Stuart Hall "Cultural Identity and Diaspora"
Questions
- Do you agree with Hall's theory in which cultures as a whole can not be identified ?
- Why do you think individuals embrace the 'facade' that is imposed upon themselves based on their cultures history & ancestry ?
- Rather than reasoning identity as an already accomplished fact, Which has currently become accustomized by current cultures, we should view identity as a production, as something that is always changing & can never be complete.
- Therefore this view displays the entire misconception of cultural identity
- There are two ways of reasoning cultural identity
Analysis
- The first position analyzes cultural identity as one shared culture & simultaneously defines each person as “one true self”, which creates a facade that individuals impose upon themselves
- Which typically people with shared background & ancestry hold in common
- Within this very definition each of our “cultural identity” mirrors the common historical background and shared cultural codes which insinuate us as “one people”
- The second position analyzes the appropriate understanding of the traumatic character of ‘the colonial experience’. The way black people, black experiences, were positioned was nothing more than a dominating scheme of misrepresentation fuelled by the exercise of cultural power and normalization
- All regimes of representation is a regime of power formed, referring back to foucault concept of knowledge is power. This knowledge is considered internal not external
- Not only were blacks considered as the other of a dominant discourse , they were also subjected to the ‘knowledge’ by intuitive conformation to the norm
- This refers back to the sombre majesty of Fanon’s insight in the experience of colonizing in Black Skins, White Masks
- Stuart Hall’s “Cultural identity and Diaspora” explores as well as facilitates a deliberation on cultural identity and representation.
- The discussion of cultural identity was generated by the development of a new cinema
- This cinema is related to but different from other enthusiastic film and other forms of visual representation displayed within the afro Caribbean communities
- The difference - All films have the concept of the black subject at matter and that puts the issue of cultural identity in question.
- Questions such as who are these people as a whole? How does one depict their culture? From where does he or she speak?
- Example; Recent theories suggest although we speak from our own experiences we are never speaking on the same person. Who I was in the past is not who I am in the moment.