Julien and Mercer, “De Margin and De Centre”
A new demand for Black representation
New “aesthetic and cinematic strategies within the Black British independent sector” (454)
A rupture in both hegemonic regimes of representation and in form (contesting documentary realism)
Because Black films are still marginal and are fewer in number, “each film text is burdened with an inordinate pressure to be ‘representative’ and to act, like a delegate does, as a statement that ‘speaks’ for the black communities as a whole.”
Singular voices often speak for many more who are excluded from the systems of production, funding, training, distribution that allow independent films to enter the public sphere
“It has become apparent that what is at stake in the debates on ‘black representations is not primarily a dispute over realist or modernist principles, but a broader problematic in cultural politics shaped, as Paul Gilroy suggests, by the tension between representation as a practice of depiction and representation as a practice of delegation.” (454)
Can these films alone displace current constructions of margin/center in film? How do we go about more fully re-articulating ethnicity?
White ethnicity
Making whiteness less “normative” can help shift the structures of center/margin?
“To ignore white ethnicity is to redouble its hegemony by naturalising it” 457
To make ethnicity something that is only associated with the Other reinforces the boundaries of margin/center as they are
“Whiteness only tends to become visible when its hegemony is under contestation.” (458) → these films have a “liberal” sensibility (460) which makes me question how much power they have to shift these structures on a wide scale.
Hall, “Who Needs Identity?”
Identity and Representation
Identification is an ongoing process of imperfect “fits.” It is “a process of articulation, a suturing” that happens with many different points of identification. (3)
Identities “use the resources of history, language and culture” and ask “what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves.” (4)
A playfulness in identification, or at least imagination
History does come to bear on our identities, but is not the only determining factor
Imagination → new representations & cultural forms
Identity and Exclusion
Identities “are constructed through, not outside, difference.” (4)
Citing Derrida, Laclau, Butler, Hall states, “Throughout their careers, identities can function as points of identification and attachment only because of their capacity to exclude, to leave out, to render ‘outside’, abjected. Every identity has at its ‘margin’, an excess, something more.” (5)
Identities are about testing and articulating boundaries between the self and the Other. What is and what definitely is not you.
All of this makes up your “identity,” both the inclusions and the exclusions
Use of Butler to make this point at the end (14-16)
Tension between the subject, body, and gender/sex norms established in discourse
To “trouble” these norms is to begin to re-articulate them, because norms are created through repetition
The same playfulness/imagination possible
Final argumentative turn:
Calls us to think about how “the racialized and ethnicized body is constituted discursively” (especially in response to Eurocentrism) (16).
Hall, “The Local, The Global, & The Return to Ethnicity”
Establishing Nation; National Culture as Narrative
Hall begins his essay on the notion of “national cultures” by indicating that “national culture” includes more than just “cultural institutions,” which, perhaps, are more of an effect than cause. Instead, national cultures are, more appropriately, a discursive form. They are composed of symbols and representations — “a way of constructing meanings that influences and organizes our actions and our conception of ourselves” (626).
National cultures “construct” identities by producing meanings about the nation we identify with. Hall quotes Anderson that national identity is an “imagined community.” Hall pivots from Anderson’s observation about what nations and national cultures are —constructed through discourse, essentially imagined — to ask about the precise mechanisms by which they are produced:
How is the modern nation imagined? What representational strategies are deployed to construct our common-sense views of national belonging or identity? If nations rely on narratives, how is the narrative of the national culture told? According to Hall, there are five main elements:
1) a “narrative of the nation” told and retold in national histories, literature, the media, and popular culture, which provide stories, images, landscapes, events, symbols, rituals, etc. that represent “the shared experiences, sorrows, and triumphs and disasters which give meaning to the nation.”
2) An emphasis on “origins, continuity, tradition, and timelessness.”
3) the “invention of tradition.”
4) A foundational myth, which locates an origin of the nation in “mythic time,” which makes the “confusions and disasters of history intelligible, converting disarray into ‘community’ and disasters into triumphs.”
5) Symbolically grounded in the idea of a “pure, original people or ‘folk.’”
Contradictions w/in Nationalism
Hall identifies an ambiguity in how a national culture “constructs identities which are ambiguously placed between past and future. It straddles the temptation to return to former glories and the drive to go forwards ever deeper into modernity.” (628). A national culture contains regressive tendencies, appealing to a “retreat” to “that lost time.” At the same time, these anachronistic elements often conceal a national culture’s imperative to mobilize, compete for power or respond to the present conjuncture. Hall borrows from Wallerstein to help underline this point about the paradoxical nature of nations: “the nationalisms of the modern world are the ambiguous expression [of a desire] for … assimilation into the universal … and simultaneously for … adhering to the particular, the reinvention of differences. Indeed it is a universalism through particularism and particularism through universalism.” (628) Modern nation-states and the national cultures that produce the identifications which uphold them are historical constructions whose closures are temporary, contingent, and always susceptible to “the pressures of difference,” and yet present themselves as if they are outside of history, continuous and unaltered, perhaps not unlike Althusser’s conception of ideology in general.
Deconstructing National Culture
Beyond how national culture works, Hall inquires into how successful these narratives are in unifying people into a single cultural identity. He reminds us that the question of cultural identity is inseparably linked to politics. Modern nation’ offers “both membership of the political nation-state and identification with the national culture: to make culture and polity congruent and to endow reasonably homogenous cultures, each with its own political roof.” (628) While the nation has been the dominant point of identification in the modern period, they are not the only form of identification and rest alongside others. Hall highlights the histories which national culture conceal — “violent conquest,” “different social classes, and gender and ethnic groups” within any given nation, western nations as “centers of empires of neo-imperial spheres of influences — to argue that national culture has never been a harmless process of bonding or seamless symbolic identification, but rather “a structure of cultural power” (629). National identity arises not from an inherent unity but is a discursive device used to represent difference as unity or identity.
Identity & Globalization
In considering the dislocation of national cultural identities occasioned by “globalization,” Hall outlines three possible consequences:
National identities are being eroded as a result of the growth of cultural homogenization and the “global post-modern”
National and other “local” or particularistic identities are being strengthened by the resistance to globalization
National identities are declining but new identities of hybridity are taking their place
While Hall writes that globalization produces contradictory effects in the realm of identity formation (which includes reactionary formations), he also finds globalization to have a “pluralizing impact on identities,” producing new possibilities and positions of identification, crucially, ones that are “more positional, more political, more plural and diverse; less fixed, unified or trans-historical.” (633). The promise in these new identities, for Hall, is that they are explicitly political and make the process of identity formation transparent in that they recognize “the way identity and difference are inextricably articulated or knitted together in different identities, the one never wholly obliterating the other,” in contrast to the totalizing, transhistorical claims of national identity. (633).
Vocabulary
Center/Margin: theoretical concept that explains how power operates in a group or society. Groups and individuals with more power make up the center. The center is defined largely through processes of exclusion, as various groups, individuals, and practices are deemed “marginal.” Julian and Chen use this terminology to describe film, with Eurocentric film traditions at the center and things like black British film operating in the margins.
Burden of representation: the idea that minority groups have been underrepresented in popular culture and when black or minority films do get made, they are “burdened with an inordinate pressure” to speak for the entire identity category and/or community.
Identity: to Hall and other scholars referenced here, a person’s identity is not stable or “settled.” It is constantly transforming. Hall sees identity as formed both through social discourse and through the formation of individual subjectivities. That is, we are agents in our own navigation of the discourses around us. They are the interplay between the “subject-position” (created by discourse and ideology) and the “subject.”
Identification: a process where an individual recognizes a similarity with another person or group. Identification is never perfect, however, and involves a good deal of trying out identifications as temporary articulations.
Globalization: Referring to processes “operating on a global scale, which cut across national boundaries, integrating and connecting communities and organizations in new space-time combinations, making the world in reality and in experience more interconnected.” Disrupting notions of “society” as “well-bounded” (often by nations in and of themselves) and inaugurating a perspective which “concentrates on how social life is ordered across time and space.” Result: a compression of distances and time-scales. (Global, 630).
National Culture(s): Composed of both cultural institutions and also symbols and representations. “A national culture is a discourse — a way of constructing meanings which influences and organizes both our actions and our conception of ourselves.” These cultures construct identities by generating meanings about “the nation” with which people identify. “...these are contained in the stories which are told about it, memories which connect its present with its past, and images which are constructed of it. As Benedict Anderson has argued, national identity is an ‘imagined community.’” (The Global, the Local, and the Return of Ethnicity, 626). In modernity, national cultures have dominated over “more particularistic sources of cultural identification,” (630).
Media Examples
Media examples
How does this clip seem to be defining ethnic identity?
How effective can a service like Ancestry be in teaching us about our heritage, especially comparing their service to how Hall describes the tensions between local, national, global, and identity?
What is up with the fascinations around these services, to put it colloquially?
Discussion Questions
Argument
For Hall, identity is contradictory, and yet, there are some identity formations he seems to favor over others. What does it mean for an identity to be political? How do the politics of a national identity differ from the politics of a positional and conjunctural identity? (global, local, 633)
Method
In what ways does Hall’s use of articulation in these readings clarify or confuse our understanding of identity? Or, for that matter, the mechanisms of articulation?
Connections to Contemporary Culture
To what extent does making media about “bad” whiteness help this process? Thinking especially about the white antihero in pop culture, what do you think Julien and Mercer would say about how this affects the center/margins?
The Oscars
In a literal example of margin/center in film, the Oscars have a history of cordoning off most international films into the “best international feature film” category. This has changed a little, though…
Just two years ago, the first non-English-language film took the Best Picture award. (Parasite, Bong Joon Ho)
Is this a game changer for the Oscars?
As an awards ceremony at the “heart” of the entertainment industries in Hollywood, which takes an international stage, is it important that the ceremony globalize more?
What impetus does the Academy have for moving past Eurocentrism, if any?
Stakes
Given that narratives of national cultures rely heavily on an often mythic, partial, illusory account of the past, should we strive for a more historically accurate account of identities? Is it possible or worthwhile to narrativize the past in a different way? If so, how do we not fall into the trap of transhistorical identities? What is the utility of narrative as it relates to “new identities”?
What traditions and national myths do opposers of “CRT” (or of discussing history in schools) draw on and why?
What traditions and histories do these ignore?
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