Stuart hall ppt

Cultural Identity and Diaspora- Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall Stuart McPhail Hall,(3

February 1932 – 10

February 2014) was a

Jamaican-born cultural

theorist and sociologist.

Widely known as

“godfather of

multiculturalism"

Introduction: Stuart Hall begins his discussion on Cultural Identity

and Diaspora with a discussion on the emerging New

Cinema in the Caribbean which is known as Third

Cinema.

This new form of cinema is considered as the visual

representation of the Afro-Caribbean subjects –

“ blacks” of the diasporas of the West- the new post

colonial subjects.

Using this discussion as a starting point Hall

addresses the issues of identity, cultural practices and

cultural production.

Cutural Identity and Diaspora:

Hall enunciates two different ways of thinking

about cultural identity. The first one defines

cultural identity in terms of ‘one shared

culture.’

A Caribbean or black diaspora must discover,

excavate, bring to light and express through

cinematic representation, this identity

This understanding did play a crucial role in

the Negritude movements.

The second point that Hall points out is the related but different view of cultural identity.

This is an identity understood as unstable, metamorphic and even contradictory which signifies an identity marked by multiple points of similarities as well as differences.

Africans at the angle of “ what they are” and “ what they have become.”

These writers of African diaspora have come out with “ one experience and ‘identity,’ along the other side, that is ‘ the ruptures and discontinuities which form the essence of Caribbean uniqueness.

Cultural identity is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being.’

Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories, yet they undergo constant transformation.

Hall elaborates the meaning of colonial experience

through his second point.

The westerners had the power to make us see and

experience through ourselves as ‘Other.’ Cultural

identity is not a fixed essence. It has its histories and

the past continuous to speak to us. It is always

constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative,

myth.

From the second point Hall confirms that one can

understand the traumatic character of the “colonial

experience.”

Hall brings in the theory of Derrida to

understand the difficulty of blacks to imitate

the western style.

Derrida’s use of the word ‘differences’ offers a

couple of meanings. Hall interprets it saying,

meaning of a word is never finished or

completed, but keeps on moving to encompass

other, additional or supplementary meanings.

Hall enumerates the repositioning of

Caribbean cultural identities in relation to at

least three presence- ‘ Presence Africanne’,

‘Presence Europeenne’, and ‘Presence

Americaine.’

Only in 1970’s this Afro-Caribbean identity

became historically available to Jamaican

people.

‘Presence Africane’ is an origin of the

displaced Africans identities.

The original Africa is no longer there. Hall pleads

for restoration of Africa of all its pristine values

by all especially by the Caribbeans.

Hall finds a delicate difference between Africa

and Europe. ‘ Where Africa was a case of the

unspoken, Europe was a case of hat which is

endlessly speaking.’

In terms of colonialism,

underdevelopment, poverty and the

racism of color, the European presence is

that which, invisible representation, has

positioned the black subject within its

dominant regimes of representations.

‘Presence Europeenne’ is about

exclusion, imposition and expropriation and

therefore that power is considered as wholly

external to the displaced African writers. They

have to face the dominating European

presence.

The New World is the third term- where the

fatal encounter was staged between Africa and

West.

‘ Presence Americaine’ continues to

have its silence, its suppressions.

Diaspora are those, which are constantly

producing and reproducing themselves a new.

Thorough transformation and differences.

Hall brings he readers attention to the

inevitable fact that the ‘uniqueness’ of

Caribbean is the mixes of colors, pigmentation

and also the blends of tastes that is Caribbean.

Conclusion:

In the newly emerging cinemas of the

Caribbean islands, one has to apply a new

relationship of the past, thus bringing together

a new relationship of the past and a new

cultural identity.

The modern black cinemas, according to Hall,

reflect and recognize the different parts and

histories of theirselves, thus constructing the

points of identification of their cultural

identities.