Stuart Hall

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Stuart Hall

• Lecture 7
• Beyond the Binaries
• COM 490
• Professor Ralina Joseph

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Midterm questions?
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Terms for the day

• Identity
• Minimal selves
• New ethnicities

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Stuart Hall

• Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic
  as we think. Perhaps, instead of thinking of
  identity as an already accomplished historical
  factwe should think, instead of identity as a
  production, which is never complete, always in
  process, and always constituted within, not
  outside representation (From Cultural Identity
  and Cinematic Represenation).

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Background on Hall

• Leading figure in cultural studies today no one
  else has had the same influence in the shaping of
  the field
• Hall's formative experiences took place in his
  native Jamaica and then when being educated at
  Oxford.
• Hall identifies with emancipatory, socialist
  politics.
• In Birmingham, during his Directorship of the
  seminal Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
  (which is now sadly defunct), Hall created a
  genuinely collaborative approach to the study of
  culture. In a series of publications in the
  1970s, the Birmingham Centre changed the way in
  which social scientists think about culture.
• In the 1980s Hall occupied the vanguard of
  criticism against the neo-conservative politics
  of Thatcherism and Reaganism. His passionate,
  principled attack on the New Right and his
  critique of authoritarian populism reached a
  readership well beyond the confines of the
  academy.
• His later work has moved on to the terrain of
  hybridity, identity, race relations,
  multiculturalism and the politics of difference.
  Hall argues that the media both reflects AND
  constructs our realities.

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Minimal Self GoPost Responses
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Minimal Selves

• Written in 1987
• Begins by identifying himself as a migrant and as
  different from the majority of white British
  people. But instead of these two identities (the
  migrant and the different) causing him to feel
  other, theyve made him feel as though hes
  quintessentially modern.
• What he means in Britain or in US cities
  influenced heavily by immigration, being
  marginalized, fragmented, unenfranchized,
  disadvantaged, and dispersed (114) is really no
  longer the margin but the center or the
  representative modern experience (115).
• Identity, according to Hall, has always created
  people who are Minimal Selves whose
  identities are multiple (remember K. Crenshaws
  intersectionality) and not necessarily neatly
  wound together

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Minimal Selves cont.

• Unpack I was aware of the fact that identity is
  an invention from the very beginning, long before
  I understood any of this theoretically. Identity
  is formed at the unstable point where the
  unspeakable stories of subjectivity meet the
  narratives of history, of a culture. And since
  he/she is positioned in relation to cultured
  narratives which have been profoundly
  expropriated, the colonized subject is always
  somewhere else doubly marginalized, displaced
  always other than where he or she is, or is able
  to speak from (115).
• His own questioning of the stability of identity
  initially resulted from his familys struggle to
  acknowledge their lower-middle class status and
  was later aided by his diasporic existence.
• Black itself is an unstable identity
  identities are narratives (stories) and histories
  and not single, one-dimensional labels. Hall
  depicts identitys inherent instability by
  demonstrating, for example, that Blacks in
  Jamaica learned they were Black in a specific,
  politicized moment of the 1970s (i.e., a
  particular identity comes because of a history).

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Minimal Selves, cont.

• In addition to identity coming from specific
  historical experiences, Hall writes, I believe
  it is an immensely important gain when one
  recognizes that all identity is constructed
  across difference and begins to live with the
  politics of difference. Unpack.
• When people use the term identity or place
  themselves within a pre-existing identity group
  that they are working off of an imagined and
  constructed set of ideas a fiction. This is
  not to say that these fictions of identity dont
  have real, tangible effects on our lives.
• He goes on to state how a recognition of
  difference, of the impossibility of identity in
  its fully unified meaning, does, of course,
  transform our sense of what politics is about
  (117).

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Goal of imagining ourselves as Minimal Selves

• Transformative politics a type of politics
  where although were conscious of our own subject
  positions as a woman, as an immigrant, as Asian
  American, etc. were able to move beyond those
  positions to work for social change. Hall writes
  that this is particularly important in struggles
  of nationalism.
• Identities are not armor-plated against other
  identities or are not tied to fixed, permanent,
  unalterable oppositions in other words,
  identities are not binaries/dualisms or
  antagonistic.
• We have to return to the point that Hall
  describes where ones understanding of identity
  is initially instinctual, and fight against life
  experiences (which ask one to choose) which erase
  that early clarity and instead work towards
  proving the natural-ness of a monolithic identity
  or force us towards easy dualisms. We have to
  work towards understanding ourselves as minimal
  selves.

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New Ethnicities

• Continuing to complicate questions of identity,
  in New Ethnicities, (written in 1992), Hall
  again describes Black as a constructed
  identity.
• Begins his essay by describing shift in black
  cultural politics, or rather two phases of the
  same movement (163). The first moment was when
  the term black (like people of color in the
  US) was embraced to talk about collective racism
  this naming helped to create organizations and
  resistance. The problem was that, like Kimberle
  Crenshaw writes about with traditional feminist
  organizations, one identity became hegemonic.
• quick hegemony moment comes from Antonio
  Gramsci, an Italian (1891-1937), was a leading
  Marxist thinker. Gramsci used the term hegemony
  to denote the predominance of one social class
  over others (e.g. bourgeois hegemony). This
  represents not only political and economic
  control, but also the ability of the dominant
  class to project its own way of seeing the world
  so that those who are subordinated by it accept
  it as 'common sense' and 'natural'. Commentators
  stress that this involves willing and active
  consent.

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New Ethnicities, cont.

• Part of the problem was seeing Black identity
  as simply other than white identity. This meant
  marginalization or stereotyping. But Hall also
  points out that the insertion of positive Black
  stereotypes, simply the opposite of the negative
  ones is just as bad. Why? For example, whats
  wrong with model minority myth?
• So he sees a change from this moment as a change
  from a struggle over the relations of
  representation to a politics of representation
  itself (163).
• Creates an end to an essential black subject.
  This means the recognition of the extraordinary
  diversity of subjective positions, social
  experiences, and cultural identities which
  compose the category black that is, the
  recognition that black is essentially a
  politically and culturally constructed category,
  which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed
  transcultural or transcendental racial categories
  and which therefore has no guarantees in Nature
  (166).

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Unpack

• What is involved is the splitting of the notion
  of ethnicity between, on the one hand, the
  dominant notion which connects it to nation and
  race and , on the other hand, what I think is
  the beginning of a positive conception of the
  ethnicity of the margins, of the periphery. That
  is to say, a recognition that we all speak form a
  particular place, out of a particular history,
  out of a particular experience, a particular
  culture, without being contained by that position
  as ethnic artists or filmmakers. We are all,
  in that sense, ethnically located and our ethnic
  identities are crucial to our subjective sense of
  who we are. But this is also a recognition that
  this is not an ethnicity which is doomed to
  survive, as Englishness was, only by
  marginalizing, dispossessing, displacing, and
  forgetting other ethnicities. This precisely is
  the politics of ethnicity predicated on
  difference and diversity (169-170).

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Goal of imagining New Ethnicities

• To point out the diversity of black and show
  that not all black people are good and not all
  black people are the same.
• Just because something is Black,or done by
  people of color doesnt mean that its
  progressive. Have to look at separate histories,
  stories, and experiences of class, gender,
  sexuality and ethnicity (167).
• Leaving behind the essential black subject makes
  way for a critical politics, a politics of
  criticism (166). Wants a new politics of
  representation becomes an intersectional
  politics as the example (e.g., looks at racism
  together with sexuality).

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Ethnicity instead of Race

• Hall calls for use of the word ethnicity in
  order to acknowledge the place of history,
  language, and culture in the construction of
  subjectivity and identity, as well as the fact
  that all discourse is placed, positioned,
  situated, and all knowledge is contextual (168).
  He also contests the term ethnicity have to
  look at historically.
• Race seen as singular, fixed, rooted in Nature

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Review Exercise applying Black.White to major
concepts

• Count off by 7s
• 1 representation
• 2 racial formation
• 3 gender construction
• 4 possessive investment in whiteness
• 5 optional ethnicity
• 6 intersectionality
• 7 minimal selves/new ethnicities