Cultural Identity and
Diaspora
STUART HALL
A new cinema of the Caribbean is emerging, joining the company of the other 'Third Cinemas'. It is related to, but different from the vibrant film and other forms of visual reprentation of the Afro-Caribbean (and Asian) 'blacks' of the diasporas of the West -the new post-colonial subjects. All the cultural practices and forms of reprentation have the black subject at their centre, putting the issue of cultural identity in question. Who is this emergent, new subject of the cinema? From where does he/she speak? Practices of reprentation always implicate the positions from which we speak or write - the positions of enunciation. What recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we speak, so to say 'in our own name', of ourlves and from our own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place. Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then reprent, we should think, instead, of identity as a 'production', which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outsid
排球协会e, reprentation. This view problematis the very authority and authenticity to which the term, 'cultural identity', lays claim.
We ek, here, to open a dialogue, an investigation, on the subject of cultural identity and reprentation. Of cour, the 'I' who writes here must also be thought of as, itlf, 'enunciated'. We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always 'in context', positioned. I
222
Cultural Identity and Diaspora
was born into and spent my childhood and adolescence in a lower-middle-class family in Jamaica. I have lived all my adult life in England, in the shadow of the black diaspora - 'in the belly of the beast'. I write against the background of a lifetime's work in cultural studies. If the paper ems preoccupied with the diaspora experience and its narratives of displacement, it is worth remembering that all discour is 'placed', and the heart has its reasons.
There are at least two different ways of thinking about 'cultural identity'. The first position defines 'cult
ural identity' in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective 'one true lf', hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially impod 'lves', which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. Within the terms of this definition, our cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as 'one people', with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicis-situdes of our actual history. This 'oneness', underlying all the other, more superficial differences, is the truth, the esnce, of 'Caribbean-ness', of the black experience. It is this identity which a Caribbean or black diaspora must discover, excavate, bring to light and express through cinematic reprentation.
Such a conception of cultural identity played a critical role in all the post-colonial struggles which have so profoundly reshaped our world. It lay at the centre of the vision of the poets of 'Negritude', like Aimee Ceasire and Leopold Senghor, and of the Pan-African political pro-ject, earlier in the century. It continues to be a very powerful and creative force in emergent forms of reprentation amongst hitherto marginalid peoples. In post-colonial societies, the rediscovery of this identity is often the object of what Frantz Fanon once called a passionate rearch ... directed by the cret hope of discovering beyond the miry of today, beyond lf-contempt, resignation and
总之英文
教学反思
abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era who existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourlves and in regard to others.
New forms of cultural practice in the societies address themlves to this project for the very good reason that, as Fanon puts it, in the recent past,
见字如画
223
Identity
Colonisation is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of oppresd people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.1
The question which Fanon's obrvation pos is, what is the nature of this 'profound rearch' which drives the new forms of visual and cinematic reprentation? Is it only a matter of unearthing that which the colonial experience buried and overlaid, bringing to light the hidden continuities it suppresd? Or is a quite different practice entailed - not the rediscovery but the production of identity. Not an identity grounded in the archaeology, but in the re-telling of the past?
We should not, for a moment, underestimate or neglect the importance of the act of imaginative rediscovery which this conception of a rediscovered, esntial identity entails. 'Hidden histories' have played a critical role in the emergence of many of the most important social movements of our time - feminist, anti-colonial and anti-racist. The photographic work of a generation of Jamaican and Rastafarian artists, or of a visual artist like Armet Francis (a Jamaican-born photographer who has lived in Britain since the age of eight) is a testimony to the continuing creative power of this conception of identity within the emerging practices of reprentation. Francis's photographs of the peoples of The Black Triangle, taken in Africa, the Caribbean, the USA and the UK, attempt to reconstruct in visual terms 'the underlying unity of the black people whom colonisation and slavery distributed across the African diaspora.' His text is an act of imaginary reunification. Crucially, such images offer a way of imposing an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation, which is the history of all enforced diasporas. They do this by reprenting or 'figuring' Africa as the mother of the different civilisations. This Triangle is, after all, 'centred' in Africa. Africa is the name of the missing term, the great aporia, which lies at the centre of our cultural identity and gives it a meaning which, until recently, it lacked. No one who looks at the textural images now, in the light of the history of transportation, slavery and migration, can fail to understand how the rift of paration, the 'loss of identity', which has
泰宁旅游攻略224
什么牛什么毛Cultural Identity and Diaspora
been integral to the Caribbean experience only begins to be healed when the forgotten connections are once more t in place. Such texts restore an imaginary fullness or plentitude, to t against the broken rubric of our past. They are resources of resistance and identity, with which to confront the fragmented and pathological ways in which that experience has been reconstructed within the dominant regimes of cinematic and visual reprentation of the West.
试验员岗位职责There is, however, a cond, related but different view of cultural identity. This cond position recognis that, as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute 'what we really are'; or rather - since history has intervened - 'what we have become'. We cannot speak for very long, with any exactness, about 'one experience, one identity', without acknowledging its other side - the ruptures and discontinuities which constitute, precily, the Caribbean's 'unique-ness'. Cultural identity, in this cond n, is a matter of 'becoming' as well as of 'being'. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from som
ewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some esntialid past, they are subject to the continuous 'play' of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere 'recovery' of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will cure our n of ourlves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourlves within, the narratives of the past.野餐作文
It is only from this cond position that we can properly understand the traumatic character of 'the colonial experience'. The ways in which black people, black experiences, were positioned and subject-ed in the dominant regimes of reprentation were the effects of a critical exerci of cultural power and normalisation. Not only, in Said's 'Orientalist' n, were we constructed as different and other within the categories of knowledge of the West by tho regimes. They had the power to make us e and experience ourlves as 'Other'. Every regime of reprentation is a regime of
225
Identity
power formed, as Foucault reminds us, by the fatal couplet, 'power/knowledge'. But this kind of know
ledge is internal, not external. It is one thing to position a subject or t of peoples as the Other of a dominant discour. It is quite another thing to subject them to that 'knowledge', not only as a matter of impod will and domination, by the power of inner compulsion and subjective con-formation to the norm. That is the lesson - the sombre majesty -of Fanon's insight into the colonising experience in Black Skin, White Masks.
This inner expropriation of cultural identity cripples and deforms. If its silences are not resisted, they produce, in Fanon's vivid phra, 'individuals without an anchor, without horizon, colourless, stateless, rootless - a race of angels'.2 Nevertheless, this idea of otherness as an inner compulsion changes our conception of 'cultural identity'. In this perspective, cultural identity is not a fixed esnce at all, lying unchanged outside history and culture. It is not some universal and transcendental spirit inside us on which history has made no fundamental mark. It is not once-and-for-all. It is not a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute Return. Of cour, it is not a mere phantasm either. It is something - not a mere trick of the imagination. It has its histories - and histories have their real, material and symbolic effects. The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer address us as a simple, factual 'past', since our relation to it, like the child's relation to the mother, is always-already 'after the break'. It is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narr
ative and myth. Cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discours of history and culture. Not an esnce but a positioning. Hence, there is always a politics of identity, a politics of position, which has no absolute guarantee in an unproblematic, transcendental 'law of origin'.
This cond view of cultural identity is much less familiar, and more unttling. If identity does not proceed, in a straight, unbroken line, from some fixed origin, how are we to understand its formation? We might think of black Caribbean identities as 'framed' by two axes or vectors, simultaneously operative: the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture. Caribbean identities always have to be thought of in terms of the
226
