Ethnicity+Identity+and+Difference

Hall describes old identities as based on the Cartesian model -- collective, homogeneous, social ... identities that provide a stable and slow-changing means of understanding one's environment.
 * =Title= || "Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities" ||
 * =Author= || Stuart Hall ||
 * =Date= ||  ||
 * =Summary By= || deRaismes ||
 * =Summary= || __**OLD IDENTITIES**__
 * "identity is the ground of action" (42).
 * "We are never quite there, but always on our way to it, and when we get there, we will at last know exactly who it is we are" (42).

__**DEMISE OF THE OLD**__ This old notion of the Self gets contested and upended by Marx, Freud, and Saussure. Each contributes to the idea that Modernity is problematic -- they upset the continuity of the notion of the Subject and the stability of identity.
 * "Because as I was saying earlier when I was talking about the relative decline, or erosion, the instability of the nation-state, of the self-sufficiency of national economies and consequently, of national identities as points of reference, there has simultaneously been a fragmentation and erosion of collective social identity" (44).

__**NEW IDENTITIES**__ The resulting new identities are never completed, never finished. They are always in the process of formation and always constructed through splitting. This is understood through the us/them or "I"/"Other" dialectic: we define ourselves through the "not-me" (or, as some psychologists say, the "me-I-don't-want-to-be"), aka, the Other.
 * "We have the notion of identity as contradictory, as composed of more than one discourse, as composed always across the silences of the other..." (49).
 * Hall gives the example of Blacks in England -- first time he was made aware of his "other-ness"

__**DERRIDA AND DIFFERENCE**__ Hall takes up Derrida's point about //différence// (to differ) and //différance// (to defer, or put off). Hall echoes Derrida by claiming that identity lives in a constant movement between the two. Hall takes Derrida and applies this to identity politics. If, according to Hall, you must have a position in order to say anything, and if the "mainstream" position is blocked from you, then you must create your own position. He argues for a politics of living identity through difference. ||
 * "You have to be positioned somewhere in order to speak" (51)
 * Here, Hall gives the example of "Black" to refer NOT to race, but a political identity of Otherness. Those included within it have re-appropriated the term as their own. They have repossessed the silence by "otherizing" the "us"

__**GRAMSCI AND HALL**__ Hall adopts Gramsci's belief that the struggles of the local mean a war of positions. Hall says that this is difficult to grasp because identities/positions are always changing.
 * "The past is not waiting for us back there to recoup our identities against. It is always retold, rediscovered, reinvented. It has to be narrativized" (58).
 * "Hegemony is not the disappearance or destruction of difference. It is the construction of a collective will through difference" (58).
 * "I think that what we call 'the global' is always composed of varieties of articulated particularities" (67).

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 * =Discussion points= || At first, I was confused by this article. However, the further I read, the more it made sense. I fully endorse the idea of identity as an us/them dialectic. However, I am still unsure about how Hall uses Gramsci and hegemony. Is he saying that identities can be reclassified to reflect their heterogeneity? His example was Thatcher's attempt to galvanize the Brits by saying that 'we are all British'. I get that. But I don't understand what the point is? We as Americans are traditionally a hodge-podge of identities subsumed under the American rubric (though recently, it seems that more local identities are having a greater influence -- like partisan politics). So what does this take on Gramsci add to our ability to understand the creation and recreation of identity? ||

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