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

76 reframing latin america
Hall grounds his theoretical elaborations regarding identity in what he
calls the “process of identifi cation.” By this he means that identity is a
gradual awareness of self as contingent upon cultural, historical, and political
contexts. Using specifi c autobiographical anecdotes, he asserts that
knowing oneself is not accomplished through the search for a so-called true
inner self, but through an understanding of how we are positioned and how
we position ourselves at any given moment by the recognition of others.
This positioning is Hall’s contingent and temporal place, and he illustrates
it by examining his own process of identifi cation.
When he fi rst immigrated to England, Hall identifi ed himself as a respectable,
lower-class Jamaican. The fi rst time he returned to Jamaica, his
mother urged him not to think of himself as an immigrant back in England.
It was the precise moment—and not before—of his mother’s suggestion that
the English most likely perceive him as an immigrant that it occurs to Hall
to identify himself as an immigrant. He became an immigrant at the moment
that he saw himself as one and was seen as one.
Hall also considers the process he underwent in understanding the shifting
meaning of his skin color. He explains that, until the 1970s, Jamaicans
never considered themselves to be black. For a modernist reader, Hall’s absence
of a black identity prior to the 1970s may be surprising; after all,
his skin color did not change. What did change was the value attached to
black skin as a signifi er. In the 1970s, Hall’s skin color took on political
meaning; thus, it became a difference that made a difference. Hall in turn
attempts to teach his own biracial son to locate himself in an unfi xed place
from which he can understand the world and recognize who he is in the
world at that moment. Hall recounts the moment that he hails his son as
Black (with a capital B to indicate an idea, not a skin color), and the latter
retorts that he is brown (with a lowercased b to indicate that he fails to
recognize the cultural, historical, and political defi nition of his temporal
place of identity.) In these ways, Hall insists that both his son and his audience
recognize and embrace the contingency of identity as the temporary
place of self-discovery.
Hall applies his theory to individual identities and to collective ones
like race, class, gender, and nation. He demonstrates this with the case of
England’s national identity under Margaret Thatcher’s government. He argues
that Thatcherism defi ned English national identity in an essentialist
way as a nationalist response to the growth of immigration. Ironically, it
is precisely when England was divested of its colonies in the 1950s that its
formerly colonized citizens began to immigrate and function as a constant
reminder of the loss of England’s glorious past. This immigrant presence,
often of nonwhite, racialized groups, in and of itself is a constant challenge