|
"Cultural
Identity and Diaspora"
Provider:
Kate Liu /劉紀雯
Neville
'kamau' Crawford HIDDEN WOUNDS (1994)
In Williams,
Patrick & Laura Chrisman eds. Colonial Discourse & Postcolonial
Theory: A Reader. Harvester Whaeatsheaf, 1993.
--- The following quotes are made according to this version.
and Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed.
Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990.
Major Argument: There
are two kinds of identity, identity as being (which offers a sense of
unity and commonality) and identity as becoming (or a process of identification,
which shows the discontinuity in our identity formation.) Hall uses
the Caribbean identities, including his own, to explain how the
first one is necessary, but the second one is truer to their/our postcolonial
conditions. To explain the process of identity formation,
Hall uses Derrida's theory differance as support, and Hall sees the temporary
positioning of identity as "strategic" and arbitrary. He then uses
the three presences--African, European, and American--in the Caribbean
to illustrate the idea of "traces" in our identity. Finally, he
defines the Caribbean identity as diaspora identity.
1. identity as oneness
p. 393 "This
oneness, underlying all the other, more superficial differences, is the
truth, the essence, of "Caribbeanness', of black experience. . .
.
We should not, for
a moment, underestimate or neglect the importance of the act of imaginative
rediscovery which this conception of a rediscovered, essential identity
entails."
[Hall
acknowledges the importance of this sense of identity, but he
also emphasizes its fictive nature.]
[Top]
2. identity as discontinuous points
of identification
p. 394 "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, precisely, the Caribbean's 'uniqueness.'"
- Cultural identities...Far
from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject
to the continuous 'play' of history, culture and power.
- Identities are the names
we give the the different ways 1) we are positioned by, and 2)
position ourselves within the narratives of the past.
A. [the first kind of otherness:
self-othering] 394-95 [otherness as an inner compulsion]
'the colonial experience'--Not only, in Said's 'Orientalist' sense, were
we constructed as different and other within the categories of knowledge
of the West by those regimes. They had the power to make us see and
experience ourselves as 'Other." . . . It is one thing to position
a subject or set of peoples as the Other fo a dominant discourse. It is
quite another thing to subject them to that 'knowledge,' not only as a
matter of imposed will and domination, but the power of inner compulsion
and subjective con-formation to the norm. ...
This inner expropriation
of cultural identity cripples and deforms. If its silences are not resisted,
they produce, in Fanon's vivid phrase, 'individuals without an anchor,
without horizon, colourless, stateless, rootless--a race of angels'
p. 395--
Cultural identities are the
points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture,
which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an
essence but a positioning.
B. [the second kind of otherness: creolization; racial mixture;
differences within the different islands]
...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. ...thought
of in terms of the dialogic relationship between these two axes. The one
gives us some grounding in, some continuity with, the past. The second
reminds us that what we share is precisely the experience of a profound
discontinuity: the people dragged into slavery, transportation, colonisation
migration, came predominantly from Africa--and when that supply ended,
it was temporarily refreshed by indentured labour from the Asian
subcontinent.
p. 395
The third kind of otherness -- otherness to different metropolitan
centers.
To return to the Caribbean
after any long absence is to experience again the shock of the 'doubleness'
of similarity and difference.
[Top]
3. Derrida's differance is used to explain cultural
difference.
p. 397 ". . . if signfication
depends upon the endless repositioning of its differential terms, meaning,
in any specific instance, depends on the contingent and arbitrary stop
-- the necessary and temporary 'break' in the infinite semiosis of language.
This does not detract from the original insight. It only threatens
to do so if we mistake this 'cut' of identity--this positioning,
which makes meaning possible-- as a natrual and permanent, rather
than an arbitrary and contingent 'ending'--whereas I understand every
such position as 'strategic' and arbitrary, in the sense that there
is no permanent equivalence between the particular sentence we close,
and its true meaning, as such.
[Top]
4. The three traces in Caribbean Identity
Caribbean identity--diaspora
- Presence/absence Africaine
or the site of the repressed: the unspoken unspeakable presence
[Hall's own experience of re-discovering
'Africa' and his being 'black' in 1970's.]
- Presence Europeenne
[about exclusion, imposition and expropriation of colonial discourse]
| p. 400
What Frantz Fanon reminds
us, in Black Skin, White Mask, is how this power has become
a constitutive element in our own identities. ...
This 'look,' from--so
to speak-- the place of the Other, fixes us, not only in its violence,
hostility and aggression, but in the ambivalence of its desire.
This brings us face to face, not simply with the dominating European
presence as the site or 'scene' of integration where those other
presences which it had actively disaggregated were recomposed--...but
as the site of a profound splitting and doubling--what Homi Bhabha
has called 'the ambivalent identifications of the racist world...the
'otherness' of the self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest
of colonial identity.
|
The Third, 'New World" presence is not so much power, as ground,
place, territory. It is a juncture-point where the many cultural
tributaries meet, the 'empty' land (the European colonisers
emptied it) where strangers from every other part
of the globe collided.
p. 401 The 'new world'
presence--America...--is therefore itself the beginning of diaspora,
of diversity, of hybridity and difference, what makes Afro-Caribbean
people already people of a diaspora. I use this term here metaphorically,
not literally: diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes
whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred
homeland to which they must al all cost return, even if it means
pushing other people into the sea. This is the old, the imperializing,
the hegemonising, form of 'ethnicity'. ...
|
[Top]
5. p.
401-402 The diaspora experience as I intend it
here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of
a necessary heterogeniety and diversity; by a conception of 'identity' which
lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity.
Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing
themselves anew, through transformation and difference.
Neville 'kamau' Crawford
RESIST (1985)
diaspora aesthetic p. 236
'Across a whole range of cultural
forms there is a 'syncretic' dynamic which critically appropriates elements
from the master-codes of the dominant culture and 'creolises' them, disarticulating
given signs and re-articulating their symbolic meaning. The subversive
force of this hybridizing tendency is most apparent at the level
of language itself where creoles, patois and black English decentre, destablise
and carnivalise the linguistic domination of 'English'--the nation-language
of master-discourse--through strategic inflections, re-accentuations and
other performative moves in semantic, syntactic and lexical codes.
[Top]
Jonathan
Rutherford
"A Place Called Home:
Identity and the Culture Politics of Difference." 9-27 from Identity:
Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence
& Wishart, 1990.
p. 19
Gramsci described this articulation
as 'the starting point of critical elaboration': it is the consciousness
of what one really is, and in 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical
process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving
an inventory'. Identity marks the conjuncture of our past with the social,
cultural and economic relations we live within. 'Each invididual is the
synthesis not only of existing relations but of the history of these relations.
He is a precis of the past.' ...
This politics of articulation
eschews all forms of fixity and essentialism; social, political and class
formations do not exist a priori, they are a product of articulation.
Stuart Hall has termed this the politics of 'no necessary or essential
corespondence of anything with anything' and it marks a significant break
with a Marxism that has assumed an underlying totality to social relations.
politics of difference
The cultural politics of difference
means living with incommensurability through new ethical and democratic
frameworks, within a culture that both recognizes difference and is
committed
to resolving its antagomisms.
politics of articulation--S.
Hall
p. 107 It seems to me that
it is possible to think aobut the nature of new political identities,
which isn't founded on the notion of some absolute integral self and which
clearly can't arise from some fully closed narrative of the self. A politics
which accepts the 'no necessary or essential correspondence of anything
with anything, and there has ....
[Top]
(external)
 Literary
Criticism Databank: Postcolonialism
|