[DOWNLOAD] "Identities in the Contact Zone (Introduction) (Essay)" by Jon Stratton # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Identities in the Contact Zone (Introduction) (Essay)
- Author : Jon Stratton
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 58 KB
Description
Cultural identity, Stuart Hall tells us, is a ''production' which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not without, representation' (1990: 222). Incomplete, identity is formed through dynamic relations patterned in the power that structures representations: 'Every regime of representation is a regime of power formed, as Foucault reminds us, by the fatal couplet, power/knowledge' (Hall, 1990: 225-26). Some relations in power are more overdetermining than others. In this regard, Hall also writes about a form of identity which he describes as 'a sort of collective 'one true self' ... which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common' (1990: 223). Hall explains the importance of this understanding for postcolonial struggles using the examples of Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor's idea of Negritude for establishing black self-respect and the political project of Pan-Africanism. The implication here is the centrality of the colonial experience in the formation of this sense of shared identity. The five essays that constitute the first Borderlands issue of 2010 take up, both implicitly and explicitly, the spectre of the colonial experience (its structures, conditions of knowledge, relations of power, its effects, traces and problems) in varying ways across different geo-political and cultural spaces.