re-producing, a space of heterogeneity of constant newness and uniqueness. The rich past of sameness and difference, of shared spiritual and cultural habits on the one hand and of memories of ruptures and discontinuities_ slavery, migration, transformation_ on the other hand constitute the reservoir of our cinematic and other narratives.It is the real black Diaspora.ReferenceRutherford, Jonathan. Identity, Community, Culture and Difference. Ed. capital of the United Kingdom Lawrence & Wishart Limited, 1990. 1 .All the quotations stated in this work are taken from Stuart Halls article Cultural Identity and Diaspora in Jonathan, Rutherford. Identity, Community, Culture and Difference. Ed. capital of the United Kingdom Lawrence & Wishart Limited, 1990. PP 222237