In The Fateful Triangle--drawn from lectures delivered at
Harvard University in 1994--one of the founding figures of cultural
studies reflects on the divisive, often deadly consequences of our
contemporary politics of identification. As he untangles the power
relations that permeate categories of race, ethnicity, and
nationhood, Stuart Hall shows how old hierarchies of human identity
in Western culture were forcefully broken apart when oppressed groups
introduced new meanings to the representation of difference.
From the Renaissance
to the Enlightenment, the concept of race stressed distinctions of
color as fixed and unchangeable. But for Hall, twentieth-century
redefinitions of blackness reveal how identities and attitudes can be
transformed through the medium of language itself. Like the "badge
of color" W. E. B. Du Bois evoked in the anticolonial era,
"black" became a sign of solidarity for Caribbean and South
Asian migrants who fought discrimination in 1980s Britain. Hall sees
such manifestations of "new ethnicities" as grounds for
optimism in the face of worldwide fundamentalisms that respond with
fear to social change.
Migration was at the
heart of Hall's diagnosis of the global predicaments taking shape
around him. Explaining more than two decades ago why migrants are the
target of new nationalisms, Hall's prescient vision helps us to
understand today's crisis of liberal democracy. As he challenges us
to find sustainable ways of living with difference, Hall gives us the
concept of diaspora as a metaphor with which to enact fresh
possibilities for redefining nation, race, and identity in the
twenty-first century.