Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

e here (or there) now 85
new ethnicities, the new voices. They are neither locked into the past nor
able to forget the past, neither all the same nor entirely different. Identity
and difference. It is a new settlement between identity and difference.
Of course, alongside the new ethnicities are the old ethnicities and the
coupling of the old essentialist identities to power. The old ethnicities still
have dominance, they still govern. Indeed, as I tried to suggest when I referred
to Thatcherism, as they are relativized their propensity to eat everything
else increases. They can only be sure that they really exist at all if
they consume everyone else. The notion of an identity that knows where it
came from, where home is, but also lives in the symbolic—in the Lacanian
sense—knows you can’t really go home again. 6 You can’t be something else
than who you are. You’ve got to fi nd out who you are in the fl ux of the past
and the present. That new conception of ethnicity is now struggling in different
ways across the globe against the present danger and the threat of the
dangerous old ethnicity. That’s the stake of the game.
Discussion Questions
• What is the difference between the old and the new ethnicity? Can
one be categorized as an essentialist understanding of identity and the
other as semiotic?
• Hall writes, “I am, I am Western man, therefore I know everything.”
In what way is he referencing the modernist notion of the Cartesian rational
subject with this quote, and how does he challenge the legitimacy of
that notion?
• What does Hall’s description of Thatcherism tell us about the role of
the nation in shaping the identity of its individuals?
• How does Hall’s description of the role of the Other in identity help
us rethink race, class, gender, and nation?
• Although Hall does not address the issue of Latin American immigration
to the United States, how might it compare with his description of
immigration to Great Britain?
• What is this place that Hall says we have to come from, and why is
the idea of it so central to his entire argument?
• Hall says that the very postmodern or cultural theory concept of
the “de-centering of the self” traces its origins to a modernist intellectual
tradition. Think back to our introductory section(s) and consider the signifi
cance of this claim for understanding debates between modernists and
cultural theorists and for the Latin Americanist challenge to so-called U.S.
cultural studies.